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com
 Advanced Praise for Provoked

“Provoked is manna from heaven for anyone who wants to know

where the extreme Russophobia in the West came from, as well
as the central role the United States played in causing the
Ukraine war. Horton provides a detailed account of America’s
foolish and dishonest behavior toward Russia in the years since
the Cold War ended.”
—John J. Mearsheimer, R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Se
Professor of Political Science at the University of Chi

“Scott Horton has become an invaluable chronicler of the

destruction wrought by our interventionist foreign policy. With
his new book Provoked, Scott blows the lid off the mountains of
lies used to justify Washington’s waste of billions of dollars and
countless Ukrainian lives in a futile proxy war with Russia. Truth
is the greatest disinfectant and Scott Horton’s crucial account of
this awful chapter in U.S. foreign policy is like a spring cleaning.
Read this book and pick up copies for your friends . . . and
adversaries!”
—Dr. Ron Paul, former Texas congressman, chairman and found

Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and co-host of The Li
R

“Scott Horton’s important new book traces America’s journey to

war and intervention through a succession of presidencies and
builds a case that points to a frightening, potential final
destination for the United States: isolation and alienation from
most of the world. Scott’s message is simple. Stop now before
it’s too late.”
—Col. Douglas Macgregor, U.S. Army (ret.), CEO, Our Country
Ch

“Scott Horton is a treasure. He is also the neocons’ nightmare.

He knows their deceptions and lies and he is fearless in exposing
the disasters they have wrought. Provoked is the most thoroughly
researched, rationally grounded, and compellingly presented
assault on war and defense of peace written in English in the
post-9/11 era. It will become the standard against which all
similar works are measured, and indispensable reading for all
who need to understand how the American government has time
and again brought civilization to a terrifying precipice.”
—Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, New York Times best-selling au
and commentator, host of the Judging Freedom Po

“Scott Horton’s new book is one of the rare literary works that is
impeccably sourced, unimpeachable in its logical conclusions—
and fearless in presenting the truth, regardless of how unpopular
or inconvenient it may be. It’s a hard read, though. Not because
of its length—its very thorough—but for its revelations and
implications: our country has some ugly warts that must be
addressed and some sins for which it must atone. If we honestly
look ourselves in the mirror and make necessary changes, we can
avoid some of the worst outcomes. Ignore Scott’s sage
observations, however, and we could be in for a rough future.”
—Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis, U.S. Army (ret.), author of Eleventh Ho
2020 America: How America’s Fo
Policy Got Jacked Up – and How the Next Administration Can F
and host of Daniel Davis – Deep

“Delving deep into the record of how the U.S. national security
machine lied and conspired to birth a new Cold War that grows
hotter by the day, Scott Horton has once again done us a fantastic
service. Never has the axiom that the devil is in the details been
more powerfully demonstrated. His account, powerful because it
is so detailed, covering the serial cynical maneuvers that
expanded and transformed Nato into an instrument of aggression
all the way to the promotion of the war that has destroyed
Ukraine is a resource that apologists for these feckless policies
will find it hard to answer.”
—Andrew Cockburn, Washington editor, Harper’s Magazine, auth
The Spoils of War: Power, Profit and the American War Mac

“Scott Horton writes history like a thriller—leaving the reader to

anxiously turn the page to see what happens next. Skeptics and
fact-checkers beware, the history is meticulously researched; this
volume packs in more than 6,000 footnotes leaving no doubt as
to Horton’s sources and methods. If you want to know why
today’s headlines are inevitable, read this post-Cold War story of
the United States, Russia and Ukraine. Five stars!”
 —Peter Van Buren, author of We Meant Well: How I Helped
the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi Pe

“Scott Horton’s latest book, Provoked, gets placed on the shelf

where the books are easiest for me to reach. Alongside it are
Horton’s books on Afghanistan and the war on terrorism. All are
authoritative masterpieces of modern military and political
history. No other author writes about American foreign policy
and war in the manner Horton does. I rely continually on his
work. Yes, Provoked is a big and intimidating book. However,
it’s not because of its size but because of the power of Horton’s
authorship in telling accurately and precisely how and why U.S.
policy, since the end of the Cold War, brought about the ruinous
war in Ukraine. It is a damning work of history which should be
required reading in universities, military academies and foreign
affairs institutions world-wide.”
—Capt. Matthew Hoh, USMC (ret.), Associate Director, Eisenh
Media Net

“Scott Horton provides an incisive treatment of the multi-decade

background to the Russia-Ukraine War. He demolishes the myth
that Western policy bears no responsibility for the current
tragedy.”
—Ted Galen Carpenter, Senior Fellow, the Libertarian Inst
author of NATO: The Dangerous Dino

“The only excuse for those of us—and I include myself—foolish

enough to think that the Ukraine War was the one that would
redeem the mayhem of four decades of stupid, disastrous
adventures, was ignorance. Ignorance of causes, ignorance of
local and international politics, ignorance of what actually
happened and above all a failure to remember that our leaders are
not our friends. There’s no excuse now. Scott Horton has
provided us with the one necessary, essential masterclass on how
we got into this mess. Provoked limpidly clarifies that far from
this being the ‘good war,’ it need never have happened and the
usual suspects are to blame. The same people who brought on us
all those other disasters. The Ukraine War is shaping up to the
worst one of all, the only conflict which threatens all of us
directly and personally, wherever we are.”
—Frank Ledwidge, former Royal Navy Reserve intelligence of
“Justice Advisor” to the UK Mission in Afghanistan’s Helmand Prov
and author of Investment in Blood: The True Cost of Britain’s Af

“A fan of Scott Horton’s previous books on U.S. foreign policy, I

expected Provoked to be the definitive work on the tragedy and
folly of America’s Eastern European policy and involvement in
the Ukraine war. I wasn’t disappointed. Horton again proves to
be a thorough and unerring guide through all the issues and
questions related to the grim story he has to tell. To those who
admire Scott for his lectures, interviews, debates and articles, I
tell them you can’t fully appreciate his brilliance unless you’ve
read his books. Provoked is a good place to start.”
 —Gene Epstein, Director of The Soho Forum, fo
Economics and Books Editor of Barron’s Financial W

“Scott Horton is perhaps the country’s most incisive and, without

question, its most indefatigable, advocate for a sane U.S. foreign
policy towards Russia. If you really want to know how we’ve
arrived at this, the most dangerous point in relations with Russia
since the Cuban Missile Crisis, then read this.”
—James W. Carden, former State Department adviser, senior consu
to the American Committee for U.S.-Russia Ac

“Scott Horton has been a voice of reason against the bipartisan

War Party for as long as I can remember, but with Provoked he
takes his rightful place alongside the great revisionist scholars of
the past hundred years. Then as now, that noble tradition of
thought pursued world peace by exposing, without mercy, the
lies of those who would foment war. Nobody who relies on the
American news media for information about Russia and Ukraine
will know the story Horton tells in this indispensable book, but
thanks to him the truth may at last overtake the lies.”
—Thomas E. Woods, Senior Fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Ins
and auth
Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself Du
COVID M

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Provoked:
How Washington Started the New Cold War
With Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine

Copyright © 2024 by Scott Horton

All rights reserved.
ProvokedBook.com

Cover Design: Andrew Zehnder

Edited by Will Porter

Copyedited by Mike Dworski and Ben Parker

Ebook Design by Mike Dworski

Published in the United States of America by

The Libertarian Institute
612 W. 34th St.
Austin, TX 78705

LibertarianInstitute.org
ISBN-13: 978-1-7336473-7-3
ISBN-10: 1-7336-4737-6

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In memory of Daniel Ellsberg.

For my mom and dad.

And for Dr. Ron Paul.

OceanofPDF.com
 Table of Contents

George H.W. Bush

The Unipolar Moment
Ending the Last Cold War
Come Home, America
The War Party
DPG ’94
PNAC
The End of History
Not One Inch
Staying
Handshake Deals
Bush
Genscher
Baker
Gates
Special Status
Alright Then
2+4 Notes
Heresy
Using Context Clues
Brits
 NATO’s Woerner
Knowingly Misleading
State Dept. Warning
Saving the USSR
Chicken Kiev
Avoiding Armageddon
Bosnia Begins
What Is NATO For?
Breaking Yugoslavia
IMF
Electing Secession
Slovenia and Croatia First
Croatian Green Light
Selfish Slovenes
Genscher’s War
Krajina Serbs Declare Independence from Croatia
Greater Serbia
Badinter(vention) Commission
Izetbegović’s Caution, Recklessness
Different Situation
Izetbegović’s Fault
Bush Sr. Recognizes
Public Choice
Lisbon Deal
A Problem Called Ukraine
 Communist Legacy
Antecedents
Mr. Republican
The EU Lags Behind

Bill Clinton
The Partnership for Peace
Missed Chance
Drunken Blunder
Fooling Yeltsin
Betrayal
Pentagon for Peace
Kissinger, Brzezinski Weigh In
I Told You to Forget It
Budapest Blowup
Bill Clinton’s Shame
Eurocorps
Early Warning
My Guy
Go, Pat, Go!
Kennan’s Dissent
Strobe’s Yellow Light
All Stars
Senate Debate
Dividing Lines
 Experienced Ambassador Dean
Foreign Friends
Kupchan’s Insight
Mandelbaum’s Crystal Ball
Z.B.: Don’t Listen to Me
Perry’s Regrets
The Iron Triangle
Lockheed Stock
Polish Votes
Standing Taller
Gorby’s Admission
Dissembling
Yeltsin’s Men
Clinton’s Bosnian War
Bill Betrays Vance-Owen
Dead Deal
Owen-Stoltenberg
The Contact Group
We Owed Them One
Arab-Afghans
Famous Veterans
The Ayatollah
Serbs Fought Dirty Too
The Siege of Sarajevo
Public Relations
 Genocide
Bosnian Croats Turn on Muslims
Srebrenica
Operations Flash, Storm and Mistral
Operations Black Lion, Miracle and Badr
False-Flag Attacks
Deliberate Force
Dayton
Proof of Concept
Russian Blowback
Neoconservatism
Ungrateful Terrorists
Failed State
Shock Therapy
The Troika and the Harvard Boys
Versailles
Hyperinflation
Vouchers
‘Bullshit!’
Sachs Blames D.C.
That’s Not Real Capitalism
1993 Coup
E. Wayne Merry
Yabloko
Davos Deal
 Collusion
The Payoff
The Money Plane
The Crash of ’98
Stop, Thief!
Excess Deaths
Paradise Lost
The Founding Act
Trust Me
Messing With Ukraine
Kosovo
Background
Illegal
Public Choice
The Bin Ladenites
KLA Provocations
Račak Massacre
Rambouillet
Quick and Easy
Civilian Targets
RTS TV
Covert Support
Kosovar Albanian Cleansing Instigated
Blaming Albright
Genocide Hoax
 Chinese Embassy Attack
Blair’s Invasion Plan
Cease Fire
Pristina
Hillary’s Choice
Serbs Cleansed
Greater Kosovo
Organs
Heroin
Regime Change
PR Stunt
Russian Reaction
Pipeline Wars
Black Gold
Azeri Coup D’état
Dual Containment
Nagorno-Karabakh
Neocons Weigh In
West to Turkey Instead
Taliban Pipeline
GUAM
Azeri Despotism
Chechnya
The First War
Terris
 Berezovsky
Terrorism in One Country
Dagestan
The Apartment Bombings
The Second War
High Treason
The Great Game
Hijackers
Zacarias Moussaoui
The Color Revolutions
NED
Electoral Revolution
Slovakia
Croatia
The Bulldozer Revolution
Stuck in the Mud
Imperial Hubris
The Grand Chessboard
There’s Always NATO
50th Anniversary
Clinton’s Broken Relationship
Right from the Beginning
Making Vladimir Putin
Laying Down the Law
 George W. Bush
Sucking Up
The Cold Shoulder
Missile Defense
Killing Two Nuke Treaties
Poland, Romania, Czechia
Far From Home
White Stork
Transnistria
The Rose Revolution
Too Close to Russia
Yer Out!
The Coup
George Soros
A Textbook Case
Rose Wilted
NATO Round 2
Whole and Free
The Elbe
Action Plan
The Orange Revolution
Reconstruction Blueprints
Corrupt Puppets
The NGO Scam
CIA and MI6, Too
 The Poison Hoax
Do-Over
Guardian On It
Dr. No
Michael McFaul
A Force More Powerful
Oh, I See How It Is
Solzhenitsyn on Ukraine
Secession Is an Option
Orange Peeled
The Tulip Revolution
To Be America’s Friend Is Fatal
Soros’s Islamists
Same Ol’ Thing
Russian Reaction
Tulip Bust
The Denim Revolution
October 2004
Foreign Agents Confirmed
Tens of Millions
Freedom Betrayed
Crying For Yukos
Texas Tea
Litvinenko
Kook Killed
 Suspects
Ultimate Responsibility
Gaidar Too
Smuggling
Blackmail
Informant
Pretensions Canceled
National Security Strategy for 2006
Cheney in Vilnius
Russian Pora
Russia’s War on Terrorism
The Pankisi Gorge
Basayev’s War Against Russia
Beslan
Chitigov
ACPC
Double Game
Abu Qatada
Hamza al-Masri
Russian Red Lines
Munich 2007
A Serious Provocation
‘Nyet’ Means ‘Nyet’
The Memos
French Plan for Ukrainian Neutrality
 Bush Pushes Ahead
Down Hill
Russell’s Report
Worst of All Worlds
Saakashvili’s War
Instigation
Motivations
He Started It
Media Consensus
A Heartbeat Away
Sour Grapes
Democrat
Thomas Graham’s Lament
You Want Information Dispersal, This Is Information Retrieval

Barack Obama
The Great Reset
Meet the New Boss
Not Impressed
Medvedev’s New Treaty
New START
Hot Mic
Overload
Round 3
Libya
 Martyr Made
Biden’s Big Trip
The Snow Revolution
The Once and Future President
Brzezinski Warns Ukraine
Yanukovych Returns
The Vaudeville Coup
Culture Wars
Sergei Magnitsky
An Important Accountant
Browder
Firestone Duncan
Der Spiegel
Motive Makes No Sense
Death in Jail
USA v. Prevezon Holdings
Nekrasov’s Film
UK Libel Suit
XKeyscore
Tapping My Telephone
Stranded
Boston Strong
Dropped Ball
Trip to Dagestan
No Ties
 Informant?
Blaming Russia
Busy with BS
Musa
No Motive
Motive
‘Trust Deficit’
Who Made the Bombs?
Unsolved Murders
Lockdown
Solidarity
The Maidan Revolution
Association Agreement
EU Sabotage
Russian Hardball
Maidan Protests Begin
Taking Sides
Nuland’s Big Claims
Intercepted
The Same Old NGO Scam
A Violent Putsch
The Radical Right
Uprisings Across the West
Just Imagine
Snipers
 In the Conservatory with a Rifle
Chronology
The Hotel Ukraine
Vladislav Surkov
Georgians
Olga Bogomolets
Consensus
If It Doesn’t Fit, You Must Acquit
Legitimacy Lost
No Sellout
President Flees
Nazis Take Credit
One For the Books
Impeachment
Victory Laps
Mr. Funny Man
Pwned
Putin’s Reaction
Chris Murphy Takes Credit
Yes, Nazis
Reds vs. Browns
Screwed at Versailles
Holodomor
Walter Duranty
The OUN
 Declaring a State
Premeditation
Helping the Holocaust
Justin Trudeau Toasts the SS
The UPA
Insurgency
The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt
Lebed and the CIA
Continuity
Rewriting History
The Book of Facts
Springtime for Hitler
Erased
Reversed
Revenge of the Right
Russians Noticed, Too
Aftermath
A Clean Nation
Foreign Policy
Liberals
10 Important Nazis
Proud Fascists
Torches Out for Bandera
Jewish Leaders Concerned
De-recognizing Russian
 Even Freedom House?
Losing Crimea
Oops
Crimean History
Post-USSR
Korsun Bus Attack
Little Green Men
Return of the King
Princess Fiona
Backdraft
The New Cold War
Crystal City
Donetsk Dissent
Protests
1994 Referendum
The East’s Maidan
Late to the Game
Nyet-Negative
The Odesa Massacre
‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’
Brennan Orders Attack
CIA’s Secret War
Putin Refuses the Donbas
Status Quo Canceled
Geneva Talks
 Luhansk
Conscription
The Azov Battalion
Patriot of Ukraine
Biletsky’s Rant
War Criminals
Cathy Young
Azov Not Changed
Even Bellingcat Agrees
The International Nazi
Unite the Right
We Can Do It Again
Domestic Terrorism
#Banderites
No, Not Everyone
Ultraviolence
Liberal Fascism
Kiev’s Murderous War
Russians Not There Yet
Horton’s Law
Suicide Economics
2014 Wales Declaration
Obama Afraid
MH-17
The Minsk Peace Deals
 Minsk I
Minsk II
Extreme Gerrymandering
Ivo Daalder
Soros Hacked
It’s Sabotage
Low-Level Casualties
H2O
Money for Nothing
Natalie Jaresko
Yats’s War on Corruption
Syria
Thanks, Obama
Kosovars
Omar the Chechen
Bandar Bin Sultan
Insubordination
After Iraq War III
Ukrainian Jihad
Reasonable Doubt
That Settles It Then
The Budapest Memorandum
The Monroe Doctrine
International Law
Sane Men
 Primordial Fear
Cold War II

Donald Trump
Russiagate
Framing Trump
Media Storm
DNC Podesta Leaks
DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0
Mueller on WikiLeaks’s Source
Manafort-WikiLeaks
Roger Stone
Electoral College
Brennan’s ICA
Big Fake Times Story
The Steele Dossier
Kooks
Ohr Smears Millian
Papadopoulos
Framing Carter Page
Mike Flynn
Smearing Svetlana
It Was Brennan All Along
Brennan’s Source
Perkins Coie and the Clinton Plan
Danchenko and Dolan (and Hill)
Alfa Bank
Yota Phones
25th Amendment
Dowd
Jeff Sessions
Facebook and Twitter Ads
Paul Manafort and Oleg Deripaska
Ukraine’s Role (Framing Manafort)
Cohen Prague
Trump Tower Moscow
Trump Tower New York
GOP Platform
PropOrNot
Hamilton 68 and the #TwitterFiles
The Ministry of Truth
Roy Moore
Tulsi Gabbard
DeRensis
Treason Summit
Maria Butina
Havana Syndrome
Mockingbird
Jerking Your Chain
Obstruction
 Even the Senate Republicans
2020
Uranium One
Lying About Russia
Reining Him In
The Skripals
Assassination Times
Porton Down
Screwy Story
Nick Bailey
Dorks
Easy Chemistry
CCTV
Dodgy Dossier
Haspel’s Lies
The Nurse
Unsolved Mysteries
Expulsion
Cold Front
Navalny
The Gerasimov Doctrine
The Four-Day War
Armenia’s Way Out
The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War
A New Security Architecture
 A Missed Chance for Peace
Nuclear Posture Review
Russia’s New Arsenal
The Kerch Strait Incident
Bin Ladenites Still Lurking
Volodymyr Zelensky
The Eastern Front
Ran on Peace
No to Capitulation!
They Needed Help
Biletsky Pulls Rank
Sivokho’s Plan
Kolomoysky
The More Things Change
Ukrainegate
End Run
Political Cover
Fired
Audio Leaked
Dormant
Fired for Corruption
Shokin’s Side
Perfect Phone Call
Impeachment
Eric Ciaramella
 Aftermath
October Surprise
Hunter Biden’s Laptop
The Whitmer Kidnap Hoax
War Games
Extending Russia
Interoperability
The Perpetual Policy
Paul Whelan
A Vision of War
Nord Stream 2
Mercantilism
Bastiat’s Warning
‘Making Russia Richer’
Broken Treaties
Intermediate Nuclear Forces
Open Skies
Ukrainian Culture War
Divisions Deepen
Orthodox Split
Afghan Bounties Hoax
Savage Takedown
Withdrawal Postponed
Press Your Luck
The Slipper Revolution
 Joe Biden
War Horse
New START
Staying Relevant
2021
Reckless Joe
Knocking
Medvedchuk
An Anti-Russia
Biden Meets Putin
Sea Breeze
Putin’s Essay
Had My Fingers Crossed
The Reznikov Plan
State and Defense Double Down
The Fall of Kabul
Turkish Drones Join the Fight
Rules of the Road
Take This Exit
No Deal
Draft Treaties
1997? Ancient History
Negotiable
Non-Negotiable
Peace Slips Away
 What Door?
Appeasement!
Uprising in Kazakhstan
Miscalibration
Blinken’s Blinders
C’mon, Man
Alliance with China
Macron’s Last Shot
WMD
Do Not Give In to Provocations
Kamala Harris Is Speaking
Declarations of War
Blame Wilson
There’s Options
Putin’s Case
New Lies for Old
Missing the USSR
Alexander Dugin
Buffer Zone, Left Behind
Told You So
Rush’n Attack
Invasion
The Right to Resist
Strategic Defeat
The Afghan Model
 Hammer and Anvil
Confidence Is High
The Censorship-Industrial Complex
Google Threats
Yellow Journalism
Chemical Weapons
Babi Yar
The Ghost of Kiev
Snake Island
Hit Lists
Mariupol Theater
The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant
Viagra
Crystallizing Public Opinion
The Negotiations Were Short
U.S., UK Prevent Peace
Belarus Talks
Bennett
Fiona Spills
Nay No Ned
Turkey
Alexey Arestovich
Boris Johnson
Multiple Confirmations
No Real Talks Since
 Poisoning Abramovich
Bucha
The Azov Battalion’s Big Chance
No Idle Threat
The Memory Hole
Stormtroopers
Purple-Brown Alliance
Blowback Coming
Disposable Heroes
It’s a Real Bargain
Feeling a Draft
Vanya Got His Gun
Bakhmut
Dystopian Drones
War Crimes
Murder
Mariupol
Kidnapping
Co-Belligerents
Time for Some Game Theory
De Facto Member
Increasing Limits
Entangling Alliances
Sułwaki
The Pit
 SOCOM and CIA in Ukraine
Passionate Attachments
Killing Generals
Boiling the Frog
War Games
Seize the Moment
Economic War
Crippling Sanctions
Sino-Russian Alliance
Global South
Who’s Zoomin’ Who?
America’s Order Wrecked
The BRICS
Putin’s Price Hike
Feb ’23: Failure
CH4
Terrorizing Europe
Russia in Germany
Spanish Letter Bombs
Weaponized by Russia
Ukrainian Democracy
Two Wolves and a Sheep
Elections Delayed
Killing Kiryeyev
‘Peacemaker’
 Gonzalo Lira
Sectarian Split Worsened
Blatant Corruption
A Big Israel
Bribing Your Congressman
Imperial Hubris
Breaking Up Russia
Killer MIC
Peace Proposals
The 2023 Offensive
The End of Fukuyama
Discord Leaks
Eurocrats
It’s On!
Failure
Minefields
You and Him Fight
Zaluzhnyi Fired
Are You Threatening Me?
Haass Backchannel
Mutiny
Attacking Russia
Commander Farkas
Drone Wars
Targeting Putin
 Sabotage
Energy Infrastructure
Shipping
Putin to Butler
Kerch Bridge, Reaction
Russian Nazis
Assassinating Tatarsky
Threatening Crimea
ATACMS
Cluster Bombs
Restrictions Lifted
Hotter than the Sun
The 800-Megaton Gorilla
Ain’t Nuked Us Yet
Russian Threats
Western Threats
Ukrainian Tough Talk
Future Primitive
Doomed
Losing Avdiivka
Stab in the Back
It Appears to Be Jammed
Body Counts
It’s Just Not Enough, Is It?
Russian Army Growing
 Khodorkovsky: Fight
The Israel Model
Late 2023 Offers
Backing Down, Finally?
Putin’s Peace Feelers
No, Fly Zone
Electoral Needs First
Behind Enemy Lines
Losing Kharkiv?
Kursk Assault
Take Warning
Negotiate Now
Population Collapse
Russia’s Pyrrhic Victory
A Less-Russian Ukraine
Ukraine’s Same Problem
Militarizing Ukraine
Don’t Call It a Comeback
Alliance Enlarged
Frozen Conflicts
The Arctic Melts
Korea Scalds
Transnistria Steams
Bosnia Simmers
Kosovo Boils Over
 Georgia Liquefies
Armenia Sublimates
The Baltics Bubble
The Real Enemy
Bigger Fish to Fry
It’s Not Over Yet
Taylor Swift
Partners
Oil, Gas, Satellites
Trudging Forward
Now What?
A Trillion More
Trump Closes a Deal
Russiagate ’24
Tilting at Windmills
Cut and Run

Trump II
Nice Miss
Heroes in Error
The Same World Order
Transition
Rogue Statist?

Good Night and Good Luck

Fool’s Errand
Same Old Nonsense
Flat Broke
Kagan Concedes
Strobe’s Second Thoughts
Rockefeller Men
Fiona’s Arc
Empire of Dunces
Enough Already
Outlaw Enforcement
Deterrence for Dummies
Leaving the Past
Call This a Govment?

Appendix: Maps

About the Author

Acknowledgments
Nuclear War
The Scott Horton Show and The Libertarian Institute

Endnotes
Chapter 1: George H.W. Bush
Chapter 2: Bill Clinton
Chapter 3: George W. Bush
Chapter 4: Barack Obama
Chapter 5: Donald Trump
Chapter 6: Joe Biden
Chapter 7: Trump II
Chapter 8: Good Night and Good Luck

OceanofPDF.com
George H.W. Bush

“If in 10 years, all American troops stationed in

Europe for national defense purposes have not been
returned to the United States, then this whole project
will have failed.”
—Dwight D. Eisenhower

“Out of these troubled times, a new world order can

emerge: a new era—freer from the threat of terror,
stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in
the quest for peace.”
—George H.W. Bush

“The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the

final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western
Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and,
indeed, the first truly global power.”
—Zbigniew Brzezinski
“If not for America, who would lead the world?”
—Joe Biden

“You’re just angry because you don’t have an enemy

anymore.”
—Katie McMaster

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who

controls the present controls the past.”
—George Orwell

“I could not be silent in the face of . . . the greatest

purveyor of violence in the world today: my own
government.”
—Martin Luther King Jr.

OceanofPDF.com
 The Unipolar Moment

Ending the Last Cold War

President Ronald Reagan (1981–1989) began negotiating an end to the first

Cold War with the old Soviet Union in 1986.[1] Frightened by the prospect
of nuclear war and inspired by a new generation of Soviet leaders,[2]
especially the new reformist premier, Mikhail Gorbachev,[3] Reagan saw
the opportunity to forge a permanent peace.[4] In the first year in office of
Reagan’s successor, George H.W. Bush (1989–1993), people began to flee
from Soviet-occupied Hungary to neutral Austria. Gorbachev refused calls
to crack down.[5] Next, the people of Berlin tore down the wall.[6] The
USSR itself was soon gone, and our terrible post-World War II global
confrontation with the Communists finally came to a mostly peaceful end.
[7]

Come Home, America

Jeane Kirkpatrick, Reagan’s second ambassador to the United Nations, was

until then a neoconservative hawk.[8] But she wrote in The National
Interest in the fall of 1990—more than a year before the USSR itself finally
unraveled—that it was now time for the United States to shed itself of “the
dubious benefits of superpower status and become again a usually
successful, open American republic . . . a normal country in a normal
time . . . an independent nation in a world of independent nations.” Instead
of maintaining political and military dominance in Europe and Asia,
America should come home “and take care of pressing problems of
education, family, industry and technology.”[9] Was this not the reason the
public was told we had fought the first Cold War, to preserve our way of life
as free people in our constitutional republic once the emergency subsided?
[10]
Along with a core group of non-interventionist libertarians and
conservatives, many of America’s liberals, progressives and leftists also
wanted to cash what they called the “peace dividend” following the Cold
War, preferring to see the money spent on social welfare, education and
infrastructure instead of militarism.[11]

The War Party

But under President George H.W. Bush, at the end of the first Cold War, the
American national security state and foreign policy community, led by the
neoconservatives, adopted a doctrine of “global dominance.” Former leftists
and Cold War Democrats, the neoconservatives were highly ideological
about the beneficence of American military power and, in many cases, close
to the nationalist Likud Party in Israel.[12] As neocon columnist Charles
Krauthammer put it in Foreign Affairs in 1990, without the USSR in the
way, it was America’s “unipolar moment” and opportunity to remake the
world as our leaders saw fit.[13]
Popular television commentators simply call it “leadership”;
neoconservative think tank ringleader and former editor of the Weekly
Standard, Bill Kristol, and his writing partner Robert Kagan labeled it
“benevolent global hegemony.”[14] Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Jimmy
Carter-era national security adviser from the “realist” school, called it
“primacy,” “preeminence” or “predominance,”[15] while the technocratic
liberal interventionist Michèle Flournoy, undersecretary of defense for
policy in the Barack Obama years, referred to America’s political and
military posture as “Full-Spectrum Dominance.”[16]
As Krauthammer put it in his rejoinder to Kirkpatrick in The National
Interest, denouncing the more conservative Russell Kirk[17] and Pat
Buchanan,[18] who urged a return to normalcy, the U.S. now ruled “a
super-sovereign West economically, culturally, and politically hegemonic in
the world. . . . I suggest we go all the way and stop at nothing short of
universal domination.”[19] He later added, “We are living in a unipolar
world. We Americans should like it—and exploit it.”[20] No, really, our
politicians insist, it is all for the world’s own good: keeping the peace,
spreading democracy, protecting the sea lanes and enforcing the “global
rules-based liberal international order”[21]—but it takes an empire to do it.
Readers may be more familiar with the neoconservatives and their
allies’ plans for increasing American hegemony in the Middle East over the
last generation and the terrible consequences.[22] But the same men and
women also led the charge to expand U.S. power and influence in Europe
after the Cold War. There was a real question of what shape the new world
would take. Edward Lozansky, founder of the American University in
Moscow, tells an incredible story about what could have been at the dawn
of the new era. In April 1989, Gorbachev’s senior adviser Alexander
Yakovlev told prominent American officials that the Soviet leadership was
ready to abolish the Warsaw Pact, retreat from Eastern Europe and make a
full rapprochement with the United States and the rest of the West.
Conservative activist Paul Weyrich and Lozansky then held a series of
meetings leading to a proposal for Russian “integration with the West,”
which Weyrich presented to President H.W. Bush. “Bush listened
attentively until his Russia adviser, Condoleezza Rice, walked into the Oval
Office and dismissed these ideas out of hand,” Weyrich told Lozansky. The
hawks prevailed. “[I]n his speeches Bush occasionally used some words
like ‘building a new world security architecture from Vancouver to
Vladivostok,’ but nothing moved further,” Lozansky wrote.[23] Rice would
later become national security adviser, then secretary of state for Bush’s
son, President George W. Bush (2001–2009). Essentially, instead of a new
world order after the Cold War, the old order remained. As the instruments
of U.S. power now grew without a counterweight, Washington ended up
perpetuating the same crisis they had finally just averted after a 40-year
nuclear standoff.[24]
The non-interventionist position, as represented most famously by
former Representative Ron Paul of Texas,[25] was never at issue in these
discussions. The debate was not over whether the U.S. would remain in
Europe, but rather the degree of cooperation with the new post-Soviet
Russia. Any form of unified northern military alliance or partnership with
Moscow would have brought its own dangers. But that possibility was not
taken much more seriously than the idea of just coming home. Worse,
successive U.S. administrations beginning with H.W. Bush showed an
avowed lack of concern over how the Russians viewed the expansion of the
Western alliance into the space where theirs used to be, while leaving them
on the outside, and possibly still the object of its intentions.

DPG ’94

The Pentagon’s post-Iraq War I “Defense Planning Guidance” (DPG) from

1992 defined foreign policy and military doctrine for the new decade and
into the new millennium: the U.S. must remain the single global hegemon
with enough strength to prevent any possible strategic rivals, such as
Germany, Japan, Russia or China, from even considering a challenge to
U.S. dominance or access to natural resources. Aside from America’s great
triumph over global Communism and its apparent success in the first Iraq
war, Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz and his staff
wrote that the U.S. had also succeeded in “the integration of the leading
democracies into a U.S.-led system of collective security and the creation of
a democratic ‘zone of peace.’”
They proposed expanding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) military alliance into Eastern Europe, saying that “a substantial
American presence in Europe will provide reassurance and stability as the
new democracies of Eastern Europe and possibly some states of the former
Soviet Union seek to be integrated into a larger and evolving security
architecture.”[26] An enthusiastic Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney told
Wolfowitz aide Zalmay Khalilzad, “You’ve discovered a new rationale for
our role in the world.”[27] Cheney officially published the document as
America’s “Defense Strategy for the 1990s.”[28] Beyond their practical
implementation, these documents were much more important politically,
setting the boundaries of debate regarding America’s place in the post-Cold
War world, including an emphasis on continued dominance in the Middle
East and expansion into Eastern Europe.[29]
As Wolfowitz told author James Mann, “What we were afraid of was
people who would say . . . ‘Let’s bring all of the troops home, and let’s
abandon our position in Europe.’ It’s hard to imagine just how uncertain the
world looked at the end of the Cold War.”[30] By 2000, Wolfowitz boasted
that his doctrine had become the mainstream consensus.[31]

PNAC

After it was leaked to the New York Times,[32] causing a small controversy,
[33] the DPG draft was rewritten[34] to include more multilateralism but
remained essentially unchanged.[35] As those same neoconservatives wrote
in their 1998 Project for a New American Century (PNAC) study,
“Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” expanding the U.S. presence in the
Middle East and the NATO alliance in Europe was at the core of their
doctrine. “The region is stable,” they wrote, “but a continued American
presence helps to assure the major European powers, especially Germany,
that the United States retains its longstanding security interest in the
continent.” They added, “This is especially important in light of the nascent
European moves toward an independent defense ‘identity’ and policy; it is
important that NATO not be replaced by the European Union, leaving the
United States without a voice in European security affairs.”[36]

The End of History

In 1996, Kristol and Kagan declared the need to establish what they called
“benevolent global hegemony.”[37] The realist-hawk Zbigniew Brzezinski,
the neocons’ sometimes-ally, echoed their argument, recognizing that it was
doubtful Americans “will wish to be permanently engaged in the difficult,
absorbing and costly task of managing Eurasia by constant manipulation
and maneuver backed by American military resources in order to prevent
regional domination by any one power.” Therefore, the empire would have
to instead be “a benign American hegemony.” The United States would rule
the world—but never for anything but the highest-minded reasons of
creating a “functioning structure of global cooperation . . . stability and
peace.” That way, when the American people’s patience or money finally
ran out, they would withdraw with a better world left in place to run itself.
The first order of the project was to unite Europe under an expanded NATO
alliance.[38]
Neoconservative theoretician and Iraq War II supporter[39] Francis
Fukuyama wrote in a celebrated article in The National Interest, and later a
book, that it was “The End of History”; all the dialectics had been resolved.
Quasi-free markets and quasi-democracy were the unstoppable order of the
day and the indefinite future. However, even Fukuyama had warned against
the dangers of nationalism, ethnic and otherwise, to the larger globalist
project.[40]

Not One Inch

Staying
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the status of then-
divided Germany soon became the center of attention. The Soviets of
course were concerned. Approximately 27 million of their citizens had been
killed in World War II, or the Great Patriotic War, as they call it.[41] After
occupying half of the nation for 43 years, the USSR was now going to
withdraw and even approve East Germany’s reunification with the West, as
well as its integration into the American-led NATO alliance, which itself
had been founded as an anti-Soviet (or Russian) bloc at the dawn of the last
Cold War. As State Department officials wrote in 1990, keeping Europe in
NATO and America in Europe was the Bush administration’s highest
priority. “The U.S. should seek to transform NATO however needed so that
NATO retains its primacy among other Europe-only structures,” they said.
It was important to rally “the British, Italians and the smaller allies” to
“press our interests . . . [and] to act as a balance to the larger powers of
Europe, above all Germany.”[42]
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was opposed to German
reunification. She told Irish Taoiseach Charlie Haughey, “I am sorry for
Gorbachev. He doesn’t want German unity. Neither do I.”[43] The Bush
administration resorted to going behind Thatcher’s back to get the rest of
NATO on board, only letting her know after it was too late.[44]

Handshake Deals

The Soviets allowed reunification because the Allies had promised they
would not expand NATO eastward, inside Germany or beyond. Of course,
the various administrations and their partisans have lied about it since, at
times claiming this pledge either never happened, or that it only ever
applied to NATO forces within Germany, but not the rest of Eastern Europe
—or does not count because it was not in writing.[45] But in 2017 and
2018, the records were posted at George Washington University’s National
Security Archive.[46] Anyone can see that the notes taken by the American
and allied side in the negotiations prove Russian claims about the verbal
assurances from the West. The New York Times, which refused to cover the
documents when they were published,[47] later shifted the goalposts. They
now say that since it was not written in a formal treaty, there was no
agreement at all.[48]
Likewise, NATO’s website insists that “[n]o such pledge was made,
and no evidence to back up Russia’s claims has ever been produced.”
Further, even if they would admit the truth, they say, “Personal assurances
from individual leaders cannot replace Alliance consensus and do not
constitute formal NATO agreement.”[49] But that just proves how
disingenuous their position is. America and the Soviet Union made
informal, spoken, handshake-type deals all the time during the first Cold
War. One prominent example would be when President John F. Kennedy
promised to remove American Jupiter nuclear missiles from Turkey—and
implicitly Italy too—and never to invade Cuba again, in exchange for the
removal of the USSR’s nukes from Cuba to defuse the Missile Crisis of
1962, one of the most crucial deals of the entire Cold War. For decades that
agreement was secret and deniable, yet they still abided by it. Everyone
now knows that is how the crisis ended.[50]
 As scholar Joshua Shifrinson wrote, informal agreements regularly
underlie the relationships between nation-states. “Put simply, explicit and
codified arrangements are neither necessary nor sufficient for actors to
strike deals and receive political assurances.” In another example, he noted
that in the first Cold War, the 1970s unofficial alliance between the U.S. and
China against the USSR was based on unwritten agreements. He added that
many scholars noting the February 1990 meetings ignore or have missed
other assurances given later that year and in 1991, and said, “[S]imply
arguing that the U.S. position later changed is not sufficient to show that a
non-expansion pledge was compromised.”[51]
Marc Trachtenberg, professor of political science at UCLA, similarly
wrote that “no one really thinks that the words high officials utter do not
commit them to anything until they are put into a signed agreement; if that
were the case, meaningful exchanges between top officials would scarcely
be possible.” He added that “otherwise purely verbal exchanges could not
play anything like the role they do in international political life.”
Trachtenberg wrote that in the strange case of the free half-city of West
Berlin, wholly within Communist East Germany during the Cold War years,
[52] the Soviets had promised to treat the deal they had made regarding
Vienna, Austria, as also applying to Berlin, and the Americans then took
them at their word. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted the agreement to
be based on a handshake to avoid sending a signal of mistrust. That deal,
struck in June 1945, lasted through the Cold War,[53] with the exception of
the crises of 1948 and 1961.[54]

Bush
The Soviets had every reason to believe President Bush and his men meant
what they said. There is no question their promises were the basis of the
greatest and gravest decisions Soviet leaders made to withdraw their forces
from Germany, and eventually, the rest of the Eastern Bloc. Jack Matlock,
the second-to-last ambassador to the USSR, recalled what he believes was
the first real assurance the U.S. gave the Soviets on the issue, and it came
directly from the highest level. President Bush told Gorbachev at their
meeting in Malta in December 1989 that “if the countries of Eastern Europe
were allowed to choose their future orientation by democratic processes, the
United States would not ‘take advantage’ of that process,” referring to their
potential choice to leave the USSR or its alliance. Matlock continued,
“Obviously, bringing countries into NATO that were then in the Warsaw
Pact would be ‘taking advantage.’”[55] He also wrote that “[w]e gave
categorical assurances to Gorbachev back when the Soviet Union existed
that if a united Germany was able to stay in NATO, NATO would not be
moved eastward.”[56] Though the consensus, as President Bush put it, was
that “the United States must and will remain a European power” after the
Cold War,[57] the ambassador is adamant to this day that “there would have
been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the
alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred
in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included
Russia.”[58]

Genscher
On January 31, 1990, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher gave a public speech in Bavaria taking the same stance on
reunification. The U.S. Embassy wrote home to Secretary of State James
Baker that though he said a reunited Germany would be a part of NATO,
“Genscher makes it clear that the changes in Eastern Europe and the
German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet
security interests.’” He said, “Therefore, NATO should rule out an
‘expansion of its border towards the east,’ i.e.: moving it closer to Soviet
borders.” He instead recommended “cooperative security structures” for all
of Europe. “Genscher also stresses, however, that it is necessary for the
alliance to define their roles more and more in political terms. Genscher
also called for a ‘partnership of stability between East and West’ to be
achieved through the CSCE [Conference on Security and Cooperation in
Europe],” of which the USSR was already a member, rather than through
the now-obsolete NATO alliance. Genscher promised reunification within
the CSCE “so that there will be no shift in the relationship of forces and no
destabilization in Europe.”[59]
On February 2, after meeting with Baker, the two held a short press
conference. After Baker emphasized America’s preference, and German
agreement for a reunited Germany’s continued membership in the NATO
alliance, Genscher told reporters that “we were in full agreement that there
is no intention to extend the NATO area of defense and the security toward
the East.” He added that “[t]his holds true not only for GDR [German
Democratic Republic], which we have no intention of simply incorporating,
but that holds true for all the other Eastern countries. . . . [T]here is no
intention to extend our area—NATO’s area—of defense towards the East.”
He said this was why “the CSCE process is so important . . . [T]hat body
[is] an area within which things can be developed jointly.”[60]
Though he had the opportunity to have the final word, Baker did not
object to this formulation.[61] A State Department document about the
meeting reads: “Genscher confirmed . . . the new Germany would remain in
NATO because NATO is an essential building block to a new Europe.” But
it also said, “Genscher reiterated the need to assure the Soviets that NATO
would not extend its territorial coverage to the area of the GDR nor
anywhere else in Eastern Europe for that matter.” There is nothing in the
document indicating the secretary disagreed with the foreign minister about
this statement.[62] That same day, according to Genscher’s chief of staff,
Frank Elbe, he met with Baker at his home in Washington and they quickly
agreed that NATO would not expand farther east. “It was completely clear,”
he confirmed in 2009.[63]
This shows that before the talks had even begun, Western leaders were
already thinking ahead about how to handle the process without causing an
unnecessary reaction from Soviet hardliners, and they were signaling that
they intended to make it easier for the Russians to see through such large-
scale changes with these sorts of upfront assurances.
On February 6, 1990, the West German foreign minister again, this
time in a conversation with Secretary Baker, said that “when he talked
about not wanting to extend NATO, that applied to other states beside the
GDR. The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the
Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join
NATO the next.”[64] British Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd agreed with
him.[65]
While discussions on this subject with the Gorbachev government in
February began with the question of the reunification of Germany and the
future of its relationship with the NATO alliance, there were assurances
throughout the talks which echoed Genscher’s public statements against
membership for nations east of Germany as well.

Baker

After discussing America’s preference for German reunification within

NATO with Russian Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze on February 7,
in his notes Baker added asterisks and an exclamation point at the important
part: “End result: Unified Ger. anchored in a *changed (polit.) NATO—
*whose juris. would not move *eastward!”[66]
President Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft,
admitted in their joint memoir: “Baker repeated Genscher’s formula of the
status of the GDR: if Germany stayed in NATO there would be no
movement of NATO’s jurisdiction or forces eastward.” They continued,
paraphrasing Baker, “NATO would evolve into a more political and less
military alliance, something the president had already spoken about in
December at the NATO meeting in Brussels.”[67] This was the beginning
of the narrative that NATO would now become more “political” and less of
a security organization, as that would be negotiated primarily under the
CSCE and later the so-called Partnership for Peace, to assuage the Soviets
over reunification and eventually over NATO expansion into the former
Warsaw Pact nations and Soviet republics.
On February 9, in meetings in Moscow, Baker promised Gorbachev six
times that if the Soviet Union would withdraw their troops and allow
German reunification under America’s NATO alliance, they would not
expand it.[68] “We understand the need for assurances to the countries in
the east,” Baker told him. “If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a
part of NATO, there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for
forces of NATO one inch to the east.” Raising the specter of an
independent, nuclear-armed Germany, Baker asked Gorbachev, “Would you
prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no
U.S. forces, or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO,
with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward
from its present position?”[69] Gorbachev answered, “Certainly any
extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.”[70] Baker replied,
“We agree with that.”
Referring to joint negotiations between East and West Germany, the
U.S., UK, France and the USSR, the secretary reiterated, “We consider that
the consultations and discussions in the framework of the 2+4 mechanism
should give a guarantee that the reunification of Germany will not lead to
the enlargement of NATO’s military organization to the East.”
Baker repeated to Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to
extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,”
and “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well
it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence
in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present
military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”[71]
At a press conference later that day, the secretary of state confirmed
they had agreed “there should be no extension of NATO forces eastward in
order to assuage the security concerns of those of the East of Germany.” He
said the USSR was “not likely to [allow reunification to] happen without
there being some sort of security guarantees with respect to NATO’s
forces . . . or the jurisdiction of NATO moving eastward.”[72]
As Trachtenberg noted, “[T]here was no attempt to make it clear that
he was just talking about what was still East German territory.” Further, he
said that “assuaging the security concerns of those to Germany’s east,
meaning above all the USSR, could easily have been taken as ruling out
NATO’s expansion into countries like Poland.”[73]
After his meeting with Gorbachev, Baker wrote to German Chancellor
Helmut Kohl in preparation for his meeting with the Soviet premier the next
day. Baker told Kohl about his threat of an independent, nuclear-armed
Germany compared to one dominated by the U.S. in NATO. Gorbachev
then told him, as he related to Genscher: “‘Certainly any extension of the
zone of NATO would be unacceptable.’ (By implication, NATO in its
current zone might be acceptable.)”[74]
Professor Mary Elise Sarotte explains, “This statement was extremely
significant to Gorbachev; indeed, he later recalled it as the moment that
‘cleared the way for a compromise’ on Germany. Based on it, he would
make a big concession to Kohl the next day at the third bilateral [meeting].”
She says this meeting was key. “Gorbachev thought he had a workable
deal. . . . [His] misperception would incline him toward generosity towards
Kohl.”
Though he definitely made these statements, it is possible that
Secretary Baker never meant what he said. That is his defense, anyway.[75]
Lawyers, as Sarotte notes, say lots of things. But if it was not in a signed
deal, at the end of the day it was only the word of an American politician.
[76]

Gates

However, that same day, Robert Gates, then Bush Sr.’s deputy national
security adviser, offered the same deal to Vladimir Kryuchkov, the head of
the KGB. They had a fascinating discussion about plans for the end of the
Communist Party’s monopoly on power and the advent of multi-party
democracy, private property ownership and impending declarations of
independence by the so-called Soviet “republics” and other members of the
Warsaw Pact alliance. Like Baker, Gates politely threatened that an
independent, reunified Germany might seek nuclear weapons, but said that
if it remained in NATO under U.S. control, “the Soviet Union would have
no reason to fear.” Gates said the U.S. supported “the Kohl-Genscher idea
of a united Germany belonging to NATO but with no expansion of the
military presence to the GDR.” He asked Kryuchkov what he thought of the
Kohl/Genscher proposal, in which reunited Germany would be in NATO,
but alliance troops “would move no further east than they now were? It
seems to us to be a sound proposal.”[77] Kryuchkov was noncommittal, but
did say the USSR had “no enthusiasm” for German reunification and that
whatever was decided, they would need “guarantees” and “verification.” As
Shifrinson wrote, “Gates’s discussion with Kryuchkov . . . belies the notion
that Baker’s offer was merely speculative,” instead showing it to have broad
support in the administration.[78]
Baker made the same offer to Shevardnadze later on the 9th. “There
would, of course, have to be ironclad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction
or forces would not move eastward.” But the hawks cling to the following
statement: there “might be an outcome that would guarantee that there
would be no NATO forces in the eastern part of Germany. In fact, there
could be an absolute ban on that.” Baker now claims he was walking back
the promise.[79]

Special Status

Since Baker’s idea that NATO would be confined to the western half of a
reunited Germany did not make sense, the White House came up with a
plan for a “special status” limiting the deployment of certain Western
materiel, such as nuclear weapons, to the former GDR instead.
The next day, February 10, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl,
though aware of the White House’s new position, still took the softer Baker
line, telling Gorbachev: “We believe that NATO should not expand the
sphere of its activity. . . . [N]aturally NATO could not expand its territory to
the current territory of [East Germany].”[80] He did not mention Bush’s
new plan for a “special military zone” in the East. At the same time,
Genscher told Shevardnadze in a parallel session, “For us, it is clear: NATO
will not extend itself to the East.”[81]
 Gorbachev, believing he already had a deal with Baker, agreed with
Kohl that “the German people” had the sole right to decide on reunification,
without getting him to repeat Baker’s promise not to expand NATO in
writing. Kohl immediately “pounced,” as Sarotte put it, announcing
Gorbachev’s statement as official policy that night.[82] Somehow it did not
matter in this case that Gorbachev had only spoken a sentence and not
signed a deal. It was enough for the West.
The next day, the State Department sent a cable to the embassies
explaining, “The Secretary made clear that . . . we supported a unified
Germany within NATO, but that we were prepared to ensure that NATO’s
military presence would not extend further eastward.”[83]

Alright Then

It was after this meeting, and based on these assurances by Baker and Kohl,
that Gorbachev gave the “green light” for the first steps toward
reunification. As Scowcroft wrote, they “paved the way for the Soviet
leader’s discussions with Kohl and Genscher and very likely predisposed
Gorbachev to be sympathetic.”[84]
A week later, on February 12, 1990, at negotiations over the Open
Skies treaty in Ottawa, Baker told Gorbachev that if they agreed a united
Germany would stay in NATO, “we should take care about non-expansion
of its jurisdiction to the East.”[85] Shortly after, they announced the
creation of the 2+4 format for talks to resolve reunification under NATO.
[86] As Shifrinson wrote, “In short, within one week of meeting Baker,
Gates and other Western leaders in Moscow, the Soviet leadership began
moving in the very direction sought by the United States on the basis of
U.S.-West German proposals.”[87]

2+4 Notes

And we know how those talks turned out. In a meeting between the political
directors of the foreign ministries of the U.S., the UK, France and Germany
on March 6, 1991, German representative Jürgen Chrobog said, “We made
it clear in the two-plus-four negotiations that we would not expand NATO
beyond the Elbe. We can therefore not offer NATO membership to Poland
and the others.”[88] U.S. Representative Raymond Seitz agreed, saying,
“We have made it clear to the Soviet Union—in two-plus-four talks and
elsewhere—that we will not take advantage of the withdrawal of Soviet
troops from Eastern Europe. NATO shall neither formally nor informally
extend to the east.”[89]

Heresy

As the German magazine Der Spiegel put it after reviewing relevant

documents in 2009, citing, for example, Genscher’s promises to
Shevardnadze, and his speech in Tutzing, that “there was no doubt that the
West did everything it could to give the Soviets the impression that NATO
membership was out of the question for countries like Poland, Hungary or
Czechoslovakia.” Genscher had promised there would be no “expansion of
NATO territory to the east, in other words, closer to the borders of the
Soviet Union.” They also cited a previously secret document showing Hurd
and Genscher agreed the USSR should be given assurances about “the
certainty that Hungary will not become part of the Western alliance if there
is a change of government” after their upcoming elections.[90]
But soon after, Sarotte writes, “Kohl’s phrasing would quickly become
heresy among the key Western decision-makers.” After Baker returned,
“members of Bush’s foreign policy team exercised strict message
discipline, making no further remarks about NATO holding at the 1989
line.”
On February 24 at Camp David, Bush Sr. railed to Kohl in preparation
for the 2+4 talks, telling him not to give in on anything. He demanded a
pledge from Kohl “that he will not allow Germany’s indispensable role in
NATO to be weakened in any way.”[91] The days when the USSR had a say
in these matters were over: “What worries me is talk that Germany must not
stay in NATO. To hell with that! We prevailed and they didn’t. We can’t let
the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.”[92] Though the premier
was still grumbling about it, he had already conceded that point more than a
week before.
Baker restated his nine points he had recently presented in Moscow,
including, “We agreed to support creation of pan-European structures,
which we avoided earlier. We announced adaptation of NATO to [the] new
situation by strengthening of its political component,” and “We assured the
Soviet Union that during a defined period there would be no NATO troops
in the GDR.”
By September 1990, Gorbachev had given in on the question of NATO
forces in the eastern part of a reunified Germany in exchange for
restrictions on troop totals, nuclear weapons and a few billion Deutsch
marks.[93] “If Gorbachev had been a more aggressive negotiator, and if he
had not had so many other distracting balls in the air,” Sarotte wrote, “he
might have pressed for written guarantees from either Baker or Kohl. But
he did not and by the end of February it was clear he would never get
them.” She added, “Gorbachev appears not to have understood this
sequence of events at the time, although by the end of the year he would
angrily turn on Kohl, saying to the chancellor that he felt like he had fallen
into a ‘trap.’”[94]

Using Context Clues

Robert Merry explained the reality beneath all the spin in The National
Interest. “Baker clearly signaled to Gorbachev that the United States and
the West would forgo eastward expansion in exchange for Russian
acceptance of German reunification.” However, “Baker had committed a
diplomatic gaffe, since NATO jurisdiction covering only part of Germany
was unworkable. Western diplomats had to walk back the Baker framework
so the alliance would protect all of Germany.” He said this was accepted by
the Soviets, “but implicitly within the context of the earlier Baker assurance
that NATO would not move ‘one inch eastward’ beyond the agreed upon
shift to include the old East Germany.”[95] The final treaty did stipulate,
“Foreign armed forces and nuclear weapons or their carriers will not be
stationed in that part of Germany or deployed there.”[96]
Shifrinson points out that contrary to those who conclude the final deal
canceled any previous assurances about eastward expansion, Bush, in a
phone call with Gorbachev on February 28, weeks after Baker and Gates’s
Moscow meetings, “pledged that the United States would recognize the
‘legitimate security interests’ of all parties.” Combined with their previous
assurances, “the new terms could be interpreted as explaining how NATO
would avoid expanding eastward if Germany reunited within NATO.”[97]
In modifying the deal to keep forces out of eastern Germany (the
former GDR), in a sense they were still respecting their promise for the
time being. If the agreement had always been that they could move into
Poland and the Baltics at their earliest convenience, then what difference
would it make how many troops they stationed in eastern Germany? The
1997 Founding Act implies the same understanding dating back to February
1990.[98]
Professor Trachtenberg makes other compelling points about these
particular discussions. In their February 9 meeting, Baker and Gorbachev
were discussing the “fundamental question of what Germany’s place in the
post-Cold War world should be” when Baker gave his assurances. The
specific question of NATO forces in the former GDR did not come up until
later. When it did, it also showed, “incidentally, that Baker had no problem
talking explicitly about East German territory when he wanted to.” Again,
Baker was threatening the Soviets with an independent, nuclear-armed
Germany, saying this was why they should accept reunification within
NATO instead, “to make it easier for them to go along with the idea he
wanted to make it clear to them that that shift would not go too far.”
Genscher told them the next day, “For us, it’s a firm principle: NATO will
not be extended toward the East. . . . Furthermore, with regard to the non-
extension of NATO, that applies in general.” By “in general” he obviously
was referring to the rest of Eastern Europe; otherwise, he would be
repeating himself with no use for the “furthermore.”[99]
Analyst Ted Snider argues that these various pledges amount to more
than a “promise,” since the Soviets then acted based on them. “Gorbachev
seems to have understood the promise as a deal. If that is the case, then
what the West offered Russia, even if verbally and never in writing, may
have been more than a promise,” but a binding agreement.[100] The
Americans made their assurances against eastward NATO expansion, and
the Soviets made their decisions on that basis. At the very least, even the
most partisan American hawk could see why the Russians thought all those
promises of restraint in the face of their collapse meant something besides
the president not dancing on the Berlin Wall.[101]

Brits

As Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton from the National Security

Archive wrote, “All the Western foreign ministers were on board with
Genscher, Kohl, and Baker.”[102] On March 5, 1991, Thatcher’s successor,
British Prime Minister John Major, when questioned about East European
nations’ potential interest in joining the alliance, promised Soviet Defense
Minister Marshal Dmitri Yazov, “Nothing of the sort will happen.”[103]
He and Hurd both promised the same to Gorbachev. The Soviet
premier had questioned Major about renewed talk of a central role for
NATO rather than its relegation to a more political organization in favor of
pan-European security structures which would include them. “This does not
sound complementary to the common European home that we have started
to build.” Major denied it. “I believe that your thoughts about the role of
NATO in the current situation are the result of misunderstanding,” the prime
minister told Gorbachev. “We are not talking about strengthening of NATO.
We are talking about the coordination of efforts that is already happening in
Europe between NATO and the West European Union, which, as it is
envisioned, would allow all members of the European Community to
contribute to enhance security.”[104]
The European Union (EU) is a political federation and free trade zone
which began as the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) after
World War II, then became the European Economic Community (EEC),
also known as the Common Market, then simply the European Community
(EC). It eventually grew into something much more like a federal
government for Europe, with a single currency, the euro, and only lacking
in a serious joint armed force of its own.[105] Military security remains the
province of the American-led NATO alliance.
Major assured the Russian defense minister that he “did not himself
foresee circumstances now or in the future where East European countries
would become members.”[106] Hurd told Soviet Foreign Minister
Alexander Bessmertnykh on March 26, 1991, “[T]here are no plans in
NATO to include the countries of Eastern and Central Europe in NATO in
one form or another.”[107] On April 11, he told Gorbachev that the UK
“recognized the importance of doing nothing to prejudice Soviet interests
and dignity.”[108]

NATO’s Woerner
In a speech in May 1990, Manfred Wörner, the German secretary-general of
NATO, seemed to back away from the special military zone, reassuring the
Russians that “[t]he primary task of the next decade will be to build a new
European security structure, to include the Soviet Union and the Warsaw
Pact nations. The Soviet Union will have an important role to play in the
construction of such a system.” He added, “If you consider the current
predicament of the Soviet Union, which has practically no allies left, then
you can understand its justified wish not to be forced out of Europe.”
Emphasizing that the USSR had nothing to fear from the West in the new
post-Cold War era, Wörner said, “This will also be true of a united
Germany in NATO. The very fact that we are ready not to deploy NATO
troops beyond the territory of the Federal Republic gives the Soviet Union
firm security guarantees.”[109] In Copenhagen on June 7, 1991, NATO
passed a resolution declaring they would neither attempt to “gain one-sided
advantage from the changing situation in Europe” nor “draw new dividing
lines in the continent.” This statement was invoked by the Russians on the
eve of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.[110]
In 2015, former Russian Foreign Minister Yevgeny Primakov
published his memoir on NATO expansion, Meetings at the Crossroads.
The National Security Archive posted an important excerpt: Primakov’s
catalog of the Bush Sr. administration’s broken promises, which included
all of the above, plus an assurance or two by French President François
Mitterrand.[111]

Knowingly Misleading
The key to understanding the situation is that H.W. Bush and his cabinet
were lying to the Soviets, later the Russians, before President Bill Clinton
ever came to Washington. His administration would then continue to do so
into the new millennium.
In April 1990, Bush met with Shevardnadze and led him to believe that
he agreed with the Soviets that the CSCE should now take the lead in a pan-
European security arrangement, in place of the two former blocs. “I want to
contribute to stability and to the creation of a Europe, whole and free or, as
you call it, a common European home. A [sic] idea that is very close to our
own.”[112]
On May 4, Baker reported on his meeting with Shevardnadze to
President Bush: “I used your speech and our recognition of the need to
adapt NATO, politically and militarily, and to develop CSCE to reassure
Shevardnadze that the process would not yield winners and losers. Instead,
it would produce a new legitimate European structure—one that would be
inclusive, not exclusive.” Shevardnadze had responded positively, saying
that “our discussion of the new European architecture was compatible with
much of their thinking, though their thinking was still being
developed.”[113]
Even though the White House had decided to cease any talk about
future limits on NATO expansion, Baker again, on May 18, 1990, told
Gorbachev, in response to a suggestion of an accusation from the premier,
“Before saying a few words about the German issue, I wanted to emphasize
that our policies are not aimed at separating Eastern Europe from the Soviet
Union. We had that policy before.” He continued, “But today we are
interested in building a stable Europe, and doing it together with you.”[114]
When Gorbachev asked, “What is the purpose of NATO now?” Baker
assured him it was no longer about keeping the Soviets out but the Germans
down, again threatening that an independent Germany could get its own
nuclear, or even biological or chemical weapons if not subsumed into
America’s military order. While promising to build “pan-European security
structures” over the long term, Baker again emphasized the danger of
“having a separate, neutral Germany.”[115]
When Gorbachev objected that adding Germany to the alliance would
“strengthen” NATO, Baker answered, “In the immediate, short-term,
maybe. However, we are currently talking about a change, about adapting
NATO, giving it a more political nature.” He told the Soviet premier, “We
recognize the importance of reducing the Bundeswehr [West German
army]. . . . We understand your concerns and we are taking them into
account. I don’t think that we are trying to get unilateral benefits.” He again
promised that “NATO will undergo an evolution to become more of a
political organization,” and that “[w]e are making an effort in various
forums to ultimately transform the CSCE into a permanent institution that
would become an important cornerstone of a new Europe. This institution
would include all the European countries, the Soviet Union and the United
States.”[116]
Baker repeatedly used the phrase “from Vancouver to Vladivostok” to
describe this future joint security structure.[117] As Brent Scowcroft later
wrote, “This gave Gorbachev the opportunity to argue to his Politburo that
NATO had been transformed and was no longer a threat.”[118]
After proposing a possible France-like “special status” for Germany
within NATO, or even “non-aligned” status, Gorbachev suggested the
USSR would try to join the Western alliance, too. “After all, you say that
NATO is not directed against us, that it is just a security structure that is
adapting to the new reality. So we will propose to join NATO.”[119] Baker
changed the subject.[120]
Bush also strongly implied to Premier Gorbachev on May 31 that the
CSCE, which already included the USSR, would now be the primary
security organization in “a new inclusive Europe,” replacing NATO, which,
again, would be turned into a “political” organization. “[O]f course, we
have no intention, even in our thoughts, to harm the Soviet Union in any
fashion,” Bush told him. “That is why we are speaking in favor of German
unification in NATO without ignoring the wider context of the CSCE,
taking the traditional economic ties between the two German states into
consideration. Such a model, in our view, corresponds to the Soviet
interests as well.”[121] Bush also said a Conventional Forces in Europe
treaty was “the gateway to developing a new political and security structure
in Europe.” He did not want “winners and losers,” only to see the USSR
“integrated . . . into the new Europe.”[122]
Thatcher also played her part in reassuring Gorbachev about the less-
threatening role NATO was to play in the new Europe. “We must find ways
to give the Soviet Union confidence that its security would be assured,” she
told him. “CSCE could be an umbrella for all this, as well as being the
forum which brought the Soviet Union fully into discussion about the future
of Europe.”[123]
In July, after Gorbachev’s final discussion with Kohl before
reunification, Bush again implied agreement with the premier’s concept of a
“common European home,” in which the USSR would be part of any new
security arrangement, particularly under the CSCE. “The U.S.-Soviet
confrontation is over. . . . [W]orking together, we’ll make a peaceful post-
war world. . . . I hope you have seen the transformation of the NATO
Alliance, and hope that is the way it was read in the Soviet Union,” Bush
told Gorbachev. “We conveyed the idea of an expanded, stronger CSCE
with new institutions in which the USSR can share and be part of the new
Europe.”[124]
Shifrinson notes how disingenuous this was. The administration was
promising to sideline NATO in favor of a new Soviet-inclusive security
arrangement while “privately planning for an American-dominated post-
Cold War system and taking steps that would attain this objective.” He
continued, “Baldly stated, the United States floated a cooperative grand
design for postwar Europe in discussions with the Soviets in 1990, while
creating a system dominated by the United States.” For example, “In July
1990, Secretary Baker referred to the inevitable expansion of NATO when
he said that the CSCE could serve as a ‘half-way house’ for governments
who want out of the Warsaw Pact . . . but can’t join NATO and EC (yet).”
As Shifrinson politely put it, “Given that U.S. policymakers were
simultaneously promising to emphasize NATO’s political nature so as to
render NATO acceptable to the Soviet Union, Baker’s comment suggests
the dual nature of U.S. strategy.” Baker had even warned President Bush
that the “real risk to NATO is CSCE.” The latter was to serve as a red
herring only. Just as Germany began reunification that October, an
interagency review stated that “the key U.S. interest was to ensure that
NATO remains the central pillar of Europe’s security architecture.” A few
days later, senior National Security Council (NSC) officials agreed on a
policy of building up NATO to prevent the CSCE from becoming the center
of new European security structures. They had to guarantee that NATO
would remain the “central institution in providing for Europe’s
defense.”[125]
State Department Counselor Robert Zoellick said they wanted to “give
an impression of movement” regarding new structures, and offer Gorbachev
“some things to make him more comfortable w[ith] the process” of the
reunification of Germany.[126]
Just a few days after reunification was complete, the White House was
already talking about expansion: “Should the United States and NATO now
signal to the new democracies of Eastern Europe NATO’s readiness to
contemplate their future membership?”[127]
In July 1991, the “Russian Supreme Soviet Delegation” reported back
to the newly elected president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, that NATO
Secretary-General Manfred Wörner was dead set against the expansion of
the alliance to include Poland, Romania, Hungary or Czechoslovakia. This
was because: “[w]e should not allow the isolation of the USSR from the
European community.” The Russians said that “[o]ne has to emphasize that
democratic changes in Russia, the largest republic of the USSR, have the
potential to exert a serious impact on the reformation of NATO, where
political cooperation is becoming the main function.” They concluded, “In
principle, they are ready for active cooperation in this sphere with the
USSR and the RSFSR [Russian Soviet Federative Socialist
Republic].”[128]
They had bought it. Before the Soviet Union was even all the way
dead, on December 19, 1991, Yeltsin reiterated Gorbachev’s query about
Russia creating a “close association” with, or even joining NATO,[129] at
least “as a long-term political goal.”[130] Baker changed the subject again.
[131]
In short, the only reason Gorbachev and the Soviets were so
cooperative on withdrawal from Germany and the reunification of its
halves, much less their further withdrawal of military forces from the rest of
the Warsaw Pact and Soviet republic states, was entirely predicated on
Bush, Baker, Gates, Kohl, Genscher, Thatcher, Major and the rest’s
assurances that they would not take advantage of the situation, especially by
expanding their military alliance eastward. And the U.S. administration was
deliberately deceitful in leading them to believe it. As Shifrinson noted,
“Ultimately, if Europe was to be linked by a new set of security institutions
while NATO was militarily constrained and had an increasingly political
focus, then formal non-expansion guarantees were superfluous.”[132]
One may object that the deals were struck with the USSR, not post-
Soviet Russia, and argue that countries which were still Soviet republics or
in the Warsaw Pact could not have been up for consideration anyway, but
that is incorrect. As shown above, nations such as Poland and Hungary were
brought up by name in the promises on NATO expansion in early 1990,
along with more general references to Eastern Europe, while the Warsaw
Pact was not dissolved until March 1991.[133] Also, they had all signed the
1975 Helsinki Final Act, which guaranteed “the right to be or not to be a
party to treaties of alliance,”[134] and Gorbachev was already raising the
question of even the USSR itself joining.

State Dept. Warning

The State Department drew up a strategy paper on the future of NATO in

October 1990. They recommended denying membership to new Eastern
European nations since the U.S. could not really protect them and does “not
in any case wish to organize an anti-Soviet coalition whose frontier is the
Soviet border. Such a coalition would be perceived very negatively by the
Soviets and could lead to a reversal of current positive trends in Eastern
Europe and the USSR.” They thought it of the highest importance to
ascertain carefully “[h]ow . . . relations with these emerging democracies,
combined with the new Western relationship with the Soviet Union, [could]
be managed to avoid any hint of superpower condominium, anti-Sovietism
or Eastern European containment.”[135]

Saving the USSR

Chicken Kiev
They may not have wanted them in NATO, but President H.W. Bush tried to
save the Soviet Union. Really. He, Secretary Baker and National Security
Advisor Scowcroft thought it would be preferable if Moscow could retain
control of the Soviet republics, mostly over concerns about the USSR’s
nuclear weapons stockpile.[136] In 1990, Deputy National Security Advisor
Gates had urged KGB director Kryuchkov to “develop a new federation as
soon as possible,” to prevent large-scale, ethnic-based secession movements
in Eastern Europe and, presumably, Central Asia.[137] They supported
Gorbachev’s proposed New Union Treaty, which would have replaced the
USSR with a federation including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.[138]
On August 1, 1991, President Bush gave his infamous “Chicken Kiev”
speech,[139] as New York Times columnist William Safire called it.[140]
The address was written by Bush’s NSC staffer Condoleezza Rice.[141] In
the speech, Bush warned against Ukrainian agitation for independence from
Russia on anything but the Kremlin’s deliberate timetable, telling their
central committee, “We will not try to pick winners and losers in political
competitions between Republics or between Republics and the center. That
is your business; that’s not the business of the United States of America.”
He added, “Some people have urged the United States to choose between
supporting President Gorbachev and supporting independence-minded
leaders throughout the USSR. I consider this a false choice.” He further
warned that “[f]reedom is not the same as independence,” and that his
administration “will not support those who seek independence in order to
replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those
who promote a suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.”[142]
The New Union Treaty was to be signed on August 20, but, in reaction
against Communist hardliners’ failed coup of August 18–22—which had
been heroically put down by new President Boris Yeltsin, with the help of
tens of thousands of civilian Muscovites who came out to support him[143]
—Ukraine ignored Bush’s advice and declared independence on August 24.
[144]
On December 1, 90 percent of Ukrainians voted for independence,
including with totals above 80 percent in favor in the predominantly ethnic-
Russian eastern and southern regions of Kharkiv, the Donbas and Odesa.
[145] Leonid Kravchuk, newly elected leader of Ukraine, switched sides
and relabeled everything Communist as “nationalist” instead.[146] Much
the same thing took place in Kazakhstan with former first secretary of the
new nation’s Communist Party, Nursultan Nazarbayev, and with Askar
Akayev in Kyrgyzstan.[147] After that, what was left of the Soviet Union
was finally doomed. The Baltics and Uzbekistan declared independence a
few days later.[148]
Yeltsin brought the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to a meeting in the
latter country where on December 8 they signed the Belovezh Accords to
finally dissolve what was left of the Soviet empire and replace it with the
powerless Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) trade pact.[149] The
Ukrainian and Belarusian parliaments ratified the new deal on December 10
and the Russian parliament on December 12. Gorbachev resigned, and the
Soviet Communist red flag with its yellow hammer and sickle, hated
symbol of totalitarian slavery, deprivation and mass murder,[150] was
finally taken down from the Kremlin on Christmas Day, 1991.[151]
Bush’s National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft confirmed this
history: “The aim was to liberate Eastern Europe—to get Soviet troops out
of Eastern Europe. We thought that would really mark the end of the Cold
War. It was not to destroy the Soviet Union. . . . [T]hat was not our goal. It
was rather to bring the Cold War to an end by getting their soldiers out of
Eastern Europe.”[152] The man even sounded wistful for the old days, and
resentful of Yeltsin for wrecking the Evil Empire. “What became clear to
me was that Yeltsin was maneuvering so that the Ukraine would be the
proximate cause of the breakup of the Soviet Union.” But he was just using
them, “almost completely because it was the way Yeltsin could get rid of
Gorbachev.” The new Russian president made the old Soviet premier the
leader “of a political entity that no longer existed.” Scowcroft mused, “If
there had not been that enmity, I think there still could have been some kind
of Soviet Union today.”[153] He also wrote that “[i]t was painful to watch
Yeltsin rip the Soviet Union brick by brick away from Gorbachev, and then
transfer most of them to Russia.”[154]
In the conception of the Bush Sr. administration, the Soviet republics,
including the Baltics, Belarus and Ukraine, were all east of Eastern Europe
—though the U.S., which had never recognized Soviet sovereignty over the
Baltics,[155] did support independence for Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia
regardless. For all their scheming, they would have never considered
extending NATO as far as Ukraine. As Bush and Scowcroft wrote in their
joint memoir, “We had to be careful not to handle this so precipitously that
we encouraged the radical nationalists in Ukraine and Russia—where there
was considerable resistance to losing Ukraine and its twelve million ethnic
Russians. The last thing we needed was a confrontation between the
two.”[156]
Though Bush was rightly mocked for trying to hold the USSR together
in this federation under the new treaty, rather than favoring its outright
destruction, his caution helped the Russian reformers see the fall of the
regime through to the end without the U.S. provoking unnecessary backlash
against their effort. So he unintentionally helped to destroy it anyway.
Bush’s speech also hinted at potentially dangerous nationalist forces in
the former Soviet Union who could do themselves much more harm than
good. Amb. Matlock has written that Bush’s denunciation of “suicidal
nationalism based on ethnic hatred” was “inspired by Georgian leader Zviad
Gamsakhurdia’s attacks on minorities in Soviet Georgia.”[157]
To his credit, when Bush called and the coup plotters of August 1991
tried to connect him to Acting President Gennady Yanayev, he refused,
saying he would only talk to Gorbachev.[158]

Avoiding Armageddon

Of course, the main reason the administration was interested in holding the
republics together with Russia was concern over Soviet nuclear weapons,
which were left behind in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan by the
thousands. Would loose nukes hit the black market if Moscow gave up
control? They determined that the risk was not worth it, before events
simply got out of hand with the commies’ failed coup and the final
unraveling of the empire.[159]
Though President Bush launched America’s “new world order”[160] of
attempted global hegemony and our 30-year catastrophic war in the Middle
East and beyond,[161] it should be noted that in one important way, he
handled the end of the Cold War in what could even be called heroic
fashion. During his presidency, the U.S. signed multiple treaties with the
Soviets,[162] and then the successor Russian Federation,[163] to drastically
reduce conventional military forces,[164] as well as both sides’ stockpiles
of nuclear weapons, from the tens of thousands to the much lower totals of
today.[165]
Bush even went so far as to make drastic unilateral cuts, including
removing all nuclear weapons from U.S. surface ships, submarines and
land-based naval aircraft, and taking American strategic bombers and
intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) off their high-alert posture. He
did this simply in the hope that Gorbachev would reciprocate where he
could, since there was no time for drawn-out negotiations. It worked.
Gorbachev announced on October 5 that the USSR would destroy all
tactical nuclear warheads for artillery, land-based missiles, surface ships
and submarines.[166]
Bush also signed Senators Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar’s Soviet Nuclear
Threat Reduction Act that authorized American assistance in dismantling
much of the former Soviet Union’s nuclear weapons stockpile,[167] and in
the very last days of his presidency, in the beginning of 1993, traveled to
Moscow to sign the START II nuclear weapons treaty[168] and the new
Chemical Weapons Convention as well.[169]

Bosnia Begins

What Is NATO For?

The United States under President H.W. Bush also began intervention in the
Balkan nation of Yugoslavia, which had started to break up as the Cold War
came to an end. This culminated in two major bombing campaigns against
the Russian-allied Serbs, their Slavic ethnic and Eastern Orthodox religious
kin. The timing of the crisis worked out well for America’s national security
state, which seemed uncertain of its own future at the time.
The loss of Russia as an enemy was seen as a blow to the status quo in
the arms industry and the Atlantic alliance. “Perhaps a third or more of the
Pentagon budget is spent on an alliance that has lost its old mission of
defense against external threat and has been unable to generate a convincing
new mission,” the Washington Post reported in 1993.[170]
NATO needed to go “[o]ut of area or out of business,” the Pentagon’s
RAND Corporation[171] and Senator Lugar agreed.[172] The NSC had
been discussing the possibilities in those terms since at least 1990.[173]
“NATO Seeks Significance in Post-War Climate,” read a headline in the
arms industry magazine Jane’s Defence Weekly. They said NATO was
“searching for a new identity” in the absence of the Soviet Union and cited
a threat from Senator William Roth that if they did not hurry up and find
something to do, they would be in danger of losing their funding.[174] A
senior NATO representative told the Los Angeles Times, “NATO must be
active in future peacekeeping operations, out of area, however complicated
—because we alone have the capability. Otherwise, it is fair to ask: What is
NATO for?”[175] As then-Senator Joe Biden put it, “Ironically, within the
fruits of NATO’s unparalleled success lie the seeds for its possible demise.
Alliances are formed to fight wars or to deter them. Once the adversary is
gone, unless alliances adapt to meet changing threats, they lose their reason
for being.” Rather than bringing the troops home, to guarantee
“enlargement” of the alliance, they needed “a redefinition of NATO’s
mission.” Referring to the mutual defense section of the Washington Treaty
which created the alliance,[176] he said that after the Cold War ended,
“[n]on-Article V missions like peacekeeping, sometimes in cooperation
with non-NATO powers, have become possible. The . . . joint effort in
Bosnia, with Russia and several other non-NATO countries I believe is an
excellent example of this.”[177]
Professor Edward S. Herman and journalist David Peterson explained
that these self-interested reasons were the primary purposes of the U.S.
intervention in Bosnia: preserving NATO by finding busywork for it to do;
establishing America, the UN Security Council and NATO’s authority to
intervene, not just to reverse international invasions such as Iraq’s 1990
attack on Kuwait, but even in civil wars wholly within one so-called “rogue
state”; reducing the potential new stature of the EU’s security structures in
favor of NATO; and of course, bringing the former Yugoslavia under the
political and economic control of Washington. “The pursuit of these goals
required that certain agents within Yugoslavia be cast in the role of the
victims, and others as villains—the latter not just belligerents engaged in a
civil war, but evil and murderous perpetrators of mass crimes which, in
turn, would legitimate military intervention.”[178]
Professor David Gibbs says that during the Bosnian intervention
NATO became rebranded as a “genocide prevention enterprise,” when in
reality a major American motivation in pushing the policy at the time was
the supposed threat that France and Germany would create their own army
and pursue an independent foreign policy in their own interests. Bosnia
gave the Bush and Clinton administrations an excuse to preempt that effort
and preserve the dominance of NATO and the U.S. in Europe.[179] As New
York Times reporter David Binder put it, “The Balkans have become
hostage to an American power concept, which is to keep Europe down and
America up.”[180] Gibbs added, “I think . . . the most pernicious feature of
this” is that “it’s a justification for more war,” noting how the Bosnian
“precedent” was later invoked during U.S.-led military campaigns in
Kosovo, Iraq, Libya and Syria.[181]

Breaking Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia (“union of the Southern Slavs”) was only created at the end of
World War I. Before that the Balkans had been dominated by the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. After World War II, the Communist Josip Tito took
power, and though he was a Red, kept the country out of the Soviet Union
and Warsaw Pact. It was a collection of peoples, mostly Slavs, but deeply
divided between Catholic Croats and Slovenes, Bosnian and Kosovar
Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, Montenegrins and Macedonians, Catholic and
Protestant Hungarians and so on[182]—“a six-nation, eight-state
confederacy, held together only by Tito’s balancing act,” as journalist
Nebojsa Malic put it.[183]

IMF

Antecedents to the war included a massive austerity regime foisted onto the
country by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the 1980s, which
destroyed the standard of living and created the circumstances in which the
various ethnic and political subgroups began scapegoating each other as
they fought over what was left. The people in the wealthier regions, Croatia
and Slovenia, felt like they were being ripped off by the poorer regions like
Macedonia and Kosovo, while the people in the poorer regions felt like they
were being deprived of what the others still had. Further, the IMF insisted
on the centralization of economic authority in the national government,
essentially forcing it to rein in the autonomy of the provinces, which, even
when change was minimal, still sparked outrage.[184]

Electing Secession

In the elections of 1990, ethnic and regional nationalist-separatists won in

Slovenia, Croatia and each of the three sections of Bosnia: the Croat, Serb
and Muslim.[185] But the anti-separatist, Yugoslav nationalist and
Communist Slobodan Milošević, then calling himself a socialist,[186] won
big in Serbia.[187] The stage for conflict was set.
 Despite the fact that the U.S. constantly invokes the absolute
permanence of international borders, in the case of multi-ethnic Yugoslavia
they did just about everything they could to break up the country. When the
Soviet Union still stood, Washington preferred Tito’s Communist, but
independent, Yugoslavia. With both Tito (who died in 1980) long gone and
the USSR disintegrating before their eyes, the Bush administration came to
prefer the separatists in Slovenia and Croatia, and their aspirations to
independence, regardless of the consequences, over the barely repentant
leftists in power in Belgrade.[188]
But more than one-third of Yugoslavia’s Serbs lived outside of Serbia,
and had for centuries. What was supposed to happen to them?

Slovenia and Croatia First

As early as January 1991, the U.S. forbade the central government from
threatening to use force to disarm Slovenian and Croatian separatist
militias, knowing good and well that they were importing weapons in
violation of the embargo in preparation for war with the Yugoslav National
Army (JNA).[189] At the same time, the State Department was joining the
Germans in encouraging the Slovenian and Croatian leadership to secede.
[190] While Croatian President Franjo Tudjman considered a European
Community (or EC, the precursor to the European Union) compromise
wherein the Serbian minority would be allowed to remain inside
Yugoslavia, the Germans went ahead and announced that they would
recognize their independence within Tito’s former administrative borders
anyway, killing the compromise.[191] Secretary Baker took contrary
positions, telling the eight members of the Yugoslav presidency not to do
anything without the mutual consent of the other groups.[192] He later said
he knew if they did so it would lead to war.[193] But Baker had also
declared, inverting the Chicken Kiev formulation the administration had
applied to the USSR, “If you force the United States to choose between
unity and democracy, we will always choose democracy.”[194] His deputy
—and later successor—Lawrence Eagleburger also gave them the green
light,[195] one seen by the U.S. Embassy there as decisive,[196] even
though the last ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren Zimmermann, knew full
well that hundreds of thousands of Serbs, already severely repressed by
Croatian forces, would be “taken” out of Yugoslavia against their will and
the potential for conflict that situation represented.[197]

Croatian Green Light

As he acknowledged in his memoir, Zimmermann knew at the time that the

Croatians were proven to be arming up in violation of the embargo and for
the purposes of “war with the JNA.”[198] But he still let President Tudjman
know that the U.S. would do nothing to stand in the way of their secession
either. Again, this was considered by all the American players to have been
an invitation for them to do so.[199] Both Slovenia and Croatia seceded in
June 1991.[200] In December, the EC, pushed hard by the Germans, who
were then followed by the U.S., officially recognized the new nations’
independence and helped get them seats in the UN General Assembly. So
much for national sovereignty. According to Zimmermann[201] and his
boss Baker,[202] it was this move, particularly by Slovenia, which started
the war since their secession meant that the rest of Yugoslavia was cut off
from Italy and Austria, a situation the national government would be bound
to attempt to reverse.

Selfish Slovenes

At a meeting with Zimmermann and Eagleburger in February 1990, when

warned by the others that secession could lead immediately to war,
Slovenian politician Peter Jambrek, from the pro-secessionist DEMOS
coalition party, responded, according to Zimmermann’s paraphrasing, that
“there would be no bloodshed in Slovenia, which would be able to escape
by walling itself off from the rest of Yugoslavia.” Zimmermann
complained, “In their drive to separate from Yugoslavia they simply ignored
the twenty-two million Yugoslavs who were not Slovenes.” And therefore,
“They bear considerable responsibility for the bloodbath that followed their
secession.”[203] Of course, the leaders of the EC and the U.S. government,
who encouraged and then almost immediately recognized their
independence,[204] shared in that same responsibility.

Genscher’s War

Former American secretary of state and Bosnia negotiator Cyrus Vance

declared the entire conflict “Genscher’s War,” due to the role the German
foreign minister had played in pushing Slovenia and Croatia to secede, and
sabotaging Vance’s diplomacy.[205] The Germans had in fact been quietly
promoting their separatism since the late 1960s,[206] and had been pouring
in arms despite the embargo, rendering it a “joke,” as one NATO official
told retired U.S. Army Col. David Hackworth,[207] then reporting for
Newsweek.[208] Hackworth traveled to Croatia and reported there was “no
limitation” on the arms coming in to the Croatians.[209] However, the
Slovenes were safe, separated on the other side of Croatia, so its ability to
intervene was limited. After EC leaders made it clear they would recognize
their independence soon enough, and faced with resistance by Slovenian
militias armed by the Germans[210] following the short “Ten-Day
War,”[211] Yugoslav Prime Minister Ante Marković ordered the Yugoslav
National Army (JNA) to withdraw from Slovenia.[212] According to
Zimmermann, after declaring independence, “Tudjman had made not the
least effort, for example, to assure Croatia’s Serbian citizens that they
would be safe in an independent Croatia.” He added, “Given the past year’s
record of discrimination against Serbs in Croatia, the issue wasn’t
academic, and Tudjman’s omission wasn’t an oversight.”[213]

Krajina Serbs Declare Independence from Croatia

In August 1990, Croatian Serb militias took control of predominantly

Serbian towns in Eastern Slavonia in far-eastern Croatia. In March 1991,
they declared the new republic of Krajina, including Eastern Slavonia,
independent from Croatia and loyal to Yugoslavia. Croatia’s declaration of
independence from Yugoslavia in June led to a six-month war between
Serbia and Croatia.[214]
The leadership in the Croatian Serb enclaves of Krajina and Eastern
Slavonia invoked the Croatians’ atrocities in the service of the Third Reich
in World War II when the puppet Ustaše regime had murdered hundreds of
thousands of Serbian, Jewish, Muslim and Roma civilians,[215] saying they
were afraid that their rights would not be protected in the new country.[216]
Though Tudjman had fought with Tito’s Communist Partisans in the war,
[217] he revived the Ustaše flag, currency and other symbols of the fascists
and officially downgraded Serbian citizens’ status to that of a minority.[218]
Tudjman, an “ethnic exclusivist,” according to his ally Amb.
Zimmermann, who had already vowed to Secretary Eagleburger that his
regime would not protect the rights of the Serb minority he despised,[219]
sent separatist militias, armed by the Germans, to lay siege to the Serb areas
Krajina and Eastern Slavonia, as well as the national army barracks,
attempting to starve out the soldiers and their families—30,000 people.
[220] They committed mass atrocities against Serb civilians, executing
hundreds of them[221] and driving tens of thousands from their homes,
which were then destroyed by the thousands, in the first, although usually
unnoticed, ethnic cleansing campaign of the war.[222] This led the JNA to
intervene on the side of the Croatian Serbs.[223] The fighting included the
brutal three-month battle of Vukovar in the summer and fall of 1991, where
3,000 were killed and ethnic Croats were then expelled by Serb forces.[224]
Milošević offered a deal to end the war whereby the Yugoslav
government would give up its claims to Croatia in exchange for recognition
of the self-determination of the Croatian Serb minority. They settled for UN
peacekeeping troops to replace those of the JNA protecting them.[225]

Greater Serbia
This became the basis for the accusation that Milošević was hell-bent on
creating a new “Greater Serbia”: simply that he would not abandon the
Croatian Serbs to the mercies of their new government which clearly meant
to oppress, kill and even forcibly remove them from the new nation they
found themselves stuck in against their will.[226]
The U.S. government and media blamed the entire war on the Serbs,
which was a vast oversimplification. There was, however, plenty of blame
to go around, including the Serbian Yugoslav President Milošević.

Badinter(vention) Commission

The EC’s Badinter Commission, chaired by French lawyer Robert Badinter,

completely ignoring Yugoslavia’s constitution and its court rulings,[227]
declared that the country was “in the process of dissolution” on December
7, 1991. They further declared that the internal regional borders within
Yugoslavia—which had been drawn arbitrarily by the Communists after
World War II[228]—would now be considered sacrosanct sovereign borders
of new states who have every right to secede from the central government.
However, invoking the recently-invented principle of uti possidetis
(“As you possess, so shall you possess”)—which says that when a nation
breaks apart during decolonization, the parts must not continue to break up,
no matter how poorly this made-up law applies to any given situation—the
Commission ruled that any smaller portions of those new states would be
forbidden from doing the same. The only precedent for this ruling by the
EC was a question regarding Mali and Burkina Faso following
independence from the French after World War II. This was not exactly
based on a treaty signed, a paragraph in the UN Charter, a Security Council
or General Assembly resolution, the Single European Act of 1987 which
incorporated the EC, nor any other pretense of real authority. Nor did
colonialism, or the end of it, have anything to do with what was happening
in Yugoslavia.[229] Uti possidetis was really just Latin for “What we say
goes.”[230]
The EC pronounced: “[T]he Serbian population in Croatia and Bosnia-
Herzegovina . . . [does not] have the right to self-determination,” though it
“is entitled to all the rights concerned to minorities and ethnic groups under
international law.”[231] In other words, they left hundreds of thousands of
people, more than a third of the Serbian population of Yugoslavia,[232]
stranded on the “wrong” side of new international borders of ethnic-based
states, leading almost immediately to war, just as the U.S. Embassy had
known would happen since at least 1989.[233] The double standard was
amazing. As explained by one of its primary practitioners, then-Ambassador
Zimmermann, Slovenia for the Slovenes and Croatia for the Croats, was
fine. They would nearly get engraved invitations to leave Yugoslavia and be
recognized as independent states. And the same for Bosnia, where the mere-
plurality Muslims ruled and refused to share power. But for Zimmermann,
the idea that the minority Serbs in Croatia and Bosnia would have the right
to decide not to simply secede from the new nations, but to remain in the
old one, Yugoslavia, was a “dangerous doctrine,” unhinged ethnic
nationalism at odds with America’s goal of seeing European muti-ethnic
democracies solve those problems at conference tables. This was right as
the U.S.A. was helping to break the country apart along ethnic lines in two
of three cases, Slovenia and Croatia, and when they knew that in the third
case, Bosnia, their intervention was certain to hasten its bloody internal
division.[234]

Izetbegović’s Caution, Recklessness

The new Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović, a Muslim, actually tried to

warn the EC against recognizing Croatia’s independence, proposing instead,
along with Macedonian politician Kiro Gligorov, the Izetbegović-Gligorov
Plan, which would have held Yugoslavia together in a loose federation.
[235] This was because were Croatia to join Slovenia in secession, and
were the Bosnian Croatians to then join with the newly independent
Croatia, it would leave the Bosnian Muslims in a Yugoslavia dominated by
Serbia. Therefore they would also have to secede, and that, he said, could
spread the war to Bosnia.[236] Even though Izetbegović had been
participating in talks with moderate Bosnian Muslim, Croat and Serb
leaders to seek a new power-sharing deal to avoid war, he betrayed them by
going on television and denouncing his own Muslim negotiating partners as
well as the Bosnian Serbs as being traitors to Bosnia.[237]
In an unconstitutional process that the Bosnian Serbs boycotted,[238]
President Izetbegović then led the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina in
seceding from Yugoslavia early the next year.[239] Once the Muslims
declared their intention to do so, the Bosnian Serbs withdrew from the
coalition government and held a referendum which showed near-unanimous
agreement to break away from Bosnia and remain part of Yugoslavia. War
between the Bosnian Muslims and Serbs broke out soon after.[240]
Different Situation

In Slovenia, the northernmost province, there was ethnic near-homogeneity

and the fewest conflicts regarding secession. In Croatia, the Croats were a
majority, but had a large Serbian minority which they would eventually
remove in a massive forced march in 1995, though in the meantime were
already a geographically separate group.[241] But in Bosnia-Herzegovina,
the Bosnian Muslims, intent on seceding from what was left of Yugoslavia,
were only a plurality in their province, with substantial Croatian Catholic
and Serbian Orthodox Christian minority populations spread in different
areas throughout the province. Combined, the Christians were the majority,
and they were determined to prevent themselves from being taken away by
this new state, determined as it was to rule from a strong central state in
Sarajevo, dominated by a Muslim government which was already refusing
to step down and share power as the constitution mandated.[242] About this
problem, Zimmermann claimed the “Serbs in Bosnia had an understandable
grievance, though not a legitimate one.”[243]

Izetbegović’s Fault

Amb. Zimmermann insisted in his memoir that “[i]t was Milošević and
Tudjman, in their desire to divide Bosnia along ethnic lines, who laid the
philosophical groundwork for a separate Muslim entity [in Bosnia].” But he
does not show this beyond speculation about a secret deal he thinks the Serb
and Croatian leaders must have made to carve up Bosnia at the Muslims’
expense. Zimmermann continued, “And it was the besieged Izetbegović
who stood alone in advocating the preservation of Bosnia’s multiethnic
framework.”[244] But he does not demonstrate that either, and in fact
acknowledged the opposite, that by seceding from Yugoslavia without the
consent of the Bosnian Serbs, and with a substantial Croat minority in a
country adjacent to the newly independent and ethnic-nationalist-run
Croatia, Izetbegović was forcing the Croats and Serbs into a situation where
ethnic war was much more likely.
Contrary to Zimmermann’s narrative about a secret Bosnian Croat–
Serb deal at the expense of the Muslims, the Bosnian Serbs were worried
about a renewed World War II-era alliance of the Bosnian Croats and
Muslims against them. After all, they had joined together to support the
unconstitutional referendum on independence.[245] This was especially
true after the attacks by Croatian forces on the Serbs of Krajina and
statements by Muslim party leaders in Bosnia that Serbs and Croats would
have to adapt their policies to the will of the Muslims, including signing up
Bosnia for the Organization of Islamic Conference, signifying their intent to
identify the new Bosnia as a Muslim country.[246]
Zimmermann quoted Croatian President Tudjman’s concerns about
Izetbegović’s intentions as though they were the nonsensical ravings of a
liar intent on exploiting pretended fears as a cynical excuse to seize land.
Perhaps they were. But he was certainly as determined as Bosnian Serb
leader Radovan Karadžić to prevent his ethnic and religious kin from being
left a minority in the new Bosnia. Tudjman told Amb. Zimmermann, “The
Muslims want to establish an Islamic fundamentalist state. They plan to do
this by flooding Bosnia with 500,000 Turks.” He said the Muslim leader’s
plan was “to reward large families so that in a few years the Muslims will
be a majority in Bosnia,” and that “Izetbegović is just a fundamentalist front
man for Turkey; together they’re conspiring to create a Greater Bosnia.
Catholics and Orthodox alike will be eradicated.”[247]
Nevertheless, the Bosnian Croatians and Muslims aligned together in
opposition to the Bosnian Serbs, jointly sponsoring and passing a resolution
on secession from Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia in the fall of 1991, with a
referendum to ratify it, which the Bosnian Serbs boycotted, the following
spring. The war broke out days later.[248] Within a year, Bosnian Muslim
forces turned on the Croats, changing the whole situation into a three-way
brawl, a situation which lasted into 1994.[249] According to the Dutch
government investigation, this Bosnian Muslim–Croat war of 1993–1994
included some of the worst atrocities of the conflict, on all sides.[250] It got
so bad that the Muslims entered secret talks with the Serbs to explore the
potential of a new alliance against the Tudjman-backed Bosnian Croatian
forces.[251] Instead, the Clinton administration intervened to heal the
Bosnian Croatian–Muslim split to unite them against the Bosnian Serbs.
[252]
Despite his overall narrative which blamed Milošević and his allies for
virtually everything, Zimmermann concluded, “Izetbegović was playing a
double game,” adding, “With the European Community supporting Bosnia’s
independence, he seemed to think he could get away with it under the guns
of the Serbs. Perhaps he counted on Western military support, though
nobody had promised him that.” The ambassador continued, “Whatever his
motives, his premature push for independence was a disastrous political
mistake. Serbia, Bosnia’s vastly more powerful neighbor, now had the
pretext it needed to strike—the claim that 1.3 million Serbs were being
taken out of Yugoslavia against their will.”[253]
A more neutral observer might think, just as in Croatia, the EC, U.S.
and Bosnian regime had given the Serbs actual reason beyond mere pretext,
from their point of view, to intervene on behalf of their brethren stranded on
the other side of this new international border. But no. Zimmermann wrote,
“There was no debate in the U.S. government about the causes of the
Bosnian war; everybody knew that Milošević and Karadžić were the guilty
parties.” Simple as that.[254]

Bush Sr. Recognizes

Throwing out their earlier position on preserving Yugoslavia’s borders and

recognizing the new nations of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia, the H.W.
Bush administration joined the EC in claiming to recognize the
independence of ethnic enclaves from the former Yugoslav state, but never
ethnic minorities within the new states. Now that they had broken up one
country, they called a halt. Any effort by Croatian or Bosnian Serbs to
remain in Yugoslavia, or by Serbia to assist them in doing so, would be
considered aggression. Baker told Serbian President Milošević, “We reject
any claims by Serbia to territory beyond its borders. If you persist, Serbia
will be made an outcast, a pariah.”[255] Scholars Robert W. Tucker and
David C. Hendrickson noted the administration “once again insisted that the
territorial integrity of the new states was something sacred and inviolable.
Having defiled the principle of territorial integrity,” it had then
“immediately rediscovered it in all its purity. Thereafter, any suggestion that
these new boundaries be changed was subsequently met by the
insistence . . . that to do so challenged the very basis of world order.”[256]
Regarding the EC’s motives in issuing the edicts they had, journalist
and author George Szamuely wrote that the leaders of the Badinter
Commission must have thought their rulings would prevent the war.
However, “By declaring administrative boundaries to be international
frontiers, the commission ensured that any disputes about them would
become international conflicts” and “trigger a mad rush for the exits in
Yugoslavia and thus catastrophe.” The EC’s approval of Slovenia and
Croatia’s declarations of independence, Szamuely wrote, “was bound to
lead others to conclude that what counts for the so-called international
community is the use of force to change the facts on the ground.” This
decision was what had incentivized “the Balkan wars’ distinctive feature:
ethnic cleansing, the purpose of which was to forge new territorial
arrangements in anticipation of the next round of international
arbitration.”[257]
Amb. Zimmermann knew at the time that the EC’s decision to
recognize the independence of Slovenia and Croatia would lead directly to
war in Bosnia. He wrote a cable back to the State Department saying war
was “certain.” He added, “Let nobody believe that the ten thousand or so
who have died so far [in Croatia] mean that violence has reached its peak. A
war in Bosnia could increase that number tenfold.”[258]
General Colin Powell, who was then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff and later held the job of secretary of state in the George W. Bush’s
administration, admitted that “we were all too quick to recognize these
individual republics as they declared their independence and asked for
recognition. We failed to think through the history of this region and so it’s
a little strange to have that political context and then ask the military to go
solve the problem.”[259]

Public Choice

Canadian Ambassador James Bissett later explained the internal, parochial

politics in Germany which helped lead to the disaster. It was not the newly
reunified country’s national interest that was at stake, but the political needs
of the few individual men in charge of the government. Chancellor Helmut
Kohl’s party needed to steal the issue from their political opposition. And
since Foreign Minister Genscher had been slow to support Iraq War I in
1990–1991, his recognition of Slovenia and Croatia would demonstrate
German capability in international affairs to make up for that supposed
blunder. Recognition also changed the situation from an internal into an
international affair and therefore their business.[260]
Of course, the EC was also a government program in need of a
justification and even to grow into the European Union. As British Lord
David Owen, a long-term negotiator on the Balkans under EC authority,
explained it: negotiating the Balkans was considered to be “the virility
symbol of the Euro-federalists,” and a way to establish the EC’s importance
in the new global system.[261]

Lisbon Deal
In July 1991, Serb Democratic Party (SDS) leader Radovan Karadžić and
Adil Zulfikarpašić from the Muslim Bosniak Organization (MBO) signed
the Zulfikarpašić-Karadžić agreement which would have kept the union
between Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro. However, as
mentioned above, Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović initially supported
but then opposed the deal, killing it. This process repeated itself early the
next year, after the Badinter Commission, when, in February 1992, the
Carrington-Cutileiro plan, or “Lisbon deal,” was struck by Portuguese
Foreign Minister Jose Cutileiro between Bosnian Muslim, Croat and Serb
representatives. The deal said that Bosnia-Herzegovina would remain
united politically but would be divided into three ethno-religious cantons
with a very weak central government in the capital city of Sarajevo. The
supposedly intransigent Bosnian Serbs were represented at the meeting by
Karadžić, who said, “Either we remain in Yugoslavia, or else we will get a
sovereign state in Bosnia-Herzegovina which will form an alliance of states,
that is a confederation, together with the other two states.” The Bosnian
Serbs were willing to accept independence from Yugoslavia and reduce the
proportion of land they controlled from approximately 60 percent to only
42.5 percent.[262]
Said by the U.S. to be the aggressors in this part of the war, the
Bosnian Serbs were satisfied with this compromise. Zimmermann says
“Karadžić was ecstatic” over this deal, which would give the Bosnian Serbs
plenty of autonomy in a new system “based on three constituent nations and
joined by a common government and assembly.”
 Izetbegović had said he would support the arrangement,[263]
originally accepting and signing the Lisbon deal; then, two days later, on
American advice, he killed it, this time starting a war.[264] It was Amb.
Zimmermann who was responsible. As recounted by State Department
official George Kenney, then-head of the Yugoslavia desk, “Zimmermann
told Izetbegović, ‘Look, why don’t you wait and see what the U.S. can do
for you?’ meaning, ‘We’ll recognize you and then help you out. So don’t go
ahead with the Lisbon agreement, don’t accept the Cutileiro plan, and just
hold out for some kind of unitary Bosnian state.’”[265] Canadian Amb.
Bissett added, “Upon finding that Izetbegović was having second thoughts
about the agreement he had signed in Lisbon, the Ambassador suggested
that if he withdrew his signature, the United States would grant recognition
to Bosnia as an independent state.” Izetbegović was convinced. He then
“withdrew his signature and renounced the agreement.”[266] Two days
later, on March 30, he called for a referendum on secession. Just a few days
after that, on April 4, he announced a full military mobilization. On the 6th
he declared independence. The war was on.[267] Referring to the peace
deal that finally ended the war two and a half years later, Damjan Krnjevic-
Miskovic wrote: “One still hears it said that ‘the difference between the
Lisbon and the Dayton agreements is simply two years of mass
graves.’”[268]
Though he denied it in his book,[269] Zimmermann later admitted his
error to the Times. “Our hope was the Serbs would hold off if it was clear
Bosnia had the recognition of Western countries. It turned out we were
wrong.” He confessed, “He said he didn’t like it. I told him, if he didn’t like
it, why sign it?” In retrospect, “the Lisbon agreement wasn’t bad at all.”
That was too bad, because, as the paper said, “after talking to the
Ambassador, Mr. Izetbegović publicly renounced the Lisbon
agreement.”[270]
After citing another Times report which said the U.S. had intervened to
ruin the Lisbon deal,[271] Tucker and Hendrickson wrote that
“Izetbegović’s repudiation of the . . . agreement . . . was the immediate
trigger for the war,” but that “[t]he war may have occurred in any event.
The Lisbon formula was vague in crucial respects, and contained no
agreement respecting the boundaries of the three cantons.” Still, they wrote,
that “cannot detract from the judgment that American diplomats acted in an
extremely irresponsible manner. . . . If war was to be averted, an agreement
respecting cantonization was the last step at which it might have been.” The
two also noted that even though the Bosnian referendum was necessary to
satisfy the requirements of the EC and U.S., the referendum itself was
unconstitutional. The constitution “had conferred a right of secession but
made it dependent on the mutual agreement of the nations composing
Yugoslavia. . . . [T]o move to secession without the consent of the Serbs
was a plain violation of its terms.”[272]
They also showed that there is nothing in the international law that
confers upon the United States or anyone else the authority to intervene or
to take sides in civil wars or wars of secession in other sovereign nations,
and that the U.S. recognition of Bosnia’s independence was “an illegal
intervention in Yugoslavia’s internal affairs, to which Belgrade had every
right to object.” Otherwise, “the contrary view may only be asserted on the
debased view that international law is whatever the United States and the
Security Council says it is and that we are free, like an Alice in the grip of
deconstructionism, to have words mean anything we like.”[273]
With the Germans making initial inroads in the newly independent
Croatia and Slovenia, and taking a strong lead in the EC on the issue, the
U.S. government wanted Bosnia to be their project along the same lines,
[274] even though the intelligence agencies, and even the Germans, were
warning that Bosnia would “blow up” into civil war.[275] David Binder
wrote that Secretary Baker, by recognizing Bosnian independence, “literally
created . . . Bosnia-Herzegovina . . . with the blessing of President Bush,
with considerable input from Lawrence Eagleburger and Warren
Zimmermann.”[276] Despite the warnings from leaders on every side of the
issue, Zimmermann had gone ahead and recommended recognition of
Bosnian independence.[277] Of course this led directly to war between the
Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Serbs. In his own defense, Zimmermann
deployed the circular argument that the war he helped provoke would have
happened anyway, since the Bosnian Serbs’ landgrabs, launched after
Izetbegović’s declaration of independence, would have caused what up until
then had not happened.[278]
Roger Cohen wrote in the Times that “[w]ith the precedent of 1991,
when a much smaller Serbian minority went to war to resist joining a
Croatian state, this international decision on Bosnia looks as close to
criminal negligence as a diplomatic act can be.” He added, “Indeed,
international recognition and the outbreak of the Bosnian war were
simultaneous: the world put a light to a fuse.”[279] He must have meant
President Bush.
Once the war started, factions of the JNA stayed in Bosnia and merged
with Bosnian Serb forces, making them better equipped than their new
enemies and leaving open the argument that Serbian troops were
participating in a deniable role as members of local Bosnian Serb forces,
though the majority of them were still Bosnian.[280]
The Bush and Clinton administrations went on to sabotage a series of
peace offers between 1992 and 1995, until Clinton finally signed the
Dayton Accords in November 1995, which, as the Times conceded, looked
much like the Lisbon deal from three years before, only with less land for
America’s chosen Muslim allies and an indefinite NATO military presence.
[281]

A Problem Called Ukraine

Communist Legacy

Future tensions in Ukraine were presaged by a short verbal conflict between

Kiev and Moscow after they declared full independence from the USSR. As
Professor Vladislav Zubok recounted, despite the fact that it was Russian
President Boris Yeltsin who had engineered the final breakup of the USSR
at the meeting in Belovezh, Belarus, he had thought Russia and Ukraine
would sign some kind of new confederation deal. Spurned by Ukrainian
President Leonid Kravchuk, Yeltsin had his spokesman announce that if
Ukraine wanted true independence, then the Russian Federation would have
to assert its own territorial claims to the country’s far-eastern Donbas region
and Crimean Peninsula. After a Ukrainian journalist called this a
continuation of Communist imperialism, the press secretary declared, “You
don’t want to live with Russia in a union? This is a Communist legacy for
you? Then go, but return Crimea and Donbas to us! Because they became
part of Ukraine because of the ‘Communist legacy!’” For the next few
weeks, it looked like there might be a war.
Finally, it was decided that Russia’s new political and economic
relationship with the West was more important, and that a conflict would
put the new working relationship in jeopardy. Yeltsin believed Russia would
have enough influence in Ukraine that it would not be a problem. So they
put it off.[282]

Antecedents

Mr. Republican

On April 4, 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty (or Washington Treaty), the
mutual-defense pact establishing NATO, was signed by the United States
and 11 other nations—Canada, Great Britain, France, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Luxembourg, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Iceland.
[283] No longer just a treaty, it is a military bureaucracy unto itself,
headquartered in Brussels, Belgium, and with institutional interests of its
own. And from the beginning, conservative American skeptics warned that
its very existence could increase tensions and make World War III more
likely.
 Back at the dawn of the first Cold War, “Mr. Republican,” Senator
Robert Taft of Ohio, tried to stop it. Predicting the eventual consequences of
the creation of the powerful new alliance, Taft told the Senate, “Under the
Monroe Doctrine we could change our policy at any time. We could judge
whether perhaps one of the countries had given cause for the attack. Only
Congress could declare a war in pursuance of the doctrine.” However, under
the Washington Treaty which established NATO, “the President can take us
into war without Congress.” Though the text does not say that, it was
certainly the implication at the time, and President Truman did intervene in
Korea without a declaration or even authorization from Congress, only on
the UN’s authority, less than a year later.[284] “But, above all,” Taft said,
“the treaty is a part of a much larger program by which we arm all these
nations against Russia.” He continued, “I believe such an alliance is more
likely to produce war than peace.” Warning of the existential threat of
nuclear war not only to the nation, but to our entire civilization, Taft said
that arming up all the countries in Russia’s near abroad could be counter-
productive and provoke the war they were trying to deter. “How would we
feel if Russia undertook to arm a country on our border; Mexico, for
instance?” he asked. “Furthermore, can we afford this new project of
foreign assistance?”[285]
Taft later elaborated on Meet the Press: “What I object to is
undertaking, by contract, to arm about 20 nations all around the world, all
around Russia, obviously an aggressive move, we say defensive, but it
obviously could be used for aggression just as well.” He said we were
unnecessarily risking nuclear war by “not just arming ourselves to defend
ourselves, but we’re arming half the world against the other half of the
world.”[286] Luckily that buildup did not cause another general war to
break out in Europe. However, his criticisms were still quite valid, perhaps
more so in our times, when the danger from Russia pales in comparison to
Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s Red Army in the aftermath of World War II.
Back then the hawks argued that if it was just the Russian empire, they
would not think the U.S. should have to stay committed to post-war
European security, but since Soviet Communism was considered a plot to
enslave all of mankind, it was therefore different.[287] By the time the first
Cold War ended, those arguments had been forgotten.

The EU Lags Behind

Now the argument was that to prevent a Yugoslavia-type disaster, a violent

attempt by European states to revisit their post-World War II borders, they
all needed to be held together by the fledgling new European superstate, the
EU. But the Western Europeans were hesitant to move forward too quickly
on political and economic integration due to simple protectionism. Western
European companies did not want to compete with Eastern European firms
who paid lower wages, and the Western European labor unions did not want
to compete with those same Eastern lower-wage earners in their home
countries or in the West, since EU expansion would include opening their
borders to floods of new immigrants from the East. So the United States
had to expand its military commitments instead to hurry along the process
of Eastern integration into the European Common Market.[288]
 President Bush Sr.’s right-hand man and former National Security
Advisor Brent Scowcroft opposed NATO expansion in the 1990s. He later
explained that one major reason they did it was that the Americans wanted
to see Eastern Europe integrated with the West, and though he believed the
European Union was the best vehicle for this, he said the French and the
Germans were more reluctant: “We wanted to anchor Eastern Europe as
closely to Western Europe as possible. Now, to me, the obvious way to do
that is the European Union, but the Europeans didn’t want to move that fast.
So we pushed the expansion of NATO on the West Europeans, and they
were so happy not to have us hector them about EU expansion that they
went along with it.”[289]
Former CIA analyst Paul Pillar agreed with Scowcroft: “The EU was
the perfect instrument for leading the way in westifying the east, and surely
the economic and cultural risks that the Union would take on should be
considered no greater than the commitment represented by Article Five of
the North Atlantic Treaty, which commits every member of the alliance to
come to the defense of any other member under attack. But instead the
order for the East Europeans became NATO first, EU second.”[290]
Senator Sam Nunn, an expert on Russia and nuclear weapons,[291]
also wanted to see EU expansion precede NATO expansion—even by 15
years.[292]
But they still had another choice, the Partnership for Peace.

OceanofPDF.com
Bill Clinton

“It only remains for us to re-bury Lenin.”

—Boris Yeltsin

“NATO expansion is not anti-Russian. It’s not

intended to be exclusive of Russia, and there is no
imminent timetable.”
—Bill Clinton

“What is the point of having this superb military

you’re always talking about if you can’t use it?”
—Madeleine Albright

“If disunity were ever to seize and paralyze the Party,

the chaos and weakness of Russian society would be
revealed in forms beyond description.”
—George Kennan
“We created a virtual open shop for thievery on a
scale which I doubt has ever taken place in human
history.”
—Wayne Merry

“Plenty of Russian reformers and democrats . . . worry

—and warn—that NATO enlargement threatens to
strengthen . . . reactionary forces. We believe that that
risk is both exaggerated and manageable.”
—Strobe Talbott

“One should not enter into solemn treaty obligations

involving the potential declaration of war, based
simply on an assumption that one would never be
called upon to honor such obligations.”
—Malcolm Rifkind

“The time has come for an attack on Russia.”

—Osama bin Laden

OceanofPDF.com
 The Partnership for Peace

Missed Chance

President Bill Clinton (1993–2001) could have called off the new Cold War
before things went too far. Instead, he committed the United States to a path
of confrontation with Russia, expanding NATO in his second term over
strenuous Russian objections.[1] Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic
were officially inducted in 1999.[2]
Though the Russians had pulled their military out of Eastern Europe
and cut its size by 70 percent by 1996,[3] the decision was made in June
1993 that NATO expansion would go forward.[4] True partnership with
Russia in the CSCE or a similar arrangement was never truly on the table to
be canceled. The administration argued that the Russians would not mind.
Maybe they would join too, the Democrats said.[5]

Drunken Blunder

In September 1993, Yeltsin wrote a letter to Clinton after returning home

from Poland, where President Lech Wałęsa may have gotten him stinking
drunk before persuading him to agree that Poland could join any alliance
they wished.[6] The Poles said it was not the alcohol, but a threat by
President Wałęsa to form an explicitly anti-Russian alliance with Ukraine if
Yeltsin would not give in on their membership in NATO.[7] Either way,
Yeltsin seemed to be trying to mitigate the damage by clarifying the
Russian position to the American president. Referring to Poland, the Czech
Republic and Slovakia, Yeltsin conceded that they wished to join NATO in
part due to the “by-no-means-nostalgic sentiments of the East Europeans
toward past ‘cooperation’ within the framework of the Warsaw Pact.” He
added, “Overall, the impression is that they do have grounds for a certain
amount of apprehension about their security.” Still, Yeltsin wrote, “I cannot
help but express our uneasiness as well over the fact that the discussion of
how NATO might evolve is centering with increasing frequency on the
scenario of quantitative expansion of the alliance by adding Eastern
European countries.”
He attempted to insist instead on a “truly pan-European security
system, an approach predicated on collective (but not on the basis of bloc
membership) actions to prevent and resolve the crises and conflicts that
now have Europe in turmoil.” He said that even though he did not think
expansion would “automatically lead to the alliance somehow turning
against Russia,” they had to think carefully about the consequences for
domestic politics. “Not only the opposition, but moderate circles as well,
would no doubt perceive this as a sort of neo-isolation of our country in
diametric opposition to its natural admission into Euro-Atlantic space.” And
he reminded Clinton of the Bush administration’s promises, invoking “the
spirit of the treaty on the final settlement with respect to Germany, signed in
September 1990.” He pointed to its prohibitions against the deployment of
foreign troops within the former East Germany, concluding this language
“precludes the option of expanding the NATO zone into the east.” He
continued, “In general, we advocate that relations between our country and
NATO be a few degrees warmer than those between the alliance and
Eastern Europe,” and once again brought up at least the long-term
possibility that Russia itself could join the alliance.[8] After Yeltsin’s
blunder in Poland, Russia’s foreign minister, Andrei Kozyrev, told U.S.
Ambassador Thomas Pickering that Russia was fine with NATO expansion,
if they could be the first to join.[9]
After Yeltsin brought up President H.W. Bush’s promises, the State
Department went back to see if it was true. Secretary of State Warren
Christopher arranged a meeting with German Foreign Minister Klaus
Kinkle, who had been Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s protégé and was still in
contact with him, along with Dieter Kastrup, Kinkle’s top aide. Kinkle and
Kastrup told Christopher that though it was not stipulated in the 1990 treaty,
the Russians’ interpretation “had political and psychological substance that
we had to take seriously.” Kastrup added that “the ‘basic philosophy’ of the
agreement had been that NATO would not expand to the east,” and that he
could see why “Yeltsin thought the West had committed itself not to extend
NATO beyond its 1990 limits.”[10]

Fooling Yeltsin

At the end of September 1993, after receiving advanced praise from the
administration,[11] Yeltsin attempted to dissolve the Congress of People’s
Deputies and parliament. When they refused and instead impeached and
replaced him, his forces violently attacked the Russian White House (their
parliament building), killing 144 people.[12] He then abolished the body
and forced through a new constitution which centralized more power in the
presidency.
Clinton made it clear his administration endorsed Yeltsin’s attack,
telling him, “History is on your side.”[13] In a speech at the Russian
Academy for the National Economy, Secretary Christopher declared that
“Russia is being reborn as a democracy,” and called the democratically
elected parliament the “last gasp of the old order in Russia.” Christopher
explained, “The United States does not easily support the suspension of
parliaments, but these are extraordinary times. The steps taken by President
Yeltsin were in response to exceptional circumstances.”[14]
Soon after the attack, Christopher met with Yeltsin and his foreign
minister in Moscow. The secretary assured him that the U.S. would not
expand the NATO alliance, and would instead seek to integrate Russia and
the entire former Warsaw Pact into a new organization to be called the
Partnership for Peace (PfP). Though in truth the PfP was always meant to
serve not as a separate organization but a pathway to NATO membership,
[15] Ambassador-at-Large and Special Advisor to the Secretary of State on
the New Independent States Strobe Talbott had cautioned in an internal
memo that they should emphasize the PfP instead of NATO expansion for
the time being. Talbott explained, “The key principle, as I see it, is this . . .
An expanded NATO that excludes Russia will not serve to contain Russia’s
retrograde, expansionist impulses; quite the contrary, it will further provoke
them.”[16]
In a memo to Clinton, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake
summed up the consensus of an NSC meeting where they had decided to
emphasize the PfP just three days before Christopher met with Yeltsin: “All
your advisers agree that doing anything at this stage to indicate that NATO’s
border will move closer to Russia and Ukraine without at the same time
including those two states would have major negative consequences within
both.” This was why they wanted to push the ruse of the Partnership for
Peace, which, Lake told Clinton, was truly meant to be the “first step
toward full NATO membership.” But Russia would not be allowed into the
alliance. They would instead be led to believe the PfP would replace a new,
more political NATO.[17]
The cable documenting Christopher and Yeltsin’s conversation reads:
“Turning to the question of NATO expansion, Secretary Christopher
explained the U.S. approach of establishing a Partnership for Peace, and
stressed that the approach to future new membership in the alliance was
inclusive and non-discriminatory.” Yeltsin was enthusiastic. He “called it a
brilliant proposal, pledged his full support, and thanked President Clinton
for his leadership on this issue which could have proved extremely difficult
for Russia to handle.”[18] Christopher also told Yeltsin that the European
allies were already agreed. “I am delighted with your approval and now I
predict widespread acceptance of the idea.”[19]
They told him the PfP would be open to all members of the former
Soviet Union, including Russia and the Central Asian Muslim “stans.”
Christopher assured Yeltsin, “There would be no effort to exclude anyone
and there would be no step taken at this time to push anyone ahead of the
others.” Yeltsin interrupted to clarify if the secretary meant to say that all
former Soviet states would be “on equal footing and there would be a
partnership not a membership.” Secretary Christopher told him, “Yes, that is
the case, there would not even be an associate status.” Yeltsin replied, “This
is a brilliant idea, it is a stroke of genius.” Yeltsin then said that “this serves
to dissipate all of the tension which we now have in Russia regarding
Eastern European states and their aspirations with respect to NATO. It
would have been an issue for Russia particularly if it left us in a second
class status.” He added, “Now under your new idea we are all equal and it
will ensure equal participation on the basis of partnership. . . . It really is a
great idea, really great. Tell Bill I am thrilled by this brilliant stroke.”
Christopher said, “We will tell him that you bought his recommendation
with real enthusiasm.” Yeltsin replied, “Of course, yes, yes.”[20]
Christopher and Talbott both later claimed that Yeltsin had
misunderstood them, but as Brookings Institution scholar James Goldgeier
pointed out, the meeting notes showed they had misled him. After getting
an excited response from the Russian president over the Partnership for
Peace proposal, Christopher seemed to add as an afterthought that they
would be “looking at the question of membership as a longer term
eventuality.” It does not appear that Yeltsin heard or understood this,[21]
though Talbott blames him, saying he had drunkenly interrupted
Christopher in his excitement and did not hear the bad news before shooing
the two Americans out the door.[22]
It is also a fact that earlier that very same day, Christopher told Foreign
Minister Kozyrev that the PfP would be “open to all,” rendering their
denials implausible. According to State Department notes of the meeting,
Christopher mentioned the possibility of NATO expansion in the long-term
future, but said that “no one would be excluded,” and instead stressed that
“the Partnership for Peace would be open to all the NACC (North Atlantic
Cooperation Council) countries.” When Kozyrev asked if there would be
new NATO members now, the secretary said “no, that we were emphasizing
a Partnership for Peace” instead.[23]
This lie was successful. As late as spring 1994, Kozyrev was confused
about what was happening and was still boasting that he had helped to
“prevent NATO’s expansion eastward to our borders.”[24] Even the Poles
were deceived and thought they were being betrayed by the United States,
which seemed to be favoring the PfP, which lacked a true security
guarantee, over the NATO alliance.[25]

Betrayal

Goldgeier, who believed Bush Sr. and Baker’s promises against expansion
in 1990 had been overblown, said this betrayal of an explicit vow in
October 1993 by Clinton’s secretary of state to pursue the Partnership for
Peace instead of NATO expansion, guaranteeing “full [Russian]
participation in the future security of Europe,” was much worse. “Unlike
the 1990 meeting,” Goldgeier wrote, “which was focused on the status of
Germany in NATO, this meeting was specifically about NATO’s future
relationship with Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.”
He added that “Yeltsin . . . thought he had dodged the NATO enlargement
bullet at a time at which he was in a raging political battle against hardliners
at home.”[26]
 But then, in January 1994, as they were preparing the official launch of
the PfP, Clinton began speaking of it as a “track that will lead to NATO
membership” for Central and Eastern European states. On January 11, he
admitted to Czech President Václav Havel, however, that “there is no
consensus now among NATO allies to extend formal security guarantees for
two reasons. First, it is not clear who could contribute to the common
defense. And second, the reaction in Russia could be the reverse of what we
want.” He went on to describe the PfP as simply the path toward joining the
alliance without “drawing another line dividing Europe,” unless Russia did
so first.[27] But the next day, just after the official launch of the Partnership
for Peace, Clinton announced in Prague: “[T]he question is no longer
whether NATO will take on new members but when and how.”[28] Yeltsin
was outraged. The PfP had gone from the centerpiece of the new security
system to more of a public relations tool, a distraction from the real effort,
while at the same time providing a process toward full membership in the
Atlantic alliance for some chosen countries. When Clinton had dinner with
Yeltsin in Moscow in January 1994, the Russian said he was shocked by the
statement in Prague that it was “not whether but when,” but insisted if that
were the case, “Russia has to be the first country to join NATO.” Clinton
refused to engage on the point.[29]
In July, Clinton again declared in a speech in Warsaw that NATO
expansion was not a question of if but when. Yeltsin seemed resigned to
expansion by that time, but again insisted that “Russia has to be the first” to
do so, that way when the rest of Eastern Europe was integrated, Russia
would not be last and potentially left out. He was only worried about how
China might react. In keeping with tradition, Clinton simply ignored his
statement.[30]
Vice President Al Gore explained that it served administration interests
to keep the long-term possibility of Russian membership open, if only to
give Yeltsin some sort of talking point to cite when he was criticized by
domestic opponents for letting a potential enemy encroach on Russia’s
historical sphere of influence.[31]
In late 1993, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service under director
Yevgeny Primakov warned that the admission of former Warsaw Pact states
“will be taken by a considerable part of Russian society as ‘the approach of
danger to the Motherland’s borders.’” The service continued, “This
expansion would bring the biggest military grouping in the world, with its
colossal offensive potential, directly to the borders of Russia.” They judged
that they would have to react. “If this happens, the need would arise for a
fundamental reappraisal of all defense concepts on our side, a redeployment
of armed forces and changes in operational plans.”[32] Defense Minister
Pavel Grachev warned that it “would be unfortunate if the former Warsaw
Pact states joined NATO in the near future, because this step would relegate
Russia to a much more isolated position.”[33]
The New York Times said that the administration, “eager not to offend”
the Russians, publicly promoted the PfP rather than NATO expansion
because “Washington and NATO officials do not want to increase the
influence of ultranationalists in Russia—and certainly not before scheduled
parliamentary elections here on Dec. 12.”[34]
 Amb. Pickering wrote a cable to Washington that in Russia, there was
“strong domestic opposition across the political spectrum to early NATO
expansion.” Yeltsin and Kozyrev were being criticized from their right as
too “compliant to the West.”[35] Nicholas Burns, senior Russia director on
the NSC, told Talbott that “we need to separate our understandable anger on
the tone of the debate [from] Russia’s substantive concerns which we must
take seriously.”[36]

Pentagon for Peace

Some in the administration, led by Secretary of Defense William Perry,

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Shalikashvili and then-Director
of Strategic Plans and Policy on the Joint Staff General Wesley Clark, truly
prioritized integrating Russia through the Partnership for Peace.[37] But in
the hands of the hawks, the PfP turned out to be not much more than a
scam. When the new Polish ambassador to the U.S. complained about the
process, Talbott explained that the whole point was to fool the Russians into
accepting NATO expansion, the same way their predecessors had done with
their later-revised promises about not moving NATO into eastern Germany
after reunification: “The Soviets initially refused to accept that the former
East Germany would become part of the alliance. But over time and with
effective reassurances we were able to bring themselves [sic] to agree.”
They would now repeat the process with the entire former Warsaw Pact.[38]
Lake was clear about his purpose as well, telling Christopher that “NATO
expansion will, when it occurs, by definition be punishment, or ‘neo-
containment’ of the bad Bear.”[39] In a memo to the Principals Committee,
Lake wrote that “neo-containment of Russia will be kept in the background
only, rarely articulated. On the contrary, the possibility of membership in
the long term for a democratic Russia should not be ruled out explicitly.”
But in the same memo Lake made clear that was a lie. They would leave
open the possibility of NATO membership even for Ukraine and the Baltics,
but pursue a “parallel track” for an “alliance with the Alliance” for Russia,
so they could consult, “but without giving them a veto over NATO
decisions.”[40]
In September 1994, Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke
summoned senior Defense officials to his office and shouted them down.
The PfP would not get in the way of NATO expansion. “The President has
made the decision, and you’re being insubordinate!” Holbrooke reportedly
yelled at them. The diplomats had out-hawked the warriors.[41]

Kissinger, Brzezinski Weigh In

Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford’s National Security Advisor and
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger criticized Clinton’s pretended hesitation
to expand NATO right away since it “could create a self-fulfilling prophecy
of future confrontation.”[42] He said this was essentially anti-American
defeatism, even though three days after that statement the president had
already overridden it, announcing his new NATO agenda.[43] Kissinger
cited Secretary of State Dean Acheson from the era of NATO’s foundation:
“Any nation which claims that this treaty is directed against it should be
reminded of the biblical admonition that ‘the guilty flee where no man
pursueth.’” If the Russians have a problem, then they are just paranoid, and
that is simply their problem, not ours. “The countries of Eastern Europe are
terrified, not threatening,” Kissinger wrote. And besides, the U.S. can give
Russia assurances “that no foreign troops would be stationed on the soil of
new NATO members.” He concluded, “[E]ither the NATO guarantee will be
extended or NATO will fall apart.”[44]
In the pages of Foreign Affairs, influential former Carter
administration National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, born to a
family of Polish aristocrats,[45] agreed, ridiculing the PfP’s inclusion of
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan as such overreach as to make the organization
meaningless. “If all are eligible, then, as a practical matter,” he wrote, “none
are admissible.” He demanded that Clinton proceed with NATO expansion
at the PfP’s expense.[46]
Brzezinski made it clear that despite the high-minded claims of the
promoters of NATO expansion, old power politics were still at the forefront
of the allies’ thinking. Europe is “America’s essential geopolitical
bridgehead on the Eurasian continent,” which “entrenches American
political influence and military power directly on the Eurasian
mainland.”[47] Meanwhile, Britain, he said, favored expansion to “dilute”
European unity. France was hesitant to enhance German power over Central
and Eastern Europe, while the Germans were happy to take up their new
role as American subcontractor in the plan to dominate Central and Eastern
Europe.[48]

I Told You to Forget It

Hawks in the administration, led by Lake and Holbrooke, as well as NSC
Senior Director for Europe Alexander Vershbow and his colleagues
Nicholas Burns and Daniel Fried, were eager to begin so-called
“enlargement.” Russia is never going to be allowed to join, they argued, so
cut the pretense and start expanding the alliance immediately.[49]
When Russian Foreign Minister Kozyrev proposed a “European
Security Plan” that envisioned both NATO and the CIS as subordinate to an
empowered OSCE (the newly renamed CSCE, changed from “Conference
on” to Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe),[50] Talbott
ridiculed the idea in a memo to Lake. The result would be “cumbersome in
the extreme—and probably self-paralyzing.” Though this would give the
Russians the “mantle of legitimacy” under Western supervision, he said it
would also “severely hamstring NATO’s ability to act,” which was
intolerable. Besides, the Russians’ problem is merely that “it sticks in their
craw that NATO appears poised to dictate the terms of the new order and
Russia has no choice but to accept.”[51]
Ukraine’s status was always central to the façade of the PfP. With a
massive ethnic Russian population and a history tightly bound to that of
their larger neighbor, the nation remained a central interest of the Russian
Federation. If Kiev could be included in the new security architecture for
Europe along with the United States and the rest of our allies, as well as
Russia and the rest of theirs, then that would essentially guarantee
Ukrainian neutrality. But with the PfP reduced to a ceremonial role, real
questions were already being raised about Ukraine’s future status and the
potential for violent conflict over it. When Talbott asked Holbrooke to
create a new interagency panel to play up the positive notes about NATO
expansion, the latter conceded that “Ukraine is the most delicate issue,” and
that, at best, the country would have to settle for the neutral buffer state
status of Finland in the first Cold War.[52] Secretary Christopher thought
they should slow down expansion because it was “hard to see how Ukraine
can accept being the buffer between NATO, Europe and Russia.”[53]
But they proceeded with the policy and deception. On July 5, 1994,
Clinton told Yeltsin, “I would like us to focus on the Partnership for Peace
program” rather than NATO.[54] According to Talbott, Clinton told Yeltsin
at dinner on September 27, “I’ve never said we shouldn’t consider Russia
for membership or a special relationship with NATO. So when we talk
about NATO expanding, we’re emphasizing inclusion, not exclusion.” All
the American president wanted, he said, was “to work with you and others
to maximize the chances of a truly united, undivided, integrated Europe.”
Yes, NATO would expand, but “it would still take several years,” and he
promised, “I want to work closely with you so we get through it together.”
He reassured Yeltsin that “NATO expansion is not anti-Russian; it’s not
intended to be exclusive of Russia, and there is no imminent timetable. And
we’ll work together.” Ever the salesman, Clinton said, “I don’t want you to
believe I wake up every morning thinking only about how to make the
Warsaw Pact states part of NATO—that’s not the way I look at it. What I do
think about is how to use NATO expansion to advance the higher goal of
European security, unity and integration—a goal I know you share.” As
Talbott explained, this entire line had been carefully designed to deceive.
The main points that NATO would expand and Russia would have to accept
it had been practiced with the team, “but the tone and content were part of
an approach that Clinton had worked out in his head during the lunch; every
time he’d said that expansion was going forward, he’d add that it was part
of a larger process including Russia.” When Yeltsin brought up the question
of Russia joining the alliance, Clinton lied again “that U.S. policy would be
guided by ‘three no’s’: no surprises, no rush and no exclusion.”[55]
The president broke all three promises at once, immediately. On
December 1, the North Atlantic Council issued a statement announcing they
“would expect and would welcome NATO enlargement that would reach to
democratic states to our East.”[56] Though it had the requisite double-talk
about a united Europe, Yeltsin was not buying it anymore. The Baltic
nations also recognized the official policy change in the communiqué and
worried if the game was NATO instead of the PfP, they would be left out of
the first round, which turned out to be true.[57]

Budapest Blowup

Three days later, on December 4, 1994, at a conference in Budapest, which

was supposedly meant to mark the OSCE as a newly improved, more
powerful player, Clinton announced, “NATO remains the bedrock of
European security.” He added, “Last week we took further steps to prepare
for expansion by starting work on the requirements for membership. . . .
[N]o country outside will be allowed to veto expansion.”[58] (It was at this
same meeting that the major powers and Ukraine agreed on the so-called
Budapest Memorandum, wherein Kiev said it would return former Soviet
nuclear missiles to Russia in exchange for certain security guarantees,
which had been a high priority of both the Clinton and Yeltsin
administrations.[59])
Yeltsin confronted Clinton and the allies: “NATO was created in Cold
War times. Today, it is trying to find its place in Europe, not without
difficulty. It is important that this search not create new divisions, but
promote European unity.” He complained, “We believe that the plans of
expanding NATO are contrary to this logic. Why sow the seeds of distrust?
After all, we are no longer adversaries, we are partners.” He warned that
“Europe is in danger of plunging into a cold peace.” He lamented the true
purpose of the expansion, written between the lines. It was “just in case
there are undesirable developments in Russia. If the objective is to bring
NATO up to Russia’s borders, let me say one thing: It is too early to bury a
democratic Russia.”[60] Evidently, he felt especially betrayed because he
misunderstood Clinton to mean they would go ahead with expansion almost
immediately in 1995.[61] The Times noted the next day that even though
the administration said no nation would be excluded, “both NATO and
Moscow know that Russia remains the perceived enemy in Europe and
would be at the bottom of the list.”[62]
Kozyrev later said this stunt caused a negative reaction in Moscow,
where even the most moderate voices counseling tolerance for gradual
expansion had to give it up. Everyone became opposed to all NATO
expansion.[63] Clinton understood very well how the Russians felt about it
—the entire population objected. He sent Vice President Gore to Moscow to
visit President Yeltsin in his hospital bed, shake hands and promise him that
no nations would be added in 1995, in the lead-up to Yeltsin’s desperate
reelection campaign.[64] But as soon as he got home, the principals met in
the White House and decided once and for all that the Eastern European
states’ desire to join the alliance far outweighed any Russian concerns. They
decided on a four-to-five-year timeframe for the first round of expansion.
The State Department sent the U.S. Mission to NATO a proposed statement
declaring that there would be “no second-tier security guarantees.” The
president then proclaimed the “inevitable expansion of NATO” in a
reelection campaign speech.[65] The illusion of the PfP as a solution to
European security was over.[66]

Bill Clinton’s Shame

According to William Burns, then-acting deputy chief of mission at the U.S.

Embassy in Moscow, and later CIA director in the Joe Biden administration,
President Clinton had already ruined the post-Cold War relationship with
Russia before the end of 1994. Recalling his memos at the time, Burns
wrote in his memoir: “I emphasized mounting Russian concern about
expansion of NATO. I noted that Yeltsin’s tough public statements in the
fall of 1994 about NATO expansion ‘were an unsubtle reminder of Russian
angst about neglect of its interests in the process of restructuring European
security institutions.’”
He had written in a State Department cable at the time that “the
honeymoon in American relations with the new Russia that blossomed in
the immediate aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union is now long
past.” They had already abused the friendship to the breaking point. “Two
years ago, we could pretty much have it our way on a whole range of issues,
so long as we paid some minimal deference to Russian sensibilities. That is
no longer the case.”[67]
Burns also wrote that the staff of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow
unanimously opposed NATO expansion. They had proposed “other forms of
cooperation” with the former Warsaw Pact nations and thought it would be
wiser to create a new “treaty relationship” between NATO and Russia. In
other words, they were trying to come up with any alternative to avoid the
certain consequences of the president’s policy. This was because, Burns
wrote just after Yeltsin’s “cold peace” outrage at Budapest, no fine-tuning
of any bureaucratic process for doing so could change the fundamental
problem that “[h]ostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt
across the domestic political spectrum here. . . . The Russian elite is much
more focused on outcomes now.” Since the U.S. refused to listen, “the
process serves mainly to remind Russians of their own weakness.”[68]
He added that the embassy went out of their way to support including
the Russians in the new “Contact Group” regarding the war in the Balkans
and the G7 group of world economic powers, making it the “G8,” not
because they had very much power and influence to wield, but they would
someday. The idea was that these gestures would “help anchor a weak and
floundering Russia in the respect and status that came with regular dealings
with the G7 countries.”
Regarding NATO expansion, Burns said Yeltsin had “considerable
justification” to believe Secretary Baker’s promises still applied after the
fall of the USSR. “That commitment, however, had never been precisely
defined or codified, and the Clinton administration saw its inheritance as
fairly ambiguous.” Burns pointed to Lake as the leading proponent of
expansion in Eastern Europe, who sought to provide these smaller countries
with “reassurance” against the return of aggression from Russia or the
newly reunited Germany.[69]
The administration knew very well how badly the entire Russian
political and military establishments were reacting. An “undivided Europe,
whole and free” clearly meant without them. Talbott wrote a lengthy memo
to Clinton in April 1995 rehashing the history of their diplomacy on that
issue, and preparing him for their first meeting after Yeltsin’s “cold peace”
statement in Budapest. The mission was to try to get Russia to accept
NATO expansion and settle for working with the U.S. under the PfP. Talbott
recognized, however, that Yeltsin feared NATO would announce new
members during his reelection year in 1996, “subjecting him and reformers
to withering, perhaps fatal attacks from the Communists and nationalists.”
Talbott, having just returned from Russia, wrote: “Virtually all major
players in Russia, all across the political spectrum, are either deeply
opposed to, or at least deeply worried about, NATO expansion.”
Talbott advised Clinton how to deceive them. “[A]lmost as much as it
fears NATO’s expansion, Russia fears its own isolation,” he wrote.
“Moreover, the Russian military very much wants to cooperate as much as
possible with NATO.” He said that since “Russia wants a relationship with
NATO,” the president could propose an agreement which could, “for now at
least, be defined in a way that finesses the question of how large a NATO
we’re talking about.”[70]
 Talbott explained Yeltsin’s view, saying, “You can have an undivided
Europe or an expanded NATO, but not both. NATO enlargement is
inherently hostile to Russia’s interests.” He continued, speaking from the
Russians’ point of view, “Therefore, we’ll cooperate on integration but
resist on NATO enlargement. If you insist on bringing Central European
states into NATO, you’ll risk re-dividing Europe into two competing,
potentially hostile blocs.” Talbott said, “The implied warning: ‘cold peace’
could be a prelude to a new Cold War.” However, he reiterated that there
was nothing Yeltsin could do to change their minds. Expansion would
proceed with or without further Russian participation in the PfP, so if they
want to complain about it, they “will succeed only in isolating themselves.”
Still, Talbott warned that virtually every country in Europe, in and out of
NATO, wanted to see the alliance work closely with Russia to avoid
“provok[ing] spasms of paranoia and countermeasures by the Russians.
They know from experience that there’s nothing more offensive than a
Russian on the defensive.”[71]
In May 1995, when Clinton went to Moscow for celebrations marking
the 50th anniversary of World War II, Yeltsin again stomped his foot,
though he was helpless to do anything to stop the growth of the Western
alliance. “For me to agree to the borders of NATO expanding towards those
of Russia—that would constitute a betrayal on my part of the Russian
people,” he said. “I want to get a clear understanding of your idea of NATO
expansion because now I see nothing but humiliation for Russia if you
proceed.” He asked Clinton, “How do you think it looks to us if one bloc
continues to exist while the Warsaw Pact has been abolished?” He said, “It’s
a new form of encirclement if the one surviving Cold War bloc expands
right up to the borders of Russia. Many Russians have a sense of fear. What
do you want to achieve with this if Russia is your partner? . . . Why do you
want to do this?” For a man who was said to be drunk most of the time,
Yeltsin certainly appreciated what was at stake. “We need a new structure
for Pan-European security, not old ones!” he insisted. “Let’s have no blocs,
only one European space that provides for its own security.”[72]
As Talbott suggested, Clinton promised that he would hold off on
NATO expansion until after the election of 1996 because he understood
how deeply unpopular the policy was among not just the Russian
establishment, but the citizens of the country as well.[73] Yeltsin had
explicitly asked him for this favor, while Clinton commiserated about
pressure from the Republican Congress and Midwestern voters pushing the
other direction.[74]
A month after Clinton’s May 1995 visit to Moscow, Burns wrote that
“nowhere are Russian sensitivities about being excluded or taken advantage
of more acute than on the broad issue of European security. There is a solid
consensus within the Russian elite that NATO expansion is a bad idea,
period.” He later wrote, “Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-
1990s, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best, and
needlessly provocative at worst.” He said he understood why others would
want to reassure Eastern European nations of their safety in the face of a
potentially revived Russian power, but argued that they should focus on the
Partnership for Peace. “It was wishful thinking, however, to believe that we
could open the door to NATO membership without incurring some lasting
cost with a Russia coping with its own historic insecurities.”[75]
In another cable the embassy sent that fall, they explained why they
opposed expanding NATO to include more former Warsaw Pact states after
East Germany. They said that in looking to America’s “own long-term self-
interest,” it should “seek to build a security order in Europe sufficiently in
Russia’s interests so that a revived Russia will have no compelling reason to
revise it.” This would ensure that “the ‘stab in the back’ theorists will have
only limited room for maneuver in Russian politics.”[76]
Russian parliamentarian Aleksey Pushkov explained that the
assumption that Yeltsin was only opposing their plans for domestic political
reasons was completely incorrect. Even Anatoly Chubais, who was very
close to the Clinton administration, had publicly said that he agreed with the
Communists and nationalists on that point.[77]
Lake wrote to Clinton in July 1995 that “[d]espite Yeltsin’s agreement
in May to join PfP and launch a ‘beyond PfP’ process with NATO,
opposition to NATO enlargement appears to be hardening across the
political spectrum among the Russian political elite.” He added, “Key
Yeltsin advisors and members of the Duma argue that NATO enlargement
and NATO-Russia cooperation are incompatible and are attacking Kozyrev
for acquiescing in the West’s agenda.” He said that Yeltsin had reportedly
approved a plan to delay or derail NATO expansion, “including by sowing
divisions within the Alliance and appealing to opponents in publics and
parliaments.” Lake continued, “[O]pposition to NATO enlargement is
unlikely to yield in the near or medium term to some kind of grudging
endorsement; Russia’s opposition is deep and profound,” and concluded,
“For the period ahead the Russian leadership will do its level best to derail
our policy given its conviction that any eastward expansion of NATO is at
root antithetical to Russia’s long-term interests.”
He warned they might be forced to choose between their Central
European policy and their strategy regarding Russia, recommending
transparency in the process and the “parallel track” deal as antidotes to the
tension being raised.[78]

Eurocorps

What were the other alternatives? Of course, American libertarians, paleo-

conservatives and leftists recommended independence and neutrality, while
everyone else on the political spectrum insisted on some form of foreign
presence, especially in Europe. In 1998, in reaction to American mendacity
in Bosnia,[79] the French and Germans expanded their small “Eurocorps”
force to guarantee security on the continent with autonomy from NATO,
[80] and even the British signaled their willingness to cooperate with this
attempted new alignment.[81] In this case, NATO could have at least been
relegated to a simple treaty, rather than its own massive, independent and
expansionist military bureaucracy. However, the proposal was fiercely
denounced by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as
threatening NATO and therefore American predominance in Western
military structures. “No, the real drive towards a separate European defense
is the same as that towards a single European currency: namely the utopian
venture of creating a single European super-state to rival the U.S. on the
world stage,” she warned.[82] President Bush,[83] the State
Department[84] and Defense Department[85] all put out similar warnings.
It was certainly true that, as the French Foreign Ministry put it, they
meant to dilute U.S. power in Europe.[86] But after American-led NATO
intervention in the Balkans, U.S. dominance remained assured, as through
the present day. Though the EU created a small-time rapid reaction force, it
saw light duty and has not been a challenge to Washington and NATO’s
hegemony in Europe.[87]

Early Warning

My Guy

The Libertarian Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter not only warned against
NATO expansion from the beginning, but also perfectly predicted what the
result would be. In his 1994 book Beyond NATO: Staying Out of Europe’s
Wars, Carpenter wrote, “It would be extraordinarily difficult to expand
NATO eastward without that action’s being viewed by Russia as unfriendly.
Even the most modest schemes would bring the alliance to the borders of
the old Soviet Union.” He noted that “[s]ome of the more ambitious
versions would have the alliance virtually surround the Russian Federation
itself.” Expansion, Carpenter warned, “would constitute a needless
provocation of Russia.”[88]

Go, Pat, Go!

Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon and Reagan speechwriter and confidant,
(first) Cold Warrior, presidential candidate and political commentator,
warned in 1999 that every major political faction in Russia considered
expansion to be in “bad faith” and exploiting Russia’s weakened position:
“We soothingly reassure Moscow that NATO’s expansion is benign. But if
the Russians gave war guarantees to Mexico and began arming and training
Mexican troops, would any Russian assurance diminish our determination
to run them out of our hemisphere?”
Buchanan also warned that “[i]f rising resentment in Russia leads to
Yeltsin’s replacement with an anti-American nationalist, full blame must
rest squarely with a haughty U.S. elite that has done its best to humiliate
Russia.” He then demanded to know, “Why are we doing this? This is not
1948. Stalin is dead; the Soviet empire is dead; the Soviet Union is dead.
European Russia is smaller than the Russia of Peter the Great.” He
maintained that “[a] friendly Russia is far more critical to U.S. security than
any alliance with Warsaw or Prague. If the United States has one overriding
national security interest in the new century, it is to avoid collisions with
great nuclear powers like Russia.”
Buchanan then predicted, “By moving NATO onto Russia’s front
porch, we have scheduled a twenty-first century confrontation. . . . America
will face a hellish dilemma: risk confrontation with a nuclear-armed Russia
determined to recreate its old sphere of influence, or renege on solemn
commitments and see NATO collapse.” Therefore, he said, “Offering NATO
memberships to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and, as some urge, Ukraine is
rashness bordering on madness.” Referring to maps the Clinton team must
have ignored, Buchanan warned, “This would put the Russian base at
Kaliningrad behind NATO lines and bring into a U.S.-led alliance three
nations with huge Russian minorities.” Foreseeing future conflict, he
observed that “Latvia is almost half Russian; eastern Ukraine, almost
entirely Russian. America could neither defend nor liberate these nations
without the risk of nuclear war.”[89]

Kennan’s Dissent

But it was not just the libertarians and paleo-conservatives. In fact, a

majority of the relevant government officials involved were opposed,
including former and current cabinet secretaries, diplomats, military officers
and experts.[90]
George Kennan was at that time considered to be the wisest and
highest-ranking of the retired foreign policy graybeards. He had been the
famous ambassador to the Soviet Union who helped to inaugurate the first
Cold War back in the aftermath of World War II and coined the containment
policy in his important “Long Telegram” cable in 1946, as well as an
anonymously written article for Foreign Affairs, “On the Sources of Soviet
Conduct,” signed by X, in 1947.[91] For generations after, Western leaders
sought his advice on dealing with the Soviets.[92]
At a dinner at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in
October 1996, Kennan called NATO expansion a “strategic blunder of
potentially epic proportions.”[93] He wrote a piece called “A Fateful Error”
for the New York Times in 1997, denouncing the policy of NATO expansion.
He said the decision was “the most fateful error of American policy in the
entire post-cold-war era,” which would “inflame the existing nationalistic,
anti-western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion, restore the
atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and impel Russian
foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.”[94] He said he
expected the result to be “a new Cold War, probably ending in a hot one,
and the end of the effort to achieve a workable democracy in Russia.”[95]
Most quotably, Kennan complained to the Times’s Thomas L.
Friedman in 1998:

I think [NATO expansion] is the beginning of a new Cold

War. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely
and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake.
There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was
threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the
Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves.
We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries,
even though we have neither the resources nor the intention
to do so in any serious way.

Don’t people understand? Our differences in the Cold War

were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are
turning our backs on the very people who mounted the
greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet
regime.

Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia,

and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told
 you that is how the Russians are—but this is just wrong.[96]

Kennan’s prediction; our present. He even foresaw that once Russia

does react negatively and takes steps to push back, the hawks would point
to those actions as post-hoc justification for everything the U.S. did to
contribute to the crisis in the first place.
Friedman had written back in November 1996, “For my money, NATO
expansion is the most ill-conceived project of the post-cold-war era.”
Betraying a skepticism missing from his prognostications during the terror
wars,[97] Friedman wrote that expansion proponents “insist it can be done
without disrupting relations with Russia or orphaning those Europeans, like
the Balts and Ukrainians, who will be left out. Well, let’s see.”[98]

Strobe’s Yellow Light

Nelson Strobridge “Strobe” Talbott III was Clinton’s roommate when they
were Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. He later became Clinton’s primary adviser
on Russia during the transition, then ambassador-at-large to the former
Soviet states, and later, deputy secretary of state. According to the Wilson
Center, he “sat in every Clinton-Yeltsin meeting and otherwise managed the
Bill-Boris relationship.”[99] Originally more of a “wooly headed one-
worlder,”[100] Talbott had opposed NATO expansion when ambassador-at-
large due to the presumed Russian reaction. He later wrote that he was
“deeply riven” about it.[101]
But Talbott changed his mind by April 1994 after being promoted to
deputy secretary of state.[102] He soon became one of the biggest
promoters of NATO expansion inside the administration. The decision to
expand had been finalized in January 1994 at the NATO summit in
Brussels. “At the urging of President Clinton, the leaders agreed that the
Alliance should expand,” Talbott later wrote. He said that leaders of the
new proposed member states were “ambivalent, skeptical or suspicious
about the very idea of enlarging NATO. They worry that if they are not in
the first group admitted, or the second, or the third, they will end up on the
wrong side of a new Iron Curtain.” He acknowledged that “[i]n Russia,
ultranationalists condemn the decision to expand as nothing less than the
declaration of a new cold war; and many reformers fear that precisely this
sinister view will strengthen anti-democratic elements in Russian politics.”
Arguing that NATO will help to promote democratic and economic
reform in tandem with the European Union and citing Italian and German
integration into the American-led order after the Second World War, Talbott
still warned that “[o]ne of the most difficult challenges to enlarging NATO
is its effect on Russia. Many Russians see NATO as a vestige of the cold
war, inherently directed against their country.” They thought NATO should
have been abolished along with the Warsaw Pact and see the plan to take in
new members as a “Western vote of no-confidence in the staying power of
Russian reform. It makes them feel as though Russia is still on probation—
still subject to a thinly disguised policy of containment.” He said that “[i]f
NATO adopted an anti-Russian rationale for taking in new members, it
could tip the balance of forces in Russian politics in exactly the direction
that we . . . most feared,” and that “[t]hese suspicions and warnings
reverberate across the Russian political spectrum.” Since every kind of
reactionary was exploiting the issue, “the reformers who are committed to
consolidation of Russian democracy and to Russia’s increasing integration
into the West also tend to oppose NATO enlargement.” Talbott’s
prescription to go ahead anyway was the beginning of a terrible self-
fulfilling prophecy.[103]
In his memoir, Talbott wrote that Clinton had confronted him about
Kennan’s opposition: “Why isn’t Kennan right? Isn’t he a kind of guru of
yours going back to when we were at Oxford?” Talbott wrote that he
believed Clinton was not just testing him for future public relations
purposes, but “in this case, there was a hint of doubt about the policy itself
—not the desirability of expanding NATO, but the feasibility of reconciling
it with the integration of Russia.” Talbott wrote, “As the engineer in this
locomotive, he was troubled by this latest forecast of a train wreck from a
revered figure with a reputation for being prophetic about Russia.” But he
dismissed Clinton’s newfound concerns. Sure, “Kennan had been and
always would be someone I admired, but not as a source of all wisdom.
Kennan had opposed the formation of NATO in the first place, I said, so it
was no great surprise that he opposed its enlargement. . . . Clinton furrowed
his brow and thought about my answer, then broke into a smile. ‘Just
checking, Strobe. Just checking.’”[104]
In Talbott’s response to Kennan’s letter warning about his upcoming
public dissent, the protégé assured his mentor that he had shown the Times
piece to the principals and that while they appreciated the advice, he
stressed the need to contain a potentially aggressive Russia and side-
benefits like the incentive for countries to maintain civilian supremacy over
their militaries and overall stability for the continent, the “political element”
of the alliance they were always talking about. As far as the Russians,
Talbott wrote, “Once again for the President a profoundly difficult issue
came down to a starkly simple choice[:] should Russia’s acute aversion to
enlargement keep the process from going forward, Yes or no? The President
decided the only right answer was no.” But they had no real answer to the
problems that Kennan had raised. The Russians would just have to settle for
“understandings and arrangements” to assuage their “legitimate political
and security concerns,” he said, “thereby managing the difficulties in U.S.-
Russian relations that inevitably arise over enlargement.” It was wishful
thinking at best, epitomized by statements like: “The NATO that is getting
ready to take in new members is already a new NATO, not the old Cold War
model.” The only thing new was that the alliance was bigger and more
powerful, while its primary enemy had been completely emasculated.
Claiming it was anything but a military alliance still directed at Russia was
just obfuscation.[105]

All Stars

Many of the most respected Cold War hawks and experts at the State and
Defense departments, Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and academia
warned against the policy and predicted what was likely to happen. They
included President Bush Sr.’s former national security adviser and close
friend Gen. Brent Scowcroft;[106] Bill Clinton’s Secretaries of Defense Les
Aspin[107] and William Perry;[108] his Ambassador to Russia, Thomas
Pickering;[109] George Kennan[110] and his one-time protégé and later
greatest professional rival Paul Nitze, the former deputy secretary of
defense and special adviser to Ronald Reagan,[111] who had previously
favored the more aggressive policy of “rollback” rather than just
containment of Soviet power.[112] Warnings also came from Robert S.
McNamara,[113] the secretary of defense during most of the war in
Vietnam; former CIA Directors Adm. Stansfield Turner[114] and Robert
Gates, who was later secretary of defense under Presidents George W. Bush
and Barack Obama;[115] Jack Matlock, the second-to-last ambassador to
the USSR;[116] Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan,[117] John Warner,[118]
Sam Nunn,[119] Bill Bradley[120] and Paul Wellstone;[121] anti-
Communist academics Richard Pipes and Edward Luttwak;[122] and
dozens more of the highest-ranking generals, admirals and foreign service
officers, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General John
Shalikashvili and military adviser to the State Department Lieutenant
General Barry McCaffrey.[123] All warned Clinton not to go through with
it. According to Council on Foreign Relations and Columbia University
scholar Kimberly Marten, the majority of Russia experts at the State
Department also opposed expansion since, they argued, “Moscow would
see expansion as being directed against it, and that this might create a self-
fulfilling prophecy of a nationalist backlash.”[124]
In 1997, Matlock told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that if
they approved the policy, “it may well go down in history as the most
profound strategic blunder made since the end of the Cold War.” He warned
that rather than improving security, “it could well encourage a chain of
events that could produce the most serious security threat to this nation
since the Soviet Union collapsed.”[125]
Also in 1997, an open letter signed by former President Eisenhower’s
granddaughter Susan, and 50 important foreign policy establishment
leaders,[126] warned in part, “The current U.S.-led effort to expand
NATO . . . is a policy error of historic proportions. We believe that NATO
expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability.”
They warned that expansion would strengthen Russian hardliners and
marginalize the democrats, provoke their reevaluation of the post-Cold War
settlement, galvanize resistance to signing important nuclear treaties, and
spread instability and fear throughout Europe by moving the line, but
excluding for the time being many smaller countries who would be
threatened by the Russian reaction. They also warned that NATO’s primary
defensive mission would be diminished and that many of the nations in
question had open issues with their borders and national minorities.[127]
Ted Sorensen, a former adviser to President John F. Kennedy,
unequivocally denounced expansion: “Such a move would force the United
States to defend these new members by both nuclear and conventional
means, while harming relations with excluded Central and East European
nations, especially Russia’s resurgent nationalists.” He mocked the
mindlessness of the policy. “It is hard to imagine a more provocative
decision taken with less consultation and consideration for the
consequences. But, so what, let’s do it our way.”[128]
Olga Oliker, director of the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Center
for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said that the Russians
took NATO expansion “as a sign that we were still against them. It was
really hard to walk back from.” She added, “[F]rom there on out, we were
doing things that . . . the Russians felt hurt them. We didn’t do it because we
wanted to hurt them. We did it because we didn’t care if it hurt them.”
Oliker explained that American policymakers just could not understand the
Russians’ point of view. “I was testifying on the Hill not long ago, and I
was saying, ‘The Russians think they’re acting defensively.’ And the
senators were like, ‘But we’ve explained to them over and over that we’re
not a threat.’ Like, are you serious?”[129]
Even the New York Times editorial board was against it. They warned
that expansion could “strengthen Russian nationalists opposed to Boris
Yeltsin and his Western-oriented reformers. . . . Will the U.S. extend its
nuclear umbrella to Eastern Europe? . . . Above all, how can Russia be
included—or be reconciled to being excluded?” They argued that “[i]t
would be far better for President Clinton to join his European counterparts
in seeking more creative solutions for Europe’s problems.”[130]
Veteran diplomat Dennis Ross, who had been director of policy
planning under Jim Baker in the H.W. Bush years, wrote a memo to Talbott
warning that “the Russians . . . see NATO expansion through a political,
psychological and historical lens. Unfortunately it tends to confirm the
imagery that they lost the Cold War, their status as a great power is
collapsing, they continue to be humiliated and worse they will face
potential threats closer to their borders.” He said this was giving the
nationalist right “a field day” and that the U.S. desperately needed to come
up with an alternative bit of “counter-imagery” for how the question was
portrayed in Russia. Ross also reminded Talbott that they already had
agreed that the Russians “feel they were snookered at the time of German
unification. As you noted with me, Baker’s promises on not extending
NATO military presence into what was East Germany were part of a
perceived commitment not to expand the Alliance eastward.” He added,
“[T]he 1991 promise to begin to transform NATO from a military alliance
was part of the Soviet explanation for accepting a unified Germany in
NATO. Today I believe the Russians feel both promises should have had
more of a binding and precise character. As a result they are taking the
lessons of 1991 and are trying to apply them now in the negotiations on
NATO expansion.” He was not urging restraint on the policy, only caution
on the politics. The U.S. needed to do the bare minimum to make sure that
Yeltsin would have something he could “present to their public” to show
their “needs were addressed and satisfied.”[131]
Kimberly Marten of the Council on Foreign Relations wrote that
though the anti-expansion forces in the foreign policy community were
prominent and large in number, they were too late, and had failed to win
champions in the Congress. Kennan’s article and Eisenhower et al.’s letter
were not published until 1997, long after the final, formal decision had
already been made at the NATO ministers’ meeting in September 1996.
“Enlargement opponents had missed the boat.”[132]

Senate Debate

In 1998, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the most respected intellectuals in

the Senate at the time, and very close to the neoconservative set,[133]
warned that bringing Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic and possibly the
Baltic states into NATO would “antagonize Russia,” saying the policy was
akin to building an “iron ring” around them. “We’re walking into ethnic
historical enmities,” Moynihan said. “We have no idea what we’re getting
into.”
But then-Senator Biden, a leading voice for NATO expansion, would
not have it. He began by accusing Moynihan of justifying Stalin’s seizure of
the Baltics generations ago, which was not at all what Moynihan had said. A
reporter from the Times was a witness: “Stalking the Senate floor, flailing
his arms, Mr. Biden continued for 10 minutes.” Biden swore he had no idea
what Moynihan was talking about. “If my friends are saying, anyone who
votes for expanding NATO to include Poland, the Czech Republic and
Hungary, are tying this noose around a Russian neck, this iron ring, well,
then I don’t quite get it,” he said. After Virginia Senator John Warner
warned that expansion could see Americans dragged into other nations’
ethnic conflicts and no-win quagmires like Somalia and Vietnam, Biden
ranted, “Vietnam and Somalia are not Central Europe, they’re not Poland,
they’re not Hungary.”[134]
However, only a few months before, Biden had revealed that he
understood what was at stake for the Russians. He told the Atlantic Council
that he understood that unlike the Visegrád states (Poland, the Czech
Republic, Slovakia and Hungary), bringing in the Baltics would drive major
“consternation” in Russia. “If there was ever anything that was going to tip
the balance, were it to be tipped, in terms of a vigorous and hostile reaction
in Russia, I don’t mean military, it would be that.” However, he assured the
crowd, “I once was told to be in this business you must be an optimist,
some would suggest it is too optimistic a view. I believe with time, time
meaning in the next several years, we will solve this.”[135]
Democratic Senator Paul Wellstone disagreed, saying he was “very
worried” NATO expansion could mean a “redivision of Europe,” causing “a
poisoning of relations with Russia and ultranationalists coming into
power.”[136] The Wall Street Journal also said, “The most sensitive
question is whether ever to admit the three Baltic States, a move certain to
infuriate Moscow.”[137]

Dividing Lines

President Clinton had said they would “build and secure a New Europe,
peaceful, democratic and undivided at last.”[138] But he wasn’t uniting
Europe. He was redividing it. Amb. Matlock warned that if they were to
exclude Russia from the expanded alliance, it would necessarily be against
them.[139] The last Cold War had ended more than two years before the
final fall of the USSR, and now the U.S.A. was already on the path to
restarting it again. Former Secretary of State Kissinger, a strong proponent
of expansion, admitted this was so, writing in the Los Angeles Times that
“the new members are seeking to participate in NATO . . . not to erase
dividing lines but to position themselves inside a guaranteed territory by
shifting existing NATO boundaries 300 miles to the east.”[140] His
Democratic counterpart Brzezinski also acknowledged that “the delusion of
a shared global status with America made it difficult for the Moscow
political elite to abandon the idea of a privileged geopolitical position for
Russia not only in the area of the former Soviet Union itself but even in
regard to the former central European satellite states.”[141]
Eugene J. Carroll Jr., a retired Navy rear admiral and deputy director of
the Center for Defense Information, criticized advocates of NATO
expansion, including Kissinger, in a 1997 essay in the Los Angeles Times.
Referring to Kissinger’s acknowledgment that they were just moving the
dividing line further east, Carroll wrote that this admission “also provided a
clear picture of Moscow’s perception of a new NATO threat moved closer
to its borders. This picture also reveals that, at its heart, NATO expansion is
aimed at Russia.” He referred to new Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright’s testimony to the Senate: “On the off-chance that in fact Russia
doesn’t work out the way that we are hoping it will . . . NATO is
there,”[142] adding, “It may be safe to treat Russia as a prospective enemy
today when it is helpless to prevent NATO expansion but there is the
longer-term danger. A hardline, anti-Western coalition will be strengthened
in Moscow and give priority to anti-NATO measures in the future.”[143]

Experienced Ambassador Dean

Jonathan Gunther Dean, a career foreign service officer and former

ambassador to Cambodia and Lebanon, then senior arms control adviser
from the Union of Concerned Scientists, wrote in 1995 that NATO
expansion was the “worst mistake in U.S. policy towards Europe since the
end of World War II.”[144] A long list of former officials and diplomats,
including Matlock and Nitze, signed a letter to Secretary Christopher in
support of Dean’s article.[145]
 In 1997, Dean told Congress, “The Russian . . . political class in its
entirety, with very few exceptions . . . opposes NATO enlargement and
strongly.” He said that “[t]his is the group which will form the views of the
Russian public . . . with the message that Russia is hostilely encircled and
has been cheated by the same countries on the cold war outcome.” This
would be especially true, he said, “if that enlargement includes the Baltic
States bordering directly on Russia.” He cited the Duma’s reluctance to
ratify the START II nuclear weapons treaty, and said that “the main thing
that every one of these costs and these risks have in common is that they are
completely unnecessary.”[146]

Foreign Friends

In November 1996, French President Jacques Chirac warned Tony Lake,

“We have humiliated them too much. One day there will be a dangerous
nationalist backlash.”[147] On this same theme, Max Jakobsen, the former
Finnish ambassador to the UN, warned, “Significantly, it is the
‘Westernizers’ who strenuously oppose a NATO expansion. They fear it
would provide neoimperialist forces with fresh arguments to demand a
remilitarization of Russian policy.”[148] In 1997, former Australian Prime
Minister Paul Keating made a direct comparison to the catastrophe of
Versailles after World War I, arguing that NATO expansion is “an error
which may rank in the end with the strategic miscalculations which
prevented Germany from taking its full place in the international
system.”[149]
 British experts Michael Clarke and Michael MccGwire warned in 1998
that the first announced round of NATO expansion to Poland, Romania and
Hungary was already too much and that the alliance should stop before they
created a crisis. They said keeping Russia cooperative on regional stability,
nuclear limits and proliferation and their territorial ambitions was
paramount, and that NATO expansion threatened all three because “[i]t is
seen by all strands of Russian opinion as violating the bargain struck in
1990 and will likely lead to the withdrawal of cooperation.” They said that
even though it was too late to rescind the invitations to Poland, Hungary
and the Czech Republic, in order to mitigate the consequences the West
should from that point forward refrain from “integrating them into NATO’s
military structure, by ceasing to insist that NATO membership is open to all
and by perpetuating the de facto nuclear-weapons-free zone that presently
exists in Central and Eastern Europe.”[150]

Kupchan’s Insight

Council on Foreign Relations Senior Fellow Charles Kupchan, a promoter

of the Partnership for Peace concept, was adamantly against NATO
expansion in 1994. He wrote that Clinton was “resurrecting” Europe’s
dividing lines and, despite the administration’s efforts to strengthen the
CSCE and assurances to Moscow that they meant no harm, “enlarging the
alliance would alter the balance of power on the continent and make Russia
feel less secure.” That NATO was directed against Russia was precisely
why the Eastern European states wanted to join, but he warned that an
“expanded NATO would lead Russia to reassert control over its former
republics and to remilitarize. The chance to build a European security
community that included Russia would be lost.” He quoted an adviser to
President Yeltsin as well: “NATO expands eastward, Russia under any
government will become a revisionist power striving to undermine the
already fragile European order.” He also importantly predicted that
expansion would help Russian hawks marginalize reformers: “Even if
NATO held open the prospect of eventual membership for Russia,
nationalists would react to Central Europe’s entry into NATO by charging
that Russian reformers had sold out to the West and had jeopardized
Russia’s security.”[151]

Mandelbaum’s Crystal Ball

International relations scholar Michael Mandelbaum called NATO

expansion “foolish and dangerous.” He told Congress that “Russia might
some day become a threat to its neighbors, but it is not a threat now and,
therefore, NATO expansion, as planned by the administration, is at best
premature and at worst counterproductive.”
He complained that domestic politics was at the core of Clinton’s
considerations, and mocked his 1996 campaign slogan about “building a
bridge to the 21st Century.” Mandelbaum told Congress the “likeliest
result” of this policy would be the “restoration of a tradition of European
international relations that predates the Cold War, a tradition featuring great
power rivalry, shifting alliances, and continuing concern with an
unregulated military balance.” He predicted, “NATO expansion would
fulfill one 1996 campaign promise that Bill Clinton did not make. It would
be a bridge to the nineteenth century.”[152]
Mandelbaum wrote in Foreign Affairs that the policy was “at best
premature, at worst counterproductive, and in any case largely irrelevant to
the problems confronting the countries situated between Germany and
Russia.” Dismissing arguments that the primary purpose of expanding
NATO is the spread of democracy throughout Eastern Europe, Mandelbaum
wrote that “it is a military alliance, an association of some sovereign states
directed against others. The ‘other’ in this case is Russia.” Citing hawks like
Kissinger protégé Peter W. Rodman,[153] who explicitly supported
expansion for this very reason, he warned that the test would be what
Russia does when the expanders eventually come for Ukraine’s neutrality.
If the true purpose of the expansion was now admitted to be “neo-
containment” of the Russians, then bringing in Poland would not be
enough. “The country most important to the West that is immediately
vulnerable to a renewal of aggressive Russian behavior is Ukraine. Yet no
one is suggesting that Ukraine join NATO. Indeed, discussions of NATO
tend to treat Ukraine as marginal.” However, he said, the nation was the
furthest thing from marginal. “So long as it remains independent it is a
buffer between Russia and the rest of Europe. More important, an
independent Ukraine is the best guarantee that Russia will remain a
peaceful nation-state.” With great foresight he wrote, “It is not an
exaggeration to say that NATO expansion will be good or bad depending on
its effect on the peaceful coexistence of Ukraine and Russia.”
 Mandelbaum said that the neo-containment policy would weaken
Russian democrats who were already identified with the West and were
desperate not to be associated with NATO expansion. He added that
embarking on such a crucial policy regarding the future of Europe against
Russia’s wishes and without any real consultation would be certain to make
Russian policymakers consider it illegitimate and induce them to do
whatever they could to undermine it, thus putting our nations back at odds.
[154]

Z.B.: Don’t Listen to Me

Even Zbigniew Brzezinski warned, “It is not even clear whether the
Russians wish to be part of NATO. But if excluded and rejected, they will
be resentful, and their own political self-definition will become more anti-
European and anti-Western.” He added, “The expansion of NATO should,
therefore, not be driven by whipping up anti-Russian hysteria that could
eventually become a self-fulfilling prophecy.” He nonsensically argued that
“NATO’s expansion should not be seen as directed against any particular
state, but as part of a historically constructive process of shaping a secure,
stable, and more truly European Europe.”
While Brzezinski acknowledged that Russia had “legitimate concerns”
about NATO militarizing Central and Eastern Europe, he argued that “the
formula of ‘no forward deployment’ of NATO forces in Central Europe
would underline the nonantagonistic character of the expansion” and
“mitigate” them. “There are other steps that should be taken to reassure
Russia, to propitiate its sense of status, and—most important—to engage it
in a transoceanic and transcontinental security system,” he added.
The U.S. should adopt a strategy of “combining the expansion of
NATO with new transcontinental security architecture embracing Russia,”
as a “productive response to Russia’s concerns.” This advice was the basis
for the eventual NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, discussed below.
Brzezinski also correctly predicted the outcome of his preferred policy:
Russia will react negatively and we will then return to Cold War or worse.
For one thing, there was the problem of Ukraine. As the country found
itself in the middle of this new contest between the U.S. and Russia, the
Americans needed to consider Russia’s sensitivity on the issue, but not at
the expense of “the West’s broader interest in consolidating geopolitical
pluralism in the territory of the former Soviet Union.” Since Ukrainian
independence is “the most decisive and substantive expression of that post-
Soviet pluralism,” it was in America’s interest to preserve it—which would
make it not quite independence after all, but our country’s problem now and
forever. Therefore, after the Baltics, he said America would also have to
consider Ukraine for membership, even though, “[o]f course, a major
disruption in European-Russian or Russian-Ukrainian relations cannot be
ruled out.” It was, according to Brzezinski, “[t]he Russian obsession with
big-power status . . . and the effort to limit the sovereignty of the Central
European states [which] could produce a crisis with the West,” since NATO
membership would preclude such Russian influence. But if expanding the
anti-Russian alliance turns Russia back into an enemy, “[i]n such a case, an
enlarged NATO would have no choice but to become again a defensive
alliance against an external threat.”[155]
Two years later, in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski
admitted that “many Russian democrats also feared that the expansion of
NATO would mean that Russia would be left outside of Europe, ostracized
politically, and considered unworthy of membership in the institutional
framework of European civilization.” He said that this “cultural insecurity
compounded the political fears, making NATO expansion seem like the
culmination of the long-standing western policy designed to isolate Russia
leaving it alone in the world and vulnerable to its various enemies.”[156]

Perry’s Regrets

President Joe Biden claimed Russia’s actions in 2022 had nothing to do

with NATO expansion, and that this was merely a thin excuse invoked by
Vladimir Putin’s government.[157] But in 2016, former Secretary of
Defense William Perry admitted to the Guardian that, although lately Putin
had been making things worse, “I have to say that the United States
deserves much of the blame. Our first action that really set us off in a bad
direction was when NATO started to expand, bringing in Eastern European
nations, some of them bordering Russia.” When he tried to explain the
Russian point of view on the issue, he was told, “Who cares what they
think? They’re a third-rate power.” Then, Perry wrote, “of course that point
of view got across to the Russians as well. That was when we started sliding
down that path.”[158] He said bringing Russia into the fold first was much
more important to him. “I feared that NATO enlargement at this time would
shove us into reverse. I believed that a regression here could squander the
positive relations we had so painstakingly and patiently developed in the
opportunistic post-Cold War period.” Perry said he did agree that NATO
should be expanded to Eastern Europe; however, he wrote, “I believed that
we needed more time to bring Russia, the other major nuclear power into
the Western security circle. The overriding priority was obvious to me.”
Lamenting his failure to persuade President Clinton and the rest of the
National Security Council to delay expansion, or resign in protest, Perry
wrote in his memoir that to this day, he blames himself for the deterioration
of U.S.-Russia relations in the years since. “In the strength of my
conviction, I considered resigning. . . . In the end, I decided not to resign,
hoping that my continued involvement would help to mitigate the growing
mistrust.” Apparently, the former secretary really beats himself up over it:
“I regret that I didn’t fight more effectively for delay of the NATO
decision.” He says he could have held one-on-one meetings with Talbott
and Lake to try to change their mind, or written an essay to pass around the
NSC. “Or I could have followed up on my consideration to resign. It is
possible that the rupture in relations with Russia would have occurred
anyway. But I am not willing to concede that.”[159]
So Clinton’s secretary of defense took personal responsibility for the
entire “rupture in relations” with Russia. He lamented his failure to do
every last thing he could to stop his boss from proceeding with such an
obviously counterproductive policy as the expansion of the NATO alliance
into the former Warsaw Pact states, much less the former Soviet
“republics”—without also letting Russia join, or at least bringing them
close enough to have confidence that it was not at their expense. No one has
attempted to argue that Perry was ignorant or wrong about this. The hawks
simply ignore his open confession and move on with their narrative
regardless.
Perry and the generals were simply outclassed in office politics by
Richard Holbrooke and Strobe Talbott. While Perry still laments his failure
to persuade at the December 1994 meeting, the argument had already been
completely closed the previous September.[160]
Perry later added, “Before NATO expansion, our two nations were on
track toward developing a relationship that could have resulted in a true
global partnership.” He continued, “Russia expressed its objections . . . but
its views were ignored. . . . The bitterness that emerged from dismissing
Russia as irrelevant created a climate ripe for the rise of an autocratic leader
who would instead demand respect and power through force.” Betraying an
honesty found virtually nowhere else in Washington, Perry advised that “the
first step in finding a solution is acknowledging the problem and
recognizing that our actions have contributed to that hostility.”[161]
Secretary Albright conceded in her memoirs that “Yeltsin and his
countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement, seeing it as a strategy
for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s dividing line to the
east, leaving them isolated.”[162]
Clinton himself acknowledged the problem with the policy before
pursuing it. Explaining his initial hesitance, he said there was no consensus
among current members and added that “we don’t want to give the
impression that we’re creating another dividing line in Europe after we’ve
worked decades to get rid of the one that existed before.”[163] They all
knew better, but went ahead anyway. In early 1997, the State Department
announced the official change in policy from containment to expansion.
[164]

The Iron Triangle

Lockheed Stock

According to Secretary Albright, an informal poll of the members of the

Council on Foreign Relations showed opposition to expansion by a margin
of two to one.[165] If so many leaders of America’s foreign policy
establishment were opposed to NATO expansion due to concerns about
provoking a negative reaction from Russia, then how did the hawks win?
Representing the establishment consensus, George Kennan ironically,
and wrongly, thought that “[w]ere the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under
the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial complex would
have to remain, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could
be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American
economy.”[166] But Kennan was a diplomat and historian, not an
economist. The end of American militarism would have been a shock to the
arms manufacturers to the benefit of everyone else whose money they had
been confiscating and destroying. With a peace dividend, all that wealth,
material, labor and talent could be reinvested in improving the production
of actual goods and services to benefit the public’s quality of life.[167]
 But the vested interests were not going to give up without a fight. As
Richard Cummings explained in his 2007 article “Lockheed Stock and Two
Smoking Barrels,”[168] the 1990s-era U.S. Committee to Expand NATO
(later renamed The U.S. Committee on NATO) was a project of Lockheed
Martin Vice President Bruce Jackson. The policy was in large part a racket
for selling jets either directly to the Eastern European states, or failing that,
to force the American taxpayer to pick up the tab for them. Cummings
wrote, “The objective of the committee was to push for membership in the
NATO military alliance for former Soviet bloc countries including Poland,
Hungary, and the Czech Republic.”[169]
The New York Times reported in 1997, “[A]t night Bruce Jackson is
president of the U.S. Committee to Expand NATO, giving intimate dinners
for senators and foreign officials. By day, he is director of strategic planning
for Lockheed Martin Corporation, the world’s biggest weapons
maker.”[170]
Cummings explained the facts of life. The relationships between the
neoconservatives’ think tanks, lobbying firms and defense industry
amounted to an “iron triangle” that rules the capital city and virtually
“always gets what it wants.”[171] Lockheed Martin and their
contemporaries had a simple interest in mind: selling big-ticket weapons
systems to the new allies to bring their militaries up to NATO standards.
Poland got expensive new fighter jets[172] and missile systems.[173] It was
a tax money goldmine.[174] Soon Jackson created the Committee for the
Liberation of Iraq,[175] and worked hard behind the scenes with a lobbyist
named Sally Painter[176] to publish the “Letter of 10,” signed by Eastern
European states in support of launching Iraq War II in 2003.[177] Jackson
got his way there as well, though the degree of the Iraqis’ liberation remains
in dispute.[178]
In 1999, the epitome of corrupt American big business showered
millions of dollars on NATO officials, foreign ministers and diplomats from
across Central and Eastern Europe at a big party in Washington in
celebration of NATO’s 50th anniversary. Boeing, Motorola, Nextel, TRW,
Honeywell, United Technologies, Ford, GM, Kodak and Raytheon along
with various high-power lobbying firms were in attendance. The
Washington Post quoted Gerald Robbins of 3Com Corp boasting about their
contracts supplying equipment for NATO’s AWACS surveillance and
control planes flying missions over Kosovo. “NATO is a big customer,”
Robbins said.[179] The Military-Industrial Complex that President Ike
Eisenhower helped to build and then warned about on his last day in
office[180] has captured our government, in alliance with foreign states in
the Middle East, Europe and Asia, and their allied domestic lobbies.[181]
The U.S. military is also a “self-licking ice cream cone,” as American
GIs called it in Vietnam, dedicated to its own perpetuation at any cost, and
conveniently, continually creating the disasters which are said to require
their next intervention.[182] Full-Spectrum Dominance[183] is a
government program; as such it is the means and the end in itself.[184]
As a senior officer told journalist Mark Perry in 2016, “This is the
‘Chicken-Little, sky-is-falling’ set in the Army,” adding, “These guys want
us to believe the Russians are 10 feet tall. There’s a simpler explanation:
The Army is looking for a purpose, and a bigger chunk of the budget. And
the best way to get that is to paint the Russians as being able to land in our
rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. What a crock.”[185]

Polish Votes

Before the USSR had even dissolved, the Polish American Congress began
a massive push to convince Washington to invite their old country into
America’s NATO alliance. They were savvy enough to see the Partnership
for Peace as “NATO lite” and a distraction from their real goal. They joined
with other pressure groups and launched a sophisticated campaign targeting
Polish-American businessmen and large Central and Eastern European
communities in Pennsylvania and the Midwest.[186]
Amb. Matlock explained, “Look, Clinton wanted to get reelected. He
needed Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illinois; they all have a very strong East
European [base]. . . . Many of these [Eastern European-Americans] had
become Reagan Democrats on East-West issues. They were insisting that
[NATO] expand to include Poland and eventually Ukraine. Clinton needed
those to get reelected.”[187] Clinton’s ambassador to Ukraine, Steven Pifer,
[188] and his national security adviser, Anthony Lake,[189] agreed on the
importance of these domestic politics to the decision to expand NATO.
The Republican Party, at that time led by House Speaker Newt
Gingrich and Senator Trent Lott, was even worse than Clinton on the issue,
and with the help of hawks like Senator John McCain, provided pressure on
the president from the wrong direction, urging him to proceed faster and
with even less regard for the consequences.[190] NATO expansion even
made it into Gingrich’s famous Contract with America in 1994.[191]
Talbott convinced Clinton to attend the Budapest summit for the
rechristening of the OSCE by telling him, “If we get this right—and at the
right-time, which means very soon—we can seize control over this issue in
a way that essentially takes it away from the Republicans in ’96.”[192]

Standing Taller

Of course, we shouldn’t sell the American foreign policy establishment too

short: they are not only greedy, but seem to truly believe their own public
relations about how smart and moral and exceptional they are. As Secretary
Albright explained in 1998, “If we have to use force, it is because we are
America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into
the future. And we see the danger here to all of us.”[193] Ironically, she was
defending Clinton’s bombing of Iraq from bases in Saudi Arabia, a policy
which was the principal motivating factor in turning the Arab mujahideen
veterans of the 1980s covert Afghan war with the Soviet Union against the
United States, getting 3,000 Americans killed in the September 11 attacks
just three and a half years later,[194] and kicking off another generation of
war in the Middle East.[195]

Gorby’s Admission

Dissembling

A major theme of the American War Party—the neoconservatives, liberal

hawks, arms manufacturer-funded think tanks and the major news media—
over the years has been that Mikhail Gorbachev himself admitted that no
one ever promised they would not expand NATO. A typical take along these
lines is from Steven Pifer from the Strobe Talbott Center, writing for the
Brookings Institution. Of course, he omitted the part that showed he was
wrong.[196]
It is clear that the former premier was defending his record from the
interviewer’s accusation. “Why didn’t you insist that the promises made to
you—particularly U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s promise that
NATO would not expand into the East—be legally encoded?” Gorbachev
then answered defensively:

The topic of “NATO expansion” was not discussed at all, and

it wasn’t brought up in those years. I say this with full
responsibility. Not a single Eastern European country raised
the issue, not even after the Warsaw Pact ceased to exist in
1991. Western leaders didn’t bring it up, either. Another issue
we brought up was discussed: making sure that NATO’s
military structures would not advance and that additional
armed forces from the alliance would not be deployed on the
territory of the then-GDR after German reunification.
Baker’s statement, mentioned in your question, was made in
that context.

The first part of this statement is simply not accurate, as shown above.
It is likely the man was simply exaggerating his answer: He could not have
neglected to get that important promise in writing if they did not make it.
He then went on to explain, correctly, that Baker’s statement referred to
foreign NATO forces inside Germany, that it was encoded in a treaty and
that the West has abided by it since then. “So don’t portray Gorbachev and
the then-Soviet authorities as naïve people who were wrapped around the
West’s finger,” he said, speaking in the third person. “If there was naïveté, it
was later, [under Yeltsin] when the issue arose.”
It should be no surprise that the Talbott Center scholar chose to omit
Gorbachev’s very next statement, where he in fact does seem to concede his
negligence: “The decision for the U.S. and its allies to expand NATO into
the east was decisively made in 1993. I called this a big mistake from the
very beginning. It was definitely a violation of the spirit of the statements
and assurances made to us in 1990.”[197]
He should never have taken the Americans’ word for it. As Gorbachev
told the Telegraph in 2008, “The Americans promised that NATO wouldn’t
move beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold War but now half
of Central and Eastern Europe are members. So what happened to their
promises? It shows they cannot be trusted.”[198] He also complained to
Der Spiegel about the broken promise in 2009, saying, “One cannot depend
on American politicians.”[199]
As far as what it meant for the future, in 1997, Gorbachev said, “I
believe it is a mistake. It is a bad mistake. And I am not persuaded by the
assurances that we hear that Russia has nothing to worry about. You may
not humiliate a nation, a people, and think that it’ll have no
consequences.”[200]

Yeltsin’s Men
Anatoly Adamishin, a former deputy foreign minister who was then
Russia’s ambassador to Britain, complained to the Telegraph in 1997,
“When we were told during the German reunification process that NATO
would not expand, we believed it.” He explained that “[i]t was extremely
important for Western countries, and first of all for the United States and
Germany, that the process should go smoothly . . . So we were given
repeated assurances that NATO would not expand an inch eastwards.”[201]
In 1998, the chairman of the committee on international affairs in the
Duma, Vladimir Lukin, warned NATO expansion was “isolating Russia
[and] will strengthen nationalist forces.”[202]
In July 1996, former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov gave an
interview to the French newspaper Le Figaro. He told them, “What is
unacceptable (about NATO enlargement) is if a new military infrastructure
sets up on our borders.” When this was interpreted to mean that he and the
Yeltsin government were backing away from their opposition to expansion,
he then clarified to the Russian paper Izvestia that just because the election
was over, that did not mean that domestic pressure against expansion had
been alleviated. He said their position “has never ruled out compromise, but
it will not become softer, because NATO expansion is seen by us
unequivocally as a minus.” Primakov also added that year, 1996, that any
attempt to bring Ukraine into the NATO alliance would cross a Russian “red
line.”[203] The U.S.-sponsored Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty[204]
continued, paraphrasing him: “Assurances that NATO intends no threat to
Russia are irrelevant . . . Suppose Russia were to conclude a military
alliance with Mexico, Venezuela and Cuba . . . Wouldn’t that provoke a
negative reaction in the United States?”[205]

Clinton’s Bosnian War

Bill Betrays Vance-Owen

Before he had even been in office for a few weeks, President Bill Clinton
deliberately killed a peace plan drafted by President Jimmy Carter’s former
Secretary of State Cyrus R. Vance and Lord David Owen, the British
chairman for the European Community’s Committee on Yugoslavia. Similar
to the Lisbon deal,[206] this agreement would have required Bosnian Serb
forces to withdraw from much of the territory they had taken and would
have decentralized power over all of the most contentious cultural issues
while still attempting to hold the new state together.[207] The diplomats
had succeeded in getting the Serbs’ allies the Russians to endorse it. While
the Bosnian Serbs were reluctant to support the plan, the leaders of Serbia
and Montenegro—what was left of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia—
led by Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, demanded they negotiate
seriously and ultimately forced the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs’ self-
proclaimed “Republic Srpska” to give in.[208] Owen said he is certain that
if the Bosnians had signed, the Serbs would have as well.[209] He also
believed if George H.W. Bush had been reelected, the issue would have
been settled in early 1993, and without any U.S. troops being involved.
[210] Former Amb. Zimmermann, who had ruined the previous Lisbon
deal,[211] advised new Secretary of State Warren Christopher to support the
plan “since the Serbs had by then consolidated their hold on more than two-
thirds of Bosnia” and it was only getting worse. He also happened to have
seen Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović’s team’s enthusiastic reception of
the plan and so was sure they would support it.[212]
But the Bosnian Muslims refused until getting the word from President
Clinton, and even though his incoming National Security Advisor Tony
Lake said they would support the deal and urge the Bosnians to sign,[213]
Izetbegović never did.[214] “Why did Izetbegović not sign?” Owen asked.
“In essence because he sensed that [Bosnian Serb leader] Karadžić might
sign if he did and he felt encouraged by U.S. attitudes to hold out for a
better deal.”[215] Just before the inauguration, Izetbegović came to the
United States and met with Vice President-elect Al Gore, who assured him
that he would have the military support of the new administration.[216]
The Washington Post reported, “The Clinton administration deflected
pressure yesterday from top Bosnian-war mediators to win U.S.
endorsement of their peace plan, saying it wants to consider other options
before endorsing their proposals to end the bloody 10-month-old conflict.”
They said Vance and Owen were pushing hard for the deal. Owen predicted
that failure to support it would lead to worse war because the Bosnian
Muslims would interpret it to mean the U.S. would take their side in the
conflict. “Nevertheless, the administration continued to hold Vance and
Owen at arm’s length.” They killed it in committee. Even though the
negotiators virtually begged them to help stop the war, the administration
decided to “make no decisions until it complete[d] an interagency study of
every aspect of the conflict in Bosnia and other former Yugoslav
republics.”[217]
In the New York Times, Anthony Lewis accused Vance of appeasement
just like that time when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain gave in
to German Führer Adolf Hitler over Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938, and
warned incoming President Clinton that he had better not follow suit. “The
Bosnian Muslims, the largest group in the country and the victims of
Serbian aggression, are essentially being pressed to accept the results of the
aggression, thinly disguised as a political solution,” Lewis claimed.[218]
Yet in reality, under the deal, the Bosnian Serbs would have had to
withdraw from approximately 40 percent of the territory they already
owned or had taken in recent fighting, which at that time was more than 70
percent of Bosnia-Herzegovina—a huge concession when they were the
ones in a position of strength on the ground.[219] This was especially true
since they would be giving up control over major industrial areas taken in
the early fighting.[220]
When Zbigniew Brzezinski, Vance’s old rival from the Carter years,
[221] attacked his efforts in the Post,[222] the former secretary hit back,
insisting, “Frankly, I am getting fed up with this mindless criticism that
doesn’t face up to a central fact. In Bosnia, there is no viable alternative to a
negotiated settlement.” Disputing the popular political moralizing about
negotiation with evil men, he wrote: “I’ll leave that to the courts to decide.
David [Owen] and I have been working round the clock to stop the
slaughter of innocent civilians and keep alive the humanitarian effort. It’s
nonsense to say we are appeasers for talking to the people who can make a
difference in our pursuit of a lasting settlement.”[223]
But it was too late. New Secretary of State Christopher had announced
the administration’s refusal to support the Vance-Owen plan.[224] There
was now “not a chance” that the Bosnians would sign on. Owen, who
sympathized with the Muslims, wrote, “The Bosnian Serbs must have been
laughing their heads off.”[225] Further, he complained that the Clinton
administration “promised to come up with an alternative policy over the
next few weeks, but in the meantime seemed intent on killing off a plan
backed by all their allies and close to being agreed by the parties. It was by
any standard of international diplomacy outrageous conduct.”[226]
Times reporter David Binder explained the thinking in Washington.
“Vance-Owen was not made in America. The Clinton administration was
coming in fresh with its own agenda and they, the Clinton folks, would
decide what was good for Bosnia-Herzegovina, for the Balkans, for the
world,” he said. “And I think that point of view pervaded the incoming
Clinton administration.”[227]
But the administration was not just sabotaging peace; they were
hurting those they were trying to help. For all their intransigence against
these peace deals in the name of preventing ethnic separatism in Bosnia,
Owen later noted, they were instead helping it to continue. While lamenting
Clinton’s sabotage of his efforts, he said, “It is salutary to remember that the
VOPP [Vance-Owen Peace Plan] gave the Serbs only 43 percent of territory
in a unified state, whereas by 1994–1995 the Clinton administration as part
of the Contact Group of nations were offering the Serbs 49 percent in a state
partitioned into two entities.”[228] Christopher was also stabbing his friend
Cy Vance in the back. Christopher had been Vance’s deputy and protégé at
the State Department back in the Carter years.[229] Now he was destroying
his own mentor’s peace plan.[230]
Lord Owen wrote that by the end of April 1993, Milošević had given
up on combining Serbia with the Serbian-populated areas of Bosnia or
Croatia. From then on, he was working for the interests of Serbia and
Montenegro only, having grown sick of and disillusioned with Bosnian Serb
leader Radovan Karadžić and his men. Milošević “argued for a settlement
on terms a majority in the Security Council could have accepted, and
through the next two years he did not waver in seeking such a
solution.”[231]

Dead Deal

Even though by the beginning of May 1993, Milošević was able to pressure
Karadžić to sign the deal, it was too late. After the Bosnian Serb leadership
decided to hold a referendum on the agreement, the Clinton administration
took that as a deal-killer rather than a setback and moved on with separate
talks with the UK, France and Russia, essentially signaling Vance-Owen’s
defeat in favor of a new plan, which in fact abandoned the goal of rolling
back of Bosnian Serb gains and accepted every bit of what they had taken
thus far.[232] Owen complained that “the U.S. argument had changed
completely in recent days: whereas they had originally argued that the
VOPP was too generous to the Serbs, they were now saying it was
unrealistic to expect the Serbs to give up so much territory.”[233]
 Then-Senator Joe Biden ridiculed the Vance-Owen peace plan for
Bosnia, saying, “I can’t even begin to express my anger for a European
policy that’s now asking us to participate in what amounts to a codification
of a Serbian victory.” He continued, “European policy is based on cultural
and religious indifference, if not bigotry, and I think it’s fair to say this
would be an entirely different situation if the Muslims were doing what the
Serbs have done.”[234] That was in May 1993. The war lasted another two
and a half years. As Owen put it, in the meantime, the “Bosnian Muslims
had now been ethnically cleansed from Zepa and Srebrenica [Bosnia] and
the Croatian Serbs from the Krajina [Croatia]. There was no longer any talk,
or hope, of reversing ethnic cleansing.”[235]
The same thing happened in late 1993, with the Bosnian Muslims
again rejecting the “EU Action Plan,” which divided Bosnia into separate
ethnic enclaves, with all sorts of connecting corridors, ironed out over
months in the smallest detail. But without U.S. support for the deal, and
with continuing diplomatic support from the administration for their
intransigence, the Bosnian Muslims decided instead to press their luck,
ultimately losing more land to the Croats and Serbs for the delay.[236]

Owen-Stoltenberg

The next push was called the “Invincible plan,” after the British aircraft
carrier HMS Invincible, where negotiators met in the Adriatic Sea, or
“Owen-Stoltenberg”[237] after Lord Owen and Norwegian Foreign
Minister Thorvald Stoltenberg, who had replaced Vance as co-chair of the
International Conference on Yugoslavia (ICFY). After soft partition had
been ruled out, the Bosnian Serbs and Croatians’ positions hardened. Now
they would insist on a “union of three republics” in a new Bosnian
confederation.[238] It fell apart over the Bosnian Muslims’ and Croatians’
inability to agree on the final map and access to the Adriatic,[239] with the
State Department again pressuring the Muslims to hold out for more
territory. Secretary Christopher assured Izetbegović that the U.S. would
support his refusal to sign.[240] Though the Muslims’ territorial percentage
had been slightly reduced since the last deal, they still would have
controlled most of Bosnia’s population centers and heavy industry.[241]
Stoltenberg complained that “this time everyone around the table agreed,
and then it came as a deep disappointment when we got to the television
[and saw] that the Americans advised against accepting this.”[242] Owen
wrote, “The Muslims had clearly chosen to continue with the war, believing
that sanctions would soften up the Serbs, and on the advice of their military
commanders, that they could defeat the Croats in central Bosnia.”[243]

The Contact Group

The next peace plan was put out by a new organization called the Contact
Group, which included the United States. It may well have been designed to
provoke Serbian rejection. The map they developed included continued
Muslim control of areas of far-eastern Bosnia when the Serbs and Muslims
had already tentatively agreed on land swaps in exchange for Serbian
withdrawal from areas they controlled near Sarajevo. The West also insisted
the town of Brcko had to go to the Muslims, even though this would
permanently separate the eastern and western Serb enclaves.[244] Under
the threat of bombing and more sanctions, the Yugoslav government signed
the deal, cut off all political and economic ties with the Bosnian Serbs’
Republic Srpska and sealed the border.[245] Though the Bosnian Serbs
would not give in on the deal, they did agree to a ceasefire that went into
effect on the last day of 1994. At this point the Bosnian Muslims could have
taken the opportunity to negotiate with the Serbs in these land swaps which
both sides wanted. Instead, they broke the ceasefire, launching a massive
spring offensive.[246] Canadian Major General Lewis MacKenzie said,
“There was an obvious short-term advantage in perpetuating the fighting in
some areas in order to encourage the world to intervene. I don’t think that’s
an illogical deduction at all, and I think most people would agree with
that.”[247]
NATO now escalated as well, launching airstrikes against Serbian
forces across Bosnia.[248] Clinton administration principals Christopher,
Perry, Holbrooke and Talbott all emphasized the institutional interests of the
NATO alliance and maintaining America’s dominant military posture in
Europe as a primary reason for their intervention in Bosnia.[249] As State
Department historian Derek Chollet wrote, “The costs of a failed Bosnia
policy would destroy the Clinton administration’s ambitions for the NATO
alliance.”[250]

We Owed Them One

In his study of the intelligence agencies’ involvement in the war, Dutch

government investigator Cees Wiebes wrote that since America had waged
Iraq War I in the Arab world, even though this was supposedly in defense of
Saudi Arabia,[251] the U.S. then owed a favor to the Saudis and their kept
mujahideen mercenaries. “After the Gulf War it was payback time for the
United States: there was an expectation in the Arab world (especially Saudi
Arabia) that Washington would support the Bosnian Muslims.”[252]
Amb. Bissett also wrote that one explanation for American intervention
on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims was that “the United States wished to
demonstrate to the Muslim world that it could support Muslim causes. After
the Gulf War, it is suggested, the U.S.A. was anxious to find a Muslim
position with which it could ally itself.”[253]
Though Iraq War I had allegedly been fought to protect the Saudi
monarchy, Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda had been enraged at the king’s
rejection of their offer to liberate Kuwait from Iraq in favor of his allowing
the Americans to station their mostly white, Christian combat forces on
holy Arabian soil to do so.[254] So as “payback,” the U.S. would back their
Arab allies from the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s[255] in another war,
this time in Europe.
President Clinton wrote that “standing up for the Bosnians had another
benefit to the United States: it would demonstrate to Muslims the world
over that the United States cared about them, respected Islam, and would
support them if they rejected terror and embraced the possibilities of peace
and reconciliation.”[256]
This goes to show Clinton’s vastly displaced priorities and hypocrisy.
If he wanted to score points with his predecessors’ International Islamic
Brigades, he could have stopped constantly bombing Iraq from bases in
Saudi Arabia, supporting Arab dictatorships and the Israeli occupations of
the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Lebanon, and the rest of al Qaeda’s list of
grievances against the United States about policies which were questionable
at best in the first place.[257] Instead, he would just support the terrorists on
another battlefield and apparently hope they would forget about their other
complaints. And what was this about rejecting terror? The administration
was counting on the bin Ladenites to get the job done.

Arab-Afghans

Osama bin Laden’s men sure took advantage of the situation. Since so many
of them could not go back to their home countries without being arrested or
shot, having no other skills and finding themselves kicked out of Pakistan,
their leaders started sending them to Bosnia to fight beginning in 1992, after
they finally finished overthrowing the Communists in Kabul.[258] Author
Evan Kohlmann estimated that approximately 5,000 of them moved on to
Bosnia to fight the second wave of their jihad on the side of Bosnia’s
military, the Armija Bosna i Hercegovina (ABiH).[259] The Times and
Lieutenant Colonel John Sray both reported that “many” were Arab
veterans of the CIA-backed Afghan war against the Soviet occupation in the
1980s,[260] including hundreds of Afghans.[261] Al Qaeda took the lead in
organizing the training and transfer of fighters, and maintained important
positions of leadership in the new war.[262] The conflict also became an
opportunity for new recruits, who had missed the war in Afghanistan, to
gain experience and credibility.[263]
John Shindler, a U.S. Naval War College professor and former chief
National Security Agency analyst in Bosnia, wrote: “The neglected truth is
that in the 1990s, Bosnia played an identical role in the global jihad to that
of Afghanistan in the 1980s, serving as a convenient place to wage war
against the infidels while providing sanctuary and training for the next
generation of militants.” The unreported story was that “[f]or Osama bin
Laden’s holy warriors, Zenica and Travnik proved every bit as satisfying
and transforming as Jalalabad and Khost had been a few short years
before.” A major organizational hub of the jihad was none other than “the
headquarters of the ‘blind sheikh’ Omar Abdel-Rahman, whose men
bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.”[264]
Ayman al-Zawahiri, Rahman’s comrade in Egyptian Islamic Jihad and
later co-founder of al Qaeda with his partner bin Laden, visited Bosnia
regularly beginning in 1992. He was even reported to have been placed in
charge by the Saudi sheik.[265] For years his brother Mohammed ran the
International Islamic Relief Organization charity as cover for support for
mujahideen fighters across the region.[266] The Americans took advantage
of them too, working with Britain, Germany, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,
Turkey and even Iran, to provide money—ultimately more than $2
billion[267]—weapons and training.[268] And the jihad spread from there.
Chechen terrorist leader Dzhokhar Dudayev admitted that his men had also
gone to Bosnia to fight.[269]
Evan Kohlmann chronicled many major battles they participated in
during the Bosnian war, including in Tesanj, Sarajevo, Travnik, Mount
Bandera and Guca Gora, where they destroyed the local Catholic church
and monastery and tortured and murdered innocent civilian captives.[270]
 The Post wrote about the terrorist connection at the start of the war in
1992, reporting that “young Muslim men eager for battle are filtering in
from the Middle East and Asia. . . . Scores of volunteers from countries that
include Turkey, Afghanistan, Bahrain, Syria and Saudi Arabia have taken up
arms and are fighting in central Bosnia.” They also described the “golden
chain”[271] of Gulf money pouring in. “Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd
personally donated $8 million for relief aid to be funneled through the al-
Ibrahim Foundation, a private Saudi charity.” They said the Muslim mayor
of the town of Konjic, near Sarajevo, was thankful for arms shipments from
Turkey, smuggled through Croatia. An adviser to the Bosnian government
said they had received shipments of weapons from Pakistan as well.[272]
The Post covered it again in 1995[273] and 1996, in the latter case writing
that in an operation “modeled in some respects on the Afghanistan
experience in the 1980s,” Saudi Arabia had paid for $300 million in
weapons for Izetbegović’s forces since 1993 “with the knowledge and tacit
cooperation of the United States.” The only real difference from the 1980s
operation, they said, was the alleged lack of matching funds by the U.S. for
Saudi Arabia’s effort, though the Saudis said that the American government
“was more than just turning a blind eye to what was going on. . . . It was
consent combined with stealth cooperation. . . . American knowledge began
under [President George H.W.] Bush and became much greater under
Clinton.”[274]
In another piece in 1996, the Post reported that the so-called charities
arming and transporting mujahideen to Bosnia had direct ties to Rahman
and bin Laden,[275] who by then had long been known to be financing
attacks against the U.S.[276] and had openly declared war.[277] They said
the Saudis used charities like the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA) to
finance the war in Bosnia, and blamed the embargo for forcing
Izetbegović’s alliance with international terrorist movements—“contacts,”
they said, “that continue to haunt the U.S.-led Balkan peace process.” The
group raised money from Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Pakistan, Turkey, Brunei,
Malaysia and even Iran. However, the Post reported, international terrorists
had also used the charity to finance the Bosnian Muslim regime,
“including,” they said, “the wealthy Saudi Arabian emigre Osama bin
Laden, a suspected sponsor of militant Islamic groups around the Middle
East.” They noted that “[b]in Laden, a resident of Sudan until last year, is
reportedly now in Afghanistan, where he has issued statements calling for
attacks on U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf.” This Saudi sheik did not sound
like a very good ally.
The Post also tied the supposed relief agency to Rahman. U.S. officials
complained that these mujahideen were “the core of a radical Islamic
movement that has resisted U.S. attempts to exert influence over the
[Bosnian] army and security services.” A senior Western diplomat told the
paper that “the Clinton administration knew about the Third World Relief
Agency and its activities beginning in 1993,” but they did nothing to
intervene. “We were told [by Washington] to watch them but not interfere,”
the diplomat said. “Bosnia was trying to get weapons from anybody, and we
weren’t helping much. The least we could do is back off. So we backed
off.” Austrian and German authorities also looked the other way.[278]
 The Post quoted officials calling them “hard-core terrorists” in one
breath and praising them as “very brave fighters” in the next. A Defense
Department official told them, “They have taken large casualties. They have
taken on some important operations and are willing to take some tough
action.”[279] Journalist Chris Deliso wrote, “In December 1992, King Fahd
met with Izetbegović and promised to open Saudi coffers wide; a special
board was soon established (the Supreme Committee for the Collection of
Donations for the Muslims of Bosnia) and overseen by Riyadh’s governor,
Prince Salman bin Abdul Aziz.” They used seven major charities, including
al Qaeda’s World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), to fund their army.
“Between 1992 and February 1996, the Supreme Committee provided some
$356 million to the Bosnian Muslims, of which $103 million came from
King Fahd himself,” Deliso reported. He also described the El Mujahid
division of 750 fighters that was attached to the Bosnian army based in the
Travnik-Zenica area in central Bosnia. The group had been created by the
army but was run by Algerian Abdelkader Mokhtari, a.k.a. Abu El Mali,
whom U.S. officials later called “a junior Osama bin Laden.”[280]
Journalist Brendan O’Neill added that the Pentagon had actually
“assisted with the movement of thousands of mujahedin and other Islamic
elements from Central Asia into Europe, to fight alongside Bosnian
Muslims against the Serbs.” It was an important milestone for the
international jihadist movement. “In moving to Bosnia, Islamic fighters
were transported from the ghettos of Afghanistan and the Middle East into
Europe; from an outdated battleground of the Cold War to the major world
conflict of the day; from being yesterday’s men to fighting alongside the
West’s favoured side in the clash of the Balkans.”[281] If Western
intervention in Afghanistan had created the Arab-Afghan mujahideen,
O’Neill said, then Western intervention in Bosnia had then globalized the
bin Ladenite terrorist movement.[282]
Kohlmann described in detail how, as he put it, “Bosnia’s unique
geographic position directly between Western Europe and the Middle East
was the ideal jumping off point for organizational expansion of the
movement into Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Canada and the United
Kingdom.” Calling it “the birthplace of al Qaeda,” he wrote that the war
had served an extremely important role in solidifying the multi-generational
permanence of the international jihadist movement after the 1980s Soviet-
Afghan War. “[A]fter six years of researching Usama bin Laden and Al-
Qaida starting in the mid to late 1990s, I could not help but notice the
particularly enduring influence of the legends of jihad and martyrdom
persisting from, of all places, the Bosnian civil war.” Kohlmann said “the
stories of the men who lost their lives fighting in a supposed Muslim ‘holy
war’ against European ‘Crusaders’ are much more telling of the history and
goals of Al-Qaida” than the writings and statements of their leaders.[283]
Clinton’s chief Balkans negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, later wrote,
“Parts of Bosnia were becoming a sanctuary for Islamic terrorists, some of
whom belonged to an organization whose name was still unknown in the
West, Al Qaeda.”[284] He later told the Los Angeles Times, “I think the
[Bosnian] Muslims wouldn’t have survived” without this help from the
Arab mujahideen veterans of the 1980s Soviet-Afghan War.[285] But the
fighters also needed Western help, in the form of covert arms shipments.
“Thank God the decision was made,” Holbrooke told them. “In retrospect, I
still think [the decision] was absolutely correct.”[286] The bin Ladenite
terrorists of the Bosnia war were not limited to those veterans. A new
generation of holy warriors would fight there as well.
The same was true of the man himself. As Shindler wrote, bin Laden
had always been overshadowed by Abdullah Azzam back in the days of the
Afghan war. “It was only in the 1990s, in Bosnia that ‘the Che Guevara of
Islam’ really came into his own, developing al-Qa’ida into the flexible,
well-funded, multinational jihadi organization it became.”[287] Bin Laden
personally visited and sent his close associate Abdelkader Mokhtari to
command mujahideen forces. The London Sunday Times reported that “in
June 1993 . . . secular Bosnian Muslim officers had grave reservations
about the foreign mujahedeen, many of whom were sent by Al-Qaeda and
commanded by Abdelkader Mokhtari, one of Osama bin Laden’s top
lieutenants.” In this case, it was the terrorists’ allies complaining about
them. Colonel Stjepan Šiber, then-deputy commander of Izetbegović’s
army, argued that the Islamist units were the ones that “commit most of the
atrocities. . . . They have been killing, looting and stealing.”[288]
Though their forces may not have been decisive in the war, Western
governments were very wrong when they concluded, as Dutch intelligence
had in 1996, “the threat from these mujahideen should not be
overestimated.”[289] When the official Dutch investigation into the
Srebrenica massacre was published in 2002 and revealed Western
intelligence agencies’ cooperation with international terrorists supporting
the Bosnian Muslims,[290] the scandal was so great the government had to
resign.[291]
After September 11, the Los Angeles Times reported on a secret State
Department document from 2000 detailing the threat of bin Ladenite
terrorist blowback from the Bosnian war. “Bosnia-Herzegovina is ‘a staging
area and safe haven’” for terrorists, a former senior State Department
official told them. “The White House leaned on Bosnia and its then-
president, Alija Izetbegović, to do something about the matter, but nothing
happened,” according to the official, who added that the terrorists “would
travel with impunity and conduct, plan and stage terrorist acts with
impunity while hiding behind their Bosnian passports.” The Times noted
that “President Clinton’s secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, personally
appealed to Izetbegović to oust suspected terrorists or rescind their Bosnian
passports,” adding this was not until “the last days of the
administration.”[292]

OceanofPDF.com
Famous Veterans

Yossef Bodansky, a former investigator for the U.S. congressional Task

Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, reported that bin Laden
himself visited Bosnia three times between 1994 and 1996.[293] According
to Agence France-Presse and the Wall Street Journal, the Bosnian
government had even given the terrorist leader a passport.[294] Renate
Flottau, Balkan correspondent for the German newspaper Der Spiegel, met
bin Laden in Izetbegović’s office in Sarajevo in 1993.[295] He showed her
his passport from Bosnia-Herzegovina, issued by the embassy in Vienna,
and told her he was bringing in fighters from outside of the country.[296]
Eve-Ann Prentice of the London Times saw him there too.[297]
Other veterans of the jihadists’ war in Bosnia included the men who
trained Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian national arrested at the Canadian
border in 1999 after planning to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on
New Year’s Eve;[298] eventual September 11 ringleader Khalid Sheik
Mohammed[299] and Flight 77 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-
Mihdhar;[300] as well as Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who recruited
Flight 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta and his friend Ramzi bin al Shib into the
plot.[301] The same was true for Saud al-Otaibi and Abdel Karim al
Meyati, the organizers of the Madrid train bombings of March 2004[302]
and Abdul Azizi al-Murqrin, the later-founder of al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula,[303] who was responsible for at least two attacks in the George
W. Bush era,[304] and whose group carried out multiple successful and
attempted attacks against the West in Barack Obama years.[305]
 After the London train bombings of July 7, 2005, British MP Michael
Meacher explained that it was blowback from U.S.-UK intervention in the
Balkans, saying the policy was still so twisted that an American federal
prosecutor credibly accused MI6 of protecting the man who may have been
behind the attack. “[T]he U.S. wanted to raise another jihadi corps, again
using proxies, to help Bosnian Muslims fight to weaken the Serb
government’s hold on Yugoslavia. Those they turned to included Pakistanis
in Britain,” Meacher said. Further, he cited a recent Indian report that
Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, at the request of the Clinton
administration, sent a contingent of 200 men from the Harkat-ul-Ansar
(HUA) terrorist group, which had been trained by their Inter-Services
Intelligence agency (ISI), to fight in Bosnia “with the full knowledge and
complicity of the British and American intelligence agencies.” Meacher
complained, “For nearly a decade the U.S. helped Islamist insurgents linked
to Chechnya, Iran and Saudi Arabia destabilize the former Yugoslavia.” He
said that after the war, thousands of fighters moved on to Kosovo, then
Austria, Germany and Switzerland.[306]
And then it turned out Omar Saeed Sheikh, the al Qaeda member
alleged to have wired $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohamed Atta before the
September 11 attack and was convicted of murdering Journal reporter
Daniel Pearl in Pakistan in 2002 (he was later released),[307] was also a
veteran of the war in the former Yugoslavia.[308]

The Ayatollah
Interestingly, the Iranian government under President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani,
which was seeking to ease tensions with the United States, as mentioned
above, got on board the effort to back the mujahideen in Bosnia,[309] with
the Sunni-Shi’ite divide and international arms embargo[310]
notwithstanding.[311] In fact, Iran’s rivalry with Saudi Arabia was likely a
motivating factor in their intervention.[312] After the U.S.-forged Croatian-
Bosnian Muslim coalition was created in early 1994, the ambassador to
Croatia, Peter Galbraith, pushed hard for the policy. It was approved by
Anthony Lake, Strobe Talbott and President Clinton, resulting in Galbraith
and Special Envoy Charles Redman[313] giving Tudjman the “green light,”
allowing them to proceed[314] with what was called “the Croatian
Pipeline.”[315] In fact, the pipeline may have begun as early as November
1993.[316] The Turks participated under U.S. supervision as well. “Black
Flights” of their C-130 Hercules heavy transport planes were also involved
while American AWACS air control planes would turn a blind eye.[317]
The Post also reported that Iranian so-called Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Al-Khamenei contributed $3.3 million to the Sarajevo government.[318]
Galbraith admitted his role in testimony to Congress.[319] Ultimately they
provided more than 5,000 tons of weapons to Muslim fighters in Bosnia
between 1994 and 1996.[320] A CIA official confirmed the Iranian arms
shipments separately to Dutch investigator Wiebes, telling him, “That is
politics.” Wiebes added that the Americans were also directly delivering
arms to the Izetbegović regime in violation of the embargo. U.S. C-130s
were seen dropping equipment, and within days the Bosnian Muslim army
were walking around in new uniforms and carrying American M-16
automatic rifles.[321]
While the American-supported arms pipeline began in 1993,[322] a
2001 BBC investigation concluded that the U.S. military itself had begun
air-dropping massive amounts of sophisticated arms to the Bosnian Muslim
forces in early 1995. They included: “[a]nti-tank guided weapons to counter
Bosnian Serb armor, Stinger surface-to-air missiles to ward off helicopters,
night vision goggles and, most importantly, Motorola radio sets to allow the
ABiH to operate more efficiently in large scale offensive operations.”[323]
Republican Senator and 1996 presidential nominee Bob Dole and
Representative Chris Cox even argued that the Iran weapons pipeline was a
compelling reason why they ought to lift the arms embargo against Bosnia
and Croatia. Dole complained to the Senate that Clinton was instead using
the Iran arms transfers as an excuse not to lift the embargo. “From
statements made by State Department officials to the press, one gets the
impression that Iran is the Clinton Administration’s preferred provider of
weapons to the Bosnians.” Granting their opposition for argument’s sake, he
challenged, “If the Administration has a problem with Iran arming Bosnia,
it should be prepared to do something about it”—meaning send the
weapons themselves to replace their efforts.[324]
The Republican position was that Clinton’s green light to Iran was a
terrible idea when, after all, they knew the administration had at least
discussed “asking friendly countries such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and
Pakistan to move weapons and support to the Bosnians. The model for such
aid,” they insisted, “existed before in the 1980s when Saudi Arabia served
as the conduit between the U.S. and the anti-Soviet Afghan
insurgency.”[325] A Saudi official whined to the Post that Iran was getting
too much credit when the Kingdom had done so much more, telling them,
“Tehran had ‘the loudest mouth’ but did not contribute nearly as much
money to the Muslim cause as Riyadh.”[326]
Though the CIA complained to the Congress and media about Iran’s
support for Bosnian President Alija Izetbegović and presence of the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Bosnia after the war, they were
satisfied that the government cut ties with Iran by 1996[327] and nothing
much seemed to come of their relationship in the long term.[328]

Serbs Fought Dirty Too

On the other side, there is no question that Milošević was himself a

demagogue who demonized Yugoslav Muslims. And the Bosnian Serb army
and allied militias committed numerous atrocities in their various cleansing
campaigns as well. The army commander Željko Ražnatović (a.k.a. Arkan)
was widely reported to have committed war crimes against civilians during
the war, including mass murder and ethnic cleansing.[329] Amb.
Zimmermann, like the rest of the government and media consensus, was
certain that Milošević, president of Serbia and nominal leader of what was
left of Yugoslavia, was responsible for all of this and “cooperating closely”
with Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić and the rest. However, his case
seemed to be mostly circumstantial. He said that Milošević’s contempt had
given militias license, and his slogans and avowed chauvinism were indirect
incitement. The only part there that would seem to hold up to scrutiny is
that when the JNA withdrew from newly independent Bosnia, they left
troops and heavy weapons with the new Bosnian Serb forces. But whose
fault was that? Izetbegović’s and Bush’s. The JNA had left many arms and
even their Bosnian arms factories in the hands of the Muslims as well.[330]

The Siege of Sarajevo

For almost four years beginning in May 1992, Bosnian Serb forces laid
siege to the capital city of Sarajevo, more or less constantly blasting it with
shells and sniper fire. More than 11,000 people were killed,[331] including
1,200 children.[332] They were not trying to cleanse and take the city, only
terrorizing the population in a vain attempt to pressure Izetbegović to come
to terms.[333]

Public Relations

The Washington War Party was in business. Center-left liberals pushed for
“humanitarian interventionism,” while the neoconservative faction
dominated the Republican Party’s messaging on the subject, over the
virtually unanimous objection of their constituents as represented by
American AM talk radio audiences out in the country.[334] The neocons
created the Balkan Institute, American Committee to Save Bosnia (ACSB)
and Action Council for Peace in the Balkans, whose members included
future Iraq War II ringleader Richard Perle, neoconservative godfather
Norman Podhoretz and President Reagan’s former ambassador to the UN,
Jean Kirkpatrick, along with Council on Foreign Relations “realists” such
as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Reagan’s former Defense Secretary Frank
Carlucci.[335] Its leaders included Stephen W. Walker, who resigned from
the State Department in protest over Clinton’s alleged inaction in the war.
[336] They launched a massive public relations campaign in favor of
intervention, including lobbying Congress, TV and radio interviews, a
speaking tour, bumper stickers, news specials, student networks, efforts to
specifically target Jewish and Catholic groups and all the propaganda
money can buy.[337]
Numerous officials from the U.S. civilian and military intelligence
agencies, as well as those from allied European states, repeatedly
questioned American bias against the Serbs in all cases, even when the
Bosnians or Croatians were the ones causing trouble, including torture,
mass murder and ethnic cleansing.[338] After immediate Western
recognition of the independence of Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia led to
catastrophe for their favored factions, they needed someone to blame.
Instead of being honest about the situation, the Croatian and Bosnian Serbs
were in and their desire to remain under the Belgrade government, or at
least independent from Sarajevo, the Americans and their allies simply
embellished their heroes-versus-villains narrative, blaming the entire
conflict not on their disastrous diplomacy, but on the evil Communist
nationalism of Milošević and his ideological crusade to create a “Greater
Serbia” at any cost.[339]
The Bosnian Muslim government hired the American firm Ruder Finn
Public Affairs to spin the war for them. They decided to cast the entire thing
in World War II terms: the Serbs, whose fathers had fought the
Germans[340] and rescued 500 downed American pilots,[341] were now
the Nazis, and the sons of the Croats and Muslims who had allied with the
Third Reich and murdered hundreds of thousands of civilians in the
Holocaust were now the Jews[342]—and this was America’s chance to go
rescue them in time before the worst took place. It was, very much in the
Bosnian Muslims’ interests to push this narrative to convince the West to
come to their aid. But for the liberal Democrats in Washington, D.C., this
was their chance to do something big and important.[343] Of course, the
Clinton administration would need to forget all the causes of the wars,
especially the role they had played in Bosnia, and instead, as George
Szamuely put it, “reverse cause and effect,” and spend the next few years
pretending the consequences of the war—mass killing, war crimes and
ethnic cleansing—were the reasons for their intervention, rather than the
result of it.[344] He picked out Roy Gutman of Newsday and David Rhode
and John Burns of the Times for extra criticism since they actually won
Pulitzer Prizes for phony stories alleging death camps, mass graves and
massively inflated casualty estimates.[345]
U.S. Air Force General Charles G. Boyd, the Deputy Commander in
Chief of the U.S. European Command from 1992 to 1995, complained in
Foreign Affairs in 1995 that “[t]he linchpin of the U.S. approach has been
the underinformed notion that this is a war of good versus evil, of aggressor
against aggrieved.” Since the issue was black and white and the U.S. on the
side of good, any bending of the rules was justified. The administration
twisted UN resolutions to favor the Muslims, created “safe areas” for
Muslim forces to use against their enemies, labeled potential Serbian
negotiating partners “war criminals” to preclude compromise, used
humanitarian aid to bolster Muslim forces and supported a government in
Sarajevo which “has become increasingly ethnocentric in its makeup,
single-party in its rule, and manipulative in its diplomacy.”[346] Gen. Boyd
noted CNN star Christiane Amanpour’s silence when Serbian civilians were
killed and their villages burned to the ground, and the West’s blind eye
turned toward Muslim and Croat atrocities against each other since reality
blurred the simple story.[347]
Investigator Cees Wiebes wrote in his study for the Dutch government
that though the Serbs’ atrocities were greater than those of their enemies,
“[u]nwelcome issues with respect to the activities of the Bosnian Muslims
and Croats were only reported to a limited extent, if at all,” while “the
deeds of the Bosnian Serbs came fully into the spotlight.”[348] This was
true even when the Croats’ victims were Bosnian Muslims, including when
they seized Muslim territory or when they committed the most horrific
crimes, such as massacres of women and children. To Western
governments, only crimes by Serbs were worth focusing on.[349]
David Owen later wrote that he received the strongest resistance
against making peace from Ejup Ganic, the vice president of Bosnia and
member of the Muslim Party of Democratic Action (SDA). “A quiet
Sarajevo was, he almost admitted, not in his interests, and he preferred a
continuation of the [Serbs’] siege.” Ganic had “one central policy objective,
namely to involve the U.S. Army as a combatant in the Bosnian fight to
defeat the Serbs.” To that end he had mastered the art of Western public
relations. “His message is simple—‘We are the victims’—and like all good
propagandists, he [did] not shrink from repeating the message over and over
again.” Owen wrote that to drive home Muslim victimhood, “they needed
the elderly and the children to stay.” When he asked Izetbegović why he
would not let Muslim women and children leave the warzone, “he retorted
that the British would never have let them leave London during the Blitz
and seemed genuinely surprised when I told him how Churchill’s
government arranged for children to not only leave London, but go as far
afield as Canada.”[350]
Lieutenant Colonel John Sray, a U.S. military intelligence officer
assigned to the UN in Sarajevo, also showed how the Bosnians’ choice to
hire major public relations firms—such as the infamous Hill and Knowlton,
the same firm who had packaged and sold the hoax about Iraqi soldiers
throwing Kuwaiti babies from their incubators to drum up support for Iraq
War I in 1990[351]—helped to bend American media coverage toward the
Bosnian Muslims, ignoring their offensives and atrocities while playing up
their suffering, and the opposite when it came to the Bosnian Serbs.[352]
Ted Galen Carpenter noted the major media’s theme at the time that the
Serbs had “taken” 70 percent of Bosnian land, when they had already
owned more than 60 percent of it in the first place. They made it seem as
though the Bosnian Serbs had invaded from Serbia, when in fact their
descendants went back hundreds of years to times before our country
existed.[353] Amb. Zimmermann, representing the ostensibly capitalist
West, found it beyond absurd that the Serbs could think they had property
rights. He ridiculed Milošević’s contention, as he put it, “that Serbs ‘living
on’ 64 percent of Bosnia’s land had the right to control it by force and to
deny it to others.” Was this not exactly the theory upon which the U.S. and
its allies had recognized the independence of the three nations they had
helped break off from Yugoslavia thus far?
Gen. Boyd explained that the common U.S. TV narrative about Serbian
land grabs was just wrong. “What is frequently referred to as rampant Serb
nationalism and the creation of a greater Serbia has often been the same
volatile mixture of fear, opportunism, and historical myopia that seems to
motivate patriots everywhere in the Balkans.” He noted, “Much of what
Zagreb calls the occupied territories is in fact land held by Serbs for more
than three centuries, ever since imperial Austria moved Serbs to the frontier
(the Krajina) to protect the shopkeepers of Vienna (and Zagreb) from the
Ottomans.” He pointed out that “[t]he same is true of most Serb land in
Bosnia, what the Western media frequently refers to as the 70 percent of
Bosnia seized by rebel Serbs.” There had only been 500,000 more Muslims
than Serbs there at the time of independence, with the Serbs tending toward
rural land ownership. “In short, the Serbs are not trying to conquer new
territory, but merely to hold on to what was already theirs.”[354]
In January 1993, Newsweek claimed the Serbs had been responsible for
between 30,000 and 50,000 “rapes committed explicitly to impregnate
Muslim women and hold them captive until they give birth to the unwanted
Serb babies,” even though they also said that “[w]hen pressed, Bosnian
officials concede that their estimates are extrapolations based on a relatively
small number of testimonies.”[355] Szamuely noted that beside the fact
there was no evidence for these claims, the accusations made no sense,
“[s]ince there is no ethnic difference between Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian
Muslims, the only result of forcible impregnation would be to increase the
number of people brought up in the Islamic faith.”[356] A year later, the UN
released a study showing that in Sarajevo they found “126 victims, 113
incidents, 252 alleged perpetrators, 73 witnesses,” implying that even where
systematically implemented as part of the war—clear war crimes—the
victims numbered in the hundreds or thousands, not tens of thousands.[357]
This is not just academic, but an important distinction. The narrative at the
time was that the Serbs were committing atrocities on a Hitlerian scale. Just
imagine the massive Imperial Japanese-type so-called “comfort”
facilities[358] which would be required to allow such atrocities to even be
possible. America’s political and media establishment did. Bosnian Serbs
believed the same sort of propaganda about the other side as well.[359]
Other rapists in the war included mercenaries from the American
military contractor DynCorp. They enslaved women and young girls, raped
them and prostituted them out for other men to rape.[360]
Declassified intelligence files from Canadian peacekeepers who were
part of the UN Protection Force (UNPROFOR) show that in secret they
blamed the Muslims far more often than the Serbs for intransigence in
negotiations, saying the “insurmountable” objective of “satisfying Muslim
demands will be the primary obstacle in any peace talks.” Also, appearing
to refer to the U.S. or NATO, in September 1993 they complained that
“outside interference in the peace process” was not helping. They could not
achieve a final deal “if outside parties continue to encourage the Muslims to
be demanding and inflexible in negotiations,” or embolden Izetbegović “to
hold out for further concessions,” adding that “clear U.S. desires to lift the
arms embargo on the Muslims and to bomb the Serbs are serious obstacles
to ending the fighting in the former Yugoslavia.”[361]

Genocide

The overall war casualties were also inflated by two or three times, from an
actual 100,000 killed on all sides to a count of 250,000–300,000 killed,
mostly Bosnian Muslims.[362] This turned a terrible and unfortunately
violent breakup of a state into a genocidal extermination campaign
committed by a group of evil madmen.[363] George Kenney, former deputy
chief of Yugoslav affairs at the State Department, wrote that he believed the
total count had been wildly inflated by the Bosnian Muslim government,
and that the death toll from violence by all sides was between 25,000 and
60,000, saying, “Bosnia is not the Holocaust or Rwanda; it’s
Lebanon.”[364] Red Cross officials told him they believed the total was
even lower than that. However, a 2005 study found that approximately
102,000 had been killed, about 55 percent civilians and 45 percent
combatants.[365] This was still less than half of what Western audiences
had been told was the minimum number killed just on the Muslim side for
years.[366] Among civilians, they found approximately 38,000 Muslims
and Croats, and 16,700 Bosnian Serbs. For combatants the numbers were
28,000 in the Bosnian Muslim army, 14,000 Serbs and 6,000 Croats.[367]
Journalist Roy Gutman infamously won a Pulitzer Prize for his fake
news stories referring to Serbian prison camps holding Bosnian Muslim
prisoners, as “death camps,” which he directly compared to Auschwitz in
World War II.[368] He had no evidence, only victim testimony.[369]
Intelligence officials dismissed his claims, with later-Ambassador Peter
Galbraith saying there was “no evidence of a concerted plan to kill
systematically the Muslim population.”[370] State Department official
George Kenney said, “We can be fairly certain that there hasn’t been mass
killing in the concentration camps. There’s just no evidence of that
whatsoever.”[371]
Amazingly, Izetbegović himself admitted the purpose of these lies in
an interview in 2003. When asked by a friendly interviewer whether he was
aware that his claims about the death camps were false, Izetbegović replied,
“Yes, I thought that the claims would help trigger a bombing campaign [by
the West against the Bosnian Serbs] . . . I tried, but my claims were false.
There were no extermination camps, even though the conditions were
terrible.”[372]
James Harff, president of the public relations firm Ruder Finn, later
boasted that he “outwitted” three major American Jewish groups—the Anti-
Defamation League, the American Jewish Committee and the American
Jewish Congress—with Gutman’s lies about the Serb-run death camps in
Bosnia. He helped them create “a simple story of good guys and bad guys,”
with the Serbs in the role of the German Nazis in the morality tale, and
convinced these groups to hold major protests and publish an ad in the
Times, helping to establish in the public debate an “emotional charge . . . so
powerful no one could go against it.”[373]

Bosnian Croats Turn on Muslims

After fighting with Muslim forces against the Bosnian Serbs in the early
part of the war, in 1993 Tudjman betrayed them in his own attempt to create
a Greater Croatia, incorporating newly expanded areas of Croatian Bosnia.
His forces committed mass atrocities against Muslim civilians, including a
brutal siege on the town of Mostar. But when he saw the advantage in
allying with the Muslims and the United States against the Serbs, he
switched sides again, taking full advantage by inviting Americans to come
and train his army.[374] Clinton promised to support Croatia if Tudjman
would make the Bosnian Croats realign with the Bosnian Muslims.[375] On
March 18, 1994, they signed a deal in Washington solidifying their new
confederation.[376]

Srebrenica

Even after all that, some of the worst ethnic cleansing and mass murder of
the war still could have been avoided. In May 1995, American Special
Envoy Robert Frasure again struck a deal with Milošević which the
administration then “disowned” since they would not have the authority
over reimposition of sanctions if the deal fell through. Owen wrote, “To
cover their tracks, the U.S. publicly blamed Milošević; this he took
uncomplainingly, and did not in public reveal the details of the
package.”[377]
Just two months later, the Vojska Republika Srpska (VRS), the militia
of the Bosnian Serbs, perpetrated the Srebrenica massacres of July 1995,
which has been called “genocide” by the International Criminal Tribunal for
the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY).[378] It was certainly a massacre—or two.
As Serb forces took the town—a supposed UN “safe area”—a column of
mostly civilian men and boys, along with soldiers from the ABiH’s 28th
Division, evacuated on foot to the town of Tuzla.
An international investigation found that while the Serbs wanted to
take that territory, they were trying to negotiate a trade for other nearby
land, and that “there was no intent to capture and kill the Muslims in
general,” or to “destroy the population of Srebrenica in any physical sense.”
Instead, they reported that the Serbs had given an ultimatum to the Muslim
fighters to disarm and evacuate, an operation which the Serbs meant to be
overseen by the United Nations. While the Muslims left, they kept their
weapons, leaving open the argument that they were still a military target.
[379] The investigators wrote, “[T]he column was formed by about 7,000
soldiers and officers . . . up to 6,000 reserve members . . . and a number of
civilians, some of whom were women. Some soldiers were unarmed, some
civilians were armed.” They found that since “there were strong military
elements within the column . . . it was not possible for the VRS to
distinguish between civilians and soldiers. Therefore, the classification of
the column by the VRS as a military column is to be supported.”
Furthermore, “an intention to kill all able-bodied civilian men from
Srebrenica cannot be found in relation to attacks on the column.” They also
found that the column “included . . . foreign Islamic fighters who had no
ethnic roots in that area. An attack on these military figures would not have
had any impact on the population of Srebrenica.” They concluded: “There is
no indication that the attacks on the column have not been justified under
international law or that they had any other intention than to reduce a
military threat during a military conflict.”[380]
Still, the Bosnian Serbs’ attack on the retreating column, as portrayed
in the report, sounds much like President George H.W. Bush, Defense
Secretary Dick Cheney and Gens. Colin Powell and Barry McCaffrey’s
“Highways of Death” massacres against retreating troops in southern Iraq in
1991.[381] Even if it wasn’t illegal to bomb them, if the evacuating Muslim
fighters were using those civilians as human shields, then that also should
have remained shameful and illegal, but effective.
The massacres of prisoners are even worse. The number of executions
may have been exaggerated,[382] as they were combined with those killed
in the shelling of the column.[383] Also, thousands of Muslim fighters did
get out and make it to safety.[384] However, thousands of prisoners were
taken from the Dutch UN Peacekeepers’ base[385] or hunted down in the
woods and killed by the invading Serb forces.[386] Nearly 7,000 bodies
have been discovered, more than 2,000 of which have been positively
identified through DNA analysis.[387] More than 3,000 of them seemed to
have been killed in the fighting, which would still leave as many as 4,000
likely executed[388]—clear war crimes, though only half as sensational as
the Clinton administration’s claims at the time, and possibly even fewer
than that since some of the bodies exhumed may have been from earlier
battles.[389]
And still, the American government and CNN’s morality play about
the purpose of their intervention in Bosnia was wildly distorted. This is
especially true considering the fact that the U.S., British, German and Dutch
intelligence services knew about the Bosnian Serbs’ preparations for the
attack but did nothing to warn the people of the town,[390] deciding instead
to “sacrifice” them for the sake of the inevitable land swaps they had
refused to negotiate in good faith. As the Guardian revealed in 2015, the
“endgame” for Western pressure to resolve the war began not as a reaction
to the massacres, but before. The fall of the city was integral to the plan—
not that they had predicted the massacres, though they should have. The
Clinton administration “vetoed” Dutch plans to reinforce their troops,
having decided that the maintenance of the safe areas was untenable. But
instead of finally relenting on the issue in the negotiations, which would
mean admitting that the Serbs had a point along with allowing a peaceful
transfer of the populations, they decided to let the facts on the ground play
out instead. And even though American and allied intelligence officials
could see the executions taking place on their live satellite feeds, no attempt
was made to intervene.[391]
Unfortunately, the typical American TV media narrative never
explained the background to these events. There was the odd and
unfortunate circumstance of this predominantly Muslim population in far-
eastern Bosnia, deep behind Serb lines. There had also been negotiations
over land-swaps between Serbs in Sarajevo and Muslims in Srebrenica,
which could have solved this problem much earlier if any of the previous
major peace plans had been supported by the United States.[392] In
essence, the people of Srebrenica were “sacrificed in a political horse deal,”
in the words of one survivor, essentially describing an arrangement which
could have been reached peacefully long before. Izetbegović had pulled out
the bulk of his forces while leaving the civilians behind. While the women
and children were evacuated to the UN base, the men and boys were left to
fend for themselves.[393]
Muhamed Sacirbey, Izetbegović’s foreign minister, told former UN
High Representative to Bosnia Carl Bildt that since they knew they would
end up losing the town anyway, “what happened made things easier,” Bildt
paraphrased.[394]
Nor did the people hear much about previous war crimes committed by
Muslim forces in Srebrenica, including mass murders, torture and
beheadings of civilians.[395] There were also massive transfers of weapons
into the UN’s Srebrenica[396] “safe zone” and the knowingly doomed
Muslim offensive launched just as the Croatian military was beginning
Operation Flash in the Krajina, meant to provoke a reaction by the Serbs
and hopefully a NATO counter-reaction on the Muslims’ behalf.[397] That
strategy was ultimately successful after a few more months of provocations.
Former NSA analyst Shindler said the U.S.-approved Iranian arms
shipments were the “proximate cause” of the operation that led to the
Bosnian Serbs’ seizure of Srebrenica and its attendant massacre. General
Mladić had repeatedly protested to the leaders of the UN mission there
about the flights, “but they were powerless to stop it because . . . the
airspace was under the control of NATO which meant de facto under U.S.
control.” So he moved his forces in to solve the problem himself.[398]
These Iranian arms were also used by Croatia in their final cleansing of
Serbs in the Flash, Storm and Mistral operations.[399]

Operations Flash, Storm and Mistral

As discussed above, in March 1994, at the urging of the United States, the
Croatian Serbs formed a new alliance and federation with the Muslim
government of Bosnia created by the Framework Agreement for the
Federation, a.k.a. the Washington Agreement.[400] The U.S. then started
training them for war against the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs.[401]
In May 1995, Croat forces began Operation Flash against Croatian
Serbs in the Western Slavonia section of the Krajina, essentially destroying
the last of their military power and setting the stage for Operation Storm
that August, launched by Croatian President Franjo Tudjman to complete
the ethnic cleansing of the Serb minority in Krajina. The remainder of the
population was force-marched into Serbia.[402] Tudjman complained that
the Krajina Serbs were refusing to negotiate, leaving him no choice. But
that was not true. They were only insisting that the UN protection force
which stood between them and the Croat army would have its mandate
renewed before talks began.[403]
The way Times reporter Roger Cohen wrote about the crisis, you would
think the Serbs had moved a population of 13,000 civilians into the Krajina
after 1991 when the war broke out and that now the Croatians were
correcting that aberration, when in fact the Austro-Hungarian empire had
moved them in 300 years before. Still, Cohen admitted the Croat
government used a local conflict on the highway as a “pretext” to start the
campaign when the true purpose was to “capture the whole enclave,” and
that they had driven out at least 5,000 Serbian civilians. He also conceded
that the Croatian Serbs had been in the middle of negotiating with Zagreb
and had completed a recent deal over an oil pipeline with them. In other
words, it was a cynical surprise attack to seize territory, not self-defense in
any way.[404] Former Amb. Zimmermann called this pogrom “Tudjman’s
recapture of the Serbian-held areas of Croatia,” land they had “seized”—
like Cohen, dishonestly implying that the Serbs or JNA had recently
invaded and conquered that territory, which was now simply and rightfully
being reversed.[405]
Denouncing the Croatian Serbs’ retaliatory attacks on Zagreb,
Ambassador Galbraith said, “Sending a rocket full of cluster bombs into a
European capital is a repugnant act clearly intended to kill many people. It’s
an act that can only be intended to provoke a full-scale war.” The Times
continued, paraphrasing Galbraith, “But he added that the United States had
warned Croatia that such attacks might occur in response to the Croatian
offensive in Western Slavonia.”[406]
The Times later reported that the West “applauded” when Tudjman
“launched a pitiless military campaign that drove some 200,000 Serbs out
of Croatia and, in coalition with Muslim forces, tens of thousands more out
of central Bosnia.” They pointed out that “[t]oday, some of Mr. Tudjman’s
generals stand accused of war crimes in these campaigns. But at the time,
the West looked the other way because the battlefield victories forced Mr.
Milošević to sue for peace.”[407]
Robert Frasure, deputy assistant secretary of state in the bureau of
European and Canadian affairs, wrote to Richard Holbrooke, “Dick: We
‘hired’ these guys to be our junkyard dogs because we were desperate. We
need to try to ‘control’ them. But it is no time to get squeamish about
things.”[408]
 President Clinton made it clear the offensive was fine with him, his
only reservation being that the Croats “exercise restraint” because their
attack was so “comprehensive, it runs the risk of a wider war.” The Los
Angeles Times noted that “conspicuously, he did not condemn the action
outright.”[409] In his memoir, Clinton wrote that during the purge he was
“rooting for the Croatians.”[410] The Post also said “senior U.S. officials
expressed cautious support for the move.”[411]
In this offensive, Croat forces cleansed all the Serbian civilians stuck
on the wrong side of the new international border in the districts of Krajina
and West Slovenia[412]—approximately a third of Croatia, mostly on the
Bosnian border, where their families had lived for centuries, and which had
never before been ruled by Zagreb.[413] In 2001, the Croatian Helsinki
Committee for Human Rights said 677 civilians were killed, mostly elderly
people who could not or refused to flee.[414] The German news agency
DW cited estimates as high as 2,500.[415] Amnesty International counted
almost 3,000 “disappeared.”[416] Milošević’s forces, some of whom
remained in Krajina, refused to intervene, and he instead withdrew his
troops along with the refugees.[417] According to the official investigation
by the Dutch government, U.S. intelligence also knew about this massive
pogrom in advance, and did nothing.[418]
Worse, retired Army generals from the group Military Professional
Resources Incorporated (MPRI), who had been hired as mercenaries under
authorization from the Defense Department, helped plan the entire
operation at secret meetings held on the island of Brioni in the Adriatic Sea.
[419] They also trained the troops who carried it out.[420] Then-Defense
Intelligence Agency Director Lieutenant General James Clapper had his
men supply all the intelligence the Croats required to launch their attack.
[421]
According to the BBC, “[a] team of retired U.S. officers planned the
bloody Croatian ‘liberation’ of the Krajina and the subsequent invasion of
western Bosnia by the Croatian Army in the summer of 1995.” They also
provided real-time targeting intelligence from their new surveillance drones
offshore,[422] while NATO launched airstrikes on Croatian Serb radars,
rendering them vulnerable to Croatian air assaults.[423]
Gen. Boyd, the former deputy commander of NATO, confirmed this,
saying, “Croatia would not have taken its military offensives that it has
taken either in Sector West [in Operation Flash] or throughout the north and
south throughout the Krajina [in Operation Storm] without explicit approval
of the U.S. government.”[424] Roger Cohen in the Times, again implying
that the Serbs had invaded the Krajina rather than lived there for centuries,
still discovered that everyone in the know understood that Americans had
helped to plan the pogrom.[425]
At a meeting after the offensive, Richard Holbrooke enthused to
Tudjman that he was the “father of modern Croatia.”[426]
The Times admitted, four years later, that the attack “was carried out
with the tacit blessing of the United States by a Croatian Army that had
been schooled in part by a group of retired American military officers.” The
U.S. was withholding documents from the war crimes tribunal, “adding to
suspicion among some there that Washington is uneasy about the
investigation.” They speculated that this was in part because two Canadian
officers had already testified that the Croats had indiscriminately shelled
civilian areas during the attack. They noted the campaign seemed to help
bring the war to an end, but said that “there was a darker side to Operation
Storm, one largely overlooked in the West, which had little [love?
sympathy? humanity?] for the Serbs. The Croatian Army drove more than
100,000 Serbs from their ancestral homelands, forcing them to flee on carts
and in small cars jammed with their possessions.” They belatedly noted, “In
terms of sheer numbers, it was the largest single ‘ethnic cleansing’ of the
war, though it was not as brutal as the worst of Serb treatment of Bosnian
Muslims during the war.”[427]
“Largest ethnic cleansing”; “largely overlooked.” It depends whether
one’s favored group is ethnic cleansing in support of the liberal, rules-based
world order or is on the side of chaos.
After Operation Storm was over, President Tudjman sent his forces
into Bosnia to link up with the Bosnian Muslim army’s Fifth Corps and
launch Operation Mistral, a massive assault on Serb territory in the west,
which won back much of the land the Serbs had taken and then some,
including territory which had belonged to Serbs all along. Thousands of
civilians were killed, and hundreds of thousands of refugees were driven
from their homes.[428]

Operations Black Lion, Miracle and Badr

Between May and September 1995, the mostly Arab bin Ladenites were
used by the Bosnian Muslim army in three major assaults, beginning with
Operation Black Lion near Vozuća, in which they succeeded in taking the
peaks of three mountains and destroying Serbian artillery positions.
Just after the Srebrenica massacre in July, they launched Operation
Miracle, a failed attempt to take Mount Ozren, then Operation Badr that
September. Badr was a successful attempt by the mujahideen to take Mount
Poceljevo, Mount Paljenik and the towns of Vozuća and Maglaj from the
Bosnian Serbs.[429] With the American-engineered alliance between the
Bosnian Muslims and Croats and this help from the terrorists, the Serbs
were dealt major setbacks in the last months of the war.

False-Flag Attacks

It should be no surprise that the incident used to precipitate major U.S.

military intervention, including the largest air campaign of the war, was a
terrible and bloody hoax.
False-flag attacks by Muslim forces against the civilians they were
supposed to be protecting had become a regular occurrence. As Gen. Boyd
explained, Bosnian Muslim soldiers would regularly bomb the Sarajevo
airport to drive up sympathy and black-market prices for the goods they
were smuggling. This included the deliberate Orwellian tactic of keeping
the population in desperate need of basics like food and water, for the
payoffs and public relations. During the winter of 1993–1994, Boyd said
the municipal government schemed to deny water to the civilian population.
“An American foundation had implemented an innovative scheme to pump
water into the city’s empty lines, only to be denied permission by the
government for health reasons.” However, he wrote, “The denial had less to
do with water purity than with the opposition of some Sarajevo officials
who were reselling UN fuel donated to help distribute water.” As an added
benefit, “the sight of Sarajevans lining up at water distribution points,
sometimes under mortar and sniper fire, was a poignant image.”[430]
They had pulled off major successful false flags in the infamous
Sarajevo breadline massacre of 1992,[431] in the Markale marketplace in
Sarajevo in February 1994[432] and during the siege of Gorazde[433] in
April 1994.[434] As the Dutch government investigator Cees Wiebes found
regarding the Markale attack, “Eleven artillery specialists subsequently
spent nine days studying the shell attack. The official final assessment was
that the attacks were executed by the VRS [Army of the Republika Srpska],
but there were serious doubts about this within the Western intelligence
community.” In fact, “[v]arious staff of intelligence and security services
from Canada, the UK, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Belgium and the
Netherlands established independently of each other that this was an act by
the ABiH to show the Bosnian Serbs in a bad light.”[435]
Then-UN Ambassador Madeleine Albright wanted to believe the lie.
She told CNN that “although we do not know exactly yet what the facts are,
it would seem to us that the Serbs and the Bosnian Serbs are the ones that
probably have a great deal of responsibility.”[436]
Republican Senator Bob Dole, the majority leader, visited the market
as part of his criticism that Clinton was not interventionist enough in
Bosnia.[437] British negotiator David Owen wrote that Western military
and diplomatic leaders knew that Izetbegović’s forces had done the attack
and had threatened to release the findings of a secret UN report if he did not
at least show up at the negotiations, but was too late.[438]
The February 1994 market attack had helped lead to the death of the
Owen-Stoltenberg plan, since the Western powers all reacted to the
bombing by threatening the Serbs with airstrikes and demanding they pull
back their guns from positions in the Serbian suburbs around Sarajevo,
convincing the Muslims to again hold out for more help since Washington
was on their side.[439]
Owen wrote about an even earlier incident when a Bosnian Muslim
army squad temporarily set up and fired mortars from a hospital’s grounds,
then took off before a news crew arrived to record the Serbs’ retaliatory
strike. “I asked General Morillon why the UN had not gone public on the
issue,” Owen wrote. “He wanted the truth out, but said, ‘we’ve got to live
here.’”[440] Gen. Morillon described the same in a documentary as well.
[441]
A Canadian military cable revealed that “Muslim troops masquerading
as UN forces” had been seen wearing blue UN helmets and “a combination
of Norwegian and British combat clothing,” driving white vehicles with UN
markings and causing their leaders concern that they would be targeted by
the Croats. “This may be exactly what the Muslims intend, possibly to
provoke further pressure for airstrikes on the Croats,” they wrote.
“We know that the Muslims have fired on their own civilians and the
airfield in the past in order to gain media attention,” one concluded. A later
memo observes: “Muslim forces outside of Sarajevo have, in the past,
planted high explosives in their own positions and then detonated them
under the gaze of the media, claiming Serb bombardment. This has then
been used as a pretext for Muslim ‘counter-fire’ and attacks on the
Serbs.”[442]
A 1994 Canadian cable said: “The Muslims are not above firing on
their own people or UN areas and then claiming the Serbs are the guilty
party in order to gain further Western sympathy.” It also added, “The
Muslims often site their artillery extremely close to UN buildings and
sensitive areas such as hospitals in the hope that Serb counter-bombardment
fire will hit these sites under the gaze of the international media.”[443]
Newsweek’s Col. Hackworth described a staged incident after British
Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd met with Izetbegović and was taken to
safety in a bunker when moments later Muslim forces launched artillery
nearby to scare him and blame it on the Serbs.[444]
Just a few weeks before the second market attack, the Times reported
on a French marine investigation which concluded that the Bosnian Muslim
government was killing its own people with sniper rifles in Sarajevo. “We
find it almost impossible to believe, but we are sure that it is true,” a senior
French officer told the Times. “French officers who conducted the
investigation adamantly defend their findings,” they wrote. They said they
thought government forces were trying to “increase international
sympathy,” but added, “We know who is responsible, for certain,” a French
officer said. “But we are not sure of the reason.”[445]
Shortly after this came the “second Markale Massacre” of August 28,
1995. This was a false-flag artillery attack staged by the Bosnian Muslims
at the same marketplace in Sarajevo they had attacked in February 1994,
which killed 37 and injured 90.[446] They were “shelling themselves,” as
one intelligence officer told Dutch investigators.[447] The former head of
intelligence in Sarajevo, Lieutenant Colonel John E. Sray, also told the truth
about the incident in an article for the U.S. Army’s Foreign Military Studies
Office.[448] American intelligence officers admitted the false-flag story
was true to Dutch government investigator Wiebes.[449] An administration
official and military officer conceded the same to Times reporter David
Binder,[450] who said he had deeply studied both marketplace massacres,
including at the scene, and had talked with the various international
government investigators, and had no doubt they were both false-flag
attacks by Bosnian Muslim forces against their own civilians.[451] British
and French experts who examined the scene agreed.[452]

Deliberate Force

Regardless, two days after the attack, Clinton and NATO launched a
massive, nearly three-week airstrike and artillery campaign against the
Serbs—Operation Deliberate Force—from August 30 to September 14, then
invited them to the negotiating table in Dayton, Ohio. State Department
historian Chollet later explained that Clinton had said “the United States
had to restore the credibility of NATO’s air power.”[453]
Decorated Vietnam War Army officer Hackworth was scathing. The
U.S. and NATO were flying as the Bosnian Muslims’ “air force” against the
Serbs based on an attack Izetbegović’s forces had done themselves
—“[w]hich, by the way,” he emphasized, “is the oldest trick of war. And we
fell for it.”[454]
 “Deliberate Force infused NATO with a new sense of strength and
vibrancy,” the Washington Post enthused. They all but conceded the
intervention was based on a lie. “[T]his shell was the proverbial last straw.
Pretext or not, it would serve. The UN scientific report remains classified.
And neither NATO military nor civilian authorities reviewed the evidence
before committing the alliance to a massive counterpunch.”[455]
Forget about anything like a declaration of war from the United States
Congress, as the Constitution requires, or even an “authorization” for the
president to consider, as has been the practice—mostly—since the Korean
War in 1950.[456] Clinton launched the assault on his own and NATO’s
pretended authority. He did not even try to get a resolution authorizing the
strikes from Congress, where the populist right would have shot it down, or
the UN Security Council, where Boris Yeltsin’s Russia would likely veto
the resolution.
Time magazine’s cover story in their September 11, 1995, issue
featured a massive explosion in an otherwise pristine small-village setting
under the caption, in big, bold, yellow, all-capitals font: “Bringing the Serbs
to Heel.” However, author Kevin Fedarko wrote that Milošević had already
succeeded in getting the other major Serb leaders to sign a deal giving him
the power to negotiate on all of their behalf before the strikes even began,
instead attributing the move to pressure from UN sanctions and the Croats’
recent advances on the ground.[457]
The BBC reported: “Senior European negotiators believe that with
U.S. backing the war could have ended two years earlier, but the U.S. desire
to see the Serbs punished meant that they instead encouraged the Bosnian
government to continue fighting.” That sounds right. “The price in human
terms? Over 15,000 dead and nearly 600,000 refugees.”[458]
For all their years of obstruction on behalf of the Bosnian Muslims, at
the end of it all, the Americans settled for a 51–49 percent division of the
new country, with the Bosnian-Croatian alliance getting the bare majority.

Dayton

In November 1995, the principals met at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

in Dayton, Ohio. But it was not the bombing campaign that ended the war.
The Bosnian Serbs had not been defeated and brought in on their knees to
sign on to the victors’ terms. They had survived the attack just fine. What
had happened instead was the Clinton administration finally dropped their
insistence on keeping a unified state and holding the Serbian government
responsible for everything the Bosnian Serbs had done. Instead, they would
now accept partition of the new country—including the land swaps they had
always opposed, such as their ceding Srebrenica and Zepa to the Serbs—
and offering to lift sanctions on Belgrade if Milošević would pressure the
Bosnian Serbs to quit while they were ahead, which the U.S. had previously
refused to consider.[459]
Since the UN had indicted Mladić and Karadžić for war crimes, the
Bosnian Serbs had no representation at the conference. Milošević was left
to deal in their place, and accepted the Americans’ offer. He agreed to give
up all of Sarajevo to the Muslims and even conceded they keep the city of
Gorazde, deep inside Serbian territory in eastern Bosnia, as well as an
eight-mile corridor which led to it. Still, Izetbegović and his men were
incensed at this climb-down by the Americans, but they were in no position
to do anything about it. Again, the U.S., in this case in the form of then-
Amb. Holbrooke, were the ones who had finally relented and told
Izetbegović that he would have to as well. Under the Lisbon deal, Vance-
Owen and Owen-Stoltenberg, the Muslims would have kept the cities of
Srebrenica and Zepa. Under Dayton, after years of U.S. assistance for the
Izetbegović regime and their refusal to negotiate, they were lost to the
Bosnian Serbs. The territories won by the Muslims and Croats during the
allied bombing campaign would have gone to them anyway under the
previous plan—now accepted as the result of NATO bombing, which had
not actually accomplished anything in terms of helping to forge the peace or
establishing facts on the ground.[460]
President Bush’s former ambassador to Yugoslavia, Warren
Zimmermann, the man who had destroyed the Lisbon deal and caused the
Bosnian war, later admitted it “would probably have worked out better for
the Muslims than any subsequent plan, including the Dayton formula.” He
added that the Bosnian Serbs “achieved at Dayton their primary political
aim—their own republic within Bosnia, ‘Republika Srpska.’ None of the
earlier Western proposals had offered them such a giant concession.”[461]
When it was all over, Tudjman and Izetbegović both denounced the deal
after begrudgingly signing it. Only Milošević had anything hopeful to say
about the possibility of peace for the future.[462]
But the accords solidified the EU’s humiliation and the Americans’
dominance in European affairs. This alleged victory helped to build the
political capital that made future NATO expansion possible.[463] The
NATO alliance, not the UN or EU, was awarded the peacekeeping mission
in Bosnia that lasted through 2004.[464]

Proof of Concept

Holbrooke wrote in his memoir, “Suddenly, the war was over—and

America’s role in post-Cold War Europe redefined.” He added, “Criticism
of President Clinton as a weak leader ended abruptly, especially in Europe
and among the Muslim nations. . . . [E]ven those who chafed at the
reassertion of American power conceded, at least implicitly, its
necessity. . . . After Dayton, American foreign policy seemed more
assertive, more muscular. This may have been as much perception as reality,
but the perception mattered.”[465]
Ronald Asmus, the deputy assistant secretary of state for European
affairs at the time, also explained that “NATO enlargement would never
have happened absent the U.S. and NATO’s all-out and eventually
successful effort to stop the war raging in Bosnia.” It was essential to
proving the credibility of their claim to be the guarantors of a Europe
“whole and free,” and at peace. “It reinvigorated NATO and reestablished
the Alliance’s, and thereby Washington’s, primary role in European
security.”[466] Asmus said, “The success at Dayton in the fall of 1995 not
only brought peace to Bosnia, but also paved the way for NATO to
enlarge,” adding, “It restored a sense of purpose and confidence in the
Alliance and reassured Washington’s allies that it could credibly extend new
security guarantees to Central and Eastern Europe.” Above all, he said, the
administration thought that “the U.S.-brokered deal on Russian
participation in NATO’s Implementation Force (IFOR) moved the idea of
NATO-Russian cooperation from theory to reality.” That turned out to be
foolish optimism, but it was enough at the time to help convince the
administration they were on the right track.[467]

Russian Blowback

After NATO launched their air war against the Serbs, it became clear to the
Russians that NATO could indeed be seen as an offensive threat, even
without its old Warsaw Pact adversary to confront. Amb. William Burns
wrote that “[w]hile often frustrated by the brutality and venality of the
Serbian leadership, Yeltsin couldn’t ignore the natural affinity of Russians
for Slavic kinsmen in Belgrade and among the Bosnian Serbs.” Instead of
working with the Russians as true partners to solve the problems, the U.S.
marginalized them. “As NATO stepped up its air campaign, and as
Holbrooke accelerated American diplomacy, the Russians resented their
secondary role,” Burns wrote.[468]
The NATO expanders all agreed that the war itself represented the
alliance simply “expanding integration and stability in Europe eastward,”
and not at all as a “strategic response to a specific military threat from
Russia.” The Red Army was long gone. Officials felt no imminent need to
put military forces, including nuclear weapons, in the new NATO states for
this reason.[469] But they insisted the Russians would just have to accept
the pure defensiveness of this steadily encroaching military alliance based
only on American reassurances, since their lying eyes might say otherwise.
[470]
 Yeltsin warned after the bombing: “This is the first sign of what could
happen when NATO comes right up to the Russian Federation’s borders. . . .
The flame of war could burst out across the whole of Europe.”[471] Burns
wrote in a June 1995 cable that “it is very clear that the Russian elite sees
NATO expansion . . . and Bosnia as parts of a whole—with concerns about
NATO’s role in Bosnia deepening Russian suspicions about NATO and its
enlargement.”[472]
The U.S. still maintains a base in Bosnia. As the neoconservatives
warned in their seminal “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” in 1998, if U.S.
forces withdrew from Bosnia, the other NATO nations would be unable to
handle the job alone. They added that “conversely, such a withdrawal would
provoke a political crisis within NATO that would certainly result in the end
of American leadership within NATO; it might well spell the end of the
alliance itself.”[473] This was an overblown threat, of course. President
George W. Bush ended up turning over the army’s Camp Eagle in 2007.
[474] A small NATO contingent does however remain in Sarajevo.[475]

Neoconservatism

In the official editorial for the December 11, 1995, issue of Bill Kristol’s
Weekly Standard magazine, opinion editor David Tell, a former aide[476] to
neoconservative William J. Bennett,[477] wrote that the only considerable
dissent against intervention in Bosnia was the “populist ‘conservative
street’”—meaning working-class conservatives who listen to talk radio—
and assured their readers that they need not worry about the ignorant views
of these rabble in flyover country. “Republicans did not take control of
Congress last fall by pandering to populism’s least sophisticated, most
crudely nativist impulses,” he assured readers. There were plenty of
domestic issues to attack Clinton over, he said. And “when the
‘conservative street’ is wrong, it should be corrected—or ignored.” Then he
got to the business of solving the war. “Diplomatic niceties aside . . . the
Serbs do not put down their guns because they trust America will treat them
fairly. They do so because they know we sympathize with Bosnia, and they
trust only that we will kick their skulls in if they break the peace.” If NATO
would not intervene directly, they should at least support arming
Izetbegović’s army. “Here, too, Republicans should give the president
cover, justifying and strengthening his determination to pursue an
American-led rearmament effort,” Tell wrote.[478] This was after the
Dayton deal had been signed.

Ungrateful Terrorists

If the Clinton administration really thought they were going to buy some
goodwill with the jihadists by intervening on their behalf in Bosnia, they
were wrong. The terrorists remained unimpressed by Washington’s efforts
on their behalf. Al Qaeda leadership in Bosnia denounced the NATO
bombing campaign and Dayton negotiations. They expected their sacrifices
of the previous months to lead to a whole new Muslim offensive and total
victory. They declared the U.S., Britain and France enemies and vowed to
destroy us.[479] As Osama bin Laden, by then back in exile in Afghanistan,
said in his first declaration of war against the United States in 1996,
addressing President Clinton, “[T]he sons of the land of the two holiest sites
had come out to fight against the Russians in Afghanistan, the Serbs in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, and today they are fighting in Chechnya. Allah
granted them victory and He came to their aid. They have been made
victorious over your allies, the Russians.” He added, “I tell the Islamic
youth of the world who fought in Afghanistan and Bosnia-Herzegovina
with their money, lives, tongues and pens that the battle has not yet
ended.”[480]
Washington got the message. The Dayton Accords mandated that all
foreign fighters would have to leave Bosnia. Special Envoy Holbrooke
pressured Izetbegović to round up the Arab-Afghans and get rid of them
before NATO troops arrived. Some did leave. Many were given asylum in
Europe, where they continued to carry out terrorist attacks, or moved on to
Chechnya or Afghanistan.[481] Izetbegović gave the rest Bosnian papers
and passports.[482] Only after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the Twin
Towers and the Pentagon was Izetbegović, disgraced by his association with
the mujahideen, forced from power.[483]

Failed State

After the accords kicked in at the beginning of 1996, 100,000 Serbs were
cleansed from predominantly Muslim areas of Bosnia by gangs of armed
thugs while the police stood by.[484]
Bosnia ended up not being a sovereign nation at all, but some new
form of internationally occupied and administered basket case. According
to Ted Galen Carpenter, Bosnia is now nothing more than an “international
colony” and a “dysfunctional international ward.” He says that “Bosnia to
this day is a joke. A pretend country. Without all the international financial
inputs and the international bureaucrats running a lot of the affairs, this
country would not function at all.”[485] U.S. troops, whom Clinton
promised would be home by Christmas 1996, stayed until 2004, when EU
troops finally took over for NATO.[486]
In early 2024, leaders of the Republic Srpska threatened again to
secede in protest against overreach by the Muslim-dominated government
in Sarajevo.[487]

Shock Therapy

The Troika and the Harvard Boys

On top of the insult and danger of Western incorporation of former Warsaw

Pact states into the NATO alliance, was the “shock therapy” economic
policy of the “Harvard Boys” from the Harvard Institute of International
Development (HIID) working on grants totaling tens of millions of dollars
from USAID.[488] These included Undersecretary of the Treasury Larry
Summers, his protégé World Bank economist Andrei Shleifer, their rival
professor Jeffrey Sachs and his friends David Lipton and Anders Åslund,
Rhodes Scholar Jonathan Hay, and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin—
eventually under the command of the “troika” of Vice President Al Gore,
Summers and Strobe Talbott. They helped to totally destroy the Russian
economy in the 1990s.[489]
Gore and Viktor Chernomyrdin, a former director of the Russian state
energy giant Gazprom, co-chaired the U.S.-Russia Commission on
Economic and Technological Cooperation, the main mechanism for
organizing the new relationship between the U.S. and Russia.[490] Talbott
chaired the Former Soviet Union Policy Steering Group,[491] while
Summers became undersecretary of the treasury for international affairs.
[492]
Under Clinton’s predecessor, President George H.W. Bush, Secretary
of State James Baker and even the self-proclaimed “Prince of Darkness,”
neoconservative hawk Richard Perle, then on the Defense Policy Board,
thought that the U.S. could cut Yeltsin a little bit of slack on the Soviet
Union’s old debts—$65 billion worth, of which $2.8 billion was held by the
United States.[493] But Bush Sr.’s Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady had
won that argument.[494] The Russian Federation would begin its new reign
from the bottom of an economic pit.
Then, instead of being a good sport at the end of a world-historic
peaceful victory, the U.S. under Bill Clinton kept kicking them while they
were down. The Soviets’ command-based economic plan had been a
disaster, with distortions, mis-incentives and imbalances all over the place.
To wind all that down and transform the country into a market-based
economy was never going to be easy. But following the Harvard Boys’
advice, the government induced hyperinflation, destroying all available
capital for real investment, then implemented “voucher” and “loans-for-
shares” schemes that handed over entire industries to connected gangsters
and oligarchs. The consequences for the economy and civilian population
were devastating.

Versailles
Comparisons to the chaotic peace at the end of World War I, caused not just
by the defeat of the Central Powers, but by the overly punitive Versailles
Treaty, are worth considering. American intervention was what had put the
Allies in the position to dictate the seizure of Germany’s outlying territories
and demand war reparations to the Allies. This destabilized German society,
helping to lead to the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s.[495]
Russia had been left in much the same position after the first Cold War.
When the USSR fell apart, Russia ended up losing lands they had
conquered centuries before,[496] including with ethnic Russian populations
in the tens of millions which were being left behind now-foreign state lines,
particularly in Latvia,[497] Estonia,[498] Ukraine,[499] Kazakhstan[500]
and Uzbekistan.[501] Previous Russian and Soviet leaders, especially
Catherine the Great[502] and Joseph Stalin,[503] had moved large numbers
of ethnic Russians into these countries for political purposes in the first
place. Now they were being abandoned. And their economy had completely
fallen apart.
Most Americans raised in the post-World War II era were taught that
the U.S. had wisely decided to rebuild and befriend our German and
Japanese enemies at the end of that war to avoid making the same mistake.
After the end of the first Cold War, the U.S. government and its Western
allies treated Russia in much the same way as the British and French treated
the Germans of the 1920s, if to a lesser degree. Instead of learning from
Versailles and making a friend out of Russia, America’s politicians and
national security establishment decided to press their advantage.
 At various times, the Bush Sr. and Clinton administrations both
invoked this same parable.[504] They both betrayed its lessons.

Hyperinflation

In 1990, Secretary of State James Baker, by trade a lawyer who represented

international oil companies and who had previously been secretary of the
treasury, had warned Mikhail Gorbachev in their all-important meeting of
February 9 that before they moved to a free pricing system, “First you have
got to absorb the ruble overhang. You plan to sell apartments, devalue the
currency, issue gold back [sic] bonds, etc., which may help. But you have
got to do it before you go [to] the price system or inflation will be in the
thousands percent.”[505]
The “ruble overhang” Baker mentioned was the artificially high value
of the Russian currency on global exchanges, as they had it pegged to the
U.S. dollar. The fact of their monetary expansion, along with the predictable
economic contraction they were sure to suffer during the transition, all
equaled out to far too much currency in circulation. The government had
been expanding the money supply for years, but price controls disguised the
effects on the shelves, instead causing shortages as to what was available.
[506] Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recommended selling
savings bonds, with part of the interest being guaranteed in convertible
currencies or gold in order to incentivize buyers, along with slashing
budgets and selling off government property to absorb all the money that
had been previously pumped into the system.[507]
 Wall Street Journal reporter Anne Williamson wrote that Russian free-
market economist Larisa Piyasheva had a brilliant plan to truly privatize
property in Moscow and the rest of Russia. An important aspect of the plan
was that they would auction off government-owned property for rubles. The
privatization itself was, first of all, necessary to create the basis for a real
free market, but the plan was also meant to help absorb extra rubles in
circulation, which would be destroyed by the government, rather than re-
spent, to combat the danger of wild price inflation once controls were lifted.
Her sound advice was ignored. The government decided to free prices
before privatizing state assets. However, once it came to lifting the price
controls, Piyasheva noted to Williamson that Deputy Finance Minister
Yegor Gaidar “freed prices only for consumer goods and services, but not
for raw materials, minerals and real estate, thereby preserving the
nomenklatura’s choicest bites while simultaneously robbing the people of
their savings.” As Piyasheva explained, “Gaidar is, in fact, a Communist.
As a Communist, he can’t consider private property to be of principal
importance and even said it was too early for privatization, that first
financial stabilization should be achieved.”[508]
So the new government did not try or was unable to compensate by
somehow “absorbing” all that extra money before price controls were lifted.
Gaidar himself complained that he would have preferred to limit the central
bank’s money printing, but that question was simply outside of his
jurisdiction.[509] Their rapid monetary expansion led to price inflation of
2,500 percent in 1992,[510] devastating Russian society, wiping out the
savings of virtually everyone. Real gross domestic product shrank by 50
percent in four years. More than 100 million people were sent into poverty.
Forbes reporter Paul Klebnikov wrote that Russia was devastated:
“Eventually Russia would sink below the level of China, India, Indonesia,
Brazil and Mexico on a per capita basis. Russia would become poorer than
Peru.” In this partially induced depression, “[d]ecades of technological
achievement were lost. Renowned scientific institutions fell apart. The
Russian cultural establishment disintegrated and the country’s assets were
sold off.”[511]
Gaidar, who had come from a Communist background and promised
Yeltsin he could create a free-market system in 18 months, was motivated,
but, like Yeltsin,[512] had no idea what he was doing.[513] Gaidar had
summoned the young economists Anatoly Chubais and Dmitri Vasiliev to
come work for him. The latter two had already worked on moving
privatization forward in the newly again-renamed St. Petersburg, no longer
Leningrad. By the end of 1991, he had hired Jeffrey Sachs and David
Lipton to advise him as well.[514] Though Sachs was credited with quickly
ending the massive hyperinflation in Yugoslavia,[515] and had been praised
for his handling of Poland’s transition to a market economy, the situation in
that nation was far different. A much greater percentage of Russia’s
economy was owned by the state, and the heavy industries were used to
running massive deficits and being bailed out by the central government.
Since scaling back the money-printing would have deepened the recession
in the short term, the central bank simply shoveled endless amounts of
money to the new private banks in an attempt to prop up government
employees and other wages, even as the inflation they were causing made
everything unaffordable anyway. Lastly, unlike in Poland where they were
able to set a fixed exchange rate in the middle of their shock therapy
program, when Gaidar tried it in Russia, it simply led to a large increase in
the demand for dollars, a further collapse of demand for their endlessly
printed rubles and massive capital flight of billions of dollars out of the
country.[516]
American free-market economist Murray N. Rothbard urged the
absolute and total privatization of everything in the old Soviet system
immediately. Half-measures, he said, would only prolong the pain of the
change. Like Williamson, Rothbard cited the great success that was the end
of the famous Marshall Plan in Europe.[517] West German Minister of
Economic Affairs Ludwig Erhard had gone on the radio on a Sunday in
June 1948, and announced that all wage and price controls were over and a
new currency would be issued. Contrary to the commonly taught history of
those events, it was this action, against the wishes of all the Keynesian
central planners, that allowed for the miracle of the rebuilding of the West
German economy after the war.[518]
Instead, the Russians lifted some price controls, kept others, continued
massively expanding the money supply through negative real interest
rates[519] and caused a hyperinflation crisis that wiped out the savings of
anyone whose wealth was denominated in rubles, as Baker predicted. This
was an almost immediate fatal blow to the capitalist system before it ever
had a chance to start.[520] Much of this was due to American pressure on
Gaidar and his team to make the transition to market capitalism
“irreversible” based on the myth that the shattered and discredited
Communist Party could somehow rise from the dead and take the country
back over again if the process took too long.[521]
“Chubais didn’t understand a thing he was doing, he never so much as
read an article on privatization,” one Russian close to the process told
Williamson. He called Russian privatization a “bamboo tractor,” referring
to an attempted Chinese invention of the 1950s, “meaning something
invented out of local resources, because for whatever reasons the natives
can not follow other procedures, so they have to be very domestic in their
approach.”[522]
The problem with the way they implemented privatization was that it
did not come before the unleashing of prices. Letting people spend all their
saved-up rubles would have been a perfect way to transfer state property to
private citizens and companies, while allowing the government to destroy
all that inflationary money as they received it, killing two birds with one
stone. Williamson later said that the Harvard Boys did not want to absorb
all those rubles in the hands of regular Russians. Accepting their money in
exchange for state property would create a “competing claim,” in the words
of one Harvard economist, on industries they wanted under the control of
chosen winners.[523]
This massive inflation meant that money had, in a sense, ceased to
exist. The economy, even among large-scale producers, had been reduced to
a barter system of exchange more primitive than the Marxism they had just
thrown off.[524] Fuel for transportation and running farm equipment and
other machinery became unaffordable.[525] Agriculture, mining and other
capital-intensive industries were devastated. Their workers were driven into
the lowest depths of poverty.[526] When Williamson asked if further
lending by the IMF and the World Bank would be helpful, Russian chief
auditor Venyamin Sokolov answered, “Giving more loans to the Yeltsin
government is comparable to giving a drug addict a fresh supply of
narcotics. Any new loans will only go to the realm of financial speculation
and to prop up support for Boris Yeltsin.” What Russia truly needed, he
said, was “loans only for the purchase of new equipment or the
restructuring of enterprises, and such funds can be attained from the private
sector.”[527]

Vouchers

In 1992, Anatoly Chubais, the head of the state property committee, on

advice from HIID’s Swedish associate Anders Åslund,[528] began issuing
vouchers for 10,000 rubles to every Russian to buy stock in new companies
taking over old state-owned firms. The whole thing turned out to be a
disaster. Western financial institutions did the same thing they had done in
Germany after World War I: they sent agents to link up with some
unscrupulous locals and offered them U.S. dollars and British pounds to go
buy up vouchers for practically nothing.[529] The hyperinflation induced
desperate people to sell their nearly worthless vouchers for shares of
industrial stock at massive discounts just to try to stay alive. Because there
were price controls on stocks, which most regular people did not
understand, the few connected rich bought up entire companies’ worth of
vouchers for the price of a few crates of vodka.[530] The later infamous
Russian oligarchs became such by seizing control of this process and
thereby the entire Russian economy.
Matt Bivens of the Moscow Times explained that regular people who
kept their vouchers ended up stuck with shares of some brick factory in the
Arctic Circle while industries of high value were divided up separately.
[531] Klebnikov added that most sold their vouchers for a few dollars or put
them into pyramid schemes that later collapsed. “Instead of creating a broad
class of shareholders, Chubais’s privatization gave away Russia’s industrial
assets to corrupt enterprise managers or to the new Moscow banks.”[532]
Another problem was that when property was being sold off at such
artificially low prices, they went to people who did not have the skills to run
the businesses they had taken over, so high-producing ventures were
replaced by lower-producing ones. Klebnikov cited a car factory and a
scientific research center that were both closed down since there were much
easier ways for the new owners of the property to recoup their investment
by simply renting out the space to someone else.[533]
Klebnikov criticized Chubais for putting everything up for auction all
at once: oil, metals, mining, timber, automobiles, machine tools, shipping
fleets and ports. This flooded the market and massively depressed prices for
the most valuable parts of the Russian economy. If they had meant well or
knew what they were doing, he said, they would have auctioned off the
property starting with smaller businesses first, with the major firms being
carefully spun off into the market to suit economic conditions as had
previously been done in Eastern Europe.[534] Perhaps if they had truly
privatized so quickly it would have worked out once prices settled, but the
economy remained heavily politicized, with the national government
retaining ownership of major portions of important firms and preventing
market pricing from ever truly getting a chance to kick in.
Rothbard, the Austrian school economist, had again thought all this
through.[535] Rather than giving everyone vouchers to buy stock in all
former state-owned businesses, they should have simply turned them over
to the individuals who already worked at each company, in other words, let
them “homestead” the assets. “After this one mighty stroke of universal
privatization,” Rothbard wrote, “prices of ownership shares on the market
will fluctuate in accordance with the productivity and the success of the
assets and the firms in question.” He said that opponents of the idea usually
decried it as an unfair “giveaway” of “windfall gains.” On the contrary, he
said, “the homesteaders have already created or taken these resources and
lifted them into production, and any ensuing gains (or losses) will be the
result of their own productive and entrepreneurial actions.”[536]
But it was not to be. A House committee led by Republican Chris Cox
of California stated that the voucher scheme “was devised by troika partner
Anatoly Chubais’s U.S.-funded Russian Privatization Center and Harvard
Institute for International Development, along with the U.S. Agency for
International Development (USAID).” Thomas Dine, the USAID Assistant
Administrator for Europe and the New Independent States, told the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee that “USAID expert advisers helped Russian
counterparts in designing and implementing the voucher system.”[537]
By handing massive industrial concerns to the well-connected for
essentially nothing, they had given control to men who were not real
businessmen, and had no access to permanent flows of capital to keep their
machines and men working. So they just liquidated whatever assets they
could and spent the profits on luxuries and entertainment for themselves
instead of reinvesting in the businesses they had come to own through
virtually no effort or even expense of their own.[538]
Writing that Sachs and his allies had put far too much emphasis on the
rapidity of the transformation from state to private ownership of major
industries, compared to establishing a rule of law, liberal economist Jamie
Galbraith—John Kenneth’s son and Amb. Peter’s brother—assessed the that
entire enterprise amounted to sabotage of the Russian economy. He quoted
Georgi Arbatov, who was then a member of the foreign policy council of
the Foreign Ministry of the Russian Federation, saying many Russians
believed shock therapy was “a conscious design to undermine Russia
completely as a great power and transform her into a kind of Third World
country. The actual results of shock therapy have not been far from this
goal.”
Galbraith concluded that nothing could change “the responsibility of
leading American economists, diplomats and politicians—well-meaning
liberals, in many cases—for the role that they played, in good faith or in
bad, in one of the great economic tragedies of a generation.”[539]
Comparing the Harvard Boys with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal
Brain Trusters who pushed through the remaking of American economic
governance in 1933,[540] Anne Williamson wrote: “Choosing favoritism
over the hard slog of institution-building, the Harvard crowd sold
themselves by overselling their Russian contacts whose importance and
competence they exaggerated to USAID officials.” Instead of working to
create a real free-market system, the Harvard Boys convinced USAID to
focus their efforts on helping the individual young “go-getters” they had
picked, “rather than to risk fragmentation in attempting to build a consensus
or to assist in engineering compromises between different social and
political groups.”[541]
Williamson described another form of shock the Russian people had to
suffer, finding out the prices at which massive industries had been sold
during the voucher privatization. “The public sneered when it became
known Russia had collected twice less than the revenues from privatization
in Hungary, a country that would hardly constitute a particularly large
Russian oblast or province.” She listed just a few of the daily outrages: “the
Hotel Cosmos with its $10 million annual net profit sold for $23,500,000,
the national electric company United Energies sold for $650,000,000, ZIL
Automobile Works’ one billion in assets went for $4 million.” She
continued, “Gazprom, representing approximately a third of the world’s
natural gas, was valued at $230,000,000. Ports, oil companies, high-tech
factories of the military sector, all sold for a pittance.”[542]
Elsewhere she described the results of the new voucher system as the
opposite of privatization. The national government had found a way to
ensure its continued partial ownership, and influence over important firms
by rigging the auctions so they would maintain a controlling portion of the
shares.[543]

‘Bullshit!’
Professor Janine Wedel wrote in 1996 that the Clinton administration’s
policy when it came to foreign aid was simply to give it all to Deputy Prime
Minister Chubais and the “St. Petersburg mafia,” as an HIID report called
them, including Maxim Boycko, Dmitri Vasiliev and Ruslan Orekhov, who
then passed around the aid to chosen cronies to consolidate their own
wealth and power. The voucher system itself was built on a $58 million
grant from USAID, which spent almost $8 million on salaries for 10
advisers to the State Property Committee. There is no point diminishing the
Americans’ part in all this. They were happy to take credit back then. When
USAID’s Thomas Dine was asked in 1996 if his organization had “helped
propel Chubais into top positions in Russian government,” he answered,
“As an observer, I would say yes.” And by picking this one small group of
reformers to support, they were, Wedel concluded, “thus alienating other
parties and avoiding other processes that clearly had to be brought on board
if legal and regulatory reforms were to take place.”[544]
The CIA warned the vice president about Chernomyrdin’s and
Chubais’ corruption, but Gore refused to listen, reportedly scrawling
“Bullshit!” across the margin of one intelligence report on the issue.[545]
He later denied the charge that he had written on it, but essentially
confirmed the rest of the story, telling NBC News’s Tim Russert about the
intelligence report, “You talk to the people who were in charge of that
division and what they’ll tell you was that they absolutely agreed that it was
a very sloppy piece of work.” Russert asked Gore if he thought
Chernomyrdin was corrupt. “I have no idea,” the vice president insisted.
[546] As prime minister, the man had sold himself and his friends the
massive oil and gas firm Gazprom for less than a thousandth of its market
value,[547] moved billions of dollars out of the country and was worth at
least $5 billion himself.[548] But Clinton and Gore were not sure if he was
corrupt.
However, Chubais himself was not so reluctant to admit the truth. As
he told journalist Alexander Gentelev, “There are now 40 million people
who hate Chubais. And they have good reason to hate me.”[549]
The Russians surely were in a difficult position. They needed to
privatize their industries quickly. At the end of 1991, there were 225,000
state companies.[550] Something had to be done with them. And they
needed men who could figure out how to run such large firms, but no one
had the money to invest. Billions had already left the country in a massive
flight of capital from the new, unstable situation.
The Soviets’ previous central plans had been a disaster, necessitating
Gorbachev’s attempts to decentralize with his Perestroika program. But in
many cases, this had only made things worse. The government had
devolved decision-making away from the central committees to the
managers of the major factories, but did not transfer ownership, which
would have created incentive to preserve the firms for the long term. In
essence, officials had given the new bosses the ability to simply strip the
factories of anything useful and split, cannibalizing and hollowing them out
from the inside. In that sense, the Communists’ attempted reforms had only
sped the collapse of their system.[551]
After the fall of the USSR, Russia’s heavy industries were turned over
to these incompetent oligarchs at deep discounts, so they had no incentive
to exert real effort to get the businesses back up and running. Like the
Communist Party’s managers before, they would often simply run off with
anything immediately valuable for short-term gains, then move the money
out of the country.
The level of criminality in the Russian government and big business
was beyond belief. One scam simply had fake banks send each other phony
wire transfers that the central bank would always honor. More than half a
billion dollars—equivalent to one third of the IMF’s loans to Russia for that
year—was stolen this way in 1992–1993 in what Klebnikov called “one of
the biggest disasters of the ‘reformist’ government of Acting Prime Minister
Yegor Gaidar.”[552]
In July 1993, the Russian central bank suddenly announced that all
previously printed banknotes would be considered worthless in two days’
time while people would have two weeks to trade in up to 35,000 rubles for
new currency. This led to a massive panic as citizens rushed to unload their
now completely worthless currency for goods of any kind. Pensioners were
wiped out. Travelers were stranded with no way to buy plane or train tickets
home. The arbitrary nature of the decision and the lack of any clear lines of
authority behind it helped to reinforce the public’s conception of the
lawlessness and corruption of the new system. Those with political
influence could have what they wanted, while regular people would not
even be left the scraps.[553]

Sachs Blames D.C.

For his part, Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs blamed Washington for ham-stringing
his efforts to help the Russians get the transformation right. His advice had
worked in Bolivia, Slovenia and Poland, where he had been advising since
the late 1980s.[554] Sachs says his focus was on trying to end the inflation
and create a working currency, and that while he supported the voucher
system, privatization was actually his colleague Andrei Shleifer’s
department.[555] As far as the inflation is concerned, Sachs wrote that he
stands by his advice to Gaidar to immediately lift price controls first, and
that it really did only cause a “one-time jump” in prices, and worked
quickly to end shortages. However, he argues, they would not listen to him
when it came to other central parts of the program, including his call for
tens of billions in Western loans, tight fiscal and monetary policy to beat
inflation and new public healthcare and pension systems to solidify political
support for the overall changes.[556] He argued at the time that the H.W.
Bush administration was not doing enough to help.[557]
The hyperinflation, as ever, was the central bank’s fault.[558] In this
case, it was under the control of Viktor Gerashchenko from the ancien
régime, who was not part of the Gaidar team. Sachs also warned about this
at the time.[559] On top of that, the IMF continued to insist the Russian
ruble remained the common currency for the 15 former Soviet states,
incentivizing each of their central banks to continue inflating on their own.
[560]
Gaidar was fired at the end of 1992. The incoming Clinton
administration had no more interest in helping Russia than the Bush Sr.
government did. Though the new finance minister, Boris Fyodorov, said
that he and his advisers produced quality reports on the economic situation,
he did not have enough influence over Prime Minister Chernomyrdin. “I
never once recommended the privatization of the oil and the gas sector by
vouchers, or giveaways, or loans-for-shares deals, and to this day regard
these actions as abominable missteps,” Sachs wrote in 2012.[561]
Though it is hard to see how tens of billions of dollars of IMF loans
would have done any good, rather than just being embezzled away like the
rest of it, by 1994 Sachs had concluded the Clinton administration was
refusing the debt relief and short-term IMF loans he believed Russia
needed, amounting to $150 billion over five years,[562] due to a deliberate
choice to prevent Russia’s recovery. He concluded that they wanted to see it
weakened.[563] Sachs and Åslund resigned just one year into Clinton’s
presidency, after Chernomyrdin announced in January 1994 that the central
government would continue massive state support for industry and
agriculture, which the two predicted would cause worse monetary and price
inflation.[564]
Finally, in October 1994, Yeltsin fired Chubais from his job running
the National Privatization Committee (GKI).[565]

That’s Not Real Capitalism

Then-New York University professor Peter J. Boettke is an Austrian school

economist who took an early interest in the Soviet Union’s and then
Russia’s transformation into a capitalist economy. His take is that shock
therapy did not go far enough. Back in January 1993, he lamented Yeltsin’s
firing of Yegor Gaidar. Though he was “not the perfect architect,” Gaidar’s
dismissal represented the beginning of the end of any real attempt to reform
the country along free-market lines. Like Anne Williamson, he cited the
Russian free-market liberal Larisa Piyasheva, who, as discussed, had tried
to insist they privatize government property before lifting all price controls,
which would have been a superior way to transfer state assets into the
market as well as soak up all the circulating rubles causing the inflationary
pressure.
Boettke wrote that “[s]hock therapy, if by shock therapy we mean the
liberalization of the economy from state control, simply did not take place.”
With slow and partial privatization and mass money-printing to prop up
failing but connected businesses, only small businesses and crime thrived.
“These aspects of Russian reality are not the consequence of free-market
reform, but the result of the lingering of state control over the economy and
the unstable political and legal environment.” He concluded, “In other
words, it is not free-market reforms that generated Russia’s problems, but
their absence.” Only by abolishing arbitrary government intervention in the
economy would Russia see prosperity.[566]
Unlike Sachs and the Harvard neo-liberals, Boettke denounced all
foreign government and IMF loans as counterproductive. Like Sachs, he
lamented the rise of Chernomyrdin and predicted the worst for Russia. This
was just 11 days after Clinton had been sworn in.[567]
In 1998, noting the decline in living standards and life expectancy in
Russia, Boettke concluded that the problem was not the changeover to
market processes, but the difficulty in getting the state to adjust to allowing
markets to work. Russia’s economic woes were “a problem of the
institutional infrastructure, and not something inherent to the pursuit of self-
interest and wealth through market exchange.”[568]
In other words, they needed something approaching a real rule of law
and institutions that would protect property rights and enforce contracts. He
did not mean a powerful central state, but one with just enough permanent
rules for people to rely on. Instead, the Russians still had a politicized
economy, with the central government owning and controlling large
percentages of the most important firms, inflationary money and arbitrary
political decision-making on economic questions. “The Yeltsin reform team
has failed to negotiate the trade-off between the administrative costs of law
and economic performance in any way that credibly commits the regime to
keep their promise of protection of private property, freedom of contract
and market expansion in general.” It was this failure that opened the door
for various mafia organizations to provide security and contract
enforcement instead.[569]
In 1998, Boettke also wrote that the U.S., its Western allies and
associated international organizations had given or loaned the Russian
Federation $90.5 billion, and that “there was little to show” for it. This was
because of continual inflation by the government to prop up zombie
companies, along with counterproductive taxation and regulatory schemes
that forced businesses to operate in the underground, black-market economy
to survive.
Boettke defended shock therapy as “the path to the cure” for the
Russian economy, not the cure itself. He disputed the arguments that the
Western economic model was inappropriate for Russia or applied too
quickly. Societies may organize any number of ways, but if they want to be
an advanced industrialized society, they need market capitalism. Central
planning just will not get the job done. Massive and immediate steps were
needed to break Russia away from its old Communist system. Like with
actual shock therapy where the analogy originates, it is not considered the
answer to long-term problems, just a method to snap a person out of the
depths of psychosis. Actual reform to a prosperous economy is a much
longer and more difficult process. “To restate the analogy, the Soviet
economy was structured in a manner so far from the reality of market
competition that only an immediate step into the market context could
initiate a process of social transformation.” More capitalism is generally
better, but in a way certain to frustrate those on the political left especially,
Boettke explains that a whole-package approach is needed, since every state
intervention creates its own vicious cycle of distortions and economic
problems. They needed to stop printing money so they would not spend too
much propping up connected companies and freezing out new entrants to
the marketplace. None of these things could realistically be stopped without
the others. Boettke concluded the real problem was: “Shock therapy has not
failed as much as it has not been tried.”[570]
The obvious issue here is that President Clinton was a center-left, neo-
liberal Democrat. What he called “free markets and democracy” meant
America’s extremely mixed economy circa 1993–2001[571]—Francis
Fukuyama’s End of History. It was the same for the Harvard Boys. They
were market-oriented, but not libertarian enough. Of course, the attitudes of
Yeltsin and his Russian partners and planners often made things even
worse.

1993 Coup

Clinton, Gore and the economists’ preference for dealing with Viktor
Chernomyrdin, Anatoly Chubais and Boris Yeltsin helped to ensure their
power at the expense of the parliament. Rule would continue to be by
decree and not law.[572]
While Western readers may prefer to believe that responsibility for
these horrible choices belonged to the Russians alone, in fact Bill Clinton
and his government played a major role, including in the constitutional
crisis that led to Yeltsin’s attack on the parliament in 1993. In December
1992, the parliament, which had been elected in 1990 and was full of
Communist opponents of Yeltsin, removed Deputy Prime Minister Gaidar.
In what reporter Jonathan Steele called “an extraordinary piece of arm-
twisting which might have caused an explosion of resistance in a more
established parliament,” the U.S. then threatened to withhold a $24 billion
loan package unless Gaidar remained in his position.[573] Yeltsin then
granted himself new emergency powers, leading the parliament to attempt
to impeach him, which failed. In September, he tried to reinstate Gaidar as
deputy prime minister. After the parliament rejected his appointment,
Yeltsin attempted to dissolve the body.[574]
The Constitutional Court ruled he was out of order, after which the
parliament again attempted to impeach the president. They declared that the
vice president, Aleksander Rutskoy, would take Yeltsin’s place.[575] On
October 4, Yeltsin responded by laying siege to the Russian White House
(again, their parliament building) and eventually deployed the army to
attack with tanks and troops.[576] At least 187 people were killed, possibly
as many as 2,000.[577] Yeltsin declared victory over the “Communist-
fascist” plot and abolished the parliament and Constitutional Court, as well
as 88 smaller councils across the country.[578] The Clinton administration
heartily endorsed his actions.[579]
President Yeltsin was able to push through a new constitution that
December, one which granted the presidency far more power and replaced
the parliament with a new two-chamber body, with the lower house named
the “Duma” after the old legislature under Tsar Nicholas II. Still, the
opposition Communist and nationalist parties did well in the concurrent
snap elections. But Gore’s group still refused to engage with the legislators
to encourage them to pass laws to create the basis for a capitalist system. If
things were not going their way in the new parliament, they would just go
around it too. The Democrats’ views on executive power had been summed
up in another context by Clinton White House aide Paul Begala: “Stroke of
the pen, law of the land. Kind of cool.”[580] Dealing with the pushover
Yeltsin and having him decree whatever they wanted was much easier than
engaging with the rabble.
As the diplomat Thomas Graham wrote, they were happy to see that
the new constitution granted broad emergency powers to the president to
rule by decree. “Again, people were thinking in practical terms, how do we
move this process forward? And we decided that we could focus on the
executive branch, we could work with reformers, we could develop the
legislation.” However, he said, “If that couldn’t be passed by the Duma
because of Duma resistance, then Yeltsin could sign a decree, and that
would be sufficient to unleash the process.” He added that because they
worked so hard to emphasize the economic transition compared to the
democratic one, and since the former turned out to be a corrupt disaster,
“many Russians drew the conclusion over time that this was, indeed, the
intended result of American policy.”[581] After all, HIID’s general director
Jonathan Hay and his staff wrote many of the decrees themselves.[582]

E. Wayne Merry

E. Wayne Merry, chief political analyst at the U.S. Embassy from 1990 to
1994, elaborated on the claim that the United States under President Clinton
worked hard to destroy Russian democracy.[583] He explained how the real
fear and desperation of the Russian working class after the disaster of
Yeltsin’s economic policies had led to his faction’s defeat in the
Parliamentary elections of 1993, and surprising support for the “Liberal
Democratic Party” of notorious right-wing nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky
—who blamed deliberate American sabotage for Russia’s economic woes.
[584] He then described the decision made by the Clinton administration
that the expressed will of the people would have to be further suppressed.
Even though, as Merry put it, “the people have spoken” in “the most
legitimate national demonstration of popular preference that had ever been
held in Russia in a thousand years . . . since from Washington’s point of
view the wrong guys won.” The president decided they should tell the
Russians, “Let’s basically ignore the election and get on with the program.”
Merry said that decision “created the basis for really the next two years in
which American policy was to help create parallel governmental structures
directly under the Kremlin to conduct policies that would not be
accountable to the national legislature in any way.” He compared the new
American-inspired system directly to the way the Russian government and
economy had worked under Soviet Communism, with official and then
parallel structures implementing the actual policies. Merry worried that
“there was a huge cost on the long-term development of rule of law and
constitutional government in Russia for making that choice.”[585]
Regarding Vice President Gore and the U.S. government’s ties with
Chernomyrdin—the Communist bureaucrat-turned-billionaire, oligarch and
gangster—Merry said, “I think our very close association with the
government of Viktor Chernomyrdin did us very great harm in terms of the
legitimacy we had in . . . Russian public opinion,” since everyone knew he
was a world-class crook. The people understood Gore’s relationship with
the man to mean that “the Americans were basically interested in dealing
with people in power in order to serve American interests rather than a
commitment to the long-term democratic development of Russia.”
Merry says that inside the U.S. government there was a contest for
influence between business interests and the Russia hands, and argued then
in a “dissent channel” cable at the State Department that America’s focus on
transforming their economic system was undermining the far more
important goal of keeping a positive relationship with the country in the
future. He foresaw that “we would so alienate the Russian electorate, the
Russian political elite, that it would be impossible for us then to cooperate
with them on the world stage,” adding this was “a reversal of real American
priorities.”
Again, Merry was chief political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in
Moscow at the time. In 2000, he said that “the United States played an
important role and we created a virtual open shop for thievery at a national
level and for capital flight in terms of hundreds of billions of dollars, and
the raping of natural resources and industries on a scale which I doubt has
ever taken place in human history.” Again, it was there not here, and every
Russian who was involved in this corruption is responsible for what they
have done, but the U.S. government and its agents had not stayed out of it.
As Merry said, “I think our policies had a great deal to do with creating the
oligarchs.” Contrary to what he called the “recent tendency by the
spokesmen from the IMF, from the U.S. Treasury to claim that this was
really all things Russia did to itself.” But, he said, the Treasury and IMF had
played an important part in deciding “what kinds of economic policies
would be created, what kind of winners and losers there would be,”
referring to the oligarchs who emerged from the wreckage as kings. “The
idea that we in the West, we Americans or the international financial
institutions or some of the big European financial institutions have clean
hands in this matter,” Merry said, “I think, is simply wrong.”[586]

Yabloko

A report issued by the Cox Committee, chaired by Republican Rep. Chris

Cox, complained about this neglect of Russia’s legislature and the
administration’s reasoning that the Communist Party was still such a major
force there, but ignoring other potential alternatives to Yeltsin’s corrupt
crew, such as the Yabloko party, led by Grigory Yavlinsky. This was
because, they concluded, “recognizing that a democratic party could oppose
policies of the Yeltsin government would have called into question the
administration’s embrace of both Yeltsin and Chernomyrdin as the
personifications of Russian democracy” and the administration’s “repeated
assertions that it had no choice in its Russia policy except to depend
exclusively on Yeltsin.”[587]
Williamson explained that by pouring hundreds of millions of dollars
into the Harvard Boys’ favored Gaidar-Chubais faction, “[c]redible and
capable people, classical liberals like Larisa Piyasheva, Grigory Yavlinsky,
Boris Fyodorov and democratic socialists like Boris Kagarlitsky, were
simply shouted down by American money.”[588]
Graham admitted that U.S. officials deliberately ignored the corruption
of Chubais and his cronies, preferring to pretend it was the businessmen
who were corrupt, not their favored supposed technocrats. It was too late to
admit it because “by then, we had become increasingly wedded to Chubais
and his group of reformers as the agents of change in Russia.”[589]

Davos Deal

In 1996, Boris Yeltsin, the drunken puppet of the oligarchs, had an approval
rating of 6 percent after the previous five years of economic catastrophe.
[590] It looked like Gennady Zyuganov—the Communist—might win the
election of July 1996. At that year’s Global Economic Forum meeting in
Davos, Switzerland, Hungarian-American international financier George
Soros met with a small group of Russian oligarchs who had come out on
top in the voucher scam and warned them that Yeltsin was sure to lose.
“Boys, your time is up,” he reportedly said. Soros himself confirmed this
story, but disavowed all responsibility.[591] So the oligarchs made a pact to
support Yeltsin’s reelection campaign, in exchange for the creation of
another major fraud on the Russian people, loans-for-shares.[592] Chubais
was made campaign manager and received a significant payoff.[593] The
Yeltsin team ultimately spent a billion dollars on a massive propaganda
campaign, maybe two.[594]

Collusion

President Clinton also sent an army of consultants and others to finance and
run Yeltsin’s campaign for him, while the oligarchs who owned Russia’s
television, radio stations and newspapers did their part to make sure he
won, arranging billions of dollars in last-minute loans for passing out
bribes, a massive propaganda operation and sophisticated ballot-box
stuffing campaign to secure Yeltsin’s reelection.[595] The Clinton
administration pressured the OSCE election monitors to stay silent about
the fraud.[596] They again promised to stop talking about NATO expansion
until the next year, since Yeltsin’s inability to prevent it hurt him politically.
[597] The IMF pumped in a $10.2 billion loan in March 1996 “that
provided liquidity not only for the Russian central government but for the
Yeltsin campaign,” according to the Cox Committee.[598]
Time magazine later ran a cover story boasting about their intervention
called “Yanks to the Rescue.” They said a “crucial reason” for Yeltsin’s
success in the election was that “[f]or four months, a group of American
political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin’s
campaign.” The director of Intercapital Trust, Felix Braynin, told Time that
“[s]ecrecy was paramount. Everyone realized that if the Communists knew
about this before the election, they would attack Yeltsin as an American
tool. We badly needed the team, but having them was a big risk.”[599]
The Los Angeles Times went with “Americans Claim Role in Yeltsin
Win.” George Gorton, who worked on Pete Wilson’s 1994 campaign for
California governor, said, “I don’t have candidates generally who are as
responsive as Boris Yeltsin.” They worked in secrecy in an expensive hotel
downtown for six weeks before finally venturing out to help conduct focus
groups with Russian voters.[600] Richard Dresner, a political consultant
from New York, said, “We actually tested the two in polls and focus groups.
More than 60 percent of the electorate believed Yeltsin was corrupt; more
than 65 percent believed he had wrecked the economy. We were in a deep,
deep hole.”[601]
Clinton got his political adviser Dick Morris to help. They poured in
millions of dollars to arrange for in-depth polling, focus groups and
propaganda campaigns, including putting pressure on state TV to soften
their attacks against the president’s record. They even made a movie about
it called Spinning Boris with Jeff Goldblum. Remember how badly
Americans reacted to accusations of Russian meddling in our election in
2016.[602] Imagine how they must have felt when the Americans were so
open about their successful intervention in Russia’s election that they even
made a Hollywood movie gloating about it.
 Campaign manager Chubais had made a smart deal whereby the
oligarchs would give the government back some of its money through
auctions, but the controlling stakes would not be handed over to them until
after the 1996 election, thus guaranteeing their loyalty.[603] Oligarch and
gangster Boris Berezovsky, who by then had seized power over Russia’s
all-important Channel 1 television network, boasted, “We and the group
of . . . [Russian media mogul Vladimir] Gusinsky were the first who
realized how the mass media could assist the different steps we wanted to
take.”[604]
Thomas Graham explained the U.S. Embassy’s thinking at the time
was that once they got Yeltsin reelected, problems of corruption and
property rights would all get worked out later. “The problem ultimately is
that we never got to that stage,” he said.
Donald Jensen, second secretary at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow from
1993 to 1995, admitted they would just smear all opponents as wanting to
return to Soviet slavery: “The choice was always black or white. The choice
was always reform or going back to the Soviet past and that I think was
over simplified, did not reflect what was going on in Russia.”[605]
The conservative Cox Committee report denounced this entire scam,
writing that the Clinton administration rationalized its intervention in the
election in the name of defeating the Communist. “But opinion polls show
that both General Alexander Lebed and Yabloko’s Grigory Yavlinsky were
also credible candidates at the time,” they wrote. “Zyuganov was hardly the
exclusive alternative to Yeltsin, who had single-digit approval ratings at the
beginning of the year.”[606] Amazingly, Gen. Alexander Lebed had
actually been brought in to split the vote,[607] and said the Communist
Party candidate, Zyuganov, was also a ringer in the election. Their groups
were secretly backed by the Yeltsin government as well, and did not really
try to seek victory in the race.[608]
Evidently, all rigging aside, Yeltsin’s men apparently did have to just
outright steal the election too. There were widespread reports of ballot-box
stuffing and fraud across the country, especially in Chechnya.[609]
The deed was done. Berezovsky admitted, “It is no secret that Russian
businessmen played the decisive role in President Yeltsin’s victory. It was a
battle for our blood interests.”[610]

The Payoff

As demanded by the billionaires, Yeltsin appointed nickel oligarch Vladimir

Potanin as minister of the economy and deputy prime minister, and the
thievery only grew.[611]
Alexander Lifshitz, the new finance minister, later told journalist
Alexander Gentelev he was summoned to a meeting with the oligarchs.
They told him, “We brought Yeltsin to power. The country belongs to us
and you’ll do what we tell you to.” He asked them, “What is it you want
from me?” He said, “They gave me a list of their demands, which included
consultation with them about all decisions, the appointment of ministry
personnel only with their consent and so on.” He says he then asked what
would happen if he did not do as instructed. They answered, “You’ll no
longer be a minister.”[612]
 Boris Berezovsky was a powerful gangster and oligarch, winner of the
Great Mob War of 1993–1994[613] and owner of ORT TV, Sibneft oil,
Aeroflot airlines and the Logovaz auto dealership cartel. After paying
Yeltsin millions for his second book, he became the highest-ranking
oligarch in the Kremlin, “a favorite of the president’s family,” in the words
of Yeltsin right-hand man Gen. Alexander Korzhakov.[614] Gen. Lebed, the
ringer the oligarchs had brought in to split the anti-Yeltsin vote,[615] later
explained the reasons behind the seemingly odd decision of Berezovsky to
abandon his billion-dollar businesses to go work as deputy secretary of the
Kremlin’s Security Council. “One was to wipe the slate clean of earlier
unsavory businesses, and the other was to create the conditions for new
ventures like the oil pipeline through the Caspian and Chechnya, which
demanded a huge investment.” He told the story of being accosted by
Berezovsky for negotiating a settlement to end the First Chechen War in
1996, which he said threatened his business interests.[616]
Once the cabal was in place, they implemented the loans-for-shares
scam, offering stock in 84 of the 286 most important state-owned industries
as collateral for bank loans to the national government, and often far more
collateral at stake than the loan would justify. But the deal said that if the
government could not pay back the loan, the banks would have the right to
auction off the shares—to themselves and their friends. When the
government defaulted, they seized control of massive industries at huge
discounts.
Oneksimbank, owned by Potanin, one of the architects of the loans-for-
shares scheme, bought 38 percent of Norilsk Nickel, which had $1.2 billion
in profits in 1995 alone, for $170.1 million in a loans-for-shares auction
even though a competing bank bid twice as much. “In the end, shares in
twelve companies described as ‘the crown jewels of Soviet industry’ were
sold off,” the Cox report said. “The firms included not only Norilsk Nickel,
but also the massive oil companies Sibneft, Yukos, and Sidanko and other
key enterprises.”[617] The banks that financed these sweetheart deals
themselves got all their money for free from the Russian central bank in the
first place since it essentially paid them to borrow and loan money with
negative real interest rates. They bought these companies, but the people
paid for them.[618]
Boris Fyodorov, former Russian finance minister from 1993 to 1994,
admitted this was simply “stealing.” He said, “Loans For Shares unleashed
a wave of corruption like never before, and the West, especially IMF, kept
quiet.”[619] According to Donald Jensen, “They were essentially giving
them a cut rate . . . initially as collateral for loans to the government, which
was badly in need of money. But, of course, a lot of us knew at the time that
they would be allowed to keep them.”[620]
Since the likes of Berezovsky, his partner Roman Abramovich and
Yukos’s Mikhail Khodorkovsky—gangsters, not real businessmen—seized
control of these firms for a song, they put almost nothing back into them,
instead stripping them of their productive capacity and moving the money
out of the country.[621]
Just before the election, Yeltsin had another heart attack and was
essentially absent from the presidency for most of the following year. So
Chubais and the billionaires took over and grabbed what they wanted.[622]
 In 1996, then-journalist Chrystia Freeland reported in the Financial
Times that seven businessmen were meeting weekly and working directly
with Chubais, who had been made Yeltsin’s chief of staff. “Its members
portray themselves quite openly as the main force shaping Kremlin policy,”
and boasted that the small group itself controlled half of the Russian
economy, she wrote. They took credit for Yeltsin’s victory after financing
his campaign and pressure on Lebed to endorse Yeltsin in the second round
of voting, and bragged about their growing media cartel.[623]
Berezovsky later told journalist Alexander Gentelev, “The scale of
corruption in Russia matched the scale of change. No more, no less. A state
official could determine with one signature what belonged to whom.”
Berezovsky continued, “I’ve never denied that the most profitable
investment for a wealthy person in Russia is an investment in politics. I’ve
never tried to pass myself off as [having] altruistic motives.”[624] Other
powerful oligarchs included Mikhail Chernoy (aluminum), Leonid Nevzlin
(oil), Alexander Smolensky (banking) and Roman Abramovich
(Berezovsky’s former partner and owner of the Sibneft oil company).
Underground black markets had thrived for years during communism
as the only way to acquire many important goods, especially for connected
bureaucrats. So when the USSR fell apart, these networks of gangsters and
mid-level pencil pushers were in position to guarantee maximum
corruption. One Moscow prosecutor complained, “The main way the mafia
penetrates into the economy is via the bureaucrats. They are our main
enemy. The mafiosi are only the second enemy.”[625]
 Jensen wrote up a 10-page memo that named the guilty, but the other
diplomats at the embassy prevented him from sending it back to
Washington.[626] He later said this was only because if their policies had
helped to wreck Russia, then that would mean they were wrong and what
they had done was wrong. They simply refused to hear it.[627]
In 1997, they held another round of loans-for-shares auctions just as
corrupt as the first. They deliberately ran the companies they already
controlled to the point of bankruptcy, excluded competition from the
auctions and so on. Berezovsky won control of the rest of Sibneft oil for a
bargain while sitting as deputy secretary of the Security Council.
“Berezovsky . . . is not satisfied with stealing,” Lebed told Klebnikov. “He
wants everybody to see he is stealing with impunity.”[628]

The Money Plane

In 1995, investigative reporter Robert I. Friedman discovered that Republic

National Bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve were shipping $100 million in
new untraceable notes per day to Russia, $40 billion worth at least, in a
money laundering operation for Russian gangsters who would then buy the
dollars with rubles from their various criminal enterprises. They used this
money to consolidate their criminal empires and buy up property across the
West.
Yet, as a New York State regulator explained, “at least part of the
federal government sees nothing wrong with it.” When New York
investigators took the issue to the FBI and CIA, they were told, “Yeah it
looks like we’ve got a potential problem here, but you know what? It’s not
our problem.” The Fed said to ask Republic Bank, which replied that they
did not know anything about money laundering. The Fed also said this was
a great way to prop up the ruble and help Russia join the global free market.
[629]

The Crash of ’98

In the crash of August 17, 1998, Russia defaulted on its national debt,
causing another massive devaluation of the ruble. Prices rose by 36 percent
in a week. That year, the Russian stock market lost 90 percent of its value.
The country was devastated more, again, with an even worse
unemployment and healthcare crisis than before. Ben Aris, reporter for the
Telegraph at the time, wrote, “It’s hard to exaggerate the scale and shock of
the 1998 crash. The whole Russian economy fell to pieces at a stroke. . . .
The crisis led to the collapse of the entire top tier of the country’s largest
private banks.” Insured deposits still lost a third to a half of their value to
inflation. “Pensioners’ life savings were wiped out again.”[630]
The Cox Committee credibly accused the previous regime of massive
IMF loans for preventing the earlier reforms that would have avoided the
collapse. They had given them $6.8 billion in April 1995, a $10.2 billion
loan in 1996 and provided $4.8 billion more on July 20, 1998, just before
the crash. A dozen oligarch-owned banks were saved at U.S. taxpayers’
expense, while everyone else was hung out to dry.[631]
Chubais admitted to lying to the IMF in an interview with
Berezovsky’s outlet Kommersant: “In such situations, the authorities have
to do it. We ought to. The financial institutions understand, despite the fact
that we conned them out of $20 billion, that we had no other way out.”[632]
He later added, “We ripped them off.”[633] And “conned” is right. As
journalist Richard Paddock showed, the $4.8 billion was simply handed
over to Russian bankers who first moved it to the Isle of Jersey, off the
northern coast of France,[634] then into their own private Swiss bank
accounts.[635] Paddock wrote, “Sometimes, the Central Bank spent $500
million in a single day to buy unwanted rubles—in effect subsidizing banks
and investors seeking to unload Russian currency.” Corruption
investigations in New York showed that at least $7 billion of this money
was simply stolen by Russian politicians, businessmen and gangsters.[636]
The Times said it was as much as $10 billion.[637]
When the crash came, hundreds of billions of dollars were destroyed.
The population again got soaked.[638] Thomas Graham later said that many
Russians “drew the conclusion that, in fact, the West had achieved what it
wanted, which was the weakening of the Russian state.”

Stop, Thief!

In the end, even the U.S. Justice Department decided their opportunity to
prosecute was too good to pass up. They accused Larry Summers’s protégé
Andrei Shleifer and his assistant Jonathan Hay of a conspiracy to defraud
the U.S. government and sued Harvard for breach of contract, but only
because of Shleifer and his wife’s personal corruption and profiteering
during it all, in which Hay was involved. They settled for $31 million, the
largest lawsuit payout in Harvard’s history.[639]
Excess Deaths

Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin’s men hit Russia like Stalin and the NKVD.
[640] It is hard to believe, but the numbers do not lie. As Boettke reported
in 1999, “From the 1960s to the 1980s life expectancy had declined from 67
to 62 for men, [and] since 1992 the decline has continued so that life
expectancy for a Russian male is now in the mid- to upper-50s.”[641]
Steven Rosefielde, professor of comparative economic systems at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, estimated 3.4 million
premature Russian deaths between 1990 and 1998.[642] That does not
count all the hardship from the second major economic crash that hit in
August 1998.
Swedish journalist Dan Josefsson recounted that “[b]etween 1991 and
1997, Russian GNP—i.e., the value of all goods and services that Russia
produces—went down 83 percent. Agrarian production decreased 63
percent. Investment decreased 92 percent.” He added, “70,000 factories
were closed down. This led to Russia producing 88 percent fewer tractors,
76 percent fewer washing machines, 77 percent less cotton fabric, 78
percent fewer TV sets—the list is endless.” Thirteen million people had lost
their jobs, the rest lost half their purchasing power. Life expectancy for men
had fallen by six years.[643] The USSR had been a centrally planned
monstrosity with malinvestments and distorted prices and systems beyond
imagination. The correction to natural price structures in a genuinely free
market was destined to be difficult. But the U.S. not only did not help them,
but actively made it worse.
 Forbes’s Paul Klebnikov concluded, “Both the Yeltsin clan and the
crony capitalists remained in power, but they presided over a bankrupt state
and an impoverished population.” In the end, he wrote, “[t]he young
democrats were supposed to clean up Russia, devise a proper legal system
and foster a market economy. Instead they presided over one of the most
corrupt regimes in history.”[644] On the demographic collapse, he wrote,
“Between 1990 and 1994 male mortality rates rose 53 percent, female
mortality rates 27 percent, male life expectancy plunged from an already
low level of 64 years in 1990 to 58 in 1994.” That meant that “men in Egypt
Indonesia or Paraguay could now expect longer lives than men in Russia. In
the same brief period, female life expectancy fell from 74 to 71. The world
had seldom seen such a decline in peacetime.”[645]
Journalist and historian David Satter wrote in the Journal, “In the
period from 1992 to 1998, the Russian gross domestic product fell by half.
This had not happened even under Nazi occupation.” He said that
“[b]etween 1992 and 1994, the rise in the death rate in Russia was so
dramatic that Western demographers did not believe the figures. The toll
from murder, suicide, heart attacks and accidents gave Russia the death rate
of a country at war.” The excess death rate had been determined to be
“between five and six million persons.”[646]
Oxford Professor Christopher Davis similarly noted that “[t]he crude
mortality rate rose from 11.2 deaths per 1,000 in 1990 to a peak of 15.7 in
1994, declined to 13.6 in 1998, and then rose to 15.3 in 2000.”[647]
Nobody knows how much money was stolen, but it was in the
hundreds of billions of dollars, much of it siphoned out of the Russian
economy into foreign bank accounts as regular Russian people were
literally starving to death and dying from a lack of basic necessities.
Another almost $30 billion in IMF loans disappeared along with it.[648]
Murder, suicides, a broken healthcare and pension system, massive
alcoholism and drug abuse—Yeltsin’s hyperinflation and gangster state
destroyed Russia.[649] Just imagine, the fall of a Communist regime and
Marxist economy leading to the lowering of life expectancy by more than
six years. That was the reality of the result of the corruption and bad faith of
the neo-liberal economic advisers Bill Clinton sent to Russia, their bosses
back home and the “family” of criminals they supported in power.
Former Premier Gorbachev lamented, “Shock therapy did irreparable
harm. Most dangerous are the social consequences—the sharp drop in
standards of living, the enormous inequality of incomes, the decline in life
expectancy—not to mention impoverishment of education, science and
culture.”[650]

Paradise Lost

By the end of the century, American-style freedom had been discredited in

Russia. Instead of putting the long-term interests of humanity first, the Bush
and Clinton administrations kicked the Russians while they were down,
ruining them economically and humiliating them in foreign policy.
Journalist Mark MacKinnon wrote that by the turn of the century, “Russians
had come to see the words ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ as synonyms for
poverty and helplessness.”[651] Vitaly Tretyakov, an old journalist from the
reformist Moscow News back in the Gorbachev days, who had founded
Nezavisimaya Gazeta (Independent Newspaper), complained to
MacKinnon: “‘Democracy’ now means the same thing as ‘corruption.’
‘Liberal’ means ‘thief,’ and ‘friendly toward the West,’ means ‘robber of the
country.’”[652]
Anne Williamson’s September 1999 congressional testimony explained
the full scale of the tragedy and how they got away with it, from
hyperinflation to the endless corruption of voucher privatization and loans-
for-shares. She told them that a better way to transform the Russian
economy to capitalism was available at the time, designed by Larisa
Piasheva and based on the free market principles of the Austrian school. But
the Russian capitalists never had a chance against the American liberals.
“[W]here, in a land in which today more of the people die each year than
are born, lies the gain?” Williamson asked. “History’s yardstick will
measure out the answer, and I suspect it will not suit us.”[653]

The Founding Act

Trust Me

Though he immediately contradicted himself, then-Senator Joe Biden, in a

speech at the Atlantic Council in 1996, said that no one in Russia believed
the “first round” of NATO “enlargement” posed a threat to them. This was
the case, he said, because of NATO’s “Three Nos”: The Alliance had “no
reason, intention or plan, in the current and foreseeable security
environment, permanently to station nuclear weapons or substantial combat
forces of current members on the territory of new member states.”
 Biden then related the story of Communist opposition leader Gennady
Zyuganov and Gen. Lebed telling him how much they and everyone else
actually opposed NATO expansion because “it’s ‘not in their security
interest,’ and on and on, and ‘if you do that, then we may have to look to
China.’” He says he then mocked them and replied: “Good luck. If that
doesn’t work, try Iran.” He continued, “And they know. I knew they knew;
everybody knows that is not an option. And everyone knows, every one of
those leaders acknowledges and needs—and they resent it—but they need
to look west.”[654] Twenty-six years later, it would be President Biden who
oversaw Russia’s major break with the West and turn toward China.[655]
In order to attempt to allay the Russians’ fears once expansion began,
the Clinton administration tried to placate them with the Russia-NATO
Founding Act of 1997, and putting that pledge in writing; well, not really. It
would be “politically,” but not legally, binding.[656] The New York Times
reported that the Americans proposed a “charter.” The Russians countered
that they would like a signed “agreement.” The result was “a legally non-
binding agreement at the highest political level.” In it the alliance assured
the Russians they would not deploy nuclear weapons or “substantial”
numbers of foreign troops on the new NATO nations’ territory.[657]
The Founding Act said, in part, that “NATO will carry out its collective
defense and other missions through interoperability, integration and
capability for reinforcement,” rather than stationing troops in the east.
Though the act created the NATO-Russia Council, they openly stated that
“[w]hile Russia will work closely with NATO, it will not work within
NATO. The Act makes clear that Russia has no veto over alliance decisions
and NATO retains the right to act independently when it so chooses.”[658]
But the Yeltsin government had been led to believe otherwise during
the negotiations. Russia expert Dimitri Simes told the Congress, “If the
Russian interpretation had been followed, Moscow would have gained a de
facto veto over NATO actions.” But the Clinton administration’s
interpretation was followed, making it “inevitable that Russia would feel
misled by false promises of a genuine role in NATO deliberations.”[659]
The NATO-Russia Council was always a joke. The Americans were
simply not willing to share power with their vanquished enemy. Russia is
just too big and too independent to be a partner. They would have a say. As
Strobe Talbott explained to Secretary Albright, “all we’re really promising
them is monthly meetings.”
Albright emphasized to the U.S. Senate, “I can assure you that the
Permanent Joint Council will never be used to make decisions on NATO
doctrine, strategy, or readiness. The North Atlantic Council is NATO’s
supreme decision-making body, and it is sacrosanct.” She added, “Russia
will not play a part in the NAC or NATO decision making and it will never
have a veto over NATO policy. Any discussion with Russia of NATO
doctrine will be for explanatory, not decision making, purposes.”[660]
Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anthony Lake also emphasized the lack of
influence the Russians would have under the new agreement in a piece in
the Times.[661]
But as Alexey Pushkov had warned, “What Russia seeks is an
arrangement that would assure its full participation in European affairs,
rather than its isolation from, or marginalization in, Europe. This is the crux
of the matter.” Russia, unlike the United States, is actually in Europe, after
all. He cited the Americans’ promises not to expand NATO eastward, but
also said that when the USSR withdrew from the Warsaw Pact states,
“Moscow was privately assured by their leaders that these states would not
seek membership in NATO. All of these promises lay broken three years
later.”[662]
Declassified documents show that in Helsinki in March 1997, Yeltsin
told Clinton, “Our position has not changed. It remains a mistake for NATO
to move eastward. But I need to take steps to alleviate the negative
consequences of this for Russia. I am prepared to enter into an agreement
with NATO, not because I want to but because it is a forced step. There is
no other solution for today.” Still, he insisted, “Decisions by NATO are not
to be taken without taking into account the concerns or opinions of Russia.
Also, nuclear and conventional arms cannot move eastward into new
members to the borders of Russia, thus creating a new cordon sanitaire.”
He also asked Clinton for a “gentlemen’s agreement” that the West would
not integrate the former Soviet republics, “especially Ukraine,” since, “If
you get them involved, it will create difficulties in our talks with Ukraine on
a number of issues.” But Clinton refused, again, like H.W. Bush claiming
his intent to “redirect” NATO’s mission to a more political, rather than
military role, and arguing that if he accepted any limits, that would be a
tacit admission that the purpose was to contain Russia, when he again
disingenuously claimed he was attempting to build an “integrated,
undivided Europe.” That would undermine the PfP, he said, even promising
to “leave open the possibility of Russia in NATO.”[663]
In a 1997 interview with Madeleine Albright, NBC News’s Katie
Couric asked, “If this new NATO is a collective security organization
designed to promote peace and friendship among the member nations, why
not include Russia as a full-fledged member?” Albright answered,
disingenuously, that if they made the proper reforms, “it is open for Russia,
if Russia wants to join and it is ready to join.” Perhaps inferring that this
was a distant possibility, Couric asked about the widely discussed concern
that expansion could cause a “nationalist backlash in Russia.” Albright
responded, “We don’t see that,” citing the recently signed Founding Act that
was supposed to allow them “to be part of a European system. So we see it
as being not outside and isolated but as a part of the international
community.”[664]
But Albright knew what she was doing. Twelve years later, in 2009,
she said, “To [the Russians], NATO’s very existence served as an
unwelcome reminder of the Cold War. From what I’ve been able to observe
in the past decade, this mindset has not changed.”[665] In her memoir, she
wrote, “Yeltsin and his countrymen were strongly opposed to enlargement,
seeing it as a strategy for exploiting their vulnerability and moving Europe’s
dividing line to the east, leaving them isolated.”[666] She did it anyway.
When in 2021 Putin demanded the U.S. abide by the 1997 agreement
in his proposed new treaty in the lead-up to war, particularly the promises
about the deployment of Western weapons in the new Eastern NATO
member nations’ territory, this was treated by the media and its experts to
have been an insane overreach, as though he was bringing up some ancient
agreement from 1897 instead.[667] As the Washington Post put it in
January 2022, “Parts of the texts were so unrealistic that many Western
lawmakers dismissed the Russian approach as unserious. Among other
things,” they said, “Russia demanded the United States and its Western
European military allies agree not to put weapons or forces in any of the
former Warsaw Pact countries that are now members of NATO.”[668]
The Founding Act was never worth the paper it was printed on. It
might as well have been a solemn vow from H.W. Bush and James Baker.
President Clinton himself mocked the Russians for believing him. “What
the Russians get out of this great deal we’re offering them is a chance to sit
in the same room with NATO and join us whenever we all agree to
something, but they don’t have any ability to stop us from doing something
that they don’t agree with.” Clinton continued, “And for their second big
benefit, they get our promise that we’re not going to put our military stuff
into their former allies who are now going to be our allies, unless we
happen to wake up one morning and decide to change our mind.”[669]
Some would prefer we forget all that and simply presume, as TV does,
that history began this morning and none of this matters. But that would be
foolish because it does matter, obviously very much.[670] Gen. Scowcroft
later told an interviewer, “They complained, but they acquiesced. And I
think I underestimated what it was really doing to Russian attitudes. I think
we all did. We were humiliating Russia, not intentionally, but nevertheless
that was the net result.”[671]

Messing With Ukraine

In July 1997, NATO and Ukraine signed the Charter on a Distinctive
Partnership, which promised to “develop relations” and “broaden and
strengthen their cooperation” with the Western alliance. Though they said
that “no state should pursue its security at the expense of that of another
state,” this evidently was a reference to Russia’s presumed wish to prevent
such association rather than any sort of recognition of their concerns. It also
promised the beginning of planning to work towards “NATO-Ukraine
military cooperation and interoperability” as well as military training under
the auspices of the PfP.[672]
In August, U.S. and Turkish warships held a week-long joint exercise
named “Sea Breeze 97,” which involved troops from Ukraine, Georgia,
Bulgaria, Romania, Turkey and the United States. Russian Defense Minister
Igor Sergeyev denounced the exercises, while deputies in the parliament
threatened to leave the PfP.[673] They were going to have the marines land
in Crimea to practice intervening in an ethnic conflict. The Los Angeles
Times reported that “the theoretical events were taken as a NATO warning
to the Kremlin of what would happen if it sought to recover Crimea.” This
caused an immediate reaction from the Russians, so the U.S. altered the
scenario to earthquake relief. Thousands of demonstrators still turned out to
protest “what they saw as a show of force against Russia.” The Times noted
that “what was intended to enhance Ukraine’s military preparedness may
actually hurt security by provoking new problems with Russia.”[674]
Yeltsin complained about this training in his meeting with Clinton in
March 1997, saying, “[Y]ou are conducting naval maneuvers near Crimea.
It is as if we were training people in Cuba. How would you feel? It is
unacceptable to us. We are not going out to seize Sevastopol.”[675]
In his book The Grand Chessboard, published that year, Zbigniew
Brzezinski explained that though Yeltsin would have no choice but to give
in on NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary and Romania in 1999, “[b]y
contrast Russia will find it incomparably harder to acquiesce in Ukraine’s
ascension to NATO, for to do so would be to acknowledge that Ukraine’s
destiny is no longer organically linked to Russia’s.” He continued, “[I]f
Ukraine is to survive as an independent state it will have to become part of
Central Europe rather than Eurasia, and if it is to be part of Central Europe
then it will have to partake fully of Central Europe’s links to NATO and the
European Union.” But Brzezinski did not explain why neutrality towards
Europe and Russia would not suffice to protect Ukraine’s independence and
national interests. He simply insisted this was so, and said that if the cost of
his policy was to push Russia further away, that would just be too bad.
“Russia’s acceptance of these links would then define Russia’s own
decision to also truly be a part of Europe. Russia’s refusal would be
tantamount to the rejection of Europe in favor of a solitary ‘Eurasian’
identity and existence,” he wrote.[676]

OceanofPDF.com
 Kosovo

Background

The southern Serbian province of Kosovo presented its own set of problems
and opportunities for U.S. and NATO intervention in 1999. The controversy
over majority ethnic Albanian and Muslim Kosovo had begun much earlier
in the 1980s, as Albanian separatists began a dirty war against local Serbs,
murdering people and desecrating Orthodox churches there with the goal of
breaking off what they called an “ethnically pure” Kosovo from Serbia and
joining in a new state with neighboring Albania.[677]
While Serbian civilization actually began in Kosovo, the Ottoman
Turks had driven out the majority of the Serbs in 1389 and ruled there for
more than 500 years until the First Balkan War of 1912, just before World
War I. The Albanian majority then expelled much of the Serbian population
with Italian assistance during World War II. After the war, Communist
dictator Josip Tito had refused to let the refugees return, leaving it a
supermajority Albanian Muslim state since.[678] Another 150,000–200,000
Serbs were forced out between 1961 and 1981.[679]
But while Albanians were 85 percent of the population, the other 15
percent—200,000 people—were Serbs and Montenegrins. The Communists
at first leaned toward the Serbs, but after the 1960s decided instead to favor
the Albanian population at their expense. With the austerity of the post-Tito
1980s, ethnic Albanian scapegoating of the Serb minority soon intensified,
followed by a brutal campaign of torture, murder and ethnic cleansing.[680]
Slobodan Milošević began his rise to power demagoguing against these
widespread and unpunished crimes and reasserting Serbian government
control over the province to put an end to the attacks.[681]
David Binder reported in 1987, “Slavic Orthodox churches have been
attacked, and flags have been torn down. Wells have been poisoned and
crops burned. Slavic boys have been knifed, and some young ethnic
Albanians have been told by their elders to rape Serbian girls.” Twenty
thousand Serbs had already been forced to flee to the north. Milošević
deposed the Serbian Communist Party secretary in the name of the
emergency.[682]
Throughout the 1990s, the Serbian-dominated government of
Yugoslavia then repressed the Albanian majority in response, including
torture and brutality at the hands of the police, purging them from
government jobs and promotion of Serbian over the Albanian language in
schools.[683] The Kosovar Albanians, led by the pacifist President Ibrahim
Rugova, embarked on a program of mass civil disobedience and non-
cooperation with the Yugoslav government and made their own,
democratically run shadow regime and social service network in its stead.
However, after the Kosovars’ exclusion from the Dayton Accords, Rugova’s
League for Democracy in Kosovo was weakened, helping lead to the rise of
the militant Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).[684]
Yugoslavia’s constitutional court rejected the Kosovar Albanians’ claim
to a constituent republic based on ethnic nationality. As author George
Szamuely explains, “Whether one considers this ruling fair or not, it was
nonetheless the decision of Yugoslavia’s highest court, the membership of
which was divided equally between the republics. It was not the diktat of
the Serbs.”[685]
The fight had stayed in the background through most of the 1990s, as
the rest of Yugoslavia was falling apart, but by 1998, real war was breaking
out. While the Serbian government was willing to negotiate autonomy up to
but not including secession, the Kosovar Albanians refused to negotiate at
all unless the talks were to be agreed beforehand to be “unconditional” and
under the auspices of international authorities.[686] According to English
Lord David Owen, who had been an EC negotiator during the Bosnia war,
they had decided years before that autonomy would not be good enough.
They were “ready to wait until they [could] join up with Albania.”[687]
Szamuely wrote, if the U.S. and its allies really meant to “intervene in a
genuinely evenhanded way . . . the West would have had to weigh Serbia’s
historical claims against the Albanians’ demographic claims.”[688] But they
did not want to do that.
To convince Congress that the security of Europe and the world was at
stake, Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Walter Slocombe told them
the fighting was likely to spread to Albania, Macedonia, Greece, Bulgaria
and Turkey if the U.S. and NATO did not get in there first.[689]

Illegal

On March 12, 1999, Poland, Hungary and Romania were officially admitted
to the supposedly purely defensive NATO alliance. Just 12 days later,
NATO launched a 78-day air war against Serbia to guarantee the
independence of Kosovo. That war—called “Operation Allied Force”—was
based on the outright lie that the Serbs had massacred 100,000 Kosovar
Albanian civilians and the threat that they were sure to obliterate the rest.
[690] In launching that war, Clinton sided with the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA or UCK for Ushtria Clirimtare e Kosove in Albanian), a
violent insurgent group, which had been founded by Communists and the
sons of the fascist militias supported by Italy in World War II,[691] though
by 1998 they were better described as heroin dealers[692] and bin Ladenite
terrorists.[693]
President Clinton bypassed the UN Security Council, where Russia had
inherited the USSR’s seat and veto power, and instead waged the war on his
own and NATO’s pretended authority. Clinton did not even bother to seek
authorization from Congress, much less an official declaration of war, as
required by the U.S. Constitution,[694] before launching the bombing
campaign. Where H.W. Bush began Iraq War I in 1991 to enforce UN
resolutions demanding the reversal of Iraq’s illegal invasion of the separate,
sovereign state of Kuwait,[695] and reluctantly obtained an “authorization”
from Congress,[696] Clinton was launching a war with no authority from
anyone[697] less than a decade later, choosing sides in a civil war wholly
within the borders of one nation, Serbia. The only license he had was the
U.S. military’s willingness to obey his illegal orders.[698] The war was also
completely contrary to the Badinter Commission’s rulings that the internal
borders of the former constituent republics of Yugoslavia were sacrosanct.
There was no such internal administrative border between Serbia and
Kosovo. So the West had previously held that the Kosovar Albanians could
not secede for the same reason the Bosnian and Croatian Serbs could not.
But since that most dire principle of just-now made-up international law
that had been worth a massive war a few years ago was now contrary to the
administration’s wishes, they just threw it out.[699]
The president’s pretended excuses amounted to a new “Clinton
doctrine,” which he described as: “Whether within or beyond the borders of
a country, if the world community has the power to stop it, we ought to stop
genocide and ethnic cleansing.”[700]
This was all fine according to the circular reasoning of the man who
ran the war, U.S. Army General Wesley Clark, then supreme allied
commander of NATO forces in Europe, who insisted that bombing another
nation’s armed forces without legal authorization does not count as an
illegal war, since, as he put it, “It wasn’t a war. There was no declaration of
war. It wasn’t legally a war. And we weren’t going in there to conquer
territory. It was simply one plank of the diplomatic strategy.”[701]
After the hawks failed to pass a belated authorization,[702] some
antiwar congressmen and senators tried to take the president to court,
accusing Clinton of violating the War Powers Resolution of 1973. The
courts kicked them right out, saying they had no standing to sue.[703]

Public Choice

Officials told the Washington Post that the war against Serbia was not only
the president’s “finest hour,” but his chance to personally make up for
avoiding the draft during Vietnam and for his generation to make up for not
having a great moral crusade to fight like World War II.[704]
 For the Brits’ part, Prime Minister Tony Blair explained that the war
was fought for the institutional interests of the Western alliance. If they had
lost, he said, “We would have dealt a devastating blow to the credibility of
NATO and the world would have been less safe as a result of that.”
John Norris, a former communications director for Strobe Talbott,
explained another motive for the war, which had nothing to do with saving
the Kosovars. “As nations throughout the region strove to reform their
economies, mitigate ethnic tensions, and broaden civil society, Belgrade
seemed to delight in continually moving in the opposite direction.” He said,
“It is a small wonder that NATO and Yugoslavia ended up on a collision
course. It was Yugoslavia’s resistance to the broader trends of political and
economic reform—not the plight of Kosovar Albanians—that best explains
NATO’s war.” Norris added, “Milošević’s repeated transgressions ran
directly counter to the vision of a Europe ‘whole and free,’ and challenged
the very value of NATO’s continued existence. . . . Failure would have cast
doubt on the future of NATO as an organization and deeply compromised
its ability to expand the community of democracies and open markets
eastward.”[705]
As then-Vice President Joe Biden said at a meeting with the Serbian
prime minister in 2016, “I have for the last three decades viewed Croatia
and all the rest of our neighbors—Kosovo, Montenegro, everyone in the
neighborhood—as an essential part of what I think is needed for a Europe
that is whole and free and united for the first time.”[706]
Just as they had done with Manuel Noriega in the 1989 war against
Panama,[707] Saddam Hussein in the 1991 war against Iraq[708] and David
Koresh in the 1993 FBI and military[709] attack on the Branch Davidians,
[710] the U.S. regime demonized the leader while writing the innocent
civilians around him out of the story entirely. Barbara Ehrenreich, author of
Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War, observed, “It’s the
one-man theory of the nation-state. And its effect is to eliminate both the
psychological impact of nationalism and the guilt produced by civilian
casualties since civilians don’t fully exist under this theory.”[711]
This is the same thing they later did in the case of Osama bin Laden in
Afghanistan,[712] Saddam Hussein again in Iraq War II,[713] Muammar
Gaddafi in Libya[714] and Bashar al-Assad in Syria,[715] where millions
ultimately paid the price for their sins, real and merely alleged. It is the
same way they discuss Vladimir Putin and Russia today.[716]

The Bin Ladenites

Speaking of Osama bin Laden, the U.S. certainly knew that the KLA was
supported by the terrorist and his al Qaeda group, which had declared war
on the United States in 1996, but was tied to attacks against Americans as
early as 1992.[717] Journalist Chris Deliso said President Clinton’s Balkans
interventions were a “gift” to out-of-work jihadis and stateless terrorist
forces, who found a safe haven in Bosnia and Kosovo.[718]
Back in 1996, just a year after the Bosnian conflict ended and three
years before the Kosovo War began, Yossef Bodansky wrote that the Saudis
and Bosnians had aimed to break off Kosovo from Serbia all along, with
Riyadh spending a million dollars on a base for the mujahideen there in
1993. He said they planned to commit terrorist attacks in the name of the
ethnic Albanians and to provoke a Serbian reaction, which the Izetbegović
government in Sarajevo hoped would “induce Western military intervention
against Yugoslavia itself.”[719]
The KLA were terrorists and drug dealers, and the Clinton
administration and their British counterparts knew it.[720] Hundreds of
“Arab Bosnian” terrorists who had stayed there after the last war began
streaming into Kosovo for the next one.[721] In February 1998, the KLA
had been dismissed by Ambassador Robert Gelbard, then-special
representative of the president and later the secretary of state for
implementation of the Dayton Peace Accords, as “without any questions, a
terrorist group.”[722] Jamie Rubin, a former adviser to Senator Joe
Biden[723]-turned-State Department spokesman, had denounced “terrorist
action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army” in March.[724] The same
month, British Foreign Minister Robin Cook told parliament, “We strongly
condemn the use of violence for political objectives, including the terrorism
of the self-styled Kosovo Liberation Army.”[725] Perhaps he had read Chris
Hedges’s piece in the New York Times about his “trek” embedded with the
KLA and meetings with its commanders from March 2. Hedges wrote that
“[i]n the last few months the rebels have overrun more than a dozen police
stations, carrying away scores of automatic weapons.” He added, “They
have attacked many police patrols and checkpoints and claim responsibility
for the assassinations of more than 50 Serbian policemen and officials, as
well as of ethnic Albanians suspected of collaborating with the Serbian
authorities.”[726]
 In February 1998, Secretary Albright removed the KLA from the State
Department’s official list of international terrorist groups.[727] Gelbard and
Holbrooke met with them in June while officials denigrated the position of
Kosovo’s pacifist president, Ibrahim Rugova.[728] Rubin “was also careful
not to refer to the KLA as a terrorist organization, reflecting the new
American view that it is ‘an insurgency,’” a senior administration official
told the Times.[729] But they were still terrorists. After al Qaeda’s attack on
the U.S. Embassies in Dar es Salam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya that
August, killing 224,[730] officials told the Post they were worried the
bombings were revenge for the CIA’s involvement in the violent arrest of
four of bin Laden’s men in Albania a few weeks before.[731] Deliso
explained that they had every reason to think so. Two days before the
bombings, a bin Ladenite newspaper in London had threatened to respond
to the arrests in a “language they will understand.” Deliso wrote that even
though the embassy bombings had obviously been planned earlier, their
reference to the arrested Albanians was revealing because “Al Qaeda had
always put great importance on symbolism, and, thus, in their minds at
least, there was a clear and immediate relationship between the street justice
their people got in Tirana and the street justice they handed out in Tanzania
and Kenya.”[732]
In November 1998, Fatos Klosi, the head of Albanian intelligence, told
the London Times that a joint operation run with the CIA had uncovered bin
Laden’s network operating inside Albania and was sending units into
Kosovo and throughout Europe. Seeming to confirm it, a French national
named Claude Kader, convicted of murder, admitted in court that he was a
member of bin Laden’s group in Albania. He said that bin Laden himself
had visited his fighters there. “Egyptians, Saudi Arabians, Algerians,
Tunisians, Sudanese and Kuwaitis—they come from several different
organisations,” Klosi told them.[733]
That was four months before Bill Clinton launched a massive NATO
air war on behalf of those same terrorists.

KLA Provocations

To get the war started, just as Bodansky had predicted three years before,
the KLA ambushed Serbian police patrols, killing cops in hit-and-run raids.
They were trying to provoke a reaction, and succeeded. KLA leader Hashim
Thaçi admitted to the BBC, “Any armed action we undertook would bring
retaliation against civilians. We knew we were endangering a great number
of civilian lives.”[734] Dugi Gorani, a Kosovar Albanian negotiator, told
the British news channel the KLA understood perfectly well that civilian
deaths were in their interest: “There was this foreign diplomat who once
told me, ‘Look, unless you pass the quota of five thousand deaths you’ll
never have anybody permanently present in Kosovo from the foreign
diplomacy.’”[735]
The KLA succeeded in provoking a response, a brutal massacre by
Serb forces of a KLA commander, Adem Jeshari, and 52 members of his
family at Prekaz in March 1998. This resulted in new recruitment gains for
the KLA.[736] However, that summer, Serb government forces took back
almost all of the territory the KLA had gained, which partially reinforced
the narrative of unmitigated Serbian violence, but also undermined the
narrative that the KLA was a viable fighting force worth supporting.[737]
In October, Holbrooke and Gen. Clark went to Serbia to demand a
ceasefire in Kosovo, at the threat of a bombing campaign by NATO, led by
the United States. Humiliated, Milošević nevertheless complied with the
American edicts, withdrawing his military forces, as verified by the OSCE
and UN.[738] But then the KLA used the one-sided ceasefire to stage a new
wave of attacks against Serb police.[739] Since the KLA was not a party to
the deal, only Serb forces were in violation when they responded to KLA
provocations.[740] The OSCE verification team was led by William Walker,
a former deputy assistant secretary of state and ambassador to El Salvador
during the Iran-Contra scandal, who had been credibly accused of
misleading Congress into believing that atrocities committed by U.S.-
backed death squads there were the work of the Communists.[741] His real
job was to stir up trouble.
As a Canadian military officer assigned to the verification team said,
Walker was part of a policy that “had vilified Slobodan Milošević,
demonized the Serbian Administration and in general was providing
diplomatic support to the UCK or KLA leadership.”[742] In a later meeting,
Clark and German General Klaus Naumann did promise to pressure the
KLA to cease their attacks and agreed that Serb forces would have to
reenter the province otherwise, but since this part of the deal was kept
secret, when Serb forces did return, it was spun by Washington and Brussels
as a massive violation by Belgrade, rather than the agreed-upon remedy for
the problem the former two had promised to solve.[743]
 The Kosovar city of Pec is the original home of Serbian Orthodox
Christianity, known as the “cradle of Serb identity” from the 7th century.
The population there was half Serb. The KLA began ambushing local Serbs,
including a group of unarmed young men drinking at a bar in December
1998, in order to provoke a response from the Serb government. Again, it
worked. Milošević cracked down with a massive raid that finally caused a
real refugee crisis. This then became the pretext for U.S. demands that Serb
forces withdraw from the province entirely. The Post said that U.S.
intelligence agencies were clear from the beginning that KLA strategy was
to “draw NATO into its fight for independence by provoking Serb forces
into further atrocities.” Their recent assassination of a small-town mayor
and the incident in Pec were making it difficult to convince the Europeans
that everything was Milošević’s fault.[744]
The BBC’s Allan Little obtained secret minutes of a meeting of the
North Atlantic Council, where OSCE chief Walker admitted the KLA was
“the main initiator of the violence” and said, “It has launched what appears
to be a deliberate campaign of provocation.” German General Naumann
told Little, “Ambassador Walker stated in the NAC that the majority of
violations were caused by the KLA.”[745] On Christmas Eve 1998, taking
advantage of the Serbian police’s withdrawal, the KLA seized an important
road between Belgrade and Pristina. The Yugoslav army then attacked
them, drawing Western condemnation.[746] Secretary Albright knew what
was going on. She later admitted in her memoir that the KLA “seemed
intent on provoking a massive Serb response so that international
intervention would be unavoidable.”[747]
Račak Massacre

It turned out the January 1999 Račak massacre, which had been Clinton’s
pretext for starting the war[748]—Albright called it a “galvanizing
event”[749]—was as fake as the rest of the claimed “genocide” there.[750]
Any American or British skepticism toward the KLA due to their
provocative tactics was erased and reversed by this lie.[751]
In a statement from the Oval Office, the president declared, “Make no
mistake, if we and our allies do not have the will to act, there will be more
massacres. In dealing with aggressors in the Balkans, hesitation is a license
to kill. But action and resolve can stop armies, and save lives.”[752] He
later added, “We’ve seen innocent people taken from their homes forced to
kneel in the dirt and sprayed with bullets. Kosovar men dragged from their
families; fathers and sons together lined up and shot in cold blood.”[753]
However, Christophe Châtelot, reporter for Le Monde, was there and
debunked the lie in real time.[754] Walker claimed 45 innocent people
“obviously were executed where they lay.” But the dead were fighters and
had not been massacred.
The fight started when the KLA ambushed four police officers in a
deliberate provocation. The Serb army then came and killed approximately
15 KLA fighters in a battle that lasted for hours. International observers
came and went, noting nothing unusual. The Serbs left. The KLA then
retook control of the village and the next morning they brought Walker on
his sightseeing tour.[755]
A Finnish forensic investigation proved that the bodies were fighters
with gunpowder residue on their hands, that they had all been shot from a
distance and that there were no pools of blood or spent bullet casings at the
scene. They had simply been moved and dumped in a ditch in the night.
[756] The major media, led by the Post,[757] spun the report the other way
anyway.[758] CNN Headline News breathlessly repeated the government’s
lies to the American people on the half-hour.[759]
Walker later admitted to the Sunday Times that the CIA had infiltrated
his OSCE team, while the agency confessed to a secret mission to bolster
the KLA, including equipping them with satellite phones and GPS systems
to aid in targeting. “Several KLA leaders had the mobile phone number of
General Wesley Clark, the Nato commander,” they reported, elaborating,
“European diplomats then working for the OSCE claim it was betrayed by
an American policy that made airstrikes inevitable. Some have questioned
the motives and loyalties of William Walker, the American OSCE head of
mission.” A European diplomat told them, “The American agenda consisted
of their diplomatic observers, a.k.a. the CIA, operating on completely
different terms to the rest of Europe and the OSCE.”[760]
This faked Račak massacre became Secretary Albright’s big chance. As
Allan Little explained, “‘Spring has come early,’ U.S. Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright told her colleagues. . . . Mrs. Albright decided it was
time for action. She told her European counterparts that she was coming to
no more of the diplomatic meetings which would result in no action.” With
everyone outraged by the massacre, she would insist that the U.S. “would
now enter a peace process only if diplomacy was backed by the explicit and
credible threat of force against Belgrade.”[761] She got it.

Rambouillet
The bombing campaign was launched on a preposterous pretext when
Albright presented the Serbian government with an offer they could not
possibly accept, the Rambouillet “peace deal.”[762]
Little explained that the Serbians accepted the vast majority of the
terms, including “wide-ranging autonomy for Kosovo.”[763] But then,
alarmed that the Serbs might give in completely and avoid war, the
Americans hurriedly added a new condition to the supposed “agreement”
which went much further.[764] They demanded total surrender on Serbia’s
part, their recognition of Kosovo’s full autonomy and permission for NATO
troops to occupy not only Kosovo, but even all of Serbia itself. Albright
demanded, among many other things, that “NATO personnel shall enjoy,
together with their vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and
unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia] including associated airspace and territorial
waters.”[765]
This “Appendix B” was kept secret from the British parliament, the
Russian government and the Western press.[766] Instead, they lied to the
people that the Serbs were completely intransigent and Milošević refused to
sign any of it.[767]
“Under an annex of the Rambouillet accord, a purely NATO force was
to be given full permission to go anywhere it wanted in Yugoslavia,
immune from any legal process,” the Times finally admitted months later.
[768]
Henry Kissinger denounced the pretended peace deal, saying, “The
Rambouillet text, which called on Serbia to admit NATO troops throughout
Yugoslavia, was a provocation, an excuse to start bombing.” That settles
that argument. But he went further: “Rambouillet is not a document that an
angelic Serb could have accepted. It was a terrible diplomatic document
that should never have been presented in that form.”[769] British Foreign
Office Minister Lord Gilbert later admitted to a House of Commons defense
committee that the portion of the proposal that required the occupation of
Serbia by NATO troops was a deliberate poison pill, meant to be rejected by
the Serbs to justify the war.[770] A “senior State Department official” also
told the press that they “deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could
accept.”[771] Humorously, the Kosovar Albanians, represented by KLA
leader Thaçi, refused to sign on to the deal for three weeks, since it fell
short of promising a referendum on full independence. It took a while for
the Americans to convince him that it was the other guy who was getting
screwed and that the deal was just a phony pretext for war on their behalf
anyway, so just sign the damn thing.[772]
The goal of the whole process, Assistant Secretary of State Jamie
Rubin admitted, was to create “clarity” where before there was ambiguity,
“and that meant the Kosovar Albanians agreeing to the package and the
Serbs not agreeing to the package.” He continued, “Obviously, publicly, we
had to make clear we were seeking an agreement, but privately we knew the
chances of the Serbs agreeing were quite small.”[773] Albright added, “If
the Serbs would not agree, and the Albanians would agree, then there was a
very clear cause for using force.” They were talking about lying the
American people into war like it was just another Thursday. Far from a
controversial and revisionist take, this is the simple truth, as Thomas
Hutson, a State Department official from the Yugoslav embassy in Belgrade
explained: “There was never a choice. This was a diktat to which [neither]
the Yugoslav government, nor any other sovereign government could ever
agree.” He resigned in protest.[774]
Kissinger complained at the start of the war that “Rambouillet was not
a negotiation—as is often claimed—but an ultimatum. This marked an
astounding departure for an administration that had entered office
proclaiming its devotion to the U.N. Charter and multilateral
procedures.”[775]
For those less familiar, Kissinger, while having held the job of national
security adviser and secretary of state under Republican Presidents Richard
Nixon and Gerald Ford in the 1960s and 1970s, and for all his various sins
committed within those roles and without,[776] the man has never been a
partisan fighter. These criticisms were coming from a theoretician of
American grand strategy, rather than some “Republican consultant” head-
in-a-box on cable TV news. Of course, Kissinger concluded that Clinton
should escalate the war he should never have started: “Now that the
credibility of the Atlantic Alliance has been staked, we must persist—with
ground troops if necessary—until Serb military forces leave Kosovo and the
refugees are allowed to return.” Still, for him to outright accuse his
successor of such treachery, and rightly so, was remarkable. But the world
order Kissinger had in mind required cooperation with Russia under the UN
system. Clinton using NATO to launch a war without the proper procedures,
and to change international borders in Europe no less, was, he feared,
sowing the seeds of his life’s work’s demise.[777]
 Senator Joe Biden was a leading voice for intervention in Kosovo,
waging a campaign all through 1998 and the beginning of 1999, pushing for
Clinton to intervene and arguing for the failed Authorization to Use Military
Force in the Senate. “NATO’s credibility is on the line,” he insisted.[778]

Quick and Easy

Announcing the bombing campaign in an Oval Office address, President

Clinton claimed it would “advance the cause of peace.”[779] Other lies and
exaggerations in his war speech included that Milošević had suppressed the
Albanian language, stripped Kosovo of autonomy, attacked Slovenia and
refused to negotiate, while claiming Russia was in agreement with the U.S.
on the Rambouillet accord. Clinton also falsely stated that both world wars
had begun in Yugoslavia and falsely implied Serbian responsibility for the
Holocaust. He then went on to claim, going back to Bosnia before, that the
Serbs were simply exterminating others out of ethnic hatred in Hitlerian
fashion, since the alternative would be to sacrifice an important talking
point and acknowledge his predecessor’s and his own role in starting that
war.[780]
The administration had no idea what they were doing. Army Colonel
Douglas Macgregor, then-chief of strategic planning and director of the
Joint Operations Center, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe,
noted that Milošević’s popularity was at its lowest point in 1998. Serbian
police and soldiers were insubordinate, refusing to deploy to Kosovo. But
American intervention changed all that.[781] War is the health of the state.
[782]
 Kissinger explained, “Before the start of the bombing, it was
conventional wisdom in Washington that Serbia’s historic attachment to
Kosovo was exaggerated and that Slobodan Milošević was looking for a
pretext to get rid of the incubus it represented—which a few days of
bombing was supposed to supply.”[783] They were wrong.
The administration also promised the war would be over quickly. Col.
Macgregor wrote that NATO’s political leadership ignored warnings from
General Klaus Naumann, the chairman of the NATO Military Committee,
that airstrikes without ground operations would be indecisive. Thinking
back to the short air campaign of late summer 1995, and ignoring the
differences on the ground, they convinced themselves it would be easy.
[784]
Albright told PBS NewsHour, “I don’t see this as a long-term
operation. I think that this is something—the deter and damage is
something that is achievable within a relatively short period of time.”[785]
U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. Mike Short was told, “You’re only going to bomb
for two or three nights. That’s all the Alliance can stand. That’s all
Washington can stand.” Administration officials also told the press they
thought the war would be over in days, a week at the most. After two
weeks, Albright announced: “We never expected this to be over
quickly.”[786]
The war ended up lasting 78 days—two and a half months. “Without
the ability to shape events in Kosovo,” Macgregor relates, “the air operation
began to focus primarily on punishing the Milošević regime, which required
identifying new targets for attack throughout Yugoslavia.”[787]
Civilian Targets

Reporter Philip Hammond wrote, “This was not a purely military operation:
NATO also destroyed what it called ‘dual-use’ targets, such as factories, city
bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an
attempt to terrorize the country into surrender.”[788] NATO bombed
civilian water supplies and electricity infrastructure in Belgrade, and also
targeted the power grid in Niš and Novi Sad.[789] Journalist James Bovard
detailed how “NATO dropped more than 1,300 cluster bombs on Serbia and
Kosovo. . . . Bomb experts estimated that more than 10,000 unexploded
bomblets . . . maimed children long after the ceasefire.”[790] On April 12, a
NATO plane bombed a train twice, they said accidentally, while it crossed a
bridge they were targeting. Between 12–20 innocent people were killed.
Two days later, NATO pilots mistakenly bombed Albanian refugees at
Djakovica, killing more than 70, an attack which they initially blamed on
the Serbs, only admitting the truth five days later. They then lied, releasing
audio of a pilot who claimed he saw some Serbs lighting villages on fire
and so made an understandable mistake when he bombed the refugees.
However, Bovard noted, “this gambit backfired when high-ranking military
officers protested that NATO, at General Clark’s urging, had released the
tape of a pilot who had nothing to do with bombing the refugee column.”
The audio was just “a red herring to distract attention from the carnage
inflicted on the refugees.”[791] After a series of attacks killed 32 innocent
civilians, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea dismissed their importance to the
BBC: “There is always a cost to defeat an evil.”[792]
RTS TV

The Serbian TV station Radio Television Serbia (RTS) showed pictures of

the aftermath of NATO strikes, which, according to the BBC, “had an
impact around the world.” But President Clinton did not like that, so he
personally ordered the bombing of the TV station too,[793] killing 16
innocent people,[794] including a young woman named Kasenja Bankovic,
a local technician working the night shift.[795] Amnesty International
called it a blatant war crime.[796]
Clinton’s ally in the war, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, explained
that without censorship-by-airstrike, they could have lost public support.
“This was one of the problems about waging a conflict in a modern
communications and news world. . . . We were aware that those pictures
would come back, and there would be an instinctive sympathy for the
victims of the campaign,” he said.[797]
But the attack accomplished nothing but murder. The station had a
backup transmitter and returned to the air in three hours.[798] Gen. Clark
admitted, “We knew that when we struck it there would be an alternate
means of getting out the Serb television. There’s no single switch to turn off
everything. But we thought it was a good move to strike it and the political
leadership agreed with us.” And they lied about it, claiming at first that RTS
facilities “are being used as radio relay stations and transmitters to support
the activities of the FRY military and special police forces, and therefore
they represented legitimate military targets.” However, NATO spokesmen
later backed down from that and settled for the excuse that RTS was a
propaganda organ for the Serbs.[799] This is notable, since Gen. Clark’s
excuse when confronted about the massacre years later by journalist Jeremy
Scahill was to still insist the station was part of Milošević’s “command and
control systems” and therefore “a legitimate target.”[800]
Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph W. Ralston
admitted that at least 1,500 civilians were killed by NATO—mostly
American—airstrikes.[801]

Covert Support

The Telegraph revealed that British Special Air Services (SAS) and MI6,
along with American special operations forces and CIA, got right to work
undercover with the KLA to help identify targets in the air war, as well as
providing them other intelligence and advice.[802] The Sunday Herald
added, “Despite government denials on both sides of the Atlantic, SAS and
U.S. Delta Force instructors were used to train Kosovar volunteers in
weapons handling, demolition and ambush techniques, and basic military
organization.”[803] The Brits armed the KLA with their best rifles and
electronic gear to help NATO planes with their targeting, and gave “field
advice” to their fighters during the war.[804]
Regardless of this support, NATO’s attack initially caused Yugoslav
forces to rally around Milošević and make major gains against the KLA.
[805]

Kosovar Albanian Cleansing Instigated

The war actually instigated the temporary so-called “cleansing” of ethnic
Albanians from the province as they fled from the violence of the war, such
as in the village of Chirez.[806] The OSCE’s Kosovo Verification Mission
(KVM), sent to monitor the implementation of the October 1998 agreement,
reported no “ethnic cleansing” campaign in their March 1999 assessment,
instead describing flight by civilians on both sides after the collapse of
Rambouillet and the imminent outbreak of war with NATO. They also
documented small-scale fighting between Yugoslav forces and the KLA,
mostly instigated by the latter (at least once even accidentally attacking the
KVM mission itself), and a buildup of the “defensive capabilities” of the
Yugoslav army in the border areas in response to increased assassinations
and other attacks by KLA forces. They also noted that the majority of
murders of Albanian civilians were at the hands of KLA death squads
meting out “punishment shootings” for those who would not toe the line,
rather than by Milošević’s forces.[807] The administration knew the Serbs
were prepared to launch a massive ethnic cleansing campaign “if NATO
began bombing,” as Strobe Talbott aide John Norris admitted. “With the
onset of NATO military operations on March 24, Yugoslav army, police and
paramilitary forces” launched the operation.[808] As Szamuely noted, “the
flight of refugees began after NATO launched its bombing. There was no
humanitarian catastrophe in Kosovo on March 24, 1999, certainly not one
that could justify NATO’s massive and deadly attack.”[809]
Macgregor related that Clark’s orders were first not to lose any of their
own planes, and “only in second place came the directive to stop the
Yugoslav army and police aggression against Albanians.”[810]
 Bill Clinton, repeatedly, disingenuously compared the Serbs to the
Nazis in World War II[811] and claimed he was trying to stop the killing,
but General Henry Shelton, then-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
admitted, “The one thing we knew we could not do up front, was that we
could not stop the atrocities or the ethnic cleansing through the application
of our military power.”[812] They went ahead anyway. Hundreds of
thousands were forced to flee NATO’s bombing campaign, though those
numbers were exaggerated too.[813] Professor Noam Chomsky, noting
reports of cleansing by Serb groups in the border lands after the NATO
bombing campaign began, wrote, “Under the doctrine of retrospective
justification, the heinous crimes that ensued are now held to be, perhaps,
‘enough to justify’ the NATO bombing campaign.”
The Americans and Brits just lied. What else could they do? They
claimed Milošević would never have signed the agreement, even without
the deal-killing Appendix B, that his forces were already expelling
Albanians from the province by the hundreds of thousands, and that their
bombing had no relation to the refugee crisis.[814]

Blaming Albright

Ivo Daalder, who had been director for European Affairs on the National
Security Council during the Bosnia war, described the Clinton
administration’s common reaction to the reality of the war they had started:
“Shock. In many ways, the team that led the President into this decision was
shell-shocked. They never thought that this was going to happen. . . . There
was a sense that in fact [Albright] had led the Administration down this path
and had failed.” Staffers started jumping ship and calling it “Madeleine’s
War.” She had convinced people it would take 10 or 12 days before
Milošević would surrender. “They never considered that in fact, rather than
giving in or even hunkering down, it would escalate to these massive
proportions.”[815] Civil rights activist, former presidential candidate and
Clinton adviser Jesse Jackson also blamed Albright for pushing the U.S.
into war, claiming the president was distracted by his impeachment scandal
when the secretary was preparing what the Post politely described as her
“unworkable peace plan.”[816]

Genocide Hoax

James Bovard collected administration and allied claims about the war, and
showed how their hyperbole about their enemies grew along with the
number of civilians they themselves killed.[817] Defense Secretary William
Cohen said, “This is a fight for justice over genocide, for humanity over
inhumanity, for democracy over despotism.” He later added, “This is no
ordinary conflict. . . . What is convulsing the United States and our NATO
allies is the face of evil, an ethnic and religious nationalism that has at its
core a hatred of everything our great democracies treasure.”[818] State
Department spokesman Jamie Rubin claimed a Serbian-inflicted “genocide”
against the Albanians had begun. He told the Times he needed no
confirmation of this, “because we can clearly say crimes against humanity
are being committed.”[819] Tony Blair said the war represented “the battle
between good and evil, between civilization and barbarity.”[820] As in
Bosnia, the Brits especially pushed claims of massive Serbian rape camps,
which were completely unsubstantiated and clearly fictional.[821]
Claims about the death toll among Kosovar civilians kept growing too.
Jamie Shea, the NATO spokesman, alleged 225,000 men were missing and
that they had confirmed at least 6,000 men killed in summary executions
and 10 mass graves.[822] He did not mind lying. As Shea later admitted in
a speech, “One thing we did well during the Kosovo crisis was to occupy
the media space. We created a situation in which nobody in the world who
was a regular TV watcher could escape the NATO message.” They had as
much contempt for their media industry middlemen as they did for the
public. Shea explained, “It was essential to keep the media permanently
occupied and supplied with fresh information to report on. That way, they
are less inclined to go in search of critical stories.”[823]
NATO spokesman Brigadier General Giuseppe Marani claimed the
Serbs had pressed Albanian men into “grave-digging chain gangs” going
around burying their countrymen in 40 different mass grave sites.[824]
After the war was over—with the U.S. eventually climbing down on
several important terms[825]—the FBI went to Kosovo to find the mass
graves and document the genocide. It turned out the 100,000 murdered
civilians claimed by Clinton and his administration[826] were as fake as
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons a few years later.[827]
In the end, it was found that fewer than 3,000 people had been killed,
evidently by the Serbs, before the war.[828] They were virtually all
fighting-age males, as Washington calls them. Though some may have been
executed, many were apparently killed in battle. Their deaths were surely
not representative of any actual genocide taking place there, like in the War
Party’s claims. The FBI was sent to investigate “the largest crime scene in
the FBI’s forensic history,” as journalist John Pilger wrote. “Several weeks
later, having not found a single mass grave, the FBI went home.” Pilger
added, “The Spanish forensic team also returned home, its leader
complaining angrily that he and his colleagues had become part of ‘a
semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines, because we did not
find one—not one—mass grave.’” The International War Crimes Tribunal
finally settled on 2,788 total killed in the war. “This included combatants on
both sides and Serbs and Roma murdered by the Albanian Kosovo
Liberation Army,” Pilger reported.[829]
Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, later kidnapped and
murdered by bin Ladenites in Pakistan,[830] also debunked the story before
the end of the year: “By late summer, stories about a Nazi-like body-
disposal facility were so widespread that investigators sent a three-man
French Gendarmerie team spelunking half a mile down the [Trepča] mine to
search for bodies.” None were found. They examined a furnace where
bodies were said to have been immolated. Investigators found no teeth or
other evidence of human remains. While Milošević’s forces were guilty of
expelling civilians and other war crimes, “other allegations—indiscriminate
mass murder, rape camps, crematoriums, mutilation of the dead—haven’t
been borne out in the six months since NATO troops entered Kosovo.”
Confirming Bovard’s observation from afar, Pearl said a NATO official
admitted to him, “As the war dragged on . . . NATO saw a fatigued press
corps drifting toward the contrarian story: civilians killed by NATO’s
bombs. NATO stepped up its claims about Serb ‘killing fields.’”[831]
Spanish pathologist Emilio Perez Pujol, leader of a group sent to find
the bodies, counted only 2,500 dead “at the most,” adding, “This includes
lots of strange deaths that can’t be blamed on anyone in particular. . . . We
had found a total of 187 bodies. Four or five had died from natural
causes.”[832] The Post finally conceded in January 2000 that investigators
could only find 2,108 bodies, “the overwhelming majority of them ethnic
Albanians.” There were no remains in the mine. Alleged “mass graves”
contained “either a handful of corpses or none.” They admitted Western
claims of Serbian rape camps were lies, “and poorly sourced allegations in
some publications that the Serbs were engaging in the mutilation of the
living and the dead—including castration and decapitation—all proved to
be false.”[833] They were only a year too late to stop the war.
Carla Del Ponte, prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for
the former Yugoslavia, likely still embellishing, admitted more than a year
and a half later that they had only found 4,000 dead. She did not even claim
to believe they must have been civilians.[834]
Walter Rockler, who served as a prosecutor at the Nuremberg War
Crimes Tribunals after World War II, said, “The attack by a coalition of
parties led by the United States to me is outright aggression. The Yugoslavs,
the Serbs in particular, did not attack any NATO country whatever and
didn’t threaten any of them.” He also condemned them for deliberately
attacking civilian targets.[835]

Chinese Embassy Attack

An important side story to the Kosovo catastrophe is that the U.S. bombed
the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on May 7, killing three and wounding
more than 20 people.[836] Though the official explanation was that a CIA
analyst used the wrong map, some have speculated that the Serbs had given
them the remains of an F-117 stealth fighter-bomber they had shot down
using World War II-era long-wave radar, and that the Americans were trying
to destroy it before Chinese engineers could take the remaining pieces.
Others thought it may be a warning for China to stop supporting the Serbian
military.[837]
Regardless of the true motive or cause, it has been reported that the
reaction in Beijing was to embark on another level of revolution in military
technology and armaments in an effort to shore up their own deterrence
against U.S. military power, just as they had done after seeing the video
presentations of precision American airstrikes in Iraq War I in 1991[838]
and after the Taiwan Strait Crisis of 1995–1996.[839]
Kissinger complained that Clinton’s recklessness threatened the entire
American-Chinese relationship, post-Sino-Soviet split, which he and
President Nixon had so deftly exploited, potentially “leaving China’s
neighbors torn by the need to choose between the world’s most populous
country, whose 5,000 years of history give it a special place in Asia, and
America, the world’s only superpower.”[840] It was just a little collateral
damage between the world’s two most important countries over others that
do not affect U.S. national interests in any way.
The same night the U.S. hit the Chinese Embassy, the Brits listed the
Hotel Yugoslavia as a potential target, then bombed it shortly afterwards—
killing one civilian.[841] The Post’s Daniel Williams rushed the
administration’s justification into print: The Bosnian Serb military leader
Zeljko Ražnatović [a.k.a. Arkan] was part-owner of a casino there.[842]

Blair’s Invasion Plan

Evidently we all were very lucky that the war was not nearly as bad as it
could have been. In 2024, journalist Kit Klarenberg revealed a secret
document[843] that showed Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government had
come up with a plan for a full-scale invasion of what was left of Yugoslavia
by British and American ground forces and their overthrow of President
Milošević. Ministry of Defense Policy Director Richard Hatfield urged the
government to pass the plan on to the Clinton administration as soon as
possible to try to overcome their “reluctance and skepticism” on the issue.
This was necessary, the UK planners believed, because the air war had so
far been a bust. Airstrikes on the capital had “demonstrated to Belgrade
citizens just how vulnerable their city is, but achieved little else.” Further,
they were afraid that Serb forces would defeat the KLA. So PM Blair
proposed a “coalition of the willing” to invade. Blair demanded that NATO
forces strike civilian targets: “We must strengthen the targets. Media and
communication are utterly essential. Oil, infrastructure, all the things
Milošević values . . . is clearly justified. . . . What is holding this back?”
The worse the war went, the more he wanted to escalate. “I have little doubt
we are moving towards a situation where our aim will become removing
Milošević.”[844] The administration put the Brits off by agreeing to have
NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana review their options for the use of
ground forces possibly after their big summit in late April. Gen. Clark,
bolstered by Sen. John McCain and Secretary Albright, also wanted to send
in ground troops, but was delayed by Defense Secretary William Cohen on
Clinton’s behalf. After weeks of failure though, the president came very
close to launching a ground invasion.[845]
According to the Times, Clinton was on the verge of ordering the
invasion, “coming much closer” to doing so “than is commonly
understood,” and “despite his vow . . . on the first day of the war that ‘I do
not intend to put our troops in Kosovo to fight a war.’” Luckily, instead of
invading, he dropped his demand to be allowed to occupy all of Serbia,
[846] and the Russians talked Milošević into signing the rest.[847]

Cease Fire

Without Russia’s support, the Serbs knew their cause was lost.[848] They
passed a message to Milošević through Swedish financier Peter Castenfelt
that it was time to “exit now.” By the time Chernomyrdin got to Belgrade,
he had already decided to quit.[849]
Professor Alan Kuperman, then at the Brookings Institution,[850]
pointed out that Albright and Clinton were the ones who had surrendered.
They dropped their demand for the right to occupy all of Serbia, accepted
that Kosovo would remain officially part of Serbia for at least another three
years, agreed to submit further plans to the UNSC, where Russia had a veto,
and also to allow a limited number of Serb troops to stay to guard the
border and certain cultural and religious sites. Kuperman wrote, “Milošević
accepted this deal the first time it was offered to him.” Invoking Albright’s
deliberate sabotage with the poisoned pills of the Rambouillet accord, he
concluded, “This is botched diplomacy, plain and simple. Madeleine
Albright must be held accountable.”[851]
The Guardian noted that the Serbian parliament had passed a
resolution asking for an “international presence in Kosovo immediately
after the signing of an accord for self-administration in Kosovo which will
be accepted by all national communities . . . to be decided by the Security
Council.”[852] This was essentially what the final peace settlement
demanded. The Yugoslavs had already given in that much before Clinton
started the war.[853]
Despite all their claims about the success of America’s space-age,
superpower ability to coerce behavior with precision strikes, a post-war
study by the military determined that despite dropping tens of thousands of
bombs on Kosovo and Serbia, NATO had only destroyed 14 tanks, 18
armored personnel carriers [APCs] and 20 artillery pieces—58 “successful
strikes” out of more than 20,000 bombs dropped.[854] Clark’s air forces
had been completely fooled by Serbia’s cardboard tank forces deployed to
distract them.[855] As Bovard noted, “At the end of the war, the Serbian
military largely was unscathed—but the country’s civilian infrastructure
was in ruins. NATO bombs were far more effective against women,
children, hospitals, and retirement homes than against soldiers.”[856]
The American foreign policy establishment still thinks they are heroes
for all this. As Philip Hammond noted, “NATO’s Kosovo campaign was
held up as a supposedly successful model by those arguing for military
action against Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria in 2018.”[857]
Pristina

At the end of the war, Milošević asked NATO to go ahead and occupy
Kosovo in order to fill the power vacuum that would be left after the JNA
withdrew its troops. But NATO forces wasted time at the Albanian-Kosovo
border, opening an opportunity for Russian forces to seize the airport at
Pristina and an air base in Slatina, Kosovo.[858] The Russian prime
minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin, had come up with the peace plan.
According to the deal, the Russians thought they were to be assigned a
sector of Kosovo, but came to understand this was not the way the U.S. saw
it. Believing they were being cheated in the deal, Yeltsin decided to order
his troops to roll out of their base in Bosnia toward Pristina. Clark ordered
500 British and French paratroopers to prepare an attack.[859] He also
negotiated with neighboring states to deny the Russians overflight rights to
prevent them from resupplying their troops.[860]
Famous British singer James Blunt, then a colonel in the British army,
allied with his superior, Lieutenant General Sir Michael Jackson—
seriously[861]—to thwart NATO commander Clark’s order to send Apache
attack helicopters to occupy the runway. “I’m not going to start World War
III for you,” Jackson is reported to have told Clark,[862] instead threatening
to resign.[863] When the Russians decided not to send reinforcements, the
episode was allowed to blow over.[864]

Hillary’s Choice
Clinton’s wife made him do it. As author Gail Sheehy told Dateline NBC,
the first lady had refused to speak to her husband for eight months after the
humiliation of his cheating scandal.[865] The silence was not broken until
she called him to demand he bomb Serbia. Sheehy wrote in her book
Hillary’s Choice that both Secretary of Defense William Cohen and
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Hugh Shelton were opposed to
starting the war. “You can’t control a territory with airplanes,” they told
Clinton. But Hillary knew better. She told journalist Lucinda Franks, “I
urged him to bomb; I supported him. You cannot let this go on at the end of
a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time.”[866]
Defining “us” as broadly as humanly possible and nonsensically
comparing the fighting to the Holocaust and World War II, she demanded,
“What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?” After
hearing that a last-minute meeting between Serbian leader Slobodan
Milošević and U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke had failed to produce an
agreement, she told the president, “You’ve got to bite the bullet.” The next
day, he declared that force was necessary, and three days later began the
attack.[867]
The U.S. continued to support KLA terrorist forces for years, long after
they started attempting to cleanse areas of Serbia and Macedonia of non-
Albanians to create a “Greater Kosovo.”[868]

Serbs Cleansed

President Clinton swore to the Serbian people that NATO “only agreed to
serve with the understanding that they would protect Serbs as well as ethnic
Albanians and that they would leave when peace took hold.”[869] That did
not last. During the war, and after it was over, Serbian civilians then became
the victims of the same cleansing policy at the hands of the Albanian KLA,
[870] which had refused to disarm after the war as they had promised Gen.
Jackson, handing over only old World War II-era rifles and keeping
everything of value. The Times reported the KLA was “carrying out random
kidnappings and executions and burning Serb villages.”[871] KLA
terrorists[872] forcibly drove more than 200,000 of them from their homes.
[873] If NATO had tried to force the issue, they would have had a whole
new war on their hands.[874]
A Clinton administration official admitted to the Post just two months
after the peace deal was signed that the U.S. government under the
authority of President Clinton was the accomplice of, not defender from,
mass murder and ethnic cleansing: “It looks like it’s over for the Serbs. We
can talk about peace, love and democracy, but I don’t think anyone really
knows how to stop this.” They told the story of a little old lady who had
been slaughtered by the KLA in her apartment in Pristina: “Ljubica Vujovic,
78, was a lifelong resident of Kosovo. She was also a Serb, and in the new
Kosovo that is enough to get you killed.” The U.S. and NATO had protected
civilian-butchering terrorists in the name of humanitarianism. “Every day
since NATO-led peacekeeping troops assumed authority in this Serbian
province, a Serb or Gypsy has been killed, tortured, beaten, kidnapped or
threatened.” The Post continued, “Serb- and Gypsy-owned homes have
been burned, looted or seized; state-owned or private Serbian businesses
have been occupied and their operators expelled; Serbian Orthodox holy
places have been bombed or desecrated”—and 75 percent of Kosovo’s
prewar Serbian population had been forcibly expelled.[875]
Deliso wrote that “[s]cores of Serbian Orthodox churches, some 700
years old, were destroyed by the KLA.”[876] Bovard noted that by the end
of September 1999, more than 60 churches and other religious sites “had
been blown up, burnt, ransacked, or otherwise ruined. Many of the
detonations of the churches were very skilled, with massive amounts of
explosives—clearly the work of the KLA, which NATO claimed had
disbanded months earlier.”[877]
Pilger denounced this actual ethnic cleansing—which took place after
the deal was signed and NATO troops occupied the province. “More than
200,000 Serbs, Roma, Bosniaks, Turks, Croats and Jews have been
ethnically cleansed by the KLA, with NATO forces standing by.” Clinton
and his men were exactly the evil they were pretending to oppose. “The
courts are venal,” the journalist added, going on to quote a UN narcotics
officer: “You shot an 89-year-old Serb grandmother? . . . Good for you. Get
out of jail.”[878]
Before the end of the summer, Human Rights Watch reported about the
effects of the war they had tacitly supported:[879] “More than 164,000 have
left Kosovo altogether. Many others have moved to Serb or Roma enclaves
under KFOR protection within Kosovo.” They said there had been a “wave
of arson and looting of Serb and Roma homes throughout Kosovo that has
ensued and . . . harassment and intimidation, including severe beatings, to
which remaining Serbs and Roma have been subjected.” They added, “Most
seriously, there has been a spate of abductions and murders of Serbs since
mid-June, including the massacre of fourteen Serb farmers on July
23.”[880] Amnesty International reported at the year’s end that “[v]iolence
against Serbs, Roma, Muslim Slavs and moderate Albanians in Kosovo has
increased dramatically over the past month,” including “murder, abductions,
violent attacks, intimidation, and house burning . . . on a daily basis.”[881]
According to a later investigation by the European Union, the KLA
committed “unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal
detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced
displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and
desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites.”[882]
Bovard noted that “[b]y 2003, almost 70 percent of the Serbs living in
Kosovo in 1999 had fled, and Kosovo was 95 percent ethnic
Albanian.”[883] This was approximately 200,000 Serbs and 120,000 Roma.
Many Serbs had at least been able to flee elsewhere in Serbia. The Roma
were scattered to the wind, their lives destroyed.[884] George Robertson,
the British secretary-general of NATO from 1999 to 2003, told the House of
Commons that the “KLA were responsible for more deaths in Kosovo than
the Yugoslav authorities had been” in the period leading up to NATO’s
intervention.[885] Canadian Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie said, “The
Kosovar Albanians played us like a Stradivarius violin. We have subsidized
and indirectly supported their violent campaign for an ethnically pure
Kosovo.”[886]

Greater Kosovo
Not only that, but the KLA started what the Los Angeles Times called a
“terror campaign,” kidnapping, beating and murdering their less-extreme
opposition among the Kosovar Albanians, the Democratic League of
Kosovo (LDK).[887] And they were just getting started. Renamed KLA
forces—now NLA for “National Liberation Army”—began attacking inside
Serbia and Macedonia, attempting to push their luck and create a “Greater
Kosovo.” The Guardian reported in the spring of 2001, “‘CIA’s Bastard
Army Ran Riot in Balkans,’ Backed Extremists.” They said, “The
accusations have led to tension in K-For [international peace-keeping force
in Kosovo] between the European and U.S. military missions.” This was
because “European officers are furious that the Americans have allowed
guerrilla armies in its sector to train, smuggle arms and launch attacks
across two international borders.” The Washington Times reported in June
2001, based on Macedonian military documents, that bin Laden was the
main financier of the NLA.[888] U.S. support for these murderers
continued right up through August 2001, and they had seized as much of a
third of Macedonia before the Macedonian army surrounded a group of
them and United States forces evacuated them back to Kosovo. After this
they decided to finally change the Clinton policy and negotiate.[889]
In the city of Pec, “cradle of Serbian identity,” after September 11,
when people came out to hold a candlelight vigil in honor of the American
victims, a group of young, bearded bin Ladenites showed up, blew out their
candles, told them to go home, and when the locals refused, beat them up.
[890]
 A month later, U.S. intelligence arrested Arabs plotting a suicide attack
against American troops stationed at Camp Eagle in Bosnia. They said one
of the men had the phone number of Abu Zubaydah—al Qaeda’s travel
agent,[891] whom President George W. Bush and the CIA later ruthlessly
tortured[892]—saved in his phone.[893]

Organs

It later became clear that KLA terrorists were also specialists in stealing
people’s organs and selling them on the black market.[894] In addition to
promoting terrorists, the Western powers put a psychopathic mafia boss in
charge of Kosovo. Hashim Thaçi was such a prolific criminal, he remained
more interested in running his organized crime ring than governing the new
mini-state. “He’s involved in drug smuggling, weapons smuggling, slave
trade and illegal organ trade from either voluntary or involuntary donors,”
according to journalist Nebojsa Malic.[895]
In 2010, Vice President Biden called Thaçi “the George Washington of
Kosovo.”[896] A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative report
tagged Mr. Thaçi as an accomplice to the body-parts trafficking operation.
[897] That means stealing the organs from the bodies of still-living Serbian
prisoners.[898] He was finally indicted in 2020 for crimes against humanity
and is facing trial in The Hague.[899]

Heroin
Clinton must have known the KLA were heroin dealers. The San Francisco
Chronicle had a full write-up on the issue during the war. They quoted a
1995 DEA report saying that “certain members of the ethnic Albanian
community in the Serbian region of Kosovo have turned to drug trafficking
in order to finance their separatist activities,” and a 1997 Interpol report
which said, “Kosovo Albanians hold the largest share of the heroin market
in Switzerland, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, the Czech Republic,
Norway and Sweden.”[900]
On the KLA’s role in the European drug trade, the Guardian reported
in 2000, “International agencies fighting the drug trade are warning that
Kosovo has become a ‘smugglers’ paradise’ supplying up to 40 percent of
the heroin sold in Europe and North America.” They said that under
NATO’s watchful eye, “the smugglers are running the ‘Balkan route’ with
complete freedom.”[901]
A Congressional report found that “between 30 and 50 percent of the
KLA’s money comes from drugs.” Terrorism expert Michel Koutouzis said,
“The KLA owes a lot of debts to the traffickers and holy warriors. They are
being pressured to assist other insurrections. [We have] reports of KLA
weapons being routed to the newest Muslim holy war in Chechnya.” An
anonymous “Congressional expert” on international drug trafficking told
Mother Jones magazine, “There is no doubt that the KLA is a major
trafficking organization. But we have a relationship with the KLA, and the
administration doesn’t want to damage [its] reputation. We are partners. The
attitude is: The drugs are not coming here, so let others deal with it.” But
that was not true. As Mother Jones reported, KLA’s trafficking included
sales to black markets in Philadelphia and New York.[902] Ever since then,
Kosovo has consistently scored near the top of the rankings for criminality
in Europe.[903]

Regime Change

Just like in Iraq, the Clinton administration continued the economic

punishment of Serbia’s civilian population after the war was over, and like
in Iraq,[904] for the explicitly stated purpose of making the people so
miserable that they would overthrow the president for them. The Orlando
Sentinel reported that “American officials have said they fear that the
assistance could shore up Mr. Milošević by alleviating public discontent,
which they hope could lead to protests in Yugoslavia, early elections, or
even Mr. Milošević’s ouster or resignation.” Jamie Rubin, the State
Department spokesman, denounced calls by America’s European allies to
lift the sanctions. “We’re concerned about proposals that may have
appropriate humanitarian goals but may lead to developments that directly
or indirectly support the regime,” he said.[905]

PR Stunt

NATO was not very good at war. Through Bosnia and Kosovo, the
Americans were concerned that the alliance’s military inadequacies were
being exposed in front of the Russians and others. So Clinton pushed
expansion even harder. As always, personal and institutional interests had
overridden any concept of the true national interest. Jenonne Walker,
Clinton’s ambassador to the Czech Republic, later said, “Our inaction was
making NATO look weak and irrelevant. And the line in the halls of power
in Washington was, ‘We have to enlarge NATO to save it, to make it look as
though it were dynamic and on the move and not stagnant.’”[906]

Russian Reaction

Former Russian diplomat Boris Bondarev later wrote that Russians’ views
of the U.S. and its allies “took another major hit after NATO’s 1999
campaign against Serbia. To Russia, the bombings looked less like an
operation to protect the country’s Albanian minority than like aggression by
a large power against a tiny victim.”[907] Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny
Primakov canceled planned talks and turned his plane around over the
Atlantic Ocean in protest upon receiving word from Vice President Al Gore
that the bombing was to begin shortly.[908]
The attack humiliated and enraged President Yeltsin and severely set
back U.S.-Russian relations. In a phone call before the war, the Russian
president ranted at Clinton for 12 minutes before angrily hanging up on
him.[909] In another call, he complained that despite “how difficult it was
for me to try and turn the heads of our people, the heads of the politicians,
toward the West, toward the United States,” we would “now lose all that”
over America and NATO’s intervention. “[T]here will not be such great
drive and great friendship that we had before. That will not be there again.”
Former acting prime minister and American friend Yegor Gaidar called
from Rome, where he was about to meet with Pope John Paul II, and asked
Talbott to tell the pontiff that America was interested in his intervention to
broker a peace, and that the administration would offer a pause in the
bombing to help facilitate it. Talbott replied, “Absolutely not. A pause
would be tantamount to surrender.” Gaidar then told Talbott, “[I]f only you
knew what a disaster this war is for those of us in Russia who want for our
country what you want.”[910] Anatoly Chubais warned American
diplomats, “You’re not just bombing Milošević, but Russian liberals as
well.”[911]
In yet another call, Yeltsin castigated the president, saying that instead
of stopping an atrocity, “what has been achieved is a giant humanitarian
catastrophe, and significant damage has occurred to U.S.-Russian
relations.” He warned Clinton that the “anti-American and anti-NATO
sentiment in Russia keeps growing like an avalanche,” and that he was
staving off demands that he send Russian forces into the war on Serbia’s
side. He asked the president to halt the bombing and offered to bring the
Serbs to the table. Clinton promised that the Russians could come to protect
the Kosovar Serbs, that Serbia’s territorial integrity would be protected
under autonomy for Kosovo and that the KLA would be disarmed, none of
which was true. But he got Yeltsin’s help pressuring Milošević to give in
and withdraw.[912]
Yeltsin then suspended participation in the new NATO-Russia Council
and threatened to have the parliament withhold ratification of the important
START II nuclear weapons treaty. He also retargeted nuclear missiles at the
U.S. and its NATO allies.[913] In the end, START II was ratified, but all the
negotiations behind START III were thrown away.[914] One NATO official
said that “everything he rooted his presidency on—getting the major
benefits of Western cooperation with minimal humiliation—was about to go
out the window.”[915]
Viktor Chernomyrdin, the former prime minister who was named
Russia’s special envoy for Kosovo in April, wrote in the Post, referring to
the U.S.-NATO policy of intervening in civil wars and without
authorization from the Security Council, that the war had set back U.S.-
Russia relations “by several decades.” He cited opinion polling showing
that before the war, 57 percent of Russians viewed the U.S. favorably. After
the war, that number was down to 14 percent, while 63 percent blamed the
U.S. and NATO for the conflict. He denied this was about “so-called Slavic
fraternity,” and instead insisted the bombing “clashes with international law,
the Helsinki agreements and the entire world order that took shape after
World War II.” He lamented the bolstering of reactionary forces inside
Russian politics and warned, “The world has never in this decade been so
close as now to the brink of nuclear war.”[916]
Stratfor is a well-known, Austin, Texas-based “private intelligence
firm,” or “shadow CIA” which consults with the federal government, big
business and other customers about international politics. Their founder and
director George Friedman explained in a memo to his customers that
besides the fake casus belli and the illegality of starting a war without UN
Security Council approval (never mind a constitutional declaration), the war
especially unsettled Russia because of the precedent it would set in Europe.
The post-World War II status quo unraveling could be used as “a precedent
for dismembering Russia. In fact, they suspected that was the point of
Kosovo.” He added that though Russia was too weak to stop the war, it
“served as a catalyst for Russia’s leadership to try to halt the country’s
decline and regain its respect.” Part of the consequences of the Kosovo War,
then, was the rise of Vladimir Putin and the return to prominence of the old
Russian intelligence services.[917]
In fact, the Kosovo conflict set a precedent that Putin’s Russia invoked
in Ukraine in the 2020s: where an ethnic minority is claiming persecution, a
great power can move right in and change their sovereign status through
unilateral force, international law be damned.
Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev pointed out that when Putin
attacked Kiev in February 2022, the initial strike at the TV tower was
obviously a direct callback to Clinton’s attack on the antenna in Belgrade in
the 1999 war against Serbia, just as he had quoted from Kosovo’s
declaration of independence when his forces seized the Crimean Peninsula
in 2014.[918] Few, if any, Americans noticed.
After Kosovo, Henry Kissinger warned, “In Russia, an outraged sense
of humiliation over NATO’s actions has spread from the elites to the
population at large and threatens to blight U.S.-Russian relations for years
to come.”[919] He continued: “The transformation of the Alliance from a
defensive military grouping into an institution prepared to impose its values
by force occurred in the same months that three former Soviet satellites
joined NATO.” This, he said, “undercut repeated American and allied
assurances that Russia had nothing to fear from NATO expansion, since the
Alliance’s own treaty proclaimed it to be a purely defensive institution.” He
wrote that the war had highlighted Russia’s decline and “generated a
hostility toward America and the West that may produce a nationalist and
socialist Russia—akin to the European Fascism of the 1930s,” and that
“Russia’s image of itself as an historic player on the world stage must be
taken seriously. This requires less lecturing and more dialogue . . . less
sociology and more foreign policy.”[920]
In 2000, Putin said he thought the most important aspect of the conflict
was the wanton violation of the UN Charter, which forbids aggressive war
without UNSC—including Russian—approval. The U.S. was trying to
“supplant” the international law with NATO. “We must not agree to that,”
he said.[921]
Harvard’s Mark Kramer wrote that the Kosovo War and NATO
expansion prompted the Russian Security Council to rewrite the country’s
“Concept on National Security” with “more aggressive language and
militaristic posture.” No longer “partner,” the United States was now again
officially considered an adversary. “The perceived slights, combined with
the displays of Western air prowess, prompted a major reassessment in
Moscow of the country’s strategy—and provided the catalyst for redrafting
the doctrine.” He warned that “[i]t also provides somewhat looser
conditions for the possible use of Russian nuclear weapons, warning that a
nuclear attack by Russia might be forthcoming to ‘repel armed aggression if
all other means of resolving a crisis have failed.’” Kramer added that the
Russians were “vehemently opposed to the admission of the three Baltic
states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania—which U.S. officials claimed last
year [1999] was ‘inevitable.’”[922] In response to the question of Russia
attempting to join NATO, Putin, at that time, seemed cold to the idea and
insisted cooperation could only take place when the U.S. would treat them
as equals, which he predicted they would not.[923] Though Yeltsin’s
government officially cut off contact with NATO afterwards, Putin restored
relations upon taking office.
Michael Mandelbaum, professor at Johns Hopkins University School
of Advanced International Studies, wrote in Foreign Affairs that the Kosovo
War was a strategic disaster for the United States. The people of the
Balkans, he said, were worse off, the precedent set in international law was
destabilizing, and America’s relationship with both Russia and China had
been severely set back. Mandelbaum predicted the consequences of
Clinton’s decision to invade a sovereign nation in the name of protecting
one side in a civil war and in violation of the UN Charter in 1999, “giving,
for example, the Russian-dominated Commonwealth of Independent States
the right to intervene in Ukraine if it believes ethnic Russians there are
being mistreated—which is unacceptable to NATO.”
The professor also noted the role the Kosovo War played in the
deteriorating relationship between the U.S. and Russia, since Clinton had
broken Bush and Baker’s promise, and those he had made to ameliorate that
fact: that they would make NATO into a political organization, that its
military role would remain defensive and that Russia would be treated as a
full partner in questions of European security. “The war in Yugoslavia gave
the lie to all three: NATO initiated a war against a sovereign state that had
attacked none of its members, a war to which Russia objected but that
Moscow could not prevent,” he said. “Whereas NATO expansion had
angered the Russian political class, the bombing of Serbia by all accounts
triggered widespread outrage in the Russian public . . . and signaled a shift
in the politics of Russian foreign policy in a nationalist direction.”[924]
Congressman Ron Paul denounced the strikes on the House floor,
saying, “This policy of nation-building and interference in a civil war
totally contradicts the mission of European defense set out in the NATO
charter.” He noted that “[w]ithout the Soviet enemy to justify the European
military machine, NATO had to find enemies and humanitarian missions to
justify its existence.”[925]
Kosovo finally officially declared independence in 2008, enraging the
Russians, but as Philip Hammond pointed out, “this was ‘supervised
independence’ under the auspices of the European Union Rule of Law
Mission in Kosovo (EULEX).” More than 4,000 NATO troops and
hundreds of EU, UN and OSCE staff members still occupy the country, and
the U.S. and EU still dictate Kosovar policies.[926] Organized crime
centered on heroin[927] still thrives under international supervision.[928]
After a quarter of a century, Western nations have completely failed to build
a functioning nation in Kosovo. In 2016, Carlotta Gall of the New York
Times complained that the war had made Kosovo a “font of extremism,”
saying it was now “fertile ground for ISIS” terrorists. Saudi money had
turned once moderate Muslims into Wahhabi extremists, transforming their
whole society. “In some cases, centuries-old buildings were bulldozed,
including a historic library in Gjakova and several 400-year-old mosques,
as well as shrines, graveyards and Dervish monasteries, all considered
idolatrous in Wahhabi teaching.”
 “Over the last two years,” Gall reported, “the police have identified
314 Kosovars—including two suicide bombers, 44 women and 28 children
—who have gone abroad to join the Islamic State, the highest number per
capita in Europe.”[929]

Pipeline Wars

Black Gold

Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid coined the term “the new Great Game”
in 1997 to describe the competition among the regional and global powers
over the control of oil and natural gas pipeline routes out of the West Asian
Caspian Basin.[930] America is a major player in this contest.
The U.S. government and connected oil companies began eyeing the
Caspian Basin in 1989, just as the Soviet Union was breaking up.[931] At
President Bush’s urging, the USSR signed their first deal with Chevron to
develop the Tengiz oil field in northwestern Kazakhstan in the summer of
1990.[932] James Baker, Bush Sr.’s first secretary of state and powerful
Houston, Texas, attorney for major oil firms, traveled to the country to
normalize relations in 1992.[933]
Though initial estimates of Caspian oil supplies were overly optimistic,
[934] there were still billions of dollars to be made and national competitors
to be eliminated.

Azeri Coup D’état

In 1993, British Petroleum (BP) and Amoco oil company overthrew
Azerbaijani President Abulfaz Elchibey, a former Soviet dissident and
leader of the elected government of the small Caspian Basin nation, in a
military coup. In his place they installed Haydar Aliyev, a former KGB
chief and first secretary of the Communist Party under the Soviet Union.
[935] The people of the country had only just held free and fair elections
and voted in Elchibey the year before. But what was left of the old British
Empire quickly put an end to this nascent Azeri democracy.[936] Aliyev’s
son Ilham, who seized power in 2003,[937] is dictator to this day. The U.S.
and UK governments openly welcomed Aliyev’s illegal takeover because
they wanted to cut the Russian Federation out of the Caspian oil game and
make a ton of money taking it over for themselves.[938] One of Aliyev’s
first acts was to sign a $5 billion deal with BP. Five years later, Tony Blair
hosted him in London, where he signed another $13 billion worth of
contracts with BP and other British oil firms. “BP has close links to British
intelligence and employs several former MI6 officers,” the London Times
noted in 2000.[939]
However, according to Forbes’s Paul Klebnikov, the Russians also
supported the coup and used their influence with the new regime to secure a
portion of the deal for the new Russian oil firm Lukoil.[940]

Dual Containment

The American companies in Azerbaijan wanted to build a pipeline through

Iran or to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. It would be shorter
and cheaper. This policy was supported by Zbigniew Brzezinski as a way to
help reopen Iran to the United States.[941]
But the Israel Lobby in America was insisting on the “dual
containment” policy,[942] which mandated permanent Cold War against
both Iraq and Iran, including a massive sanctions regime against both
countries enforced from U.S. air bases in Saudi Arabia. Any deal including
Iran was out.[943] The pipelines would have to go east and west out of the
Caspian, not north or south. Though Talbott was again initially somewhat
reluctant to stick it to the Russians this way, Clinton’s Deputy Secretary of
Energy Bill White, new National Security Council Caspian region desk
chief Rosemarie Forsythe, NSC director for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasian
Affairs, energy expert and Russia hawk Sheila Heslin,[944] and the rest of
the State Department were enjoying their opportunity to dance on Russia’s
shallow grave.[945]
The policy was explicitly anti-Russian, rather than profit-driven, in its
origin. Brzezinski, later, after conceding defeat on his previous plans to
work with Iran,[946] explained that Azerbaijan “is the cork in the bottle
containing the riches of the Caspian Sea basin and Central Asia.”[947]
Russia wants “control,” while the U.S. and its allies simply want to help
guarantee the “independence” of these nations—from Russia.[948] This is
especially true, he said, because in the case of Russia, any attempt by their
government to assert an imperial role in their near abroad would necessarily
destroy their experiment in self-government. Precluding the attempt by
asserting American dominance instead would help to preserve their
democracy and potential for future “Europeanization,” he claimed.[949]
 The trio of White, Forsythe and Heslin succeeded in classifying the
Caspian Basin region as an issue of national security and part of America’s
effort to continue containment of Russia. They would expand NATO to
Eastern Europe, and in the Caspian Basin, and while refraining from
stationing troops there, would work politically to freeze out Russian
influence, particularly through the use of oil pipelines.[950]
Talbott considered Russia a far more important country to America’s
national interests than Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Georgia, and fought to
limit the hawks’ goals. Marc Grossman, the new ambassador to Turkey,
then intervened. While President Eduard Shevardnadze was pushing hard
for Georgian inclusion as a way to secure the new nation’s independence
from Russia, Grossman knew the Turks wanted in on the action too.
Working with the NSC’s Forsythe and Heslin, they succeeded in an end-run
around Talbott by implying they would include the Russians in their plans
while instead establishing that U.S. efforts would go into the Baku-Tbilisi-
Ceyhan (that is, Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey a.k.a. BTC) pipeline.[951]
After leaving the NSC, Heslin urged the administration and international oil
firms to push through the BTC pipeline as soon as possible, to cut out the
Russians: “From a strategic perspective, the first generation of pipeline
development should proceed along a western route, notably the Baku-
Ceyhan route.”[952] Heslin wrote in the Times that the closing of the deal
to create the BTC and preclusion of any new pipelines through Russia or
Iran was a “dire” national security concern. Failing her favored policy,
Russia would be sure to dominate all the lands of the former Soviet empire
through their control of one proposed pipeline from Azerbaijan to
Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan, she said.[953]
Brzezinski, then working for the oil company Unocal on a supposed
“humanitarian” mission to Azerbaijan, delivered a letter to President Aliyev
from President Clinton promising support for a dual-pipeline plan that the
Americans never meant to live up to in order to convince Aliyev to resist
Russian pressure against the Georgian pipeline plan, promising that theirs
would come soon after.[954] Clinton closed the deal in November 1999.
[955] The BTC pipeline was completed in June 2006.[956]
“There’s a very interesting split of oil people on one hand and
geopoliticians on the other,” Thane Gustafson, a Washington-based energy
consultant, told journalist Stephen Kinzer. “The geopoliticians are still
breathing heavily, but for the oil people it’s more like a sigh.” Julia Nanay, a
consultant involved with the companies pumping crude out of the Caspian
told Kinzer, “This is not really about oil. It’s about defense politics and
world strategy. Whether you’re talking about containing Russian influence
or helping Turkey or containing Iran or building up new states in the region,
oil is just a political cover.”[957]

Nagorno-Karabakh

Before they could do that, the Clinton administration decided they needed
to try to help the new Azeri junta defeat Armenia in the impossibly
complicated war that broke out between them when the Soviet Union fell.
Under borders drawn by Stalin and the Turks in 1921, an important
Armenian enclave they call Artsakh (a.k.a. Nagorno-Karabakh to the
Azeris) was left totally surrounded by the foreign state of Azerbaijan. They
fought from 1992 to 1994 in a war that killed approximately 30,000
people[958] and intermittently afterwards, until in September 2023 the
Azeris finally “cleansed” the area of Armenians by force.[959] The U.S., of
course, supports Azerbaijan.
Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the ethnic Pashtun Afghan warlord and leader
of Hezb-e-Islami—then a U.S. favorite and later deadly enemy during the
American war in Afghanistan (2001–2021)[960]—sent 1,000 mujahideen
veterans of the 1980s Afghan-Soviet War to fight on Azerbaijan’s side. At
least 1,500 more joined them.[961] Clinton’s government sent a secret team
of American retired special operations forces mercenaries working with
former Iran-Contra scandal figure General Richard Secord and calling
themselves “Mega Oil” to match Hekmatyar’s efforts,[962] even though
due to domestic lobbying, Congress appropriated more money for the
Armenian side, as did the Russians, who also sent arms and mercenaries to
help.[963] After the war, many of these fighters turned to terrorism,
bombing civilian targets in Baku, and launching four failed coup attempts
against Aliyev.[964]

Neocons Weigh In

In 1996, Ariel Cohen, the same man who wrote up the original
neoconservative plan for rapid privatization of national oil resources in Iraq
War II,[965] wrote an article for the Heritage Foundation called “The New
‘Great Game’: Oil Politics in the Caucasus and Central Asia.” In the article,
Cohen explained, “Like the ‘Great Game’ of the early 20th century, in
which the geopolitical interests of the British Empire and Russia clashed
over the Caucasus region and Central Asia, today’s struggle between Russia
and the West may turn on who controls the oil reserves in Eurasia.” He
claimed that “[p]owerful interests in Moscow are attempting to ensure that
the only route for exporting the energy resources of Eurasia will pass
through Russia,” while insisting the U.S. make every effort to cut them out
entirely. “Independent and self-sufficient former Soviet states, bolstered by
their oil revenues, would deny Russia the option of establishing a de facto
sphere of influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia.” He was even ahead
of the curve demanding the creation of the BTC pipeline.[966]

West to Turkey Instead

In 1998, Clinton’s Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, addressing Caspian oil

supplies and pipeline routes, explained, “This is about America’s energy
security, which depends on diversifying our sources of oil and gas
worldwide. It’s also about preventing strategic inroads by those who don’t
share our values.” He made it clear that the policy was pure geopolitical
power politics. “We’re trying to move these newly independent countries
toward the West. We would like to see them reliant on Western commercial
and political interests rather than going another way,” Richardson said.
“We’ve made a substantial political investment in the Caspian, and it’s very
important to us that both the pipeline map and the politics come out
right.”[967] Clinton created the Office of the Special Adviser to the
President and the Secretary of State for Caspian Basin Energy Diplomacy to
pass out subsidies for the massive Eurasian Transportation Corridor
network of pipelines to ship all that Turkmen and Kazakh oil west across
the Caspian Sea and on to Turkey, including the BTC pipeline.[968] As the
Washington Post explained, the oil majors wanted subsidies and protection,
and the pro-Israel factions were most concerned with cutting out the
Iranians.[969]
Narrow personal and economic interests trumped anything like what
would be good for the American people in the long-term. Bribes and
corruption would rule the day.[970] Post reporters Dan Morgan and David
B. Ottaway wrote as part of their in-depth series on the subject that once the
big companies got on board for the project, the faction fight within the
administration was won by the hawks. “The State Department encapsulated
U.S. ambitions in a report last April, which said the U.S. goal is ‘to tie the
region securely to the West’ through multiple pipelines and transportation
corridors outside Russia.”[971] In a follow-up, the pair wrote, “This sat
badly in Moscow. Russian nationalists had warned of an expanding
American presence in Central Asia,” adding, “Now Russian newspapers
denounced ‘American imperialism’ and Yeltsin decried U.S. ‘penetration’ in
the region.”[972]
That was the whole point of the BTC pipeline. As the former director
of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) in Georgia explained, “There
was an overarching understanding that Russia having a lock on
hydrocarbons to Europe is a problem. Threading the needle between Russia
and Iran stuck it to them pretty good.”[973]

Taliban Pipeline
The Clinton administration also backed proposals for new pipelines from
Azerbaijan to Kazakhstan, and canceled another planned route between
Turkmenistan, Iran and Turkey, a project first floated by Reagan’s ex-
secretary of state, Alexander Haig.[974] The Post explained, “To State
Department strategists, the perfect pipeline out of [the] Dauletabad [gas
field] lay in a different direction: from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan to
Pakistan, connecting the gas resources of Central Asia to the surging
economies of South Asia,” noting this would “deprive Iran of transit fees
for Turkmen gas crossing its territory while capturing the South Asian gas
market coveted by Iran.”[975] Clinton had tolerated Saudi and Pakistani
support for the Taliban in the mid-1990s, hoping to win a contract for a new
oil pipeline from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan and on to Pakistan’s
Port of Karachi. Therefore, not only did Washington back the Taliban, but
even favored a military victory over the rival Northern Alliance and a
consolidation of power in Afghanistan, rather than the division of authority
that might have resulted from a negotiated peace. For instance, American
officials were pleased after the Taliban captured the ancient city of Herat in
1995, and when it seized the Afghan capital the following year, a U.S.
diplomat told Rashid it might even be desirable if they went on to conquer
the entire country: “The Taliban will probably develop like the Saudis did.
There will be Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia
law. We can live with that.” Another senior diplomat similarly
acknowledged that the U.S. had “acquiesced in supporting the Taliban
because of our links to the Pakistan and Saudi governments who backed
them,” though insisted “we no longer do so and we have told them
categorically that we need a settlement.”[976]
Energy expert Sheila Heslin, the anti-Russia hawk on Clinton’s
National Security Council, explained how the administration coordinated
with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to aid the Taliban’s rise to power. “U.S.
policy was to promote the rapid development of Caspian energy,” she told
lawmakers. “We did so specifically to promote the independence of these
oil-rich countries, to in essence break Russia’s monopoly control over the
transportation of oil from that region, and frankly, to promote Western
energy security through diversification of supply.”[977] The U.S. oil firm
Unocal, a major player in the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline plan, finally gave
up on the effort after Clinton ordered cruise missile strikes on Afghan
training camps in response to al Qaeda’s 1998 African embassy bombings,
as well as the collapse of oil prices around the same time.[978]

GUAM

The regional grouping of former-Soviet Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan and

Moldova (GUAM), backed by the U.S., was first established in 1997. The
acronym used to have two Us, because Uzbekistan was a member until
2005. It is meant to speed European integration and exclude Russian
influence from the South Caucasus. The Russians denounced the
organization as a new “Axis of Evil” aimed at them in 2005.[979] Anatol
Lieven pointed out in 1999, “At barely 2 percent of the world’s proven oil
reserves (around a thirtieth of the Gulf’s reserves), it should be blindingly
obvious that Caspian energy does not constitute a vital U.S. interest.” He
said that “[i]f the United States possessed vital interests in the Caspian
region, and were prepared to secure them with determination, there would
then be a case for saying to hell with Russian opinion.” However, he wrote,
“in the absence of those conditions, many aspects of existing policy seem
like unnecessary and even frivolous provocations.” He cited the GUUAM
(now GUAM) group the U.S. had put together. What could they possibly
have to offer the United States that is more important than maintaining a
positive relationship with Russia?[980]
In 2001, Paul Rogers, professor at Bradford University, warned of the
potential of Russian re-militarization based on their “perception that NATO
expansion and U.S. commercial interests in the Caspian Basin are part of a
strategic encroachment into Russia’s historic sphere of influence.”[981]

Azeri Despotism

In 2003, Azeri dictator Heydar Aliyev—who never won a fair vote[982]—

died just weeks before he was set to steal another one. His son Ilham soon
took over after an obviously rigged election.[983] Even though opinion
polls had him set to lose, the younger Aliyev somehow ended up with over
80 percent of the vote. Police beat protesters, shot them with rubber bullets,
gassed them and sicced dogs on them. Two were killed. Journalist Jonathan
Steele pointed out that the Bush administration did not say anything about
the rigged 2003 election[984] because that was for a loyal American client.
[985] Bush had praised the younger Aliyev’s “commitment to a free and fair
election,” then went ahead and preemptively announced the winner himself,
saying, “I look forward to working with you after these elections.”[986]
Just a few days before the official opening of the BTC pipeline in May
2005, Azeri security forces smashed a pro-democracy protest.[987] But that
was just fine with W. Bush and the American foreign policy community.
“He’s a sonofabitch, but he’s ours,” as President Roosevelt said about
Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza,[988] so he can do whatever he
wants.
Ilham Aliyev has cheated his way to continuing to hold that power ever
since. In 2013, the government accidentally announced the president’s
reelection victory a day before the vote was held.[989] The OSCE
denounced the election.[990] But the BTC pipeline flows West.

Chechnya

The First War

Chechnya, a small Muslim province in the Northern Caucasus Mountains,

had violently resisted Russian imperial rule since at least 1785. In 1937,
Stalin’s People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD) massacred
14,000 Chechens and Ingush at Gori Yachevodskaya, and during World War
II, the Soviets rounded up approximately 500,000 more and deported them
to Kazakhstan and Siberia until after Stalin’s death in 1953.[991] So there
was plenty of bad blood between the people and the regime in Moscow.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, and the loss of such former imperial
possessions as Georgia and Azerbaijan, the new Russian Federation decided
to draw the line at the Northern Caucasus. The Chechens had other ideas. In
the fall of 1990, a meeting of 1,000 prominent Chechens declared their
intent to seek independence from the then-unraveling USSR and elected
Dzhokhar Dudayev, a former Soviet air force commander, president. A year
later, he declared independence.[992] The new Russian government was too
weak at the time to do much about it. The war did not break out until 1994.
It began as a falling-out between gangsters. The Chechen mob had
extensive business connections with the corrupt Russian army, as well as
side deals on oil. It also ran massive protection rackets in Moscow and
other major Russian cities. Gen. Lebed said that “Dzhokhar Dudayev
decided he had become big and strong and stopped sharing the booty with
his Moscow sponsors.”[993] It was a devastating war in which, after a
series of humiliating setbacks, the Russians eventually bombed the Chechen
capital of Grozny to bits. Just as U.S. marines would do in the Iraqi city of
Fallujah five years later,[994] Russian forces warned civilians to flee,
declared the city a free-fire zone and determined that anyone left by the
time the fighting started must be a terrorist and a legitimate target.[995] At
least 30,000 civilians were killed. Many more were put in concentration
camps and tortured. One hundred thousand refugees fled to Ingushetia.[996]
While the Russian military bombed civilians, the rebels publicly cut the
throats of Russian prisoners of war.[997]
The Clinton administration had contributed $10 billion to the cause,
and the president and vice president both defended Yeltsin’s brutality by
comparing him to Abraham Lincoln in the U.S. Civil War.[998] E. Wayne
Merry later said, “In that, we lost our credibility, I think, with almost all of
the democratic forces in Russia.” Washington may have even been involved
in helping the Russians target President Dudayev in a rocket attack in April
1996.[999]

Terris

At the end of the 1980s Soviet-Afghan War and beginning of the dissolution
of the Soviet Union, the Chechen capital city of Grozny became a major
destination and hub of travel for mujahideen veterans, especially Arabs.
[1000] Osama bin Laden, then in exile in Sudan, sent fighters to join the
jihad via an office his men had set up in Azerbaijan.[1001]
This included military commander Samir Salih Abdallah al-Suwaylim,
otherwise known as Ibn al-Khattab, a Saudi associate of terrorist godfather
Abdul Azzam[1002] and Azzam’s successor bin Laden[1003]—who had
fought in Afghanistan,[1004] Bosnia,[1005] Tajikistan, Dagestan and both
Chechen wars[1006]—and Khattab’s right-hand man, Shamil Basayev, who
had been committing terrorist attacks inside Russia since 1995. In June of
that year, Basayev led a team that took hostages at a hospital in the town of
Budyonnovsk, 70 miles inside Russia. At least 140 innocent civilians were
eventually killed by the terrorists and the Russian forces sent to stop them.
In August, Basayev’s men took Grozny, killing 500 soldiers and leaving
3,000 more surrounded in their barracks. These successful attacks forced
the Yeltsin government to send Gen. Lebed to negotiate.[1007] Lebed later
said that he began talks after finding out that Chechen terrorists were
planning to hit Russian nuclear plants.[1008] The next August, Yeltsin
signed the Khasavyurt Accords, which gave autonomy to the province and
brought the first war to an end.[1009]
 But it was not truly over. The new government in Grozny could not
control all the rebel factions, with the bin Ladenites rejecting new president
Aslan Maskhadov’s rule as too moderate, and committing the most violent
attacks on Russian forces in neighboring provinces and along the border.
[1010] Jordanian Soviet-Afghan War veteran Sheikh Ali Fathi al-Shishani
created a new group of Chechen fighters in 1993, just in time to recruit
massive numbers of other terrorists to fight in the first war, including
Khattab, who quickly assumed command of most of the unit. Khattab then
allied himself with the native commander Basayev.[1011] In the time
between the wars, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Egypt all sent at
least hundreds of their bin Ladenites to fight in Chechnya.[1012] They were
led by Khattab and his men, who had already been there for years. President
Maskhadov was so dependent on the bin Ladenites that after the first war,
he was forced to include Sharia law in the new government’s constitution.
He could not control the jihadists, who later started the second war without
his approval.[1013]

Berezovsky

The powerful Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky, who had been

instrumental to Vladimir Putin’s rise to power, helped to negotiate the end
of the First Chechen War in 1996.[1014] After becoming deputy secretary
of the Security Council, he took charge of rebuilding the Chechen economy.
Gen. Lebed accused him of simply needing to cover up his previous
business ties to assorted Chechen terrorists and gangsters. Paul Klebnikov
marveled at Berezovsky’s confidence and ease of travel around the
renegade state. Berezovsky made himself famous by successfully
negotiating the release of various hostages seized by Chechen terrorists. But
Klebnikov noted, “Over two and [a] half years, Berezovsky maintained
close relations with the warlords who either carried out kidnappings or were
closely linked to the criminals who did.” He associated not with moderates
like Maskhadov, but with bin Ladenite terrorist leaders like “Shamil
Basayev and Salman Raduyev or Islamic fundamentalists like Movladi
Udugov,” who had been made deputy prime minister in the Maskhadov
government. According to Klebnikov, “Maskhadov tolerated this man’s
presence for the sake of national unity but privately scorned him as a
proponent of jihad (Islamic holy war)—Udugov’s brother was one of the
leaders of the Wahhabi sect the most fanatical Islamic fundamentalist group
in Chechnya.”[1015] Moscow police considered Berezovsky to be the
kidnappers’ banker. Authorities allowed Klebnikov to listen to audio of
Berezovsky and Udugov haggling about payoffs.[1016] Maskhadov himself
also declared that Berezovsky was playing a double game and deliberately
financing the kidnappers, as he put it, “to discredit the whole Chechen
people.” More likely he was just enjoying the publicity of posing as a hero
solving problems, and taking a kickback on the side. He was later accused
by Putin of backing Basayev in the second war after their falling-out and his
exile to London. In fact, he admitted to giving Basayev a million dollars,
claiming it was for a cement factory.[1017]
Lebed died in a helicopter crash in Siberia in 2002.[1018] Klebnikov
was assassinated by Chechen hitmen in Moscow two years later.[1019]

Terrorism in One Country

Some experts, such as Paul Tumelty of the Jamestown Foundation and
Justine A. Rosenthal of the Brookings Institution, point to differences in
strategy between bin Laden and Khattab to downplay their connection,
which they both admitted was real.[1020] But Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—the
Jordanian who had turned down bin Laden’s offer to join al Qaeda, since he
wanted to focus his efforts on Jordan, rather than the U.S., as bin Laden
preferred—later became the leader of the most violent part of the Sunni-
based insurgency in Iraq War II (2003–2011), employing terrorist tactics
like suicide bombings and beheadings. He was no less a bin Ladenite
terrorist for his more parochial views and belated declaration of loyalty to
the Saudi sheik.[1021]
The same argument would apply to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who
explicitly denounced the leadership of Ayman al-Zawahiri when he broke
from al Qaeda and began to create his so-called Islamic State Caliphate in
eastern Syria in 2013 and western Iraq in 2014,[1022] as well as the KLA,
Algeria’s Armed Islamic Group,[1023] the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
(LIFG)[1024] and Ansar al-Sharia[1025] in Libya, Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria,
[1026] in addition to Khattab and Basayev in Chechnya before them. In the
Chechens’ case, just like the others, bin Laden’s organization was directly
involved in financing and transporting mujahideen to get involved in the
fight.[1027] The BBC went to interview the jihadists in 2000. They were
bin Ladenite terrorists, determined to create an Islamic state. Calling it “the
ultimate jihad,” the reporter described the International Islamic Brigade
fighters as “Turks, Arabs, Kurds [and] Azeris.” They fought under Ibn al-
Khattab, whom they called “Osama bin Laden’s agent in Chechnya.”
Members glorified female suicide bombers.[1028] Whether they focus on
the near enemy or far, the terrorists are the same psychopathic killers and
statists—an “Islamist Khmer Rouge,” as journalist Patrick Cockburn
described ISIS in 2014.[1029]
A 2010 UN report confirmed Basayev had been to Afghanistan to meet
with bin Laden and arrange for fighters to come back with him to Chechnya
at least twice. In 1999, he sent emissaries to meet with the al Qaeda leader,
who agreed to send more money and fighters to support their effort. Over
the years, hundreds of Chechens had traveled to Afghanistan to fight and
train. The UN said Khattab had used al Qaeda’s money to help recruit
fighters from Ingushetia, Ossetia, Georgia and Azerbaijan for the holy wars
in Chechnya and Dagestan, and that by 1995, “substantial numbers” of
Arab-Afghans were fighting Russian troops in Chechnya. Many Chechens
also fought for al Qaeda’s “055 Brigade” alongside the Taliban against the
Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.[1030]
Another article at Jamestown explained that the Saudis financed their
Chechen fighters through a charity called Mercy International.[1031] The
Washington Post confirmed the Saudi involvement in 2003, identifying
another charity front, al Haramain. Magomed Makhdiyev, a local village
imam in neighboring Dagestan, told them about the al Qaeda-backed Arab
imams who had infiltrated his village: “They tried to lure people in a
friendly way at first, but by 1999, they were saying, ‘Join us or we’ll cut
your head off.’”[1032]

Dagestan
The war started up again in 1999, when Chechen forces led by Basayev and
Khattab invaded Dagestan, killing Russian border guards, taking over a few
villages and declaring an Islamic state. Col. Robert W. Shaefer, who is
sympathetic to the Chechens and their resistance against Russian
domination, conceded, “A strong case can . . . be made that the radicals
caused the second war, partly because they themselves did not honor the
Khasavyurt agreement and vowed before the start of the second war to
liberate Dagestan.” Citing the bin Ladenites, he wrote that “the inexorable
advance of Salafism provided at least some of the motivation for the
Russians to consider the reinvasion in the first place, while the attack into
Dagestan . . . gave them the clear legal justification to do so.”[1033]

The Apartment Bombings

Basayev and Khattab’s invasion of Dagestan was followed shortly by a

controversial series of apartment complex bombings that September which
killed more than 300 people and were blamed on Chechen terrorists.[1034]
Former Prime Minister Primakov had been ahead in the polls compared to
the new prime minister, Vladimir Putin. But the renewed war against
Chechen terrorism solidified Putin’s popularity and rise to the presidency.
[1035]
Federal Security Bureau (FSB) agents were caught by local police in
the middle of what they said was a drill with fake explosives, causing
suspicions that they were behind the entire wave of attacks in order to
restart the war and boost Vladimir Putin’s fortunes.[1036] The American
War Party loves this particular conspiracy theory.[1037] Alexander
Litvinenko, a former FSB agent, had defected to England after claiming he
had been sent to assassinate by-then-exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, his
later patron. Berezovsky then financed the writing of Litvinenko’s book and
a documentary claiming Putin and the FSB were behind the string of
attacks.[1038]
But former KGB agent and fellow defector Oleg Gordievsky cast
severe doubt on the story in the Telegraph. “Planting a bomb which kills
300 civilians merely to increase your popularity would set a new record for
cold-blooded callousness, even by the standards set by Russia’s past
leaders,” he wrote, adding, “It would mean Putin is capable of the kind of
Caligulan cruelty which would raise serious questions about his sanity.”
Calling Putin’s responsibility “unlikely,” Gordievsky wrote that Putin was
“well able to calculate that the risks of exposure would guarantee the
operation was not worth its possible benefits.” He also doubted
Litvinenko’s story about being sent to assassinate Berezovsky: “Stalin’s
KGB was famous for assassinating opponents, with or without the slightest
pretext. But by the time I joined the KGB, such ‘wet jobs’ were very
rare.”[1039]
Paul Klebnikov also doubted this “strange” story, noting Berezovsky
had worked closely with the FSB on Chechen kidnappings in the past and
had a decent relationship with them. In his book Godfather of the Kremlin,
which features more Russian mob hits than one could imagine, Klebnikov
dismissed this one as unlikely. “Most knowledgeable observers,” he wrote,
“concluded that the alleged FSB plot to assassinate Berezovsky was a
fabrication.” However, it was this fake scandal which served as the pretext
for Yeltsin’s so-called “family” to fire Putin’s predecessor Nikolai Kovalev
and make Putin the head of the FSB—his first big step on his way to the
presidency.[1040]
The Times also conceded that the accusations against Putin for the
bombings were completely unproven, noting that “terrorism has
traumatized Russia for two decades. Suicide bombers have killed hundreds
of Russians in dozens of attacks.”[1041] CBC News counted 654 Russians
killed in 18 attacks between 1996 and 2011.[1042] Why would the FSB
need to fake a few of those against their own people?
Klebnikov also wrote that though the bombings helped Putin in the
polls, he found it “hard to believe” Putin was behind the attacks. “There’s
nothing in the man’s past to indicate that he would commit such a
monstrous crime to gain power,” Klebnikov wrote. “On the contrary, Putin’s
past career betrays an unusual dedication to a fixed code of conduct (albeit
an authoritarian one); there is nothing to suggest the bottomless cynicism
necessary to massacre one’s own people to promote one’s career.” On the
contrary, he said, the more likely answer was that the terrorists had done it.
“Both Shamil Basayev and other commanders such as Salman Raduyev had
carried out terrorist assaults against the Russian civilian population in the
past and had boasted of their exploits.” Noting their connections to bin
Laden, Klebnikov wrote, “These men publicly executed Russian prisoners
of war and civilian hostages by cutting off their heads with large hunting
knives, and videotaped the procedure. Clearly there were plenty of
candidates . . . capable of carrying out the 1999 apartment
bombings.”[1043]
 Professor Robert Bruce Ware, an expert on Dagestan,[1044] found that
rather than Chechens or FSB agents, the simplest explanation was that
“they were perpetrated by Wahhabis from Dagestan, and perhaps elsewhere
in the region, under the leadership of Khattab, as retribution for the federal
attacks on Karamakhi, Chabanmakhi, and Kadar,”[1045] three Dagestani
towns which had recently been bombed by Russian forces. Ware also
showed that the explosives used—said to be proof of FSB involvement—
were widely available in Dagestan at the time.[1046] Khattab stopped just
short of taking credit for the attacks, declaring his group’s future anti-
Russian terrorism should be considered revenge for their attacks on his
forces in Dagestan.[1047]
Basayev, the founder and leader of the Islamic International Brigade
(IIB), later carried out the massacre at Moscow’s Podshipnikov Zavod
(Dubrovka) Theater in October 2002, where terrorists killed 129 hostages.
[1048] He attributed the bombings to Dagestanis: “The latest blast in
Moscow is not our work, but the work of the Dagestanis. Russia has been
openly terrorizing Dagestan. . . . [T]he army and the Interior Ministry units
have been pounding three small villages.” Citing revenge for the women
and children who had been killed by Russian forces, Basayev said, “This is
a natural process and it is yet more evidence of Newton’s third law, that
each action generates a reaction.”[1049] Former Chechen foreign minister
and insurgent leader Ilyas Akhmadov suspected Basayev himself and
confronted him about it.[1050]
No matter. The professional regime changers over at the National
Endowment for Democracy and their friend, the Hungarian-American
billionaire investor and political intriguer George Soros, bought the story,
though he believed the conspiracy was Berezovsky paying Basayev to do
the deed as a way to both help and compromise Putin.[1051] The apartment
bombings, which the hawks blamed on Putin and the FSB, were central to
their thesis that the KGB had returned to power and must be stopped at all
costs. Soros alluded to the apartment bombings, as well as Putin’s
association with Boris Berezovsky, to declare the failure of Russian
democracy before the election of 2000 had ever been run.[1052] For these
old Cold Warriors, the new Cold War was already on.[1053]

The Second War

Khattab did have a point about the violence of the Russian army. It was an
absolutely brutal war,[1054] which, after relatively rapid success for the
Russians, then turned into a prolonged counterinsurgency campaign that
lasted many more years. First, local Dagestanis fought off the invaders
themselves, driving the Chechens back across the border to deal with the
Russians.[1055] The Russian army then came with more than 100,000 men.
Rather than roll right into Grozny this time, they slowly worked their way
towards it, eliminating all opposition in their path. Combined with more
modern communications and planning, and aided by Chechens who had
switched sides, the Russians had it much easier the second time around.
When they got to Grozny, they again leveled the place, this time with
artillery, before moving in. After a month of heavy fighting, the Chechens
withdrew to the mountains to restart their guerrilla war.[1056]
 That December, after President Clinton had offered some mild
criticism of Russian tactics in the renewed war,[1057] Yeltsin pointedly
reminded the U.S. that Russia was still a nuclear power: “Yesterday, Clinton
took the liberty of putting pressure on Russia. He obviously must have
forgotten for a few seconds . . . what Russia is and that Russia possesses a
full arsenal of nuclear weapons.”[1058]
Col. Shaefer writes that the first phase of the Chechen resistance was
based on attacks against military targets, or at least government employees,
and that this was true even after they began to use suicide attacks in June
2000.[1059] But that did not last. Beginning in 2002, Basayev launched a
major terrorism campaign against Russian civilians. “For all intents and
purposes,” Shaefer wrote, by 2003, “this terrorism campaign would become
the insurgents’ main effort . . . as Chechen and foreign terrorists tried to
blow Russia apart from the inside, attacking military, government and
civilian targets, killing over 1,000 people and injuring thousands more by
the end of 2004.” The purpose of this terrorism campaign was to “create
fear in the minds of average Russian citizens, to create a schism between
the people and the government that would encourage them to protest to stop
the war like they had in 1980 (Afghanistan) and the Chechen campaign in
1994.”[1060] It backfired. After the Beslan massacre of September 2004,
the Chechens were completely discredited and the Russians gained the
upper hand in the war.[1061] Russia took control of Grozny in early 2000,
after a brutal fight that killed tens of thousands of people, though a lower-
level insurgency continued until at least 2005.

High Treason
Though Clinton publicly supported Russia’s Second Chechen War,[1062]
his CIA, in alliance with Saudi Arabia, also backed the separatist
mujahideen fighters in the North Caucasus Mountains province starting in
1999.[1063] Again, this included bin Ladenite terrorists from the
International Islamic Brigades.[1064] According to former FBI
counterterrorism agent Ali Soufan, when young would-be jihadis who had
missed the Soviet-Afghan War traveled to Bosnia and Chechnya, they did
so “through the same infrastructure that supported the Afghan jihad—the
recruitment channels, funding, NGOs, and travel facilitators were all still in
place.”[1065] New al Qaeda recruits were even confused about why bin
Laden wanted to attack our country. “Their past experience with America
had been positive—the United States had been on the side of Muslims in
Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya,” he wrote.[1066]
In 2008, the private spooks at Stratfor confirmed, “Saudi Arabia, the
United States and Turkey—all of whom had a vested interest in keeping
Russia heavily preoccupied after the fall of the Soviet Union—helped fuel
these wars by providing support to the Chechen rebels.” They said that
“Saudi Arabia in particular led this effort by implanting the Wahhabist
doctrine and providing financing, arms, supplies, guerrilla training and
moral support to Chechen militants. The bulk of Saudi support to the
Chechens was funneled in through charities and humanitarian aid in the
region.”[1067]
Yossef Bodansky, then-director of the U.S. Congressional Task Force
on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare,[1068] wrote in June 2000 that
the United States had been “encouraging its allies to support the irregular
Islamist forces fighting the Russians, while providing strategic and
diplomatic umbrella, and reviving radical militancy in the process.” He
added that “the anti-Russian forces which Washington is supporting are
radical Islamist and allied with Osama bin Laden and other similarly anti-
U.S. forces.” Al Qaeda’s numerous attacks against the United States by that
time[1069] notwithstanding, Bodansky wrote, “As if reliving the ‘good ol’
days’ of Afghanistan of the 1980s, Washington is once again seeking to
support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces.” His
specific accusations included U.S. officials meeting in Azerbaijan in mid-
December 1999, “in which specific programs for the training and equipping
of mujahedin from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world
were discussed and agreed upon.” After this meeting, the Clinton
administration encouraged Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, along with
private American security contractors, to help train and arm up the
insurgency for their escalation in the summer of 2000. And he confirmed
that the only point of this treacherous game was to “deprive Russia of a
viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism,” adding, “In
the calculations of the Clinton Administration, a U.S.-assisted escalation
and expansion of the war in Chechnya should deliver the desired
debilitation of Russia.” Slightly more than a year before September 11,
Bodansky warned, “the Clinton Administration keeps fanning the flames of
the Islamist jihad in the Caucasus through covert assistance, tacit
encouragement of allies to actively support the mujahedin.”[1070]
Previously, in 1999, Bodansky had written that the bin Ladenites had
struck a deal with Heydar Aliyev to allow the free flow of fighters through
Azerbaijan, and in exchange, they would not attempt to overthrow him and
would make forces available for deniable missions in Nagorno-Karabakh
and Armenia. The terrorists had set up an entire infrastructure there,
disguised as charities and educational organizations, like the World
Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), to oversee the “absorption, handling
and initial acclimatization and indoctrination of foreign volunteers . . .
before being sent forward to terrorism and military training bases in central
Chechnya”—those of Ibn al-Khattab. He said that there was at that time a
“major expansion” of the pipeline of arms and fighters coming into the
country. Just days before, a large group of Arabs, alleged associates of bin
Laden, had left Azerbaijan, heading for the mountains and the war.[1071]
In 2005, the U.S. State Department reported that Basayev’s Islamic
International Peacekeeping Brigade (IIPB) was the same group that had
carried out the horrible Dubrovka Theater attack in 2002. It accused them of
involvement in “terrorist and guerilla operations against Russian forces,
pro-Russian Chechen forces, and Chechen non-combatants” and added,
“The IIPB and its Arab leaders appear to be a primary conduit for Islamic
funding of the Chechen guerrillas, in part through links to al-Qa’ida-related
financiers on the Arabian Peninsula.”[1072]

The Great Game

The policy was all about the oil in the Greater Caspian Basin. Again, it was
not only about gaining control over it for the money, but keeping that
wealth out of the hands of the Russians and Iranians. An old Soviet pipeline
ran through Chechnya—from Baku, Azerbaijan, through Grozny, to the
Russian city of Novorossiysk on the Black Sea—and the Americans wanted
it disrupted at any cost. As journalist Sergei Blagov noted in 1999, “Russia
has been keen to use its Baku-Novorossiysk export route for Azerbaijani
‘early’ oil exports. But the pipe crosses over 153 kilometers of Chechen
territory, which makes it unreliable as long as the country is lawless.” The
Russians had tried to pay off the Chechens, but armed gangs kept stealing
the oil. They built another pipeline running through Dagestan instead, “[b]ut
inroads by Chechen militants into Dagestan last August showed that this
option was unsafe too. It was then that the Second Chechen War
commenced.” Blagov added, “Ankara’s quiet support to the Chechen
militants has been said to be designed to sustain volatility in the Northern
Caucasus—which would make it impossible for the competing CPC project
to proceed.”[1073] Neoconservative strategist Ariel Cohen wrote in 1996
that this pipeline had been at the center of the First Chechen War. Criminals
had been allowed to steal hundreds of millions of dollars in oil from the
pipeline running through Chechnya. The Russians had invaded to prop up
opponents of Dudayev’s regime and put a stop to it. Dudayev had then
made common cause with the terrorists to resist them. Cohen noted, “This
exacerbated the religious aspect of the conflict between the Muslim
Chechens and Christian Orthodox Russians.”[1074]
Fighting this pipeline war was also important to Putin’s rise to the
presidency. When he became prime minister in the summer of 1999, his
first assignment was to build this new segment of pipeline across Dagestan
to bypass Chechnya, just as Basayev and Khattab were invading the small
republic and bringing the Russia-Chechnya war with them. The new PM
promised to solve the problem immediately. As oil industry analyst John
Daly noted, once the new BTC pipeline opened in 2005, the West began
transporting “oil that would have otherwise moved northwards to Russia,
providing lucrative transit fees. Chechnya proved ground zero for both
Western political and business interests.” Even though most Americans
knew nothing about this history, he wrote, responsibility for the conflict was
partly on us. “The shadow war between Moscow and Washington for the
Caspian’s energy riches saw Chechnya squarely caught in the middle,
leaving the Chechen homeland virtually destroyed.”[1075]
A former CIA analyst told author Richard Labévière in the 1990s, “The
policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our
adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red
Army.” He said that “[t]he same doctrines can still be used to destabilize
what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese
influence in Central Asia.”[1076] In 2000, Uigur fighters being trained in
Afghanistan were said to have been moved by the Taliban away from Kabul
and to northern regions where they were encouraged to join the Islamic
Movement of Uzbekistan.[1077] However, Eric Margolis witnessed
dissident Chinese Islamist Uigurs being trained under Taliban and Pakistani
supervision, and with CIA approval, for potential use against China, as late
as summer 2001.[1078] Margolis, the great war reporter and the author’s
friend, was right to complain that the involvement of the bin Ladenites was
used by the Russians as propaganda to discredit the entire insurgency the
same way the George W. Bush administration pretended to believe the
entire Sunni-based insurgency in Iraq War II (2003–2011) was simply
“terrorism” by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his group al Qaeda in Iraq.
[1079] But it was still true that such terrorists were heavily involved, and as
in Iraq, the insurgency’s association with bin Ladenite terrorists did the
local resistance far more harm than good, discrediting their cause and
provoking a far worse reaction from their enemies. Noting the large number
of Arabs involved in the September 2004 school massacre in Beslan, North
Ossetia, perpetrated by Khattab and Basayev’s terrorists,[1080] journalist
Scott Peterson wrote that the bin Ladenites had been coming to Chechnya
to fight since the first war. “By 1999, when Chechen warlord Shamil
Basayev invaded Russian territory in Dagestan—prompting a second war—
it became clear that Islamic radicals dominated Chechen rebel
groups.”[1081]
Just as in Bosnia, Kosovo and mid-1990s Afghanistan, the Americans
knew good and well that in Chechnya they were backing bin Ladenite Arab
and Central Asian veterans of the 1980s covert Afghan war.[1082] Assistant
Secretary of State Jamie Rubin detailed the danger in December 1999,
while then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said that the chief
terrorist himself had been to Chechnya “several times.”[1083] A 1998
Defense Intelligence Agency report, reviewing a captured al Qaeda
document, describes bin Laden’s creation of al Qaeda from the “nucleus” of
Arab-Afghan fighters who had remained loyal after the Soviet-Afghan War.
After a curious redaction, and noting Khattab’s friendship with bin Laden
and legendary brutality, the report says it was actually the Saudi sheik who
sent him and nine others to Chechnya in the first place to train a new
insurgent army. The DIA report stated that “[s]everal times in 1997 in
Afghanistan, Ben Laden [sic] met with representatives for Movladi
Udugov’s party, ‘Islamic Way’ and representatives of Chechen and
Dagestan Wakhabites from Gudernics, Grozny and Karamakhy.” There they
agreed on financing for the new army and the need to recruit European
converts to commit attacks against Western targets. They noted fighters
being sent by bin Laden to Chechnya through Turkey and Azerbaijan, and
said their strategy was to use “new strikes and kidnapping conducted for the
purpose of provoking a unified uprising against Russia and creating an
Islamic state of Northern Caucasus.” The report went on to connect the two
to international terrorist movements and leaders across the Middle East and
Europe, including the KLA in Kosovo and Islamist groups in Bosnia.[1084]
This is how Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin rose to power, as leader of
Russia’s war against the treasonous, terrorist alliance of William Jefferson
Clinton and Osama bin Laden. Twenty-two years later, when he was
declaring Russia’s “special military operation” invasion of eastern Ukraine,
Putin railed against America’s “empire of lies,” and accused them of
“actively supporting separatism and gangs of mercenaries in southern
Russia” at the turn of the century. “What victims, what losses we had to
sustain and what trials we had to go through at that time before we broke
the back of international terrorism in the Caucasus! We remember this and
will never forget,” he said.[1085]
At the ceremony marking the signing of the Conventional Forces
Europe treaty, Yeltsin defended Russia’s Chechen War, adopting exactly the
formula and what could have been the words of the incoming George W.
Bush administration: “You have no right to criticize Russia over Chechnya.
We are standing up to a wave of terrorist acts which have swept through
Moscow and other cities and villages of our country.” He continued, “1,580
people—peaceful citizens—have suffered. The pain of this tragedy is now
being felt by thousands of families in all corners of Russia.” He demanded
Western understanding for his position. “There will be no peace talks with
bandits and killers! We are for peace and a political resolution to the
situation in Chechnya,” Yeltsin said. “And for this, the complete liquidation
of bandit formations and the elimination of terrorists is necessary. Russia
has the right to count on the understanding and support of Europe and the
OSCE.”[1086]

Hijackers

But it is much worse than that. In 1997, the Russians had arrested bin
Laden’s partner Ayman al-Zawahiri in Dagestan and held him for six
months.[1087] September 11 hijackers Salem al-Hazmi and his brother
Nawaf al-Hazmi, as well as Khalid al-Mihdhar, all three veterans of the
Bosnia war, also traveled to Chechnya before attacking the Pentagon in a
hijacked American Airlines jet full of civilians.[1088] Mohand al-Shehri,
Hamza al-Ghamdi and Ahmed al-Ghamdi from United Airlines Flight 175,
[1089] which they crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center,
fought in Chechnya as well. Wail al-Shehri and Waleed al-Shehri, brothers
who helped hijack American Airlines Flight 11—with which they hit the
North Tower—had also allegedly been to Chechnya before they were
diverted to Afghanistan and eventually the September 11 operation in the
United States.[1090] That is not all. Saeed al-Ghamdi and Ahmed al
Haznawi from United Airlines’ Flight 93 fought the Russians in Chechnya
as well.[1091]
After nearly a decade of fighting, and after the catastrophe of
September 11, the Post said that “[t]he United States now agrees that
Khattab had al Qaeda ties, and cited those links when it added three
Chechen rebel units to its list of terrorist organizations earlier this year.”
U.S. officials also said that “several hundred Chechen fighters were trained
at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and that bin Laden sent ‘substantial
amounts of money’ to equip Chechen rebels in 1999.” They had reportedly
raised $2 million for the Chechen War as recently as May 2002.[1092] The
Post said the terrorists’ plan was to merge Chechnya and neighboring
Dagestan into a new Islamist state.[1093]

Zacarias Moussaoui

But in 2001, when that small cadre of al Qaeda terrorists had infiltrated the
United States, plotting the September 11 attack, the FBI’s Minneapolis field
office could have stopped it—if they had been allowed to do their job.
Bureau lawyer Coleen Rowley was Time’s Person of the Year in 2002 for
her whistleblowing on FBI supervisors Michael Maltbie and Michael
Rolince. The officials had stonewalled her office’s investigation of al Qaeda
operative Zacarias Moussaoui, who famously wanted to learn how to fly a
jumbo jet, but not how to take off or land.[1094] It later became clear that if
their team had been allowed to seek and execute the warrant, they would
have found information in his computer which would have led them straight
to key planner Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Europe and the core cell of September
11 hijackers in Florida, and almost certainly would have stopped the plot in
its tracks.[1095] Bin al-Shibh later told interrogators that he and fellow
members of the Hamburg Cell of September 11 hijackers were on their way
to join the holy war against Russia in Chechnya when they were advised
that it was too difficult to get in and that they should meet bin Laden in
Afghanistan instead.[1096] As previously noted, 10 of the 19 September 11
hijackers had fought in or at least traveled to Chechnya before taking their
war to the United States.
As Roland Jacquard, who wrote two books about al Qaeda and was
given access to classified French intelligence on Moussaoui, told the Wall
Street Journal in 2002, “Western intelligence services completely neglected
the importance of Chechnya. . . . To earn one’s stripes as a jihadi, one had to
go to the land of the jihad and wage jihad first-hand. . . . It’s the Chechen
cause that turned Moussaoui into who he is today.”[1097]
Rowley explained that her office sought permission to pursue a
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant against Moussaoui, on the
basis that he was tied to a foreign terrorist group, Ibn al-Khattab’s bin
Ladenite fighters in Chechnya, which they knew was true by at least August
22. His status as a jihadist recruiter had been confirmed by French
intelligence.[1098] Despite an April 2001 FBI memo which linked al-
Khattab to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda,[1099] D.C. supervisors were
“denying [these links] existed to the Minneapolis field office,” refused to
consider the bin Ladenite fighters in Chechnya a foreign terrorist group for
FISA purposes and continued to deny their agents permission to seek a
search warrant. After nearly 3,000 people were slaughtered on September
11, they simply claimed ignorance, though Rowley believed America’s
conflict of interest in the Chechen war played a part in their reasoning.
[1100]
Sure, it was treason, but it was not a matter of Clinton’s loyalty being
bought by the enemy. He and his government were just too clever by half.
They thought they could use bin Laden and his terrorists on the 1980s
Afghan model in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya or wherever else their
enemies’ civilian population needed to be terrorized. As far as al Qaeda
blowback hitting the United States, well, in the 1990s terrorism was thought
to be just “a small price to pay for being a superpower,” as policy planners
for the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon were repeatedly heard to say by
a “very senior” special operations commander.[1101] They reaped the
whirlwind,[1102] and took thousands of civilians they had sworn to protect
with them.[1103]

The Color Revolutions

NED

The color-coded revolutions were essentially U.S. coups d’état dressed up

as local “uprisings,” primarily against Russian-leaning states in their near
abroad. Backed by the CIA, the United States Agency for International
Development (USAID), National Endowment for Democracy (NED),
National Democratic Institute (NDI), International Republican Institute
(IRI) and friendly, supposedly private non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) like Serbian Otpor, the Soros Foundation, Open Society
Foundation, International Renaissance Foundation and the Atlantic Council,
they have had quite a few successes.[1104]
Allen Weinstein, a co-founder of the NED, told the Washington Post’s
David Ignatius in 1991, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly
twenty-five years ago by the CIA.” Ignatius added, “When [Cold War-era]
covert activities surfaced (as they inevitably did), the fallout was
devastating. The CIA connection, intended to protect people and
organizations from public embarrassment, had precisely the opposite
effect.” However, “The biggest difference is that when such activities are
done overtly, the flap potential is close to zero. Openness is its own
protection.”[1105]

Electoral Revolution

Though the U.S. and allied oil companies British Petroleum and Amoco
helped overthrow President Abulfaz Elchibey of Azerbaijan in 1993, that
was more of a straight-up coup than any pretended “revolution.”[1106] But
those started with mixed success in Albania and Bulgaria in 1996,[1107]
Montenegro and Romania[1108] in 1997, Armenia in 1998,[1109]
Slovakia[1110] and Croatia in 1999 and Serbia in 2000.

Slovakia

The NED’s Rodger Potocki explained that “NDI . . . and IRI, in the early
90s, working in Bulgaria and Romania, came up with two key ideas on how
you build momentum for democratic change: citizen advocacy and
monitoring groups.”[1111] In 1997, after the success of their intervention in
the Bulgarian elections, the NED targeted Slovak President Vladimír
Mečiar. The NED and associated NGOs spent more than $850,000 in direct
financial support to Mečiar’s opponent, Paval Demeš, and his OK’98
campaign. Contributors to Demeš’s “electoral revolution” included the
United States Information Service, the IRI and NDI, Soros’s Open Society
Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, as well as the governments of
Britain and the Netherlands.
This money paid for a tour of 13 rock concerts, two films and a
television ad buy, encouraging the young to vote. It was a massive success.
The NGOs also did extensive exit polling so they could claim their results
before the votes could be counted. Though the incumbent’s party received
the most votes, the minority parties were able to form a coalition and oust
him for a Western-compliant MP named Mikuláš Dzurinda. The NED and
associated groups only claimed to be supporting the process, but that was an
obvious lie. Their propaganda was entirely designed to push people to vote
for the right guy—or at least against the wrong one.[1112]

Croatia

In Croatia, Clinton turned on his ally Franjo Tudjman. The NED and its
allies created a new group called Citizens Organized to Monitor Elections
(known by its Croatian acronym GONG). Again they bought a massive
advertising campaign in support of pro-Western parties. The Slovak
politician and NGO leader Demeš traveled to Croatia to help show GONG
how it was done. Tudjman died just before the election and the pro-Western
parties won. Demeš later became a leader at the German Marshall Fund. At
least he was honest about what they were doing, saying that “[e]xternal
funding for these civic campaigns is critical. Without external support, they
wouldn’t happen.”[1113]

The Bulldozer Revolution

The Clinton administration finally got rid of Serbian President Slobodan

Milošević in 2000. Perhaps the most notable thing about this coup,
disguised as a democratic election, was the degree to which the participants
boasted about it. As the National Democratic Institute later explained, in
1998 they brought 11 Serbian activists to Poland to be trained explicitly for
the purpose of using the media to help accomplish regime change against
Milošević.[1114] The NDI later said, “The opposition relied on information
gathered in a series of 11 public opinion polls conducted for NDI by Doug
Schoen of the U.S. polling firm of Penn, Schoen and Berland.” They added,
“In the three years leading up to the September elections, NDI worked with
Serbia’s democratic parties to help them develop the political skills needed
to compete more effectively, training party leaders and local activists who,
for the first time, used grassroots techniques . . . to better communicate with
the electorate.” They backed a group called the Center for Free Elections
and Democracy (CeSID), which deployed more than 5,000 election
monitors across the country.[1115]
The operation was run from the Office of Yugoslav Affairs, America’s
de facto Yugoslav embassy-in-exile. Journalist Mark MacKinnon wrote,
“From the moment that office was opened in August 2000, the diplomats’
station there had one task—to overthrow Milošević.”[1116]
The regime changers got their start backing a protest movement in the
winter of 1996–1997 that had come together to oppose the annulment of
more than a dozen local elections, forming a group called Zajedno
(Together).[1117] Then-American Ambassador Richard Miles allowed the
embassy to be a base for the opposition. Jadranka Jelinčić, the former
program manager for the Soros Foundation and executive director of
Soros’s Fund for an Open Society-Serbia, said the two groups spent $108
million on Serbian NGOs and media, including the important radio station
B92. This total was not including whatever funds also came from the
foundation’s New York and Budapest offices, the latter of which had spent
at least $30 million.[1118] While claiming the money was not targeted
against Milošević, Jelinčić acknowledged that she and her colleagues all
agreed he would “have to go.”[1119]
Otpor—Serbian for “resistance” and famous for their ubiquitous
clenched fist symbol—was an anti-Milošević youth group founded by Srđa
Popović. He also founded its offshoot, the Center for Applied Nonviolent
Action and Strategies (CANVAS). They specialized in provoking the
regime into cracking down on them and radicalizing more people to their
cause.[1120] The Open Society Institute rented office space for them and
bought them all the spray paint they needed to throw up their fist logo all
over town. Anti-Milošević activist Marko Marković of Otpor explained,
“Soros came to this country several times and spent a lot of money, really
huge money. . . . There was nobody on the media scene in Serbia back then
who was against Milošević and didn’t have contacts with Soros.”[1121]
The NED said they had spent approximately $40 million to support 18
anti-Milošević groups in the lead-up to the 2000 election. Author Gerald
Sussman calculated that this would be the equivalent to a foreign
government spending more than $1 billion to influence an American
election in 2010 dollars,[1122] as much as American major party candidates
for president spend on their campaigns.[1123] Though they are forbidden to
outright back candidates for foreign office, the NED “skirts these rules by
funding what it refers to as ‘civil society’: non-governmental organizations
and media outlets that are non-partisan on paper but whose activities work
to the benefit of a favored candidate or party,” as MacKinnon put it.[1124]
In this case, the NED, NDI and Open Society-Serbia also supported
parallel vote tabulation [PVT] so they could dispute the government-
announced vote totals.[1125]
The Germans also came up with a brilliant plan to pour cash, around
45 million marks, into nearly 40 cities where the opposition had the most
support, for campaigns such as “Energy for peace,” “Education for peace,”
and “Asphalt for peace.” Along with “large-scale” support for so-called
“independent” media, Der Spiegel explained that this “was just a trick to
conceal the fact that Germany—like other states—was directly supporting
the opposition in Yugoslavia.”[1126]
The 78-day bombing campaign on behalf of the Kosovar Albanians in
the spring of 1999 did much to set back the anti-Milošević movement in the
country due to the “rally ’round the flag” effect. Otpor activist Marković
says that some people dropped out of the group and began to support
Milošević in defiance of their American benefactors once the war began.
[1127] But a few months later, they were back in business.
The regime changers took credit in the Post, calling it a mostly “overt
operation,” run by USAID, the NED, NDI and IRI, with just a little help
from the CIA. Reporter Michael Dobbs wrote that even though the
administration’s $41 million “democracy building” campaign was well
known, “interviews with dozens of key players, both here and in the United
States, suggest it was much more extensive and sophisticated than
previously reported.” Aside from hosting the “strategy session” where the
opposition was consolidated and campaigns were planned, “U.S.-funded
consultants played a crucial role behind the scenes in virtually every facet
of the anti-Milošević drive, running tracking polls, training thousands of
opposition activists and helping to organize a vitally important parallel vote
count.”
Two dozen Otpor leaders were brought to the Hilton hotel in Budapest
by the IRI and given training in nonviolent resistance by retired U.S. Army
Col. Robert Helvey, based on the theories of author Gene Sharp.
“Removing the authority of the ruler is the most important element in
nonviolent struggle,” Otpor leader Popović told his group.
The Americans supplied 5,000 cans of spray paint, and 2.5 million
stickers that said “He’s finished”—the “catchphrase” of the revolution.
“Milošević’s overthrow,” the Post said, “may also go down in history as the
first poll-driven, focus group-tested revolution.”[1128] The NED also
backed a massive TV and radio campaign, including supporting stations in
Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo.[1129]
Based on Sharp and Col. Helvey’s instruction, they came up with their
five-point plan for winning the election no matter what: uniting the
opposition, promoting opposition media, bankrolling NGOs to spread
messages of discontent with the president, paying for election observers and
exit pollsters in preparation to dispute the results and getting nonviolent,
young demonstrators out in the streets. That was exactly what they did.
[1130]
William D. Montgomery, the former American ambassador to Croatia
who worked on the operation, told the New York Times, “Milošević was
personal for Madeleine Albright, a very high priority. She wanted him gone,
and Otpor was ready to stand up to the regime with a vigor and in a way
that others were not.” Little did the American people know, this was regime
change. “Seldom has so much fire, energy, enthusiasm, money—everything
—gone into anything as into Serbia in the months before Milošević went,”
he told them.[1131]
Albright personally demanded that Zoran Đinđić and Vuk Drašković,
two leading opposition figures, follow or get out of the way of the State
Department’s chosen candidate, Vojislav Kostunica.[1132] The various
opposition parties united into a new group calling itself the Democratic
Opposition of Serbia (DOS) and around Kostunica. Đinđić joined up;
Drašković stayed out. The party then used tens of millions of dollars
pumped in by Western NGOs to run sophisticated polling and “get out the
vote” programs, and ran simultaneous efforts through Otpor, G17, DOS and
the Kostunica campaign itself.
The NED, NDI and IRI gave Otpor at least $2.5 million for their
various public relations projects.[1133] “The [German] Chancellor and
Foreign Minister have been working discreetly for months towards the
change of power in Belgrade—with money and ideological support for the
opposition to Milošević,” Der Spiegel reported. “Massive political and
material support from Berlin—as from other Western capitals—has helped
opposition groups and parties develop the strength to force Milošević to
give up and take over the government themselves.”[1134]
Within hours of the vote, the NED and Soros-funded Center for Free
Elections and Democracy (CeSID, its Serbian acronym), announced that
their candidate had won 57 to 33 percent, according to their exit polls. The
government then announced, quite improbably, that no, Kostunica was
ahead, but falling short of a majority, would have to face a run-off.[1135]
Instead, Kostunica and other opposition leaders arranged a 10-day general
strike and massive protest in downtown Belgrade, culminating in the
sacking and burning of the parliament building[1136] in what would surely
be called a violent insurrection by American Democrats if they had not been
behind it.[1137] Though Milošević attempted to dispute the results and stay
in office for a little over a week, after heavy pressure from the Germans,
Yeltsin withdrew support,[1138] and he conceded defeat on October 6.
The regime changers were just getting started. Otpor’s founder Srđa
Popović, the self-described “ideological commissar” of Otpor,[1139]
boasted that he was in contact with revolutionary groups around the world
—all of them from countries who were adversaries of the United States.
[1140] A Freedom House spin-off called the International Center on
Nonviolent Conflict even made a documentary about their effort called
Bringing Down a Dictator, narrated by Hollywood film star Martin Sheen,
[1141] which they played continuously on an opposition TV channel for
protesters.[1142]
Popović was close with the previously mentioned private security firm
Stratfor. Years later, a trove of Stratfor emails were hacked by a man named
Jeremy Hammond[1143] and furnished to WikiLeaks.[1144] In the emails,
Stratfor’s Marko Papic said that Popović was his “great friend” who
“travels the world fomenting revolution.” Referring to Otpor, he added:
“They . . . basically go around the world trying to topple dictators and
autocratic governments (ones that U.S. does not like).” In a follow-up
email, he said, “They just go and set up shop in a country and try to bring
the government down. When used properly, more powerful than an aircraft
carrier battle group.”[1145]
Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton’s nemesis Slobodan Milošević died in jail in
2006, during his extended trial for war crimes in the ad hoc International
Tribunal for Yugoslavia. He was essentially exonerated 10 years later. In
their ruling in the Radovan Karadžić case, the court unanimously concluded
that while Milošević had agreed with the Bosnian Serb’s objective of
remaining part of Yugoslavia, he was “more cautious” from the beginning
and not part of a “joint criminal enterprise” against the Croats and Muslims
in the Bosnian war. They said that due to “the diverging interests that
emerged between the Bosnian Serb and Serbian leaderships” during the
war, and “Milošević’s repeated criticism and disapproval of the policies and
decisions made by the Accused and the Bosnian Serb leadership, the
Chamber is not satisfied that there was sufficient evidence presented in this
case to find that Slobodan Milošević agreed with the common plan.” They
added, “The relationship between Milošević and the Accused had
deteriorated beginning in 1992; by 1994, they no longer agreed on a course
of action to be taken.” They also found that “beginning as early as March
1992 . . . Milošević and other Serbian leaders openly criticized Bosnian
Serb leaders of [sic] committing ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘ethnic
cleansing’ in the war for their own purposes.”
The court cited numerous other examples of divisions between
Milošević and the Republika Srpska leaders, on excluding minorities,
protecting them, intransigence over peace negotiations, excessive territorial
demands, as well as the Yugoslav leader’s reduction of support for their
army over disagreements with how far they were taking the fight against
Izetbegović’s forces.[1146] Karadžić and Mladić were sentenced to life in
prison in The Hague.[1147]

Stuck in the Mud

After September 11, Vojislav Kostunica, the man Bill Clinton had installed
to replace Milošević, blamed his benefactor, telling a Serbian radio station,
“These are the true deep roots and the true reasons that triggered the birth of
terrorism and its development.” He explained, “One thing that is needed is a
redefinition of America’s role in a new world in which it is the only
superpower; of its role as a world policeman who can function quite easily
when he needs to bomb a country, such as Yugoslavia, for 78 days.”
However, “When this country is also faced with terrorism in its most
fanatical form, as happened on September 11, then things look rather
different.” Kostunica said he hoped the “terrorist evil and crimes committed
in New York and Washington” would prompt the U.S. to view “terrorism in
the Balkans” in a new context, now that it had happened to them.
“Terrorism has not been taken seriously unless it happened on one’s own
territory or rather, the territory of the world’s only superpower—the
U.S.A.,” he added. “These dual criteria must be dropped. Terrorism would
become much more easy to spot than in the past, and the fight against it
more efficient, if these dual criteria were abolished.”[1148]
President Kostunica was quickly marginalized by his prime minister,
Zoran Djindjic,[1149] who arrested Milošević[1150] and made a deal with
separatists in Montenegro to finally abolish Yugoslavia in 2002.[1151]
Kostunica ran for president of Serbia the same year but lost.[1152] Djindjic
was assassinated by a sniper in March 2003.[1153] The pro-Western Boris
Tadić was elected president in 2004 and lasted until 2012.[1154] The
current leader, Aleksandar Vučić from the Progressive party, was supported
by the United States, but has angered them by refusing to pursue NATO
membership or to join the sanctions regime against Russia.[1155]
Marko Marković from Otpor finally understood his role in the world
years later, telling Mark MacKinnon that the Western powers were simply
playing a game of Risk: “I was somebody’s little red chip. I am deeply
convinced of that.” His partner Sinisa Sikman regretfully concurred.
“Maybe the CIA did use us. Maybe they did.”[1156]
 The Times agreed that “the CIA supported a State Department push in
2000 to help opposition leaders defeat President Slobodan Milošević at the
ballot box.”[1157] So, apparently, he was right. It was a covert and an overt
operation simultaneously.

Imperial Hubris

The Grand Chessboard

In 1997, Zbigniew Brzezinski published his famous book The Grand

Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives. He wrote
of the major “geopolitical pivots” of Eurasia, including Ukraine,
Azerbaijan, South Korea, Turkey and Iran, and recommended various ways
to perpetuate American dominance on the continent, especially at Russia’s
expense. He identified Ukraine as key to limiting their regional power:
“Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a
geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country
helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian
empire.” He warned, “[I]f Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52
million people and major resources as well as access to the Black Sea,
Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful
imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”[1158]
According to Brzezinski, who drew from the ideas of British imperial
thinker Halford Mackinder, the global naval power of the U.S. and UK
must be complemented by domination of Eastern Europe, the “heartland” of
the “world island”; otherwise, it would naturally be dominated by the
Russians.[1159] In The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski cited the Mackinder
mantra as the basis of all modern geopolitical thinking, though he
begrudgingly admitted the man’s apparent influence on Nazi Führer Adolf
Hitler as well:

Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland;

Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island;
Who rules the World Island commands the World.[1160]

Eurasia is “the chessboard on which the struggle for global primacy

continues to be played,” Brzezinski wrote. “It is imperative that no Eurasian
challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus also of
challenging America.”[1161]
With the Soviet Union out of the way, America was ready to embrace
world empire on a level never considered before. If the U.S. could keep
Russia moving toward the West, where it is already dominant, and prevent
any other single player from dominating the Global South and East Asia
from uniting against us and kicking our navy out of the region, “America
can then be said to prevail.”[1162]
Brzezinski identified the greatest dangers to American hegemony,
including a renewed alliance between Russia and China: “If the middle
space rebuffs the West, becomes an assertive single entity and . . . forms an
alliance with the major Eastern actor, then America’s primacy in Eurasia
shrinks dramatically.” Preventing such an outcome, then, was the highest
priority. “To put it in a terminology that harkens back to a more brutal age
of ancient empires,” he wrote, “the three grand imperatives of imperial
geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence
among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the
barbarians from coming together.”[1163]
The barbarians had just ratified the START II treaty, slashing nuclear
weapons arsenals by 66 percent, and were asking to join NATO. But instead
of drawing them closer, the Clinton administration was treating the
Russians with such contempt as to almost guarantee they would attempt to
turn East. Perhaps the surprise is how long it took them to quit trying.

There’s Always NATO

By so ruthlessly exploiting their “unipolar moment,” the U.S. government

was squandering it. President Clinton’s brutal blockade and no-fly zone
bombings against Iraq were two important issues which had soured
relations with Yeltsin’s Russia. “Russia’s fury with American policies in
Iraq were most acute when Washington’s propensity for unilateralism led it
to defy liberal principles such as commitment to a rules-based system and
international law,” wrote Samuel Helfont, assistant professor of strategy and
policy in the U.S. Naval War College program at the Naval Postgraduate
School in Monterey, California.[1164]
Oh well. What were they going to do about it? Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright told the Senate Armed Services Committee in April
1997, “On the off-chance that in fact Russia doesn’t work out the way that
we are hoping it will, NATO is there.”[1165]
William Perry said much the same thing. If we pick this fight by
arming up and adding members to our alliance, then it is a good thing we
have our newly expanded alliance. “If Russia hews to a course of internal
reform, respect for its neighbors’ independence, and cooperation with the
West, NATO will continue to evolve in the direction of maximum
inclusiveness.” This had already been shown to be false. Russia would
never be more welcome to participate than what few concessions they got
out of the 1997 Founding Act. And it was the West, led by the U.S., which
was refusing to cooperate with them. “If however, reform in Russia falters,”
Perry concluded, “NATO will be there to provide for the allies’ collective
defense.”
The Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, signed by Bush
Sr. and Gorbachev in 1990, was breached by the construction of permanent
U.S. military bases in Bulgaria and Romania, beginning in 1999. The
Clinton administration said they were not in violation because the bases
were not to be permanent, but they were, as agreed from the beginning.
[1166] Russia and the U.S. both quit the treaty in 2023.[1167]

50th Anniversary

Within the space of a few weeks in the spring of 1999, the U.S. and NATO
brought Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the NATO alliance,
[1168] announced their “New Strategic Concept” declaring their intent to
expand “non-Article 5 crisis response operations”[1169] and launched the
aggressive war against Serbia to break off Kosovo.
At NATO’s 50th anniversary meeting in the midst of the war in April
1999, the Clinton administration inaugurated their new Open-Door Policy,
inviting the Baltics, Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and
Macedonia to begin their track to full-fledged membership.[1170] Always
wary about nationalist Russian reaction, the administration also debuted the
new Membership Action Plan (MAP) system for further NATO expansion,
beginning with the Baltic states. This was simply for public relations:
announcement of MAPs was “less insulting” to Russia. “In practical terms,
the outcome would be the same, but it sounded better,” as historian Mary
Elise Sarotte wrote.[1171] Importantly, she also noted that Ukraine was not
included in the list of nine new entry-level members, “not least because of
tensions over Sevastopol”—the important city and Russian naval base on
the Crimean Peninsula—as well as the amount of corruption in Kiev. The
nation had been “taken off the conveyor belt of future members.”[1172]

Clinton’s Broken Relationship

In 2000, after Putin took power, he restored the official Russia-NATO

relationship that had been suspended over the Kosovo War the previous
year. He then asked President Clinton if Russia could join the alliance as
well.[1173] Clinton ignored the overture, telling Talbott it was “blue-sky
stuff.”[1174] Brzezinski had previously argued against Russia’s inclusion
since the U.S. would have to share decision-making authority to an
intolerable degree, insisting it was the Russians’ “delusion” regarding their
current status that made them believe they should have any influence in
Eastern or Central Europe at all.[1175] But he also recognized that “[t]he
costs of the exclusion of Russia could be high—creating a self-fulfilling
prophesy in the Russian mindset—but the results of dilution of either the
EU or NATO could also be quite destabilizing.”[1176]
 At the end of the century, former Russian Finance Minister Boris
Fyodorov said that all of Washington’s recent intervention in the Russian
economy and expansionist policies in Eastern Europe had already cost the
Russian people’s goodwill and risked setting our nations on a collision
course: “It’s clear that this kind of honeymoon period between United
States and Russia is long gone because, after all these efforts of United
States government, many more Russians now dislike America than ever
before, and that’s sad.”[1177]

Right from the Beginning

Making Vladimir Putin

Just as former Republican and Reform Party presidential candidate, author

and commentator Pat Buchanan and so many others predicted, a nationalist
strongman came to power in reaction to American overreach after the fall of
the USSR. But the wrinkle was, this strongman’s rise was not just a reaction
to, but also an example of, that intervention.
As mentioned, at the urging of oligarch Boris Berezovsky, President
Yeltsin appointed Vladimir Putin, a former deputy mayor of St. Petersburg
and made member of the Yeltsin “family,”[1178] to head the FSB and run
the Second Chechen War against Western- and Gulf-backed forces there.
After Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov’s investigations into government
corruption got too hot, Berezovsky pushed to have him removed from
power.[1179] He had the same problem with Primakov’s successor Sergei
Stepashin. When pressed, the man refused to shut down ongoing criminal
investigations of Berezovsky and his associates, so Yeltsin fired and
replaced him as prime minister with Vladimir Putin in August 1999.[1180]
Putin then made himself invaluable to the “family” by releasing
compromising materials on Prosecutor General Yuri Skuratov and
launching repeated investigations against him just as he was bringing
charges against Berezovsky and other close friends of the Kremlin.[1181]
According to Paul Klebnikov, “The family decided that Putin was the man
to guarantee that there would be no retribution after the change in
power.”[1182] Strobe Talbott called Putin “the new product I knew
[Berezovsky] was selling.”[1183]
Yeltsin then resigned and appointed Putin to be president on New
Year’s Eve 1999,[1184] a rise to power that was widely celebrated by
American politicians and pundits.
Putin had originally been brought to Moscow by these gangsters and
made his major break toward power when he helped his mentor Anatoly
Sobchak, the mayor of St. Petersburg and a favorite of the Clinton
administration,[1185] escape the country to the West to avoid prosecution
for corruption. A former colonel in the KGB, Putin had sided with the
reformers during the failed coup attempt of August 1991. America’s man
Boris Yeltsin took an instant liking to him, and his promotion up the ranks
was soon underway. Yeltsin’s daughter would later reportedly tell Talbott,
“It was really hard, getting Putin into the job—one of the hardest things we
ever pulled off.”[1186] Journalist Matt Taibbi later wrote, “Putin would go
on to help the whole Yeltsin clan slither out of Russia with their stolen
millions.”[1187]
 Oligarch Berezovsky boasted, “After the 1999 election, only two
oligarchs were left center stage, Gusinsky who supported [Yevgeny]
Primakov and [Yury] Lujkov, and yours truly, who supported Putin [for
PM].” They had groomed him to be president all along by making him head
of the FSB, then prime minister. Berezovsky spent millions on a massive
propaganda campaign to make Putin famous.[1188] According to the
London Times, “On the evening that Yeltsin resigned and Putin was
appointed acting president, Berezovsky celebrated by attending the Bolshoi
ballet.” He had told a Times reporter there that “Russia now has the best
president in the world.”[1189]
According to in-depth investigations by the Moscow Times and
Christian Science Monitor, even with the three-month head start and an
ongoing war, Putin’s faction resorted to stuffing ballot boxes across Russia
to steal the election of 2000.[1190] The State Department took Putin’s side,
telling Congress there were “very few procedural improprieties.”[1191]
President Clinton, Prime Minister Blair and all the powerful players
praised Putin.[1192] He was part of Yeltsin’s “family” after all. But soon it
became clear his priority was to assert the power of the central state over
the seven corrupt kings of Russian business. Many of the oligarchs fell in
line. Berezovsky’s old partner Roman Abramovich is close with Putin to
this day.[1193] But many others fled to Tel Aviv, London and New York,
often spending their misbegotten fortunes agitating against their former
country.[1194]
In 2000, Boris Fyodorov explained that though Putin might consolidate
power at the expense of organized crime, the man was no angel. Everyone
expected him to purge the family that made him, Fyodorov wrote, “[b]ut it
doesn’t mean that anybody today in Russia thinks that Putin is great
reformer, that Putin is great democrat, that Putin is ideologically motivated
idealist or anything like that, because clearly he’s not.”[1195]
But Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin are now widely hated and
reviled in Russia as villains and traitors for selling out the country to
America.[1196] By then, virtually the entire national consensus was that
democracy was a failure. The word itself became a curse.[1197] The men
who led Russia’s transition from Communism—with much assistance from
their American friends—had blown it. If a strongman could give them their
dignity back, they would let him.

Laying Down the Law

Putin said the government “would not investigate the controversial

circumstances in which the oligarchs made their money as long as they
stayed out of politics,” as the London Times put it.[1198] Gusinsky went to
jail until he signed over his television network to the state, then fled to
Spain and later Israel.[1199] Putin stripped his previous patron Berezovsky
of everything[1200] and charged him with money laundering and theft.
[1201] The billionaire fled to England, which granted him asylum to avoid
extradition to Russia in 2003.[1202] He died of a reported suicide 10 years
later.[1203]
Referring to the purge of Gusinsky and his Media-Most empire, the
revival of the Soviet national anthem, marginalization of Moscow’s mayor
and beatings of dissenting journalists, Taibbi called the purge “Putin’s Night
of the Long Knives,” a reference to Adolf Hitler’s betrayal of Ernst Röhm’s
brownshirt SA Stormtroopers or Sturmabteilung in favor of the “protective
echelon,” or Schutzstaffel (SS), under Heinrich Himmler in 1934.[1204]
A month into Putin’s new reign, Congressman Ron Paul gave a speech
on the House floor noting that one of the first things to happen under the
new regime was the consolidation of the nuclear weapons authority in the
Russian presidency. “The first reason given for this change in policy,” Paul
noted, “was that the expansion of NATO had caused the Russians to see a
threat drawing closer to them which had not been previously perceived.” He
added, “The second reason—the war in Yugoslavia had made it apparent
that there is now a NATO precedent for launching an attack into a country
that had not itself attacked any NATO member.”[1205]
Russian patriotism is a powerful force, often compared to Americans’
own sense of their country’s special destiny. They did not react well to
being robbed blind, starved and threatened, especially by their longtime
foreign rival. Instead of heeding the lessons of Versailles and treating our
defeated foes with respect, President Clinton kicked the Russians while they
were down, sowing extreme deprivation and resentment that lasts to this
day and setting the stage for the rise of Vladimir Putin.

OceanofPDF.com
George W. Bush

“All of us are committed to the advance of freedom in

Belarus. People in that country live under Europe’s
last dictatorship, and they deserve better.”
—George W. Bush

“How the United States both manipulates and

accommodates the principal geostrategic players on
the Eurasian chessboard . . . will be critical to the
longevity and stability of America’s global primacy.”
—Zbigniew Brzezinski

“Russia is particularly worried that the strong

divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with
much of the ethnic-Russian community against
membership, could lead to a major split, involving
violence or at worst, civil war. In that eventuality,
Russia would have to decide whether to intervene; a
decision Russia does not want to have to face.”
—William Burns

“Though it is clear that present-day Russia poses no

threat to them, NATO is methodically and persistently
building up its military machine into the east of
Europe and surrounding Russia from the south. This
involves open material and ideological support for the
‘color revolutions’ and the paradoxical forcing of
North Atlantic interests on Central Asia. All this
leaves no doubt that they are preparing to completely
encircle Russia and deprive it of its sovereignty.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Her . . . flag is the flag not only of America but of

humanity.”
—Woodrow Wilson

OceanofPDF.com
 Sucking Up

The Cold Shoulder

Following up on his previous request to Bill Clinton, Vladimir Putin asked

President George W. Bush (2001–2009) if Russia could join NATO the
summer after the new president took office. Putin said, “The simplest
[solution] is to dissolve NATO, but this is not on the agenda. The second
possible option is to include Russia in NATO. This also creates a single
defense and security space.” The administration did not directly respond to
this statement, but noted that, in fact, Secretary of State Colin Powell had
explicitly shot that idea down a month before.[1]
Russia was never going to get into NATO, because, as Brzezinski said,
the Russians would surely demand too much of a share of the decision-
making authority. The Americans wondered why the sole remaining
superpower ought to concede so much to those they had beaten. But it is
worth noting not just the predictions of disaster by the experts in the
beginning, but Putin’s attempt to nullify the threat of what was still an anti-
Russian military alliance, which claimed not to be one, by calling their bluff
and asking to join.[2] At a joint press conference in June 2001, in Bush’s
presence, noting the latter’s statements that he wanted our countries to be
“partners” or even “allies,” Putin said, “We ask ourselves, is this a military
organization? Yes, it’s a military organization. It doesn’t want us in it. No,
they don’t want us. It’s moving toward our border. Yes, it’s moving toward
our border. Why?” That July, Putin reiterated, “When NATO enlarges,
division doesn’t disappear; it simply moves toward our borders.”[3]
In Putin’s 2000 book First Person, an interviewer asks, “Will we once
again search for Russia’s special path?” He replies, “Russia is a very
diverse country, but we are part of Western European culture. No matter
where our people live, in the Far East or in the South, we are Europeans.”
His interviewer adds, “All that remains is for Europe to think that too,” to
which the president responded, “We will fight to keep our geographical and
spiritual position. And if they push us away, then we’ll be forced to find
allies and reinforce ourselves. What else can we do?”[4] He even told
Madeleine Albright, “Sure, I like Chinese food. It’s fun to use chopsticks.
But this is just trivial stuff. It’s not our mentality, which is European. Russia
has to be firmly part of the West.”[5]
In a March 2000 interview with David Frost, when asked about Russia
joining NATO, Putin answered, “Why not? Russia is part of European
culture . . . and seeing NATO as an enemy is destructive for Russia.”[6]
Russian diplomats even attended preliminary membership talks with NATO
officials until the Americans put a stop to it.[7] He reiterated this view of
Russia’s place as late as 2012, writing that “Russia is an integral, organic
part of Greater Europe, a broad European civilization. Our citizens feel like
Europeans.”[8]
In a speech to the German Bundestag in 2001, Putin said he believed
Europe could again regain its global importance “if it succeeds in bringing
together its own potential and that of Russia, including its human, territorial
and natural resources and its economic, cultural and defense potential.”[9]
 There is real reason to believe Putin meant what he said. He acted like
it. Though he had warned against NATO expansion to the Baltics in January
2001, saying it would be a “serious matter,”[10] Putin was the first foreign
leader to call George W. Bush on September 11, 2001, to offer his
condolences.[11] He promised not to respond in kind after America’s move
to DefCon 3, as they normally would,[12] and stood down a major military
exercise that had been planned for the next day as a show of “moral
support” for the United States.[13] In a public statement, he said, “We
understand the feelings of the American people better than anyone. I want
to tell the American people in Russia’s name, ‘We are with you. We fully
and wholeheartedly share and feel your pain. We support you.’”[14]
He also offered Russia’s full cooperation in America’s new war,[15]
including the use of Russia’s “northern route” into Afghanistan, as well as
the use of former Soviet bases in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.[16] Putin is
said to have spent considerable political capital facing down critics on his
right in Russian politics and the military to do so.[17] But he seemed to
think it would be worth a shot to turn a crisis into an opportunity to
strengthen Russia’s relationship with the United States. After all, it was
America that was switching sides in the by-then already 20-year civil war in
Afghanistan. Some Russian analysts had actually expected their Federation
would go to war with the Taliban in 2001 before the U.S. attacked them
instead.[18]
In fact, not a month after the September 11 attacks, Putin officially
softened his stance on NATO expansion on the condition that, like in Bush
Sr. and Bill Clinton’s broken promises, it would become a “political,” rather
than military organization—one that Russia could even join. He made these
overtures under severe criticism back home.[19]
After a meeting in Slovenia, Bush famously said about Putin, “I looked
the man in the eye. I was able to get a sense of his soul,” reflecting Putin’s
attempted charm offensive.[20] Senator Biden said in early 2002 that “[n]o
Russian leader since Peter the Great has cast his lot as much with the West
as Putin has.” Then-State Department official Richard Haass agreed. “The
hallmark of the 20th century was the great power rivalry,” he said. “At the
beginning of the 21st century, we’ve ensured that it’s now over.”[21]
Shortly after September 11, Putin raised the issue of Russia joining the
alliance with NATO Secretary-General George Robertson, who put him off
with a line about checking bureaucratic boxes. The RAND Corporation’s
Samuel Charap and Harvard’s Timothy Colton wrote, “Putin undoubtedly
heard: ‘get in line behind Estonia and Bulgaria.’”[22] Experts suggested
that rather than embracing the policy, Putin was more likely “simply getting
reluctant constituencies ready for what could be inevitable new NATO
expansion,” as well as an attempt to create closer ties with the U.S. in the
name of fighting terrorism.[23] Marc Grossman, undersecretary of state for
political affairs, said that one important reason to hold a new NATO-Russia
summit would be to “help President Putin neutralize opposition to
enlargement,” due to the Russian president’s “public opinion problems” on
the issue.[24]
But the W. Bush administration never had any intention to compromise
and forge a true working relationship with Russia. Even America’s Middle
East wars of the last 30 years can be seen as an extension of the last Cold
War. Strategists believed it was important to control certain choke points in
the Persian Gulf to lord oil supplies over our potential enemies, like energy
importer China and our Pacific allies alike, and to wield control over the oil
price against energy exporters like Iran and Russia.[25]
William Burns wrote in his memoir that Putin hoped to trade Russia’s
cooperation in the Afghan war with American restraint on further NATO
expansion beyond the Baltics, a free hand in Chechnya and a promise not to
interfere in Russian domestic politics. Three for one, perhaps, but
reasonable enough. “As Putin quickly learned, however,” Burns wrote, “this
kind of transaction was never in the cards. He fundamentally misread
American interests and politics. From Washington’s view, there was no
desire—and no reason—to trade anything for Russian partnership against
al-Qaeda.” He says Putin was wrong to see anything nefarious in this
attitude. The Americans were just “generally disinclined to concede or pay
much attention to a power in strategic decline.”[26]

Missile Defense

Killing Two Nuke Treaties

Then, despite all of Putin’s efforts to befriend the U.S., and Bush declaring
the Russian “a new style of leader” and “a reformer,”[27] Bush turned right
around and announced America’s withdrawal from Richard Nixon’s Anti-
Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty of 1972,[28] which prohibited large-scale
missile defense systems for the purpose of “curbing the race in strategic
offensive arms.”[29] Russia, which had already procrastinated on ratifying
the START II treaty in protest over NATO expansion,[30] but did so in
2000,[31] quit it entirely in response the next day.[32] The treaty, Bush’s
father and Boris Yeltsin’s great achievement of January 1993, would have
banned multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRV) on all
ICBMs.[33] The son killed them both.
Bush’s first choice for defense secretary had been former Senator Dan
Coats of Indiana. However, Coats had blown his job interview by stating he
thought missile defense was not that important. So the job went to Vice
President Cheney’s old friend and mentor Donald Rumsfeld instead.[34]
John Bolton, the neoconservative fellow-traveler,[35] then deputy secretary
of state for arms control and international security affairs, took the lead in
building the case to withdraw from the treaty.[36] The administration also
refused to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty negotiated by Bush’s
predecessor, which Russia did sign and ratify,[37] though at least he did
sign the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT, in 2002, which
limited the number of deployed warheads to 1,700–2,200 for each side.[38]

Poland, Romania, Czechia

Bush soon added plans to put defensive missiles in Romania and Poland
and radars in the Czech Republic. Attempting to avoid the obvious, the
president claimed these were to protect Poland from ballistic missile attacks
from Iran.[39] For their part, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
mocked these assurances as “laughable.”[40] Their Deputy Foreign
Minister Sergey Kislyak complained about it bitterly in private as well,
“arguing that the locations in Poland and the Czech Republic were better
suited for intercepting Russian ICBMs than against ‘hypothetical’ Iranian
ballistic missiles.” The Russians said if this was really about protecting
Europe from Iran, “the proposed MD sites should be located in Turkey,
France and Italy.”[41]
Rather than keep the peace, anti-ballistic missiles potentially tip the
balance of Mutually Assured Destruction toward potential first-strike
capability. This is naturally considered a major threat by Russia.[42] On the
other hand, the Bush administration’s argument that these systems could not
possibly be meant to shoot down Russian missiles due to the limited
number installed seemed to be a sound one.[43] His pretense that they were
meant to protect Poland, of all places, from an Iranian attack[44] with
nuclear weapons and long-range missiles they do not possess,[45] however,
was preposterous.[46]
Maybe it all comes down to connected contractors soaking the
taxpayer.[47] But it is understandable that some Russians—evidently
including President Putin, who continues to bring this up—seem to be
convinced that ballistic missile defense (BMD or MD, as they call it) is just
a cover story for the installation of Mark 41 Vertical Launch System (MK-
41) missile launchers, which are capable of firing defensive SM-3 missile
interceptors, but also Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can potentially be
armed with hydrogen bombs.[48]
In January 2007, Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Mikhail
Kamynin said that “the creation of a U.S. European anti-missile base can
only be regarded as a substantial reconfiguration of the American military
presence in Europe . . . a mistaken step with negative consequences for
international security.”[49]
Ambassador Burns later wrote in his memoir that he thought Putin had
accepted but resented U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. Putin,
however, was far more upset about the new missile defense systems in
Poland and the Czech Republic (a.k.a. Czechia). Since Putin “not
unreasonably” thought an anti-Iranian defense would make much more
sense if it were placed in the Mediterranean or Italy, “[n]o amount of
argument about the technological limitations of systems based in the Czech
Republic and Poland against theoretical Russian targets, however soundly
based, swayed Putin and his innately suspicious military.”[50]
In a press conference after the G8 summit in June 2007, Putin publicly
proposed that Russia join the project with the United States. Putin correctly
stated that Iran’s best missiles still had a range far short of even Southern
Europe, and that Tehran had no current program to make longer-range ones
and no motive to attack Europe in the first place. He did not bother to
mention the fact that Iran had only an internationally safeguarded civilian
nuclear program and no nuclear weapons to tip a missile with anyway.[51]
Putin explained the Russian fear that when defensive missiles are deployed
—such as those the U.S. was placing in Poland and Romania—they could
give one side the false confidence to attempt a first-strike, relying on the
defensive missiles to protect them from retaliation and upsetting the balance
of power. He warned further that “yes, it seems we will have to target our
missiles at these facilities. Such a step should not be seen as a surprise. It
would be better not to provoke Russia into taking such action in the first
place.”
Putin said he had offered an alternative to President Bush in a
conversation the day before in the form of the Gabala radar station in
Azerbaijan, which was already under lease by Russia. Interceptors could be
deployed closer to Iran, at sea, in Turkey or Iraq, where the U.S. still had a
large detachment of troops. “What was the war for, after all? At least some
advantage could be gained from it all,” he said. “Even if Iran were to begin
developing such missiles, we would have timely warning, and even if we
did not get any warning, we would soon find out when the first tests were
carried out,” he continued. Since it takes four or five years from the time of
first tests to military deployment, this would leave “enough time to deploy
any missile defense system anywhere in the world. So why destabilize the
situation in Europe today? It seems to me that our proposals are entirely
logical, justified and are made in a spirit of partnership.”[52] Even Mikhail
Gorbachev added that “[e]recting elements of missile defense is taking the
arms race to the next level. It is a very dangerous step.”[53]
In January 2008, Republican Senator Chuck Hagel met with Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and among other things, discussed missile
defense. Ambassador Burns summarized the meeting in a classified State
Department cable. Lavrov revealed a proposal by Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates in October 2007 “to keep the Czech radar inactive and leave
the Polish silos without interceptors until the U.S. and Russia agreed that an
Iranian missile capacity had materialized, while having a permanent U.S.
and Russian presence located at both sites.” When they finally got the
proposal in writing, the part about the Russian presence at the sites had
been cut and assessment of the Iranian threat was now to be left to the U.S.
alone to decide.
For some reason, the Russians just could not get over the way that the
Bush administration’s claims did not make any sense. If the project was
driven out of a generic sense that it would enhance security, then why not
discuss it with all of NATO and Russia? If it was about Iran, why not take
the Russians up on their offer to use the base in Azerbaijan? “When Czech
and Polish officials justified the radar and missile interceptors as providing
a defense against Russia, the logic of the U.S. deployment was further
called into question,” Burns wrote.[54]
When German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Russia in March
2008, officials reported back to the State Department that Putin had again
offered to set up a joint system. If not, he said, he would require a
permanent inspection presence, and would have to react by targeting the
sites in return.[55] But W. Bush went ahead anyway. So, too, eventually did
the Russians. In May and June 2007, they began testing new generation
cruise missiles and RS-24 ICBMs,[56] and in November 2008, deployed
Iskander medium-range ballistic missiles into the small Russian seaport
region of Kaliningrad. This small strip of land, which also borders Poland,
serves as home base to Russia’s Baltic Fleet and is separated from the
Russian mainland by their ally Belarus and NATO member Lithuania—
which provides a railway across the Suwałki corridor between the two, a
possible flashpoint itself. “From what we have seen in recent years, the
creation of a missile defense system, the encirclement of Russia with
military bases, the relentless expansion of NATO, we have gotten the strong
impression that they are testing our strength,” new Russian President
Dimitry Medvedev said in late 2008.[57]
In September 2007, Burns, then-U.S. ambassador to Russia, wrote in a
classified State Department document about the Russian leadership’s angry
reaction to their treatment by the Bush administration, including leaving the
ABM Treaty, the failure of negotiations over the Adapted Conventional
Forces Europe Treaty, keeping them from securing a cooperation agreement
with the EU, further NATO expansion and delay in their joining the World
Trade Organization (WTO). He added that after speaking with numerous
Russian analysts, most had said that “unlike the Kosovo situation, the entry
of Ukraine and Georgia in NATO represents an ‘unthinkable’ predicament
for Russia.” Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov had recently stated that
“Russia has been and will remain against all unilateral or coalition
approaches to international affairs that undermine the principle of equal
security, which includes not only MD [missile defense], but the expansion
of NATO.” Burns continued, “Russia still hopes to cause enough trouble in
Georgia and is counting on continued political disarray in Ukraine to
minimize the prospects for further NATO expansion eastward.”[58]
One need not have any sympathy for the men who run the Russian
state, but a little bit of empathy might have gone a long way.

Far From Home

White Stork
In the name of “global democratic revolution,” W. Bush’s government also
launched their own series of color-coded coups in Russia’s near abroad.
They botched the export of the successful Serbian template to Belarus in
2001, but were successful with the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003, the
Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004 and the Tulip Revolution in
Kyrgyzstan in 2005. They also failed with the attempted Cedar Revolution
in Lebanon,[59] the second-try Denim Revolution in Belarus in 2005–
2006[60] (as well as the disastrous Green Revolution in Iran[61] and
unsuccessful Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong[62] during Obama’s
presidency in 2009 and 2014).
Bush had obviously been deceiving conservatives when he claimed in
his debates with Vice President Gore in 2000 that he intended to inaugurate
a “humble foreign policy,” because “if we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll
resent us.”[63] The Texas governor, son of committed internationalist
George H.W. Bush, had even given away his game in the same statement: if
we are humble, “they’ll welcome us,” he had said. The man’s role as a
foreign interventionist had been set long before September 11, 2001.[64]
W. Bush spent much of his first year in power trying to figure out how
to overthrow the government of Belarus, consequences for America’s future
relationship with Russia be damned. Elected in 1994 in the aftermath of
disastrous shock therapy policies which had deindustrialized the country
and wiped out the average citizen’s standard of living, President Alexander
Lukashenko sought strong ties with Russia, brought back the old Soviet-era
flag, minus the hammer and sickle, and cracked down on dissent, even
expelling the Belarusian Soros Foundation from the country.[65]
 The NDI and IRI had been funding opposition groups in Belarus for
some time. In just the two years leading up to the 2001 elections, they spent
approximately $50 million supporting dissident groups. As Mark
MacKinnon noted, “[I]n a country where the average wage was just $77 a
month, it empowered the opposition to challenge the status quo.” He
continued, “That $50 million was just the overt spending. American money
funded about three hundred non-governmental organizations, some with
such clear links to the opposition that many observers considered them to
be one and the same.”[66]
In 2001, Freedom House funded a mission by Serbian Otpor to Minsk
to train their dissidents. They created their own version, a group called Zubr
(Bison).[67] “Like Otpor,” MacKinnon wrote, “Zubr was an American
invention from day one.”[68] They were simply foreign agents. “They
transfer the money into European banks in Poland, and we bring it from
there,” one member told the Wall Street Journal. “As in Yugoslavia, the
U.S. encouraged the political opposition to put forward a single,
compromise presidential candidate,” they reported, adding, “Belarus’s small
independent media and its independent nongovernmental organizations
depend on U.S. government-funded organizations for legal defense,
technical support, and occasional cash infusions.”[69] Otpor operative
Milos Milenkovic said he made approximately 20 trips to Belarus before
the election to train members of Zubr.[70] The IRI paid to have Zubr
activists travel to Lithuania and Poland for further training. Again, they put
up anti-regime graffiti and mocked the government in street theater scenes.
[71]
 The American ambassador, Michael Kozak, was a regime change
specialist with experience in Nicaragua, Panama, Haiti and Cuba.[72] He
was publicly adamant about seeking regime change in Belarus. The
opposition had been deeply fractured, but the U.S. had the money to bring
them all into line. In a meeting at the U.S. Embassy, they chose a former
trade union leader named Vladimir Goncharik to be the unity opposition
leader. Engaging in a “battle of wits” with the current administration, he
offered normalized relations and aid money “in return for his establishing
laws and procedures to ensure a fair election,” according to the Guardian.
[73]
But President Lukashenko was not having it. Two days before the
election, the major state newspaper Sovetskaya Belarus ran an investigative
piece exposing the coup plot, which they said had been codenamed
Operation White Stork. As MacKinnon put it, the article was “bang on”—
he is Canadian—including about the dissidents’ plan to call out massive
street protests to dispute the election results and provoke crackdowns to
legitimize Western denunciations of the president.[74]
The election was held on September 9, 2001. Lukashenko claimed a
victory of 76–13 percent. Zubr came out to complain, but no one joined
them. The cops did not even bother busting up the protest. Lukashenko
announced that the attempted “revolution” against him had failed, “[o]r at
least [has] been postponed.”[75]

Transnistria
Transnistria, a.k.a. Transdiniester, or the Pridnestrovian Moldovan Republic
(PMR), a small strip of land on Ukraine’s western border with Moldova
along the Dniester River, is known for one of the world’s dangerous
“frozen” conflicts left over from the breakup of the USSR in the early
1990s. Populated by approximately one-third ethnic Russians,[76] the
territory broke away from Moldova in a short war in 1992 and, though
unrecognized by the Russian Federation, has remained under the protection
of its troops ever since. Moldova has no real historical claim to the land,
which was only granted to it by the decree of Joseph Stalin after World War
II.[77]
In 2003, the president of Moldova, Vladimir Voronin, announced a
compromise plan, written by the Russians, to absorb the breakaway
province—and another, smaller breakaway region of Turkic speakers called
Gagauzia—under Moldovan rule, but with a note of strong federalism and
the presence of Russian peacekeeping troops. The EU’s high representative
for common foreign and security policy, Javier Solana, worked hard to kill
the plan and convinced Voronin to rescind it just as Putin was preparing to
fly to Moldova to witness the signing ceremony.[78] William Hill, then the
chief of the OSCE’s mission to Moldova, said, “What was for most Western
capitals a fairly minor incident for the Russians was a personal affront to
their president and a denial of Russia’s right to play an independent political
and diplomatic role in a part of the world that had once been theirs
exclusively.”[79]

The Rose Revolution

Too Close to Russia

Bush had sent troops to Georgia in 2001, shortly after the September 11
attacks, in the name of fighting terrorism, but more likely to guarantee the
route of the new BTC pipeline meant to bypass Russia and Iran through
Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey.[80]
The U.S. had been involved in Georgia since 1992, when the Georgian
president, former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, came to
power with promises to restore order and attract Western aid. Due to his
personal relationship with Secretary of State James Baker, diplomatic ties
were quickly established and the aid money flowed, hundreds of millions of
dollars’ worth: Georgia was receiving more per capita from American
taxpayers than any other country besides Israel.[81]
But Shevardnadze was too close to Russia. Later that year, he made a
deal with them to solve the crisis in the secessionist ministate of Abkhazia
on the Black Sea, a deal which required Georgia to join Russia’s
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
He had asked for Yeltsin’s help to suppress a violent insurrection by
supporters of his predecessor Zviad Gamsakhurdia in October 1993. As an
investigative commission appointed by the EU later noted, after Russian
troops intervened to help, “[T]his led to a pro-Russian re-orientation of
Georgia’s foreign policy. In October 1993 Eduard Shevardnadze signed
Georgia’s accession to the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent
States (CIS).” They added that “in the following year Tbilisi joined the
Russian-led Collective Security Treaty (CST), too.”[82] In 2001,
Shevardnadze had expressed disinterest in joining the NATO alliance. The
next year, after a meeting of the CIS in Moldova, Shevardnadze started
sending troops to the Pankisi Gorge in northern Georgia to clear out
Chechen and allied terrorists. Shortly afterwards, he made a new deal with
Russia’s Gazprom to take over Georgia’s internal pipeline network and
signed a 25-year deal to make Russia Georgia’s sole supplier of natural gas.
[83] Journalist and Russia expert Jonathan Steele reported that “ambassador
Richard Miles complained that Washington must be informed of such deals
in advance. Then Bush’s energy adviser Steven Mann flew to Tbilisi to
warn Shevardnadze not to go ahead with it.” The young reformer Mikhail
Saakashvili—an American-educated former city council chair of Tbilisi and
Shevardnadze’s former minister of justice—and his allies “denounced the
Gazprom negotiations.”[84] Third, Shevardnadze sold Georgia’s electricity
grid at an artificially low price to the Russian firm RAO-UES, then headed
by Bill Clinton and Al Gore’s old friend Anatoly Chubais, right after its
chief financial officer was brutally murdered. The Americans decided this
was a threat to the BTC pipeline. Shevardnadze told them not to worry
about it, even as he named a former ambassador to Russia to lead his party
in the upcoming elections.[85]

Yer Out!

Regime change was on. Amb. Richard Miles, who had run the operation
against Milošević in Serbia in 2000,[86] and was ambassador to Azerbaijan
during the 1993 coup,[87] was brought in to lead the effort. Miles publicly
announced his mission before he even left America, telling the U.S. Senate
that he intended to make sure Georgia stayed with the West, not Russia. As
soon as he arrived in Tbilisi, Miles made it clear his priority was to
influence the upcoming election in an interview with Rustavi 2 television
channel, which was backed by Soros’s Open Society Institute,[88] and met
with opposition leaders.[89]
The coup was assisted by a group called “The Liberty Institute,” which
was also funded by USAID and George Soros. The Wall Street Journal
called it the “organizing juggernaut behind the move to push Mr.
Shevardnadze out of office.”[90] Its leader, Giga Bokeria, and at least 1,000
others were trained by Otpor from Serbia and Slovakia’s OK’98 group with
funding from Freedom House and Soros’s Open Society Institute[91] at a
former Communist Young Pioneers camp on the outskirts of Tbilisi. They
also established their local clone youth group called Kmara (“Enough!”),
which later helped create pressure from below for the street putsch. The
group was run out of the Liberty Institute’s offices.[92] Mark Mullen, the
director of the Tbilisi office of the National Democratic Institute, helped
train the kids himself with the approval of Amb. Miles. Mullen also hired
the Global Strategy Group to run the exit polls used in the regime change.
On top of the tens of millions spent by the private NGOs, the U.S.
government, through the NDI, IRI, NED and USAID, spent at least $2.4
million on swaying the election.[93]
The NDI introduced former Justice Minister Mikhail Saakashvili,
Washington’s favored candidate, “to the methods insurgents in Serbia used
to depose dictator Slobodan Milošević,” the Journal reported.[94] In
February 2002, the NDI brought Saakashvili and other opposition figures to
meet with George Soros, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and
the other regime changers in Washington. Upon his return to Georgia,
Saakashvili declared that he had the support of the United States to “assist”
building civil society, holding elections and managing military affairs.[95]
Former Secretary of State James Baker went to Georgia in July 2003, first
meeting with the opposition and then with Shevardnadze to let him know
the U.S. was on the other side. Sen. John McCain, the leader of the IRI,
went to meet with the opposition as well.[96]
The New York Times reported that the administration was happy to
boast about their aid to Saakashvili, then “the dominant candidate in
presidential elections.”[97]

The Coup

The early results of the parliamentary elections in November 2003 were

entirely believable. Shevardnadze’s party won the most seats, but not a
majority. The opposition coalition would be in charge.[98] The president
conceded this and announced that he did not expect any confrontation with
the new parliament.[99] But the U.S. had invested too much in the plot to
back down by that point. So they got him with the exit poll scam.
The foreign-backed Rustavi 2 television station declared that the real
poll numbers should have given the opposition parties higher percentages of
the vote and that the election had been stolen by the ruling regime. “They
were a tribune,” Liberty Institute director Bokeria said. “People knew
where to get real information. They were informed about the details of the
election, when to go into the streets, where and how.”[100] The signal
activated, the professional protest groups, led by Kmara, hit the streets.
[101] American and EU observers joined in, denouncing the vote as rigged.
Even though the State Department’s official report had noted the good and
bad of the election, Ambassador Miles outright denounced it as a fraud and
demanded satisfaction.[102]
On November 4, Saakashvili led a protest where he demanded that
Shevardnadze concede that the opposition had won—which he had already
done—and threatened to force him from office. “If [Shevardnadze] wants a
revolution, he will get it!” Saakashvili declared.[103] On the 7th, he led
another march denouncing the “scumbags and rogues” in the Shevardnadze
government.[104]
Rustavi 2 television constantly called for Shevardnadze to resign over
the supposed election irregularities, devoted extensive coverage to the 24-
hour-per-day protests Soros had financed and repeatedly played their
documentary about Otpor’s success against Milošević, Bringing Down a
Dictator, for the youth groups to mimic.
When the government announced the final vote totals on November
20, they claimed another party, the Revival movement, had a slight lead
over Saakashvili’s National Movement party, giving them the chance to
form a government with Shevardnadze’s For a New Georgia.[105] On
November 22, Shevardnadze convened the parliament with the intent of
forming a new government with Revival. Instead, MacKinnon wrote, “with
Kmara and Saakashvili in the forefront,” the foreign-paid crowd stormed
the parliament and occupied the president’s offices.[106] “Armed guards
whisked Shevardnadze away from the Parliament building after
demonstrators broke into the chamber while he was speaking . . . and still
clutching his unfinished speech in a shaking left hand,” the Washington
Post reported. The speaker of the parliament, Nino Burdzhanadze, declared
herself interim leader.[107] Shevardnadze insisted the Georgian constitution
had to be followed.[108] But no law could stop the most powerful nation in
the world posing as the will of a local mob. Democracy would prevail. After
three weeks of street protests financed by Soros’s NGOs and American
taxpayers, Shevardnadze was forced to resign and was replaced with
Saakashvili.
Toronto Globe and Mail reporter Mark MacKinnon ran an explosive
story on George Soros’s role in the coup. He detailed the Open Society
Institute’s and Liberty Institute’s support for Serbian Otpor leaders’ travel,
training of Georgian Kmara in how to run their street protests, financial
support for Kmara itself, as well as the television station Rustavi 2 and
Saakashvili’s National Movement party.[109] Richard W. Carlson, a former
director of Voice of America, learned from a former member of parliament
that “from August through October, Soros spent $42 million ramping-up for
the overthrow of Shevardnadze.” Soros even paid to have the roses shipped
in along with the buses full of demonstrators.[110]

George Soros

Journalist Joshua Eaton, who has done good work,[111] apparently

attempting to help forge a new consensus on the question, recently wrote a
“reminder”: use of the term “‘Soros-backed’ is anti-Semitic.”[112] That is
absurd nonsense and no one should be intimidated by it. George Soros is a
billionaire investor and currency speculator who has been deeply involved
in global politics for generations. He is a self-described “stateless
statesman”; a center-left, liberal anti-Communist and later anti-Russian
activist; he was and remains deeply involved in Eastern Europe, including
Ukraine.[113] Whether he was bankrolling the Polish Solidarity movement
and Czechoslovakian Charter 77, which led the revolution against Soviet
power in Eastern Europe in the 1980s,[114] pot legalization in California in
the 1990s,[115] overtly funding aggressive regime change efforts in former-
Soviet, Russia-friendly states in the 2000s, or for some reason backing
American prosecutors who go soft on violent felons in the 2010s,[116]
Soros is as responsible for his actions as any man, only with much more
wealth and influence. “He had power on the international scene that no
other private individual could claim to have,” as MacKinnon put it.[117]
Soros boasted in his book, ironically titled The Bubble of American
Supremacy: “My foundations contributed to democratic regime change in
Slovakia in 1998, Croatia in 1999, and Yugoslavia in 2000, mobilizing civil
society to get rid of Vladimír Mečiar, Franjo Tudjman, and Slobodan
Milošević, respectively.”[118]
Back in the Clinton years, Strobe Talbott told The New Yorker, “I
would say that Soros’s policy is not identical to the foreign policy of the
U.S. government, but it’s compatible with it.” He continued, “It’s like
working with a friendly, allied, independent entity, if not a government. We
try to synchronize our approach to the former communist countries with
Germany, France, Great Britain—and with George Soros” [emphasis in
original]. Morton Abramowitz, the former United States ambassador to
Turkey, who was formerly the president of the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace in the mid-1990s, and who had been a part of Soros-
backed groups in the past, added, “As I frequently say about George, he’s
the only man in the U.S. who has his own foreign policy—and can
implement it.”[119]
Of course, Soros and his organizations mostly take credit for their
involvement in these projects. He is only trying to help create “open
societies” and liberal democracies, after all.[120]
And since Soros largely acts in a supporting role for the U.S. State
Department overseas, the only accountability he will ever see is criticism in
the press. Instead of being anti-Semitic, critics should be presumed to have
never considered Soros’s religion in their lives as they remark upon his
actions and those of the people, groups and movements he funds—which do
not happen to include religiously motivated Israeli colonization of the West
Bank, for example.[121] In fact, it is probably true that much of the modern
day “hate Soros” movement is an astroturfed phenomenon made to punish
him for not being a Zionist, or at least not prioritizing Israel’s alleged
interests.[122] Too bad, though. These things about him are true.[123]
Humorously, the Western allies parachuted in Salome Zourabichvili, a
French woman of Georgian descent, and until then the French ambassador
to Georgia. She switched citizenship and was made Saakashvili’s foreign
minister.[124] She would end up being elected president with American
support in 2018.[125] A decade before, Zourabichvili told the French
journal Hérodote, “These institutions were the cradle of democratization,
notably the Soros Foundation. . . . The NGOs which gravitate around the
Soros Foundation undeniably carried the revolution. However, one cannot
end one’s analysis with the revolution and one clearly sees that, afterwards,
the Soros Foundation and the NGOs were integrated into power.”[126]
Soros’s business partner Kaka Bendukidze became the new economy
minister.[127] Alexander Lomaia, the director of Open Society Georgia,
was made education minister, while Giga Bokeria, co-founder of the
Liberty Institute, became leader of the National Movement party in the
parliament. In the name of fighting against corruption, they stayed on
Soros’s payroll. Saakashvili too.[128]
“I’m delighted by what happened in Georgia, and I take great pride in
having contributed to it,” Soros told the Commission on Security and
Cooperation in Europe.[129]

A Textbook Case

On November 22, Secretary of State Colin Powell called and told

Shevardnadze to give it up. The next day he did, as the Journal noted in an
article titled “Putin Is Not Amused by the Coup in Georgia.”[130] “This is a
textbook case of how to do things right,” an unnamed ambassador told the
Times.[131] Journalist Wendell Steavenson later wrote in The New Yorker
that after the coup, Saakashvili hired advisers like American Daniel Kunin,
son of former Vermont Governor Madeleine Kunin, with the financial
support of Condoleezza Rice’s State Department and Soros Foundation. In
addition to actually making foreigners such as Zourabichvili and others into
government ministers, this “contributed to the Russian sense that Georgia
was a Western—and for ‘Western’ the Russian élite tends to read
‘American’—proxy,” Steavenson wrote.[132]
Rose Wilted

In May 2005, W. Bush gave a speech in Tbilisi hailing the Rose Revolution.
“[B]ecause you acted, Georgia is today both sovereign and free, and a
beacon of liberty for this region and the world,” he declared. “The path of
freedom you have chosen is not easy, but you will not travel it alone.
Americans respect your courageous choice for liberty. And as you build a
free and democratic Georgia, the American people will stand with you.”
Bush gave them credit for inspiring his “global democratic revolution,”
saying that “before there was a Purple Revolution in Iraq, or an Orange
Revolution in Ukraine, or a Cedar Revolution in Lebanon, there was the
Rose Revolution in Georgia.” He continued, “Your courage is inspiring
democratic reformers and sending a message that echoes across the world:
Freedom will be the future of every nation and every people on
Earth.”[133]
But the new regime, while at first tackling corruption, ended up
becoming a tyranny, no better than it had been under Shevardnadze.[134]
Saakashvili won the 2004 elections with a Saddam Hussein-like 97 percent
of the vote,[135] which is grounds for the highest ridicule from the U.S.
foreign policy establishment when they are writing about governments that
are not American client states.[136] Fitting the tyrant’s mold perfectly,
Saakashvili locked up his opponents from the Justice and Conservative
parties.[137] Sozar Subari, Georgia’s “public defender,” said that after
Saakashvili seized power, the courts had become even more crooked than
before. “The law has been adjusted for the comfort of the ruling party as if
it were the reign of Louis XIV,” he added.[138]
 It was a brutal police state.[139] In 2007, when protesters massed in
central Tbilisi,[140] Saakashvili cracked down hard, declaring a state of
emergency and sending riot cops with tear gas and truncheons to smash
them.[141] Saakashvili and his party, United National Movement (UNM),
were finally run out of office in 2012, as reported by Foreign Policy
magazine, after their “reformist credentials were undermined by a prison
scandal that broke days before the elections. Prison guards were caught on
tape sodomizing prisoners with broom handles.” Further, they reported,
“knowledge of these practices allegedly went all the way to the top. For all
of Georgia’s pro-West rhetoric, the scandal showed just how incomplete the
UNM’s commitment to the rule of law had been.”[142]
But before he was run out of office for his organized mass-male rape
campaign, in 2008, Saakashvili went to war.

NATO Round 2

Whole and Free

In June 2001, President Bush had invoked his father’s phrase “Europe
whole and free” to mean that “[a]ll of Europe’s new democracies, from the
Baltic to the Black Sea and all that lie between, should have the same
chance for security and freedom and the same chance to join the institutions
of Europe as the old democracies have.”[143] This implied that Europe
could not be whole and free until they had all joined—all but Russia, of
course—and that if they did not want to join, that could be considered a
threat to its new “wholeness” and freedom.[144]
 In early 2004, he continued further NATO expansion into Eastern
Europe in violation of his father’s promise, bringing seven more countries
into the alliance: the former Warsaw Pact nations of Bulgaria, Romania and
Slovakia, as well as the former Yugoslav republic of Slovenia, and the
Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania[145]—the latter three actual
former Soviet “republics,” the former two of which share a border with
Russia.
By this time, the controversy seemed to have worn off in the United
States. The foreign policy establishment’s focus was on Iraq War II, and
many of the critics from just five and six years before had by then faded
from the scene. Putin seemed to begrudgingly accept it, so the Bush
administration just went ahead.[146] But they were not really listening.
The New York Times wrote, “To Russia, at least, the meaning is clear:
the alliance still views it as a potential enemy rather than a partner.” While
they could not stop the expansion, the lower house of Russia’s parliament
protested by passing a resolution denouncing the stationing of F-16s in the
Baltics. “Russian politicians and commanders have vowed to increase their
forces in Kaliningrad and northwestern Russian [sic] in response.”[147]
“The presence of American soldiers on our border has created a kind of
paranoia in Russia,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told the AFP in April.
[148] That August, Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov complained that F-16s
stationed in Latvia were “a three-minute flight away from St. Petersburg.”
He then added to Bush’s Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “We cannot
understand how these four planes can intercept al Qaeda, the Taliban or
anything else. The only thing they can intercept is a mythical Soviet
threat.”[149] Putin complained, “This purely mechanical expansion does
not let us face the current threats, and cannot allow us to prevent such
things as the terrorist attacks in Madrid or restore stability in
Afghanistan.”[150]

The Elbe

But as Pat Buchanan, ardent cold warrior in the bad old days, likes to point
out, the U.S. used to draw the line halfway across Germany.[151] The threat
was that if the Soviets invaded West Germany, threatening France, Belgium,
Denmark and the other Western democracies, the United States would go to
war to stop them. Even though the CIA had at least rhetorically supported
each uprising, in Hungary in 1956,[152] Czechoslovakia in 1968[153] and
Poland in 1981,[154] once the USSR intervened, as in the former two cases,
or their puppet government cracked down, as in the latter, America stayed
out.[155] “The heart of America goes out to them,” as Eisenhower said, but
they do not have our sword, as he and Presidents Lyndon Johnson and
Ronald Reagan had decided.
President Clinton had put Poland, Czechia and Hungary under NATO
protection in 1999. Now his successor was continuing to move that dividing
line from the middle of Germany, 1,200 miles east to Russia’s very western
border with the Baltic states. There is no real reason to fear it, but if Russia
did decide to reconquer Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania, our politicians have
signed us up to fight a war to defend them from a power that could in fact
destroy our entire civilization permanently in a single afternoon if it came
down to it.[156]
Action Plan

In 2002, NATO published their first NATO-Ukraine Action Plan, which was
different from the more controversial Membership Action Plan which
President Bush attempted to push through at the Bucharest Summit in April
2008.[157] Still, this was another step toward further integration between
the alliance and Ukraine, setting objectives for the reorganization of
Ukraine’s armed forces and communications systems for easier integration
with allied military forces.[158]

The Orange Revolution

Reconstruction Blueprints

In 2003, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice brought in a scholar

named Stephen Krasner to work with former Ambassador to Ukraine Carlos
Pascual to implement a system of intervention in what they deemed to be
“weak states” on the pretext that any government judged to be so is a threat
to international order and must be assisted by Western governments.[159]
They drew up “reconstruction blueprints,” including putting American
taxpayers on the hook for financial assistance for up to 25 different
governments willing to “share sovereignty”[160] with the U.S. and its allies
in order to “change the very social fabric of [their] nation.”[161] They went
right to work in Ukraine.[162]

Corrupt Puppets
In the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the U.S. helped to prevent the
disputed election winner Viktor Yanukovych—a member of then-President
Leonid Kuchma’s Russian-leaning Party of Regions—from taking power.
This was done in favor of the Western-backed former central bank head
Viktor Yushchenko and his allies, such as Yulia Tymoshenko, the so-called
“gas princess” who had served as president of United Energy Systems of
Ukraine (UESU).
The Bush administration’s favorites were both notoriously corrupt.
UESU made their billions out of a crooked deal with the government,[163]
massive embezzlement[164] and siphoning off Russian gas to sell on the
black market,[165] and the IMF had accused Yushchenko of lying about the
size of Ukraine’s reserves to get an extra $200 million out of them.[166]
Yushchenko had been Kuchma’s formerly hand-picked prime minister, but
he had been fired, allegedly under pressure from Moscow, due to his
resistance to attempted Russian corporate takeovers of Ukrainian
companies.[167] Tymoshenko and former Ukrainian Prime Minister Pavel
Lazarenko had been accused of arranging the murders of Donetsk
businessmen Yevhen Shcherban and Alexander Momot in 1996. Lazarenko
was later prosecuted by the United States for stealing the $200 million. The
Department of Justice listed Tymoshenko as an “unindicted co-conspirator”
in the scheme.[168]
American politicians and TV anchors say things about democracy. But
even one of the aides of the new president installed in the “revolution”
admitted, “The key people in the Yushchenko team are from the same
oligarchic mold as our opponents.” British parliamentarian Michael
Meacher noted the obvious: “Economic interests, not political principle,
pitted them against the Yanukovych camp.”[169] Yanukovych’s predecessor
Kuchma had ceased cooperation with the Partnership for Peace and said he
had no interest in joining the EU unless Russia could join as well. Worse,
from the West’s point of view, he signed a deal giving Gazprom a majority
stake in Ukraine’s pipeline network and reversed the flow of the Odesa-
Brody oil pipeline that had been delivering U.S.- and British-pumped
Caspian oil to Europe, having it instead terminate at Odesa, making Russian
oil available for export. When the prime minister, Anatoliy Kinakh,
resigned in protest, Kuchma replaced him with Donetsk governor Viktor
Yanukovych to get the deal done.[170] Now Kuchma had designated
Yanukovych to replace him as president too.
In another unforgivable sin, Kuchma had signed Ukraine up for Putin’s
new Common Economic Space (CES), a closer economic and political
union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan than the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS).[171]
It did not matter to the American champions of democracy that the
people of Ukraine supported these policies by significant majorities and that
polls showed that were Putin allowed to run for president of Ukraine
himself, he would win in a landslide. The United States would intervene to
ensure their hand-picked president, former central banker Yushchenko,
would win. They would not only prevent this increased Russian influence,
but reverse it, and bring Ukraine towards the West.[172]

The NGO Scam

The U.S. government pulled the same scam that had worked so well in
Georgia the year before. In the second round of voting during Ukraine’s
2004 presidential election, foreign-backed NGOs quickly reported all of
their exit polls before the actual votes could be counted. They claimed
Yushchenko should win by 54 to 43 percent.[173] The narrative was set: the
winner had stolen it, and the losers would refuse to accept their defeat in a
rigged election. The U.S., led by Secretary of State Colin Powell and then-
Senator Joe Biden, along with the European Union, quickly sided with
Yushchenko and denounced the results.[174] Yanukovych may have been
attempting to steal the election.[175] If so, he simply lost a contest between
thieves.
George Soros had been heavily involved in supporting various groups
and institutions in Ukraine since the Soviet Union collapsed, including the
successful candidacy of “his man” Leonid Kuchma back in 1994. He then
worked with Russian shock therapist Anders Åslund of the Carnegie
Endowment to help push through a $4 billion IMF loan for Ukraine, based
on what they said were Kuchma’s clear pro-market reform credentials. “If
this isn’t meddling in the affairs of a foreign nation, I don’t know what is!”
Soros boasted in 1995. “I look at Ukraine with the same frame of mind as I
look at [Real Estate Investment Trusts]. . . . By my intervention, I make it
happen!”[176]
Things change. The Soros-backed Serbian group Otpor had been
training the anti-Kuchma opposition since 2001.[177] Aleksandar Maric
from the group explained to the U.S. government’s Radio Liberty: “We
trained them in how to set up an organization, how to open local chapters,
how to create a ‘brand,’ how to create a logo, symbols, and key messages.”
He continued, “We trained them in how to identify the key weaknesses in
society and what people’s most pressing problems were—what might be a
motivating factor for people, and above all young people, to go to the ballot
box and in this way shape their own destiny.” If it was not a zillion-dollar
foreign conspiracy, this part at least might sound like what a legitimate
democratic movement should be doing. “Indeed, Otpor’s tactics have been
replicated not only in Kyiv, but were also visible in Minsk and Tbilisi. They
include nonviolent mass protests with humor and irony, a distinct logo and
clear demands,” as Radio Liberty put it.[178]
The Associated Press laid out much of the program in what amounted
to a Bush administration press release boasting of their success. They had
spent more than $65 million through the NED, NDI, IRI, Eurasia
Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, Renaissance Foundation, local media
and other groups in the preceding two years, building Ukrainian political
organizations and “underwriting” the exit polls indicating their man had
won. “Other countries involved included Great Britain, the Netherlands,
Switzerland, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Denmark,” the outlet added.
[179]
The Bush administration even brought Yushchenko to Washington to
introduce him to Vice President Dick Cheney, Deputy Secretary of State
Dick Armitage and congressional Republican leaders before the election. In
another example of the U.S. siding with the revolution, despite their
nonpartisan, “democracy building” pretense, the AP noted that the website
of the U.S.-funded Center for Political and Legal Reforms had a link to
Yushchenko’s site under the heading “partners.” USAID had brought a
Center for Political and Legal Reforms official to Washington in 2003 for
training on political advocacy and had also funded the Center for Ukrainian
Reform Education, “which produces radio and television programs aiming
to educate Ukrainian citizens about reforming their nation’s government
and economy,” the AP reported.[180] Yushchenko also met with Zbigniew
Brzezinski on the same trip.[181]
In the lead-up to the Orange Revolution, Freedom House gave the
newly formed dissident group Pora at least $500,000, and the U.S.-Ukraine
Foundation donated $1 million to a group called Znayu to run an
advertising campaign against Yanukovych in 17 cities across Ukraine.[182]
Western-leaning billionaire oligarch Petro Poroshenko’s television station,
5th Channel, was enlisted to play a similar role to B92 and Rustavi 2,
boosting the revolution on the airwaves. The channel would earn the
nickname “Orange TV” due to its blatant support for the revolution.[183]
Delegations included Soros himself,[184] Senators John McCain and
Richard Lugar, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, former President H.W.
Bush, former Secretaries of State Albright and Kissinger, former National
Security Advisor Brzezinski and retired Army Gen. Wesley Clark, who
traveled to Ukraine shortly before the election to make it clear what
outcome the U.S. government preferred.[185] Albright and McCain were at
that time chairs of the NDI and IRI respectively.[186]
When Mark MacKinnon traveled to Kiev in early 2004, Tymoshenko
and her colleagues were already making preparations. They had publicly
asked for Western assistance. The Soros machine quickly responded and
worked to prepare the virtual battlefield. Just days after the Rose
Revolution, David Dettman, director of the NDI in Kiev, traveled to Tbilisi
to meet with his counterparts and begin preparations for the overthrow of
Ukraine. Their first order of business was to bring in Otpor and Kmara to
help train the youth groups who would be central to the plot.[187]
Not to be outdone, Boris Berezovsky, Vladimir Putin’s spurned former
patron, donated approximately $21 million to the cause from his hideout in
London. This became a prominent news story when Berezovsky’s sock
puppets tried to play down his influence and he threatened to sue them for
the credit he was due, demanding an apology and an admission they were
working for him. Otherwise, how would Putin know that it was his old
enemy who had gotten over on him?[188]
A USAID report written by their contractors boasted that “the
Strengthening Electoral Administration in Ukraine Project (SEAUP),
administered by Development Associates, played a decidedly important role
in facilitating Ukraine’s turn to democracy in 2004.” But, they said, they
could not have done it without the generous support of USAID, which had
them “working directly with NDI, IRI, Freedom House, InterNews, and
ABA/CEELI [American Bar Association/Central European and Eurasian
Law Initiative].” Not to deny the locals “agency” or anything, but “[w]hile
the Ukrainian people are clearly the ultimate owners of the Orange
Revolution, the U.S. Government and its implementing partners can take
pride in their role in supporting the country’s turn to democratic rule.”
The Supreme Court judges who ordered a third round of voting and
somehow ruled it constitutional just happened to have been trainers with
SEAUP, a fact the USAID contractors found “extremely fortuitous.” Their
role was “more subtle, indirect, discreet, its success due to the close ties it
enjoyed with the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv and USAID,” they continued, “as
well as with Ukrainian MPs, multiple party representatives, the OSCE,
international and domestic election monitors and other Western government
officials.”[189]

CIA and MI6, Too

The Australian magazine The Age later ran an extensive piece explaining
that the U.S. and Britain had gone beyond the overt NGO-based
intervention and had also launched a major covert operation to intervene in
the Orange Revolution. A group made up of the American CIA, British
MI6, and even part of the Ukrainian SBU and military intelligence ran a
massive operation “using spies, intercept technology and old-fashioned
dirty tricks,” but only to prevent outgoing president Kuchma from stealing
the election from Yushchenko, they claimed. “An intelligence net involving
Mr Yushchenko’s youthful and energetic chief of staff, Oleh Rybachuk, an
important faction of the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine, their civilian
intelligence agency), Ukrainian military intelligence and British and U.S.
ambassadors was established,” the magazine said. “When Mr Rybachuk
received SBU warnings of attempts to disrupt the elections or threats to Mr
Yushchenko, he reported these to both ambassadors.”[190]
The New York Times, though they omitted the role of the CIA and MI6,
also alleged that the SBU had switched sides and supported the Orange
Revolution, saying that in addition to providing intelligence to leaders of
the protest movement, they also “provided security to opposition figures
and demonstrations, sent choreographed public signals about their
unwillingness to follow the administration’s path and engaged in a
psychological tug-of-war with state officials to soften responses against the
protests.”[191] The SBU gave Rybachuk, whom the Kyiv Post called their
“chief conduit” for intelligence against Yanukovych, unverified audio
purporting to reveal Kuchma’s people planning to steal the election.[192]
When Kuchma arranged to have miners from the eastern city of
Donetsk bused to Kiev to counter-protest—or as the Western intelligence
agencies claimed, to start a fight with the goal of justifying a state of
emergency—the nationalists had the brilliant idea of getting them stinking
drunk. At their designated meeting place, someone had left them crates of
vodka. Alex Kiselev, an adviser to Yanukovych, admitted to The Age, “No,
the vodka was not a coincidence. We realized what was going on too late. It
wasn’t illegal but it was damned clever.” He lamented, “It was a trick and
we were dumb enough to fall for it, we shot ourselves in the foot with that
one. It was all very scripted. There were hundreds of Western agents in
Ukraine.”
The Age piece went on to explain how the entire Orange encampment
had been set up by Western intelligence agencies: “Tents, stoves, food,
medical supplies, polystyrene boards for sleeping on in the bitter cold
arrived as if by magic,” they wrote. “In fact, much had been planned.” It
was also “Western intelligence officers [who] had recommended constant
music and rock concerts to distract the huge crowd, which virtually owned
the heart of Kiev.” The reporter said that “conversations with PORA leaders
reveal that some of them attended a seminar in the Crimea funded by the
American Freedom House Foundation—whose chairman is former CIA
chief James Woolsey, and USAID, where these techniques were
taught.”[193]

The Poison Hoax

Even better than in Georgia, the losing candidate came up with the hoax
that he had been poisoned by the Ukrainian SBU—who had slipped dioxin
in his soup, causing not his death, but just some nasty boils on his face.
[194] In fact, he publicly blamed Colonel General Ihor Smeshko,[195] who
it turns out was very much opposed to Yanukovych and had helped
Yushchenko all through the elections.[196] These claims were made by
Tymoshenko and Yushchenko’s chief of staff, Rybachuk,[197] but
debunked by one Dr. Lothar Wicke of the Rudolfinerhaus clinic in Austria,
where Yushchenko was brought for treatment.[198] When they tried to
biopsy his facial tumors, Yushchenko refused to allow it, though the
chemical should have been detectable much later if it had been there.[199]
The German magazine Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ)
reported, “Wicke gave a press conference in which he pointed out that
people not employed in the Rudolfinerhaus—meaning [Nikolai] Korpan
—‘made medically falsified diagnoses about the state of health by Mr.
Yushchenko.’” They picked the wrong doctor to try to pressure into
changing his story. After his repeated debunking, “Yushchenko’s people
made clear to Wicke that he should not say anything more concerning the
affair, since otherwise [as Wicke puts it] ‘one would resort to other means
against me and the hospital.’ Dr. Wicke is also supposed to have received
death threats at the time.”[200] Wicke later told the Telegraph, “I was
directly involved, and I can tell you that the Institute of Forensic Medicine
in Vienna did not find any traces of poisonous agents in his blood. If there is
no poison, there cannot be poisoning, and there was no trace of it
whatsoever.” It was a lie against one of their own allies by a false authority,
complete with threats against the real one.[201]

Do-Over

After the first round of voting, neither man won a majority. Though all the
exit pollsters and parallel vote tabulators had come up with results favoring
Yushchenko, the Committee of Ukrainian Voters, which had been granted
almost half a million dollars by the NED and International Renaissance
Foundation, had skewed the numbers so badly that their leadership decided
against making their impossible claims in public.[202]
Tymoshenko and Pora were ready to launch the street protest
movement, but Yushchenko announced that he would continue to campaign
and try again in the second round of voting, scheduled for November 21.
Kuchma’s people did attempt to rig the vote by busing people from
Ukraine’s far-eastern Donbas region to various polling places to vote
multiple times and resorted to stuffing ballot boxes to credulity-straining
degrees as well, though there was massive support for Yanukovych
throughout the country’s south and east.[203] It hardly mattered. Anything
but a landslide for the Western-backed candidate would have the same
outcome. Before any official results were even announced, the NED and
USAID-backed exit pollsters had proclaimed their own results—a 58 to 39
percent victory for Yushchenko—and started busing in hundreds of
thousands of protesters to take over the capital city’s streets.[204]
Operatives from Serbian Otpor, Georgian Kmara and Belarusian Zubr
worked the crowds as an expensive laser and fireworks show kept the
people entertained. More than 1,500 tents were set up to help establish the
permanence of the protest.[205]
On November 23, Yushchenko declared himself the president of
Ukraine, while Tymoshenko, in a conscious decision to emulate her
predecessors in Serbia and Georgia, led the protesters to lay siege to the
Presidential Administration building where Kuchma and his men had
gathered. Though she had attempted to intimidate the regime with the size
of the protest movement behind her, authorities simply told her the protest
was unlawful and that they would not resign their offices.[206]
Secretary Powell announced that the U.S. would not accept Ukraine’s
election results.[207] In a “symbolic vote,” parliament sided with
Yushchenko, calling for a new election.[208]
The Supreme Court, whose members had been “trained” in election
law by the American Bar Association and the International Republican
Institute on a $400,000 grant from USAID, blocked Yanukovych from
taking power until they could hear Yushchenko’s case. They ended up
ruling that a completely ad hoc, unconstitutional third round of voting
would be held on December 26.[209] Tymoshenko, flanked by Poroshenko,
declared victory from a stage which had been set up on the Maidan
Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kiev for the perpetual rock concert
and protest movement.[210] Thousands of foreign observers flooded the
country for the explicit purpose of showing a Yushchenko victory, which he
evidently did win in the unconstitutional third round.[211]

Guardian On It

While the alleged crisis was ongoing, Guardian European editor Ian
Traynor wrote a piece on the unfolding coup, “U.S. Campaign Behind the
Turmoil in Kiev.” After explaining the role of the various U.S.-backed
NGOs and front groups who ran the fake revolutions in Serbia, Georgia and
Belarus, Traynor wrote that again the strategy would be to force the
opposition to unite behind the chosen candidate, sending “more than 1,000
trained” parallel vote tabulators (PVTs), exit pollsters and election monitors
to hover at polling stations, ready to dispute the vote.
Then, of course, “[t]he final stage in the U.S. template concerns how to
react when the incumbent refuses to concede.” He continued, “In Belgrade,
Tbilisi, and now Kiev, where the authorities initially tried to cling to power,
the advice was to stay cool but determined and to organize mass displays of
civil disobedience.”[212]
Traynor’s colleague Jonathan Steele added that “the demonstrators do
not reflect nationwide sentiments. In Ukraine, Yushchenko got the western
nod, and floods of money poured in to groups which support him.” Exit
polls, he said, can be unreliable, but “provide a powerful mobilizing effect,
making it easier to persuade people to mount civil disobedience or seize
public buildings on the grounds the election must have been stolen if the
official results diverge.” Steele further explained, “Intervening in foreign
elections, under the guise of an impartial interest in helping civil society,
has become the run-up to the postmodern coup d’état, the CIA-sponsored
third world uprising of cold war days adapted to post-Soviet
conditions.”[213]
Just as in Georgia, Soros’s men immediately took positions in the new
government, including foreign minister, defense minister and prominent
advisers to both Yushchenko and Tymoshenko.[214] One of the first acts of
the new government was to order the reversal of the Odesa-Brody oil
pipeline. Before long, the new government began openly talking about
joining the EU and NATO, while U.S. warships docked at ports on the
Crimean Peninsula.[215]

Dr. No

Congressman Ron Paul wrote that USAID had given millions to the Poland-
America-Ukraine Cooperation Initiative (PAUCI), which was run by
Soros’s Freedom House. They then disbursed those funds to groups who
supported Yushchenko over Yanukovych. Paul cited the PAUCI-funded
Ukrainian International Center for Policy Studies. “On its Web site, we
discover that this NGO was founded by George Soros’ Open Society
Institute. And further on we can see that Viktor Yushchenko himself sits on
the advisory board!” And that was not the only one: “The Western Ukraine
Regional Training Center, as another example, features a prominent USAID
logo on one side of its Web site’s front page and an orange ribbon of the
candidate Yushchenko’s party and movement on the other.” He continued,
“By their proximity, the message to Ukrainian readers is clear: the U.S.
government supports Yushchenko.” It was the same with the Center for
Political and Legal Reforms. “It is clear that a significant amount of U.S.
taxpayer dollars went to support one candidate in Ukraine,” Paul said.[216]

Michael McFaul

A month later, Michael McFaul, a Hoover Institution fellow and future

ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama, admitted the truth
while denying it. “Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine?
Yes.” He said that “the American agents of influence would prefer different
language to describe their activities—democratic assistance, democracy
promotion, civil society support, etc.—but their work, however labeled,
seeks to influence political change in Ukraine.” He said that USAID, the
NED, Freedom House, IRI, NDI, the Solidarity Center, Eurasia Foundation,
Internews, International Renaissance Foundation and others provided what
he dishonestly claimed were “small grants” to the pro-Yushchenko side.
The EU and several European countries did as well. Then McFaul claimed
that all they were trying to do was make sure the election was “fair.” They
did this by training all the election monitors, exit pollsters, pro-Western
media and the Znayu and Pora student movements. They also kept
Ukrainian “democrats” in contact with their “counterparts in Slovakia,
Croatia, Romania and Serbia.”
While McFaul denied siding with Yushchenko or anyone else, this is as
disingenuous as can be since it was Yanukovych who won, and they had to
pull their Orange Revolution stunt to cancel the results of his election. Then
came the ultimate rationalization: “Does this kind of intervention violate
international norms? Not anymore. There was a time when championing
state sovereignty was a progressive idea, since the advance of statehood
helped destroy empires.” When they talk about the liberal, rules-based
order, what they mean is that the UN Security Council is nothing compared
to the U.S. National Security Council. Those who still care about national
sovereignty are just siding with old dictators. Now, “those who champion
the sovereignty of the people”—including the leaders of the most powerful
foreign governments on the planet—“are the new progressives. In Ukraine,
external actors who helped the people be heard were not violating the
sovereignty of the Ukrainian people; they were defending it.”[217] McFaul
was simply obfuscating. At the very best, the U.S. was siding with half the
Ukrainian people against the other half so that the politician that the U.S.
government favored would win the power.
In 2005, McFaul wrote a journal article extrapolating from the regime
changes in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine, and explained how to accomplish a
color revolution. The target needs to be an unpopular “semi-autocratic”
regime because they have to pretend adversary states with regular elections
are still dictatorships. The opposition must be united and organized. Groups
need to be ready to claim election results are fraudulent, turn out large
crowds and exploit divisions within the regime. Presto: democracy.
This time, McFaul completely omitted the role of foreign interests in
any of these events. He credited Serbian, Georgian and Ukrainian NGOs for
their supposedly “independent” exit polling and “parallel vote tabulation,”
but the reader was left to believe this was all grassroots, local, patriotic,
democratic activity. The same argument is made about opposition radio
stations, especially in Serbia.[218]
That is the template. Wherever an incumbent leader or his designated
successor they do not like is running for office, the U.S., the most powerful
government in the world, will stand firmly against the democratic process,
supporting any number of “extraconstitutional measures,” as McFaul put it,
to prevent their victory. They do this all while wrapping themselves in flags
and declaring they are the ones truly committed to democracy.
Speaking of the sovereignty of the people, when protesters in
Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region called for a referendum on autonomy after
their candidate’s electoral victory was canceled, Ukraine’s new president
threatened them: “Those who are calling for separatism are committing
crimes and will definitely receive severe punishment.” They backed down.
[219]
McFaul followed up with another piece in 2007, wherein he explained
that a mass protest movement was required for the Orange Revolution to
succeed, and that it really was the U.S. and its allies that got it done after
all. “To understand why there were hundreds of thousands and sometimes a
million people mobilized for two weeks after the vote requires a closer
examination of the resources that made the Ukrainian democratic
opposition powerful and effective.”[220]
He went on to note the effect of declaring exit polling as superior to
actual counted ballots, as well as NGO-funded, so-called “independent”
media, also citing the “wealthy Yushchenko ally, Petro Poroshenko,” who
bought a TV station and turned it into the pro-Yushchenko Channel 5.
Poroshenko would later become president after the next regime change in
2014.[221] However, the masses of protesters in the streets are what really
made the difference. “The protest was not spontaneous. . . . The quick
appearance of truck-loads of tents, mats, and food supplies, which had been
secured weeks before, clearly demonstrated the opposition’s preplanning,”
McFaul said. It was Pora, with American taxpayer money, that built the
permanent tent city on the Maidan and provided the supplies that made the
whole thing work. He boasted that the NDI and IRI “also helped ensure that
Kuchma’s party did not win an overwhelming majority of seats in the
parliament.” They “worked with several parties that won representation in
the Rada, and in turn helped maintain this institution’s independence from
the president.” McFaul also bragged that Western denunciations of Kuchma
“helped magnify his image as an illegitimate and criminal leader,” and
added, “Media reporting, think tank publications, Our Ukraine
[Yushchenko’s party] press releases, and parliamentary hearings . . . played
some role in decreasing popular support for the Kuchma regime.” He was
happy to admit that “[m]any of these critical sources received Western
technical assistance or financial support, including Ukrainska Pravda, the
Razumkov Centre, and the Rada.” The U.S.-backed youth groups Znayu,
Pora and Freedom of Choice coalition “all contributed to more critical
coverage of the Kuchma regime and a decline in its popularity.” Without
irony, he noted that Western “experts” were then also able to “inform” U.S.
and European officials, “who in turn influenced their own governments’
perception of Kuchma.” McFaul also said that it is even better than we
think because both the Western governments and groups, as well as the
locals, have an interest in playing down the foreign role in what are
supposed to look like grassroots movements. The reality was that the U.S.
essentially created the pro-Yushchenko Our Ukraine coalition. “Well
before” its formation, McFaul said, “IRI and NDI worked closely with
many of the individuals who later assumed senior positions in the Our
Ukraine organization and campaign.” They continued to support it. IRI
focused on consolidating regional party leaders across the country, while
the NDI worked with the top-level organizers in Kiev.[222]
After describing the NDI and IRI’s part in bringing Yushchenko to the
U.S. for a tour around Washington, where he met important officials, and
how they helped “assure the Bush administration that the Ukrainian
opposition was viable and worth supporting,” McFaul added another
admission about the Western groups behind Yushchenko’s alleged victory.
The NDI, IRI and Soros groups had also boosted turnout in pro-Yushchenko
districts with “get out the vote” projects. He continued, “Even with the
PVTs [parallel vote tabulators] the Committee of Ukrainian Voters (CVU)
still played a leading role in exposing fraud (and creating the perception of
fraud) during the second round of the presidential vote. . . . The PVT
technology used by CVU was imported from the United States.”[223]
It goes on and on like that, detailing the role of USAID, the NED, IRI,
NDI and dozens or even hundreds of George Soros-backed NGOs of all
sizes across Ukraine before, during and after the election in conducting the
exit polls, making the accusations of fraud and spreading them throughout
the “independent” media, which was independent from the ruling party in
Kiev, if nothing else. Serbian Otpor and Georgian Kmara came to help train
the Ukrainians “through the facilitating efforts of Freedom House and the
German Marshall Fund.” McFaul added that “Pavol Demes, a leader of the
OK 98 movement in Slovakia, traveled to Ukraine several times in the
months leading up to the Orange Revolution to train and provide support
for Yellow Pora.” He continued, “Given the extremely precarious
distribution of power . . . these imported inputs from the West were
consequential in tipping the balance in favor of the democratic challengers”
[emphasis in original].
According to McFaul, the Bush administration also played a crucial
behind-the-scenes role in the EU and UN mediation efforts during the crisis,
encouraging Yushchenko to agree to reduced powers for the presidency and
increased powers of the prime minister if Kuchma and Yanukovych would
agree to a third round of voting. “Ironically,” McFaul noted, “after the 2006
parliamentary elections, Yanukovych became prime minister again, this
time with more enhanced powers as a result of the Orange
Revolution.”[224]
Just for a moment, imagine any other nation intervening in America’s
elections this way.

A Force More Powerful

At the height of the Bush administration’s imperial hubris, an American

consulting firm called the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict
(ICNC), Freedom House and Otpor even made a video game about the
color-coded revolutions called A Force More Powerful, where players go
through supposedly realistic scenarios of building up nonviolent resistance
groups to destabilize their local governments.[225]

Oh, I See How It Is

President Putin was greatly angered by the Orange Revolution. “They lied
to me, I’ll never trust them again,” he reportedly said. Economist and author
David Goldman wrote that “[t]he Russians still can’t fathom why the West
threw over a potential strategic alliance for Ukraine. They underestimate the
stupidity of the West.”[226]
Jonathan Steele then warned, “This one-sided intervention is playing
with fire. Not only is the country geographically and culturally divided—a
recipe for partition or even civil war—it is also an important neighbor to
Russia.” He said that “Putin has been clumsy, but to accuse Russia of
imperialism because it shows close interest in adjoining states and the
Russian-speaking minorities who live there is a wild exaggeration.” A
Russia expert who lived there for years and wrote an incredible book about
the fall of the Soviet Union, Steele made it plain. “Ukraine has been turned
into a geostrategic matter not by Moscow but by Washington, which refuses
to abandon its cold war policy of encircling Russia and seeking to pull
every former Soviet republic into its orbit.” He acknowledged that “[t]he
vast bulk of the demonstrators in Kiev are undoubtedly genuine. Their
enthusiasm and determination are palpable.” However, he said, “they do not
reflect nationwide sentiment, and the support for Yanukovych in eastern
Ukraine is also genuine.” Steele also challenged the black-and-white moral
narrative spun by Western governments. “Nor are we watching a struggle
between freedom and authoritarianism, as is romantically alleged.” He
noted that Western hero “Yushchenko served as prime minister under
Kuchma, and some of his backers are also linked to the brutal industrial
clans who manipulated Ukraine’s post-Soviet privatization.” And on the
other side, “Putin is not inherently against a democratic Ukraine, however
authoritarian he is in his own country. What concerns him is instability, the
threat of anti-Russian regimes on his borders and American mischief.”[227]
Bush apparently admitted to Putin that the U.S. spent at least $14
million supporting the protest movement there. As the Journal put it, “The
Kremlin saw the Orange Revolution as U.S.-sponsored destabilization
aimed at pulling Ukraine out of Moscow’s orbit—and as a prelude to a
similar campaign in Russia itself.”[228] George Friedman also wrote, “To
Putin, the actions in Ukraine indicated that the United States in particular
was committed to extending the collapse of the Soviet Union to a collapse
of the Russian Federation.”[229]
That was correct. Neoconservative commentator Charles Krauthammer
explained in the Post, “This is about Russia first, democracy only second.”
Forthright in his arrogance, he added, “This Ukrainian episode is a brief,
almost nostalgic throwback to the Cold War. Russia is trying to hang on to
the last remnants of its empire. The West wants to finish the job begun with
the fall of the Berlin Wall and continue Europe’s march to the east.”[230]
For her part, Yulia Tymoshenko, riding high on her victory, threatened,
“As soon as our Orange Revolution has been completed, we’ll transfer it to
Russia.” The Guardian paraphrased her, adding that “one could see cars
with orange ribbons in Moscow even now.”[231]
Solzhenitsyn on Ukraine

In 1990, as the USSR was falling apart, the great Soviet dissident Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, author of the Gulag Archipelago,[232] attempted to beseech
Ukraine to stay in a union with Russia. Whether or not that would have
been the right thing, his statement goes to show how truly complicated and
intertwined these historical loyalties can be. The coming problems were
obvious from the beginning, since the newly independent nation would
include “those regions which have never been part of the traditional
Ukraine: the ‘wild steppe’ of the nomads—the later ‘New Russia’—as well
as the Crimea, the Donbas area, and the lands stretching east almost to the
Caspian Sea.”
Still, he said that “the two populations are thoroughly intermingled;
there are entire regions where Russians predominate; many individuals
would be hard put to choose between the two nationalities; many others are
of mixed origin, and there are plenty of mixed marriages.” In vain,
Solzhenitsyn exclaimed, “Brothers! We have no need of this cruel partition.
The very idea comes from the darkening of minds brought on by the
communist years. Together,” he said, “we have borne the suffering of the
Soviet period, together we have tumbled into this pit, and together, too, we
shall find our way out.”[233] Solzhenitsyn elaborated his views in a 1994
interview with Paul Klebnikov. He asked us to imagine states in the
American Southwest breaking away to join Mexico, then vowing to oppress
Anglos who refused to learn Spanish and swear loyalty to Mexico City,
even if their families had lived there for two centuries. “What would be the
reaction of the United States?” he asked. “I have no doubt that it would be
immediate military intervention.” This, Solzhenitsyn said, was the exact
situation Russia was in, having left 25 million “undesirable aliens” behind
in what are now foreign countries, even in places where their history went
back centuries. “And in this situation ‘imperialist Russia,’” he said, “has not
made a single forceful move to rectify this monstrous mess. Without a
murmur she has given away 25 million of her compatriots—the largest
diaspora in the world!”
Being half-Ukrainian himself, Solzhenitsyn said he wished the best for
Ukraine, “but only within her real ethnic boundaries, without grabbing
Russian provinces.” And he warned that the Ukrainian right was “acting out
and trumpeting a cult of force, persistently inflating Russia into the image
of an ‘enemy.’ Militant slogans are proclaimed. And the Ukrainian army is
being indoctrinated with the propaganda that war with Russia is
inevitable.”[234]

Secession Is an Option

Tensions between the new regime and the east became apparent
immediately. Leonid Kravchuk, the first president of post-Soviet,
independent Ukraine, once said, “We are a country of different interests.
Ukraine has three small Ukraines: South-East, West and Center. Different
historical roots, different mentalities, different historical memory.”[235]
Nicolai N. Petro, a former U.S. State Department official and professor
of politics at the University of Rhode Island, explains this historical idea of
“three Ukraines,” with the South-East as the economic and industrial center,
the West as the cultural center, and the Center as the geographical and
political center.[236] Petro himself views Ukraine as “two nations in one
state,” Galician (anti-Russia) in the west and Maloross (pro-Russia) in the
east. “The competition between these two mutually exclusive versions of
Ukrainian identity,” he wrote, “plays a central role in Ukrainian history.
During much of the twentieth century, these two identities struggled to
coexist and find common ground.”[237] That was sure putting it mildly.
[238]
The history of the region was a complicated mess. Russian civilization
had in fact been born in what is now Ukraine. Its history is usually traced
back to when Prince Vladimir of Kiev was baptized into Eastern Orthodoxy
in 988. From the Russian point of view, the center of Eastern Slavic power
naturally moved to Moscow. From the Ukrainian view, the Muscovites
simply usurped their rightful legacy as the true heirs of the ancient Rus.
[239] The political map of the region changed many times over the
centuries, with various warlords and clans ruling parts of what is now
Ukraine, including the Turks, Poles, Lithuanians, Hungarians and Austrians.
Under the later Tsars, ethnic Russians dominated, especially in the eastern
industrial cities. Then the Communists had enforced their own tyranny over
the land, including Stalin’s deliberately inflicted famine, known as the
Holodomor, in Ukraine and Uzbekistan in the early 1930s.[240] By the time
the Soviet Union disintegrated in the late 1980s, more than 20 percent of
the population was ethnic Russians, especially concentrated in the eastern
and southern regions of Kharkiv, the Donbas (Donetsk and Luhansk Oblasts
or provinces), Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts on the Azov Coast, as
well as the Crimean Peninsula and Odesa.[241] In these regions, they were
mostly between 20 and 40 percent of the population, 60 percent in Crimea.
But a far greater proportion of the people, up to 80 percent, primarily spoke
Russian, and the vast majority of print publications were in Russian—at
least until the new government’s post-2004 Ukrainianization policy.[242]
The Communists in Moscow had redrawn Ukraine’s borders to suit
their interests, first as part of the cost of making peace with the Central
Powers in the First World War,[243] then to regain as much of the territory
as they could afterward,[244] more after the Hitler-Stalin pact and division
of Poland[245] and finally with their victory over Germany in World War II
and the deal with Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta.[246]
Part of the reason the Communists drew the border to include the
Donbas and Crimea was to have ethnic Russians dominate the eastern
industrial base, and to dilute the influence of ethnic Ukrainians in the east.
[247] The nation’s eastern border since independence in 1991 was drawn by
the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union,
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, in 1919.
The reaction in the east to the election interference of 2004 was a
protest movement of their own. Tens of thousands turned out in late
November in Donetsk to protest and threaten autonomy or secession. The
Donetsk soviet moved to hold a referendum on autonomy, though they
eventually withdrew it.[248]
Murray N. Rothbard described exactly this problem with the Western
doctrine of collective security. All borders are considered sacrosanct, even if
they are all wrong.[249] It truly is the curse of the Old World that virtually
all borders have been drawn in blood, and often by far-flung foreign
empires who deliberately divided or artificially grouped different ethnicities
in the interests of ruling them. Ukraine’s borders have been drawn and
redrawn over the centuries as its territory was virtually always dominated
by foreign empires. Perhaps they simply need adjusting.
Predicting dissention and further reaction during the 2004 Orange
Revolution, Rothbard protégé Justin Raimondo wrote that Kiev should just
let the east go. “Why are boundaries carved by Russian Communists set in
stone?” he wondered.[250] For some countries, democratic, pluralistic,
multi-ethnic, multi-religious statehood works. For others, separation may be
preferable. It worked for Czechoslovakia, which is now the Czech Republic
and Slovakia. The U.S. was more than happy to support the secession of
Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Macedonia[251] and Montenegro[252]
from the former Yugoslavia.
But Secretary of State Powell, whose department had done so much to
foment the crisis, said he was concerned that Ukraine might split. “I
reaffirmed to President Kuchma the United States’ position and the position
of others that the territorial integrity of Ukraine is important.” He then
joked, “We once again reaffirmed that we hope that Ukrainians will find a
legal way forward as well as a political process based on the constitutional
law.”[253]
That was the first time America helped overthrow Ukraine’s
government.

Orange Peeled
Of course, it is true that some governments the U.S. has helped to
overthrow are corrupt, but that is just a convenient excuse. It is not the case
that the U.S. is replacing corrupt governments with clean ones. The
Yushchenko-Tymoshenko alliance, which had been forged in a secret deal
authored by the American NDI,[254] and which took power in Ukraine in
the 2004 Orange Revolution, was so corrupt and dysfunctional that the two
were at each other’s throats within a year.[255]
Anders Åslund is a Swedish anti-Russia hawk, and at that time director
of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace. He had been part of the Harvard Institute for
International Development (HIID) group who helped to wreck the Russian
economy in the Bill Clinton years[256] and aided George Soros as he
rigged the 1994 election for Leonid Kuchma.[257] Åslund would later
hysterically demand that President Biden bomb Russia after an errant
Ukrainian missile killed two Polish farmers,[258] and the Associated Press
reported a false claim by a single American intelligence source asserting
Russia had deliberately fired it[259]—so the reader understands whose side
he is on. Just a year after the supposed revolution, Åslund complained that
the new government, led by Prime Minister Tymoshenko, was as socialist
as the last, expanding government monopolies, raising government
employee wages, imposing price controls, causing shortages and taxing
everyone to death.[260] Yushchenko fired her and National Security
Council Secretary Petro Poroshenko in 2005.[261]
The country then gave the plurality in the Rada to Yanukovych—the
great villain of the Orange Revolution—leaving Yushchenko no choice but
to name him prime minister in 2006.[262] Yanukovych won the Presidency
in 2010,[263] in an election that was ruled free and fair by all the
international observers.[264] Yushchenko got 5.5 percent of the vote in the
first round.[265] In both cases Yanukovych was assisted by American
political consultant Paul Manafort, a notorious adviser to dictatorships
across South America, Africa and East Asia,[266] as well as Sen. McCain at
the IRI. Former McCain adviser and Manafort partner Rick Davis supported
Yanukovych as well, even though the senator was firmly behind
Yushchenko.[267]
Joe Biden, a leading voice of support for the Orange Revolution in the
U.S. Senate,[268] later summed up its results in a speech to the Rada:
“Ukraine’s leaders proved incapable of delivering on the promise of
democratic revolution. We saw reforms put in place only to be rolled back.
We saw oligarchs uninterested in change ousted from power only to return.”
Despite all of America’s best efforts, “the bright flame of hope for a new
Ukraine snuffed out by the pervasive poison of cronyism, corruption, and
kleptocracy.”[269]
When Yanukovych’s government prosecuted Tymoshenko over her
signing a gas deal with Russia in 2011, her old partner Yushchenko testified
against her, accusing her of being a “pliant, pro-Russian leader.” Either one
hero of the Orange Revolution was a traitorous sellout to the Russians, or
another was corrupt enough to falsely accuse her of being one on the stand
at her criminal trial.[270]
In the midst of the Orange Revolution, and the Russian reaction to it,
the administration announced a broad review of Russia policy, saying they
were abandoning their “strategic partnership” in favor of a “more
confrontational approach.” They cited NSC Director for Europe and Eurasia
Daniel Fried and Vice President Cheney’s foreign policy adviser, Robert
Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, as saying that Secretary Rice’s old
realpolitik approach to Russia was outdated and the U.S. now needed to
confront them about Democracy. Stanford’s McFaul said it was Putin’s
reaction to the perfectly legitimate goings-on in Ukraine that necessitated
America’s new harsher doctrine.[271]

The Tulip Revolution

To Be America’s Friend Is Fatal

Daniel McAdams, foreign policy adviser to then-Rep. Ron Paul,

complained to Voice of America in 2004 that the NED did not just blindly
support the democratic process in these countries, but supposed American
“interests” as well, and that they often chose very poorly. “As a matter of
fact in Slovakia,” he told them, “the candidate that they were fighting
against—Prime Minister Vladimír Mečiar—had been persecuted by the
Communist regime, and the people who they supported were for the most
part former Communist officials in Czechoslovakia.”[272]
In Kyrgyzstan, the previous leader Askar Akayev had been America’s
friend.[273] But in the “Daffodil” or “Tulip” Revolution of March 2005, the
U.S. government overthrew Akayev in favor of Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who
had been prime minister, but had been forced to resign[274] after police
under his command killed five demonstrators at a protest in 2002.[275]
 Under Akayev, the Americans maintained the Ganci Air Base at the
Manas airport, which was crucial to the war in Afghanistan.[276] The Bush
administration had made a fuel deal with companies owned by the
president’s family members. This was supposed to solidify his support for
the Americans’ position there. Instead, the obvious corruption helped to
discredit him and weaken his rule.[277]
Then, just after returning from a trip to Moscow, Akayev made the
mistake of allowing the Russians to return to and expand another air base
near the village of Kant, just 30 miles from Ganci. Akayev also announced
that he had decided to deny the U.S. the right to base Airborne Warning and
Control System (AWACS) planes at Ganci. The Americans claimed to need
them for the Afghan war, but the Russians were concerned they would be
used for surveillance inside their country instead.[278] Lockheed’s Bruce
Jackson was upset. He complained to Congress that Russian pressure on
Kyrgyzstan to deny America the right to base AWACS planes on their
territory was a major signifier of their failure to become a modern
democracy.[279]

Soros’s Islamists

The regime had also gone after the radical Islamist faction Hizb ut-Tahrir
(HuT), which was being supported by Soros’s Freedom House. According
to the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, “In another sign of
Kyrgyzstan’s apparent shift away from the West, the country’s security
forces have accused foreign civil rights advocates of helping the radical
Islamic group Hizb-ut-Tahrir.” What an odd thing to say, but true. “At a
government meeting on 28 June, National Security Service, NSS,
spokesman Tokon Mamitov said the banned group was exploiting the undue
attention it was paid by groups like the United States-based Freedom
House,” which had “angered the Kyrgyz authorities when it invited Hizb-
ut-Tahrir members to a March 1 meeting that was also attended by Kyrgyz
police and prosecutors, and by representatives of the U.S. embassy and the
OSCE.”[280]
In 2006, Daniel Fried, then-assistant secretary of state for European
affairs, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Hizb ut-Tahrir
“claimed to be non-violent and moderate, while appealing to the idealism of
socially alienated and/or spiritually hungry Muslims in Europe,” but that “it
transmits a hateful, anti-Semitic and anti-American call for the overthrow,
albeit non-violent, of existing governments and the reestablishment of a
single Islamist theocracy (or Caliphate).” He added that “Hizb ut-Tahrir’s
websites have deemed justified the killing of Americans or Jews, and even
the flying of airplanes into office buildings.” The Germans and British had
banned the group. The State Department’s Fried continued, “We lack
evidence of Hizb ut-Tahrir having organized terrorist actions, but we know
it skillfully uses Western freedoms to provide the ideological foundation for
Islamist terrorists.”[281]
On June 6, 2003, Russian police arrested 55 men they said were
members of Hizb ut-Tahrir and accused them of possessing explosives.
[282]
Perhaps the danger of this group was embellished, and they were as
peaceful as the U.S. State Department now claims.[283] However, just
think how Western intervention in favor of such dissident factions in
countries on the other side of the world must look to them and, more
importantly, to the Russians. Then when their governments react against
these groups—even ones also banned by our closest allies—that becomes
the excuse for intervention against them.

Same Ol’ Thing

The U.S. sponsored another color-coded “revolution,” this time a violent

one against their old client Akayev.[284] In early 2005, the usual suspects
started getting prepared. The NED financed a group called Civil Society
Against Corruption and sponsored a new youth group called Kel-Kel. The
election was held on February 27. The OSCE had complained about
irregularities in their electoral process,[285] which was all the excuse the
U.S. government needed to interfere. Violent mobs seized control in the
southern cities of Jalal-Abad and Osh. Like Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan is deeply
divided by region and ethnicity. The south of the country was dominated by
ethnic Uzbeks who resented the ethnic Kyrgyz control of the national
government and its powers over the economy. They were taking the
opportunity to riot against central authority. Democracy, like in previous
color-coded revolutions, had very little to do with it beyond a rallying cry of
pretended legitimacy for the protesters.
The Wall Street Journal explained it all before the coup. An American
named Mike Stone was paid by USAID through Soros’s Freedom House
and Open Democracy Institute to run a State Department-owned printing
press on U.S. Embassy-provided generators to endlessly print anti-regime
propaganda, including all the typical Otpor-style advice on civil
disobedience. They directly tied the Kyrgyz protest movement to previous
color-coded revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, saying, “Now, opposition
figures hope to go three-for-three—this time using yellow as their color—in
a bid to push Mr. Akayev from power.” He had allowed the Trojan Horse
inside the city walls, having welcomed as many as 8,000 foreign-backed
NGOs to influence society. “Akayev once joked that if the Netherlands is a
land of tulips, then Kyrgyzstan is a land of NGOs,” the Journal said. The
U.S. had spent almost $750 million there between 1992 and 1995, including
$31 million after the Freedom Support Act of 2004.[286] The NDI paid an
Akayev opponent named Edil Baisalov $110,000 per year to run a group
called “the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Rights,” who in turn
supported the dissident group Kel-Kel and printed their manifesto.
The exit pollsters, election monitors and radio reporters were ready.
[287] On February 27 they held elections, and the Western-backed side
immediately cried fraud. Two cities in the predominantly ethnic-Uzbek
south, Osh and Batken, were taken over first, and then the protests spread to
the capital of Bishkek.[288]
On March 25, protesters seized control of the Presidential
Administration offices, forcing Akayev to flee to Russia. Police simply
stood aside and allowed them in.[289] Five days later, the New York Times
helped the W. Bush administration publicize their great success. They had
spent at least $12 million on “pro-democracy” programs, not including
money funneled through Freedom House or Radio Liberty, which was spent
supporting groups, backing radio and television stations and “civil society
centers” where propaganda was distributed. The NDI’s Baisalov told the
Times, “It would have been absolutely impossible for this to have happened
without that help.” American Jeffrey Lilley from the IRI boasted that his
group had helped to get the regime change done. Alexander Kim, editor of a
U.S. government-subsidized opposition newspaper, said that “[t]he role of
the NGOs and independent media were crucial factors in the
revolution.”[290] Who needs secret CIA plots when you can just put NED
ones on the front page of the Journal and the Times? What could Putin’s
Russia do about it anyway? “What happened today concerns the Kyrgyz
people and their decisions, yet the United States is proud to have assisted
the process,” declared Ambassador Stephen Young.[291] “It’s the fourth
wave of democratization,” said the Washington Post’s Daniel Drezner.[292]
The normally reasonable Samuel Charap of the RAND Corporation
dismissed claims of American influence in the alleged revolution by saying
the new regime did not end up behaving substantially different toward the
United States or Russia. But that fact does not reflect on their effort at all,
only its result, which may have been less than what the regime changers
had hoped for. And, to be fair, he emphasized that what mattered most was
Russian perceptions of the events—and those were decidedly negative. The
“revolution” only proved to them how unrelenting the American regime
change agenda in Russia’s near abroad really was.[293]

Russian Reaction

Perhaps here we should take the naïve version of this story at face value for
argument’s sake. Let us stipulate that all the U.S. government’s direct
support for “civil society” institutions, NGOs, independent political parties
and election infrastructure in this vast number of countries across Eastern
Europe and Central Asia—due solely to a pure and virginal commitment to
the highest ideals of natural rights, equality and independence for the
benighted people of the world—has only coincidentally empowered pro-
American forces time after time, if not from winning elections, then from
disputing them, because people just really like the U.S. and truly hate and
fear Russia. The fact that these “democratic” revolutions always target
Russia’s friends over disputed elections while the U.S. supports outright
monarchies and military dictatorships across the Middle East and Central
Asia can also be dismissed as only a correlation that does not indicate true
U.S. intentions in any way. . . Well, still. The policy is clearly causing the
Russians to panic, understandably, and is risking major war in the name of
democracy in places that never had it and probably never will, like Georgia,
Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan.
Unsurprisingly, after the coup, Putin started cracking down on foreign-
funded NGOs in Russia, telling the press, “I object categorically to foreign
funding of political activity in the Russian Federation. . . . Not a single self-
respecting country allows that and neither will we.”[294] In January 2006,
he signed a new law requiring detailed reports of their finances and
relationships. Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov explained that “NGOs won’t
be able to act in Russia as they did in the color revolutions in Ukraine and
Georgia. Period. In the ’90s we were too weak and distracted to act. Now
Russia will defend its sovereignty.” When Putin warned Amb. Burns about
interference in Russia’s elections in 2007, the diplomat gave him the
standard line about U.S. supporting democracy, but never any particular
party or candidate. Putin simply responded, “Don’t think we won’t react to
outside interference.” He cited all the money being poured in and American
diplomats and spies running around the country meeting with opposition
figures.[295]
In reaction to the overthrow of Akayev in Kyrgyzstan, the Kazak and
Uzbek regimes also preemptively cracked down on foreign-backed NGOs,
with the Uzbeks shutting down the Open Society Institute permanently. As
Mark MacKinnon noted, Soros’s groups were willing to encourage dissent
even in U.S.-backed nations like Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan, where the
NED and USAID would not.[296] Even after Uzbek dictator Islam
Karimov’s forces machine-gunned hundreds of protesters in May 2005, the
Bush administration waited days to condemn the slaughter. They would not
lift a finger to help dissidents in any of the three nations because they liked
the dictatorships there just fine.[297] As MacKinnon also noted, it was
clearly U.S. support for the groups on the ground that had made the
difference in every nation where the color-coded revolutions had succeeded.
Soros money, opposition media and energetic youth groups could not make
the difference without the NED and their associates to handle the heavy
lifting.[298]
William Perry faulted the U.S. for stationing provocative missile
defense systems in Eastern Europe[299] and for supporting the color-coded
revolutions in Russia’s near abroad,[300] saying they had poisoned
relations with Putin’s Russia. In fact, he said Putin was sure the U.S. was
plotting to overthrow him too, something which Perry did not seem to think
was too farfetched himself. “After he came to office, Putin came to believe
that the United States had an active and robust program to overthrow his
regime,” he told the Guardian. “I don’t know the facts behind Putin’s belief
that we actually had a program to foment revolution in Russia, but what
counts is he believed it.”[301]

Tulip Bust

Bakiyev was as corrupt as his predecessor.[302] He lost much of his

credibility after a U.S. soldier stationed in the country shot and killed a fuel
delivery man at a checkpoint in 2006. The soldier claimed self-defense
based on sketchy claims that the man had brandished a knife at him,[303]
an incident the later Obama administration decided to compound by making
a “condolence payment” of merely $2,000. Though they later gave the
victim’s wife more money, it was too late. The scandal of the lower amount
had already made its impression on the population.[304]
Bakiyev dealt with the pressure by turning on his American patrons.
He shut down the local rebroadcasts of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty
and threatened to expel the U.S. military from the Manas Air Base in
2006[305] and again in 2009.[306]
After installing his own family kleptocracy and obviously rigging the
election of 2009,[307] Bakiyev was then overthrown himself in what
looked much more like a real popular revolution in 2010,[308] which he
attempted to suppress violently, massacring protesters before giving up and
fleeing the capital.[309]
 Anti-Russia hawk Steve LeVine complained that when Obama refused
Bakiyev’s request for military assistance, it represented “pulling the plug on
America’s empire in Central Asia.” At least he was being honest, instead of
pretending the U.S. was on the side of Kyrgyz independence. LeVine wrote,
“On paper, the Obama administration continues to reject the idea of a
Russian sphere of influence in Central Asia, but the events in Kyrgyzstan
appear to mark a softening of this red line in practice.” He was “leaving a
largely powerless government to its own devices”—as opposed to, say,
helping the coup regime crack down on dissent to stay in power.[310]
An expert from the Brookings Institution was even so honest, or
critical, to write in April 2010, when Bakiyev was overthrown, that the new
regime was much more cautious about working with the Americans since
they had been willing to countenance Bakiyev’s corruption and oppression
while Russia had supported more democratic forces.[311]
The new government vowed to force the United States out of the
Manas Air Base in 2011,[312] in part because of the scandals, and in part
because of pressure from the Russians.[313] Though the Obama
administration delayed as long as possible, they finally left in 2014.[314]
It was the same in Kyrgyzstan as it was in Serbia, Georgia and
Ukraine: all the color-coded revolutions eventually fade to black.[315]
Why would foreign-backed coups ever produce stable governments,
when whoever the outsiders pick are virtually necessarily not those who
would have the most support to inherit power over the state? Even if they
did not have a conflict of interest, the knowledge problem precludes it.
They are virtually guaranteed not to have enough information to decide who
they can put in power and who will protect their interests while holding on
to what could be seen by many locals as foreign rule.[316]

The Denim Revolution

October 2004

Bush tried again to overthrow Belarus’s Alexander Lukashenko in the

“Denim Revolution” of 2005–2006. First, in October 2004, a referendum
was held on amendments to the constitution which would allow the
president to seek a third term. While Western-backed exit polls showed
broad support for the measures, the dissenters’ blatant attempts to spin them
otherwise only backfired, discrediting the pollsters.[317]

Foreign Agents Confirmed

In February 2005, President Bush awarded “Champion of Freedom” medals

to members of Slovakian OK’98, Serbian Otpor, Georgian Pora, Belarusian
Zubr, as well as activists with the Liberty Institute and the Young Lawyers
Association in Georgia. Bush’s association with Zubr was so toxic that the
award recipient, Vlad Kobets, was discredited and was forced to resign and
flee to Ukraine.[318]

Tens of Millions

That spring, Secretary Rice traveled to Lithuania to meet with Belarusian

opposition figures. While there, she declared Belarus an “outpost of
tyranny” and announced that it was “time for a change” of regime there.
[319] The U.S. and its allies spent at least $25 million on the attempt to
overthrow Lukashenko, with all involved making direct references to Serbia
and Ukraine as models for how it should be done.[320] But the nation was
nowhere nearly as divided as had been the case in Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine
or Kyrgyzstan. Nor would Lukashenko tolerate NED- and Soros-backed
NGOs inside the country, forcing dozens of them out and leaving the
regime changers to wage the attempted overthrow from Ukraine, Poland,
Lithuania and Slovakia.[321]
Their new youth group, Khopits (“Enough”), was well-funded by the
IRI, NED, the UK’s Westminster Foundation and German Foreign Ministry,
but had little success, with public opinion solidly behind the government.
[322] With help from the German Marshall Fund office in Slovakia, they
came up with the gimmick of using blue jeans as the symbol of their new
color-coded revolution. The EU poured in $2.4 million to bankroll
opposition media, and the NED another $2.2 million for other election-
related grants. They chose a little-known professor named Alexander
Milinkevich to be their unification candidate since the other opposition
leaders were already identified by the public as being foreign agents.[323]
A poll in January showed only 17 percent saying they planned to vote for
the challenger.[324]
While the media claimed more than 10,000 protesters turned out to set
up their tent city,[325] this was false. McAdams reported the truth of the
matter, having witnessed it firsthand. “I was there standing in October
Square on Wednesday afternoon watching the 150 or so protesters while the
BBC reported ‘thousands.’” That same day, he said, the German paper
Frankfurter Allgemeine reported that “they flew flags of denim” when
McAdams saw not one denim flag on the square. And while the Western
media reported an oppressive government presence, he said “there was
hardly a police officer to be seen.” He also pointed out that the OSCE
observers who complained about the vote process were almost all Western
diplomats and intelligence officials with a massive conflict of interest in
complaining about the election, and that the IRI failed to produce their
promised exit polls, indicating that they likely showed a solid victory for
the incumbent.[326] He also observed the vote-counting and found the
process to be perfectly transparent and inclusive of all parties.[327]
Jonathan Steele explained the situation: “Would you expect a European
leader who has presided over a continual increase in real wages for several
years, culminating in a 24 percent rise over the past 12 months, to be voted
out of office?” He asked, “What if he has also cut VAT [value added tax],
brought down inflation, halved the number of people in poverty in the past
seven years, and avoided social tensions by maintaining the fairest
distribution of incomes of any country in the region?” That was the
situation in Belarus. Just because the administration was angry at them for
being independent, that did not mean the people of the country agreed with
whatever George W. Bush wanted.
Steele noted, however, the amount of Western media coverage already
set on the narrative that the upcoming election was sure to be unfair. “We
saw similar conformism little more than a year ago in Ukraine, when one
side was glorified to the skies, as if only a tiny minority of benighted
Soviet-era automatons did not support the pro-western candidate, Viktor
Yushchenko.” In fact, Yanukovych had gotten 44 percent of the vote, and,
Steele correctly predicted, “may even emerge with the highest number of
votes in Ukraine’s parliamentary elections.” But the public narrative was
being driven by the administration’s policy. “[T]here is a huge campaign by
foreign governments to intervene in the Belarussian poll, even more
controversially than in Ukraine in 2004. While Russia is hardly engaged in
this election, Europe and the U.S. are pumping in money.” He said that
“[s]ome of this foreign money will be used to fund street protests promised
by opposition activists if Lukashenko is declared the winner. They have
already dubbed it the ‘denim revolution,’ giving supporters little bits of the
cloth as symbols to copy the successful demonstrations in Ukraine and
Georgia.”[328]
Steele cited a New York Times report called “Bringing Down Europe’s
Last Ex-Soviet Dictator,” saying the NED and friends were pouring in
millions of dollars on the attempted regime change. The Times introduced
Milinkevich and explained that state monopoly media had made the people
crazy, their heads full of dumb conspiracy theories: “In the consciousness of
a people saturated with state propaganda and ideology, he appears as the
shadowy leader of a revolutionary cadre financed by big powers abroad and
committed to the overthrow of the government,” the truth of which was
exactly the point of the article itself. They continued, “President Bush [and]
leaders across Europe, have thrown their support—and money—behind
Milinkevich and an array of democratically minded activists determined to
wake up a populace considered too passive, or too afraid, to challenge the
state.” They quoted Lukashenko’s warning to would-be revolutionaries:
“Any attempt to destabilize the situation will be met with drastic action. We
will wring the necks of those who are actually doing it and those who are
instigating these acts.” He added that “[e]mbassies of certain states should
be aware of this. They should know that we know what they are up to. They
will be thrown out of here within 24 hours.”[329]
Democracy is when there is a “popular uprising” by “George W. Bush
and leaders across Europe” against governments with overwhelming
domestic support to cancel election results that do not go their way. Or at
least in this case to stage some sort of mass protest to show their discontent
when they were sure to lose badly. Lukashenko “acts as if the world were
plotting to overthrow him,” the Times wrote in their piece about how the
West was trying to overthrow him. “In a sense, Lukashenko is right. The
policies of the European Union and the United States—supporting free
news media, sponsoring civic organizations and providing assistance to the
country’s democratic opposition—all seek to undermine his hold on
power.” The article started to read as if it had been written by Lukashenko’s
press office. Whose side were they on anyway? “With the election
approaching, foreign aid has jumped in ways reminiscent of the cold war. In
January, the European Union awarded a two-year, $2.4 million contract to a
German organization, Media Consulta, to coordinate the broadcasting of
news into Belarus.” They also said the Bush administration spent $11.8
million on “democracy promotion” in 2005 and planned to spend another
$12 million in 2006. The NED was prepared to spend another $2.2 million
“on 49 grants related to the Belarus election.” The Americans sponsored an
election-monitoring group called Partnership. What the Times called “the
Belarusian freedom industry” met in Vilnius, Lithuania, to divide up
millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars, with one big winner being the youth
group Khopits, which they said “does not, officially, exist. . . . According to
its members and sponsors, [it] is a network of cells with dozens of activists
in 60 cities and villages.” The Times said that “Khopits’s information war is
well under way.” The NED, Westminster Foundation for Democracy (the
NED’s British equivalent) and the Foreign Ministry of Germany were
bankrolling it all.
They went on to describe the role of Bush 2004 campaign manager
Terry Nelson and the IRI, NDI, NED and others in coordinating the
Belarusians’ dissent with Khopits and Zubr, including their planned protests
after the election. Milinkevich told the Times they were trying to provoke
Lukashenko into declaring martial law in a desperate attempt to undermine
his legitimacy. Perhaps they did not consider what it meant for theirs.[330]
Steele concluded, “The revolt against Lukashenko within Belarus is
genuine, idealistic and, in some cases, courageous. . . . But they are not the
majority.” He elaborated, “A poll in January by Gallup/Baltic Surveys, and
reported in the emigre Belarusian Review, found only 17 percent in favor of
Milinkevich and nearly 55 percent supporting Lukashenko.” If the U.S.
government really supported democracy, they would have respected that.
[331]

OceanofPDF.com
Freedom Betrayed

As Thomas Carothers from the Carnegie Endowment for International

Peace pointed out, the W. Bush administration’s blatant support for the
overthrow of the governments of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan,
combined with their total contempt for the rule of law and individual rights,
was a public relations disaster for freedom and self-government in the
world. “Democracy promotion” had come to be seen as just an excuse for
the American empire to launch regime change operations in other people’s
nations.[332] Not only did the U.S. back royal monarchies[333] and
assorted military dictatorships[334] while overthrowing elected
governments and starting illegal wars,[335] but the CIA tortured at least
seven men to death,[336] the military at least 108,[337] in addition to
thousands more tortured by their Iraqi and Afghan clients during the terror
wars.[338] And they were guilty of millions of felony violations of the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, illegally spying on Americans.[339]
Not that foreign states care about that, but it goes to show that the U.S.
government does not mean what they say about the rule of law any more
than the others do, and so all criticisms along those lines may be ignored as
irrelevant. Carothers seemed honestly surprised at the transparency of the
administration’s hypocrisy in the cases of Egypt, Kazakhstan and
Azerbaijan. After rigged elections in all three countries, “U.S. officials have
said little in public about the events. It seems that all three of these
strongmen will pay no significant price for their antidemocratic defiance.”
 Within a year and a half of Carothers’s essay, due to the Federal
Reserve’s big budget-friendly, low-interest rate policy, they created a
bubble that collapsed the world economy.[340] Bush claimed freedom,
justice and the American way as their purpose for it all.[341] So in reaction,
more came to consider the concepts themselves to be bankrupt, and worse,
plausible denial for American covert operations against them. In response,
Carothers lamented, Russia, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Belarus and many other
countries passed laws restricting foreign NGOs from interfering in their
politics.[342] MacKinnon, who was probably the foremost chronicler of the
color-coded revolutions, actually thought they were on balance good for the
target countries, but noted that they meant fair elections would now be
further away than ever for other nations in the region, making them a wash
at best.[343]

Crying For Yukos

Texas Tea

Due in large measure to W. Bush’s self-described “unjustified and brutal

invasion of Iraq”[344] in 2003, oil prices skyrocketed, saving the Russian
economy and the presidency of Vladimir Putin. By 2005, the government
had paid off all of their foreign debt and cut taxes,[345] while their annual
growth rate was averaging 7 percent. Unemployment fell to record lows,
and the president’s approval rating was sky-high.[346] Putin, a former
member of Yeltsin’s corrupt crime “family,” had instituted a new domestic
economic order. The oligarchs could have their wealth, but they better stay
out of politics from now on, or find out the hard way who is really the boss.
[347]
In October 2003, Putin arrested Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s
wealthiest man and CEO of the oil company Yukos, who had been waging a
public campaign against the president. Khodorkovsky had announced his
retirement, hinting at challenging Putin in politics. “I am all three
generations of the Rockefellers,” he told journalist Ben Aris, “The first were
robber-barons. The second consolidated the empire. And the third were
royalty.”[348] Putin then arrested him, took away his oil company and put
him in prison.[349]
Khodorkovsky was as corrupt an oligarch as any of them. He gained
control of Yukos through a rigged loans-for-shares auction where he loaned
the government $159 million on a company worth billions.[350]
After his Menatep Bank failed in the financial crisis of 1998,
Khodorkovsky turned to politics and, with the help of his friend George
Soros, founded a new group called Open Russia, which was modeled on the
Open Society Institute.[351] The newly reinvented “Open Mike” paid big
dividends and promised corporate transparency, which so many American
investors wanted to cash and believe.[352] Khodorkovsky proceeded to
pour money into the liberal Yabloko Party, right-wing nationalist Vladimir
Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party and the Communist Party. But after
he publicly challenged Putin about a rigged oil deal that went against him,
his fate was sealed.[353]
The final straw was when Khodorkovsky tried to sell his shares in
Yukos to the American firms ExxonMobil or Chevron-Texaco for $25
billion. Soon he and his partner Platon Lebedev were arrested. The state
seized their shares[354] and convicted them of fraud and tax evasion. The
oligarch was sentenced to nine years in prison.[355] He was later convicted
for more fraud and theft and given seven more years.[356] The Russian
public broadly supported the Putin regime’s persecution of Khodorkovsky,
Berezovsky and Gusinsky. For some reason, MacKinnon attributed this to
Russian anti-Semitism rather than the fact that these were quite literally
three of the most corrupt individual human beings in the world, and
certainly in their poor country, which they had mercilessly exploited
through fraud and violence.[357]
Soros and neoconservative Richard Perle, the major ringleader of the
plot to lie the United States into war with Iraq in 2003,[358] declared that
Russia should be kicked out of the G8 over Khodorkovsky’s arrest.[359]
John McCain decried the “new authoritarianism in Russia.”[360] Bruce
Jackson railed to Congress that it was the “watershed event” that showed
the deterioration of democracy in Russia.[361]
But as Anne Williamson explained, since the Harvard Boys had
completely blown the opportunity to institute real property rights in Russian
law, the very basis of social cooperation and peace[362] was ruined. In its
place, the people demanded a strong, state-led order to keep the private
criminals in line and the inflation rate low. So whose fault was that again?
[363]
After the Soros Foundation was raided by armed men said to be
working for a businessman they were in a dispute with, the foundation
reasoned it must be revenge for their support of Khodorkovsky.[364] The
tycoon was eventually released in 2013 in a deal cut by former German
Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher.[365] American Russia hawks
sure pick strange champions sometimes.

Litvinenko

Kook Killed

In November 2006, a former FSB agent and exile named Alexander

Litvinenko died of poisoning by the radioactive isotope polonium-210 in
London. He had worked for Boris Berezovsky in the UK spreading
farfetched claims about the Russian state, such as that Ayman al-Zawahiri
was their secret agent and al Qaeda an FSB plot against the West, that the
government was behind the 1999 apartment bombings, the 2002 theater
siege, and the 2004 Beslan school massacre,[366] and even that Putin was a
child molester.[367] The mysterious death was widely proclaimed to be a
Russian nuclear attack on a British citizen on British soil—perhaps an act
of war[368]—and served as a major turning point on Russia and the West’s
path to renewed confrontation.
While the official British investigation seems to make it clear who
poisoned the man, they failed to demonstrate the Russian government’s
responsibility. It made little sense that they would kill him this way.
Litvinenko was no threat. His accusations against Putin and the Russian
government were absurd nonsense. “Litvinenko just wasn’t worth it. He
didn’t pose a threat,” as an FSB veteran told The Observer. Not only that,
but the poison used to kill him was a highly refined radioactive metal which
would obviously bring suspicion onto them. And it took three weeks for the
poison to kill the guy, enough time for the victim and all his friends to make
a huge show out of it and call it a politically motivated assassination. They
could have just shot him. Again, as former FSB agent Oleg Gordievsky told
the press regarding Litvinenko’s initial sensational claims that he had been
sent to kill Boris Berezovsky in the first place, that was not how they did
business anymore.[369]

Suspects

For his part, Litvinenko implicated an Italian academic security consultant

named Mario Scaramella, since he had insisted on a meeting about a
potential assassination plot against them both, where the information he had
provided had suspiciously not been worth the trip. He had told the same
thing to his co-author Yuri Felshtinsky.[370] But the London Times said that
“Scaramella has spoken freely about the meeting and is keen to cooperate
with any investigation. He believes that Litvinenko had already been
poisoned by the time they met.”[371] Scaramella was not accused of killing
Litvinenko by British authorities. The official investigation by Lord David
Owen[372] found that Litvinenko named Scaramella to the press to
convince two other suspects that they were in the clear and could return to
London.[373]
British prosecutors ended up charging Yegor Gaidar’s former
bodyguard and an ex-FSB agent, as well as his associate, a retired Russian
army officer named Dmitri Kovtun. These two men also met with
Litvinenko on November 1 at the Millenium Hotel in Mayfair. Despite their
repeated denials,[374] the timeline and investigators’ claims about the
radioactive trail left behind at their various hotel rooms, restaurants, a
nightclub and in the airplanes they took,[375] would seem to be conclusive
as to their responsibility for the deed.[376]
The New York Times noted that when the UK filed its charges against
Lugovoy, he, like Litvinenko, had previously worked for Boris Berezovsky.
[377] The exiled oligarch predictably blamed Vladimir Putin.[378]

Ultimate Responsibility

But the origins of the polonium have not been proven. British investigator
Owen cited testimony by nuclear expert “A1” that “very many” research
reactors around the world would be capable of producing the polonium
simply by “irradiating bismuth 209,” leaving it impossible to attribute
responsibility for its manufacture.[379] The furthest the British government
ever went with their accusations was to claim that Litvinenko was
“probably” killed on orders from Putin.[380] Owen, author of their final
investigative report on the matter, wrote that unfortunately the proof would
have to remain classified.[381]
Lugovoy eventually won a Duma seat under Zhirinovsky’s party—
where he now enjoys immunity from prosecution—and an award he
received from Putin. So it does not seem that they were very mad at him for
making them look bad. (Kovtun kept a low profile after returning to Russia
and died of Covid in 2022.[382])

Gaidar Too
After Yegor Gaidar himself was also possibly sickened by poison the day
after Litvinenko died, former Deputy Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, by
then CEO of the electric company UES, had a theory of his own: the
shooting murder of Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya,[383] the
poisoning death of Litvinenko and would-be death of Gaidar were a plot
against Putin, rather than by him. “Yegor Gaidar was on the verge of death
on 24 November,” he said. “The deadly triangle—Politkovskaya,
Litvinenko and Gaidar—would have been very desirable for some people
who are seeking an unconstitutional and forceful change of power in
Russia.”[384]

Smuggling

There was always the possibility that Litvinenko was smuggling nuclear
materials and became sickened by them, and that he and his allies then
decided to pin his death on Putin.[385] Scaramella claimed that Litvinenko
told him he had run an operation smuggling radioactive material out of
Russia to Switzerland in 2000.[386] The German daily Der Spiegel
reported, “In Hamburg, police consider Kovtun to be a nuclear smuggling
suspect.”[387] Scotland Yard and MI5, Britain’s domestic national police
and counterintelligence force, quickly focused their investigation on
London’s criminal underworld. The Australian reported, “It is thought the
former Russian spy might have been killed in London after a deal that went
wrong with associates involved in the ruthless world of Russian business.”
They wrote, “Police will look at investigations that his friends say he
claimed to be involved in at the time of his death, including smuggling
rings for nuclear material and prostitutes.”[388]
Owen’s official investigation also found that Litvinenko had implicated
Scaramella to all of his associates, Yuri Shvets, Vladimir Bukovsky,
Akhmed Zakayev and Boris Berezovsky, but did not mention his meeting
with Lugovoy and Kovtun at all. This, Owen wrote, “cannot be explained
by his strategy to try to lure the two men back into the jurisdiction, since
these were private conversations with trusted friends.”
Owen then attributed this massive omission to “wounded professional
pride,” since he must have known it was the two who had done it and was
then embarrassed that he did not see the attack coming.[389] But the guy
was clearly dying, and Lugovoy and Kovtun were the obvious alleged
connection if he wanted to implicate the Russians. Perhaps there was
another reason for Litvinenko to attempt to direct attention away from
them.
Owen also related that two years before his ultimate poisoning by
polonium, Litvinenko and his friend and neighbor, Chechen separatist exile
Akhmed Zakayev, both had their Berezovsky-provided houses firebombed
by two Chechen men who claimed Berezovsky owed them money in a
dispute over the smuggling of nuclear material. Wanted by Russia, English
judges refused to hand Zakayev over.[390] After also mentioning a previous
alleged poisoning attempt against the oligarch, Owen wrote, “I refer to the
two incidents because they do perhaps give a flavour of the life that Mr
Litvinenko was living, and the risks that he was running, as a member of
Mr Berezovsky’s entourage during this period.”[391]
Blackmail

There was also the possibility that Litvinenko was killed by any number of
criminals or Russian government officials to put an end to his reckless
blackmail schemes, what the Guardian-Observer said “may prove the most
compelling motive yet for murder.” They reported, “Litvinenko claimed to
have made contact with senior sources in the heart of the FSB, the
successor to the KGB, who would supply him with a stream of confidential
dossiers on any target that the 43-year-old exile requested.” According to
Litvinenko, he would use the intelligence to blackmail figures from
Russia’s criminal underworld. Julia Svetlichnaja, a Russian-born academic
who knew him, informed the paper that Litvinenko “told me he was going
to blackmail or sell sensitive information about all kinds of powerful people
including oligarchs, corrupt officials and sources in the Kremlin.” She
continued, “He mentioned a figure of £10,000 they would pay each time to
stop him broadcasting these FSB documents. Litvinenko was short of
money and was adamant that he could obtain any files he wanted.”[392]
While Lugovoy claimed Litvinenko planned to blackmail Berezovsky, who
had severely scaled back his monthly allowance, the official investigation
could not corroborate that.[393]
The Guardian reported that Litvinenko had claimed to have a file on
the nationalization of Yukos—compiled by another former KGB agent and
Berezovsky associate, Yuri Shvets[394]—that was worth his traveling to
Israel to give a copy to Leonid Nevzlin, a Yukos executive then in exile, to
avoid criminal charges back in Russia.[395] However, the official
investigation found that the Russian government’s first knowledge of this
came too late to have motivated a series of events which were already being
planned.[396]

Informant

The official investigation did, however, develop the story of Litvinenko’s

involvement with the Russian mafia in Spain. According to the official
investigation, based on multiple sources, he was working with Spanish
police against them. Berezovsky told investigators that Litvinenko had
helped them arrest a mobster named Shakuro and was giving them
information about Berezovsky’s old protégé Roman Abramovich.[397]
According to an article in Spain’s El País[398] and a State Department
cable posted to WikiLeaks.org,[399] Litvinenko was working with Lugovoy
and national police in Spain on what they called operations “Avispa” and
“Troika” against the “Tambov-Malyshev crime family,” and “tipped off
Spanish security officials on the location, roles and activities of several
‘Russian’ mafia figures with ties to Spain.” The cable went on to say that
Litvinenko “allegedly provided information on Izguilov, Zakhar Kalashov
and Tariel Oniani to GOS [Government of Spain] officials during a May
2006 meeting.” In 2018, a Spanish court acquitted the mobsters on all
charges.[400] Perhaps silencing the informant did the trick.
Berezovsky died in an apparent, but obviously suspicious, suicide by
hanging in 2013.[401]
In the end, whether Litvinenko was involved in something criminal or
killed by criminals for exposing them, claims that the hit was ordered by the
Kremlin seem to be based only on inference, as in the official UK
government report by Lord Owen. But that never stopped the Western War
Party from making the man’s death a cause to celebrate and use as a cudgel
against Russia.[402]

Pretensions Canceled

National Security Strategy for 2006

Outlining Russia policy in the Bush administration’s new National Security

Strategy for 2006, they wrote, “Recent trends regrettably point toward a
diminishing commitment to democratic freedoms and institutions. We will
work to try to persuade the Russian Government to move forward, not
backward, along freedom’s path.” They added, “[E]fforts to prevent
democratic development at home and abroad will hamper the development
of Russia’s relations with the United States, Europe, and its
neighbors.”[403] That might not sound too bad, but in the era of W. Bush’s
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and multiple color-coded coups, all in the
name of spreading democracy, it may have come across like Bush was
threatening regime change.
Secretary Rice announced new permanent troop deployments of up to
5,000 men each in Romania and Bulgaria,[404] in violation of President
Clinton’s solemn promises in the 1997 Founding Act.[405]

Cheney in Vilnius
Russia had been selling natural gas to the former Soviet republics at a
discount, but after the Orange Revolution decided that Ukraine would have
to pay global market rates like the rest of Europe.[406] In May 2006, Vice
President Cheney gave a speech in Vilnius, Lithuania, where he condemned
Russia for ending subsidies to Ukraine the previous year: “No legitimate
interest is served when oil and gas become tools of intimidation or
blackmail, either by supply manipulation or attempts to monopolize
transportation. . . . No one can justify actions that undermine the territorial
integrity of a neighbor.”[407]
That part was a reference to Georgia, certainly not Serbia’s Kosovo,
Sudan’s south nor Syria’s Golan Heights. The territorial integrity of those
places was undermined by the United States and its clients, so they do not
count. But what an absurd thing to argue anyway, against an end to
subsidies for a foreign nation? Why even bring it up, asked Justin
Raimondo. “It was a provocation, pure and simple.” So was the fact that
Cheney secretly met with Russian dissident MP Vladimir Ryzhkov while he
was in town.[408]
It appears Russia was not even singling out Ukraine for any particular
extortion at the time. Instead, they had decided on a new policy that only
the most cooperative nations would get a break on the price of gas. In 2006,
only Belarus avoided the global going rate.[409]
In Moscow, Cheney’s speech was taken as a sure sign the U.S. would
attempt to back the opposition in the 2007 Duma and 2008 presidential
elections. Even the pro-Western Kommersant accused Cheney of
announcing the beginning of the second Cold War. Putin mocked the vice
president’s pretense to democracy as he stopped in Vilnius to give his
provocative speech on the way to visit bloody dictator Nursultan
Nazarbayev in Kazakhstan: “Where is all that pathos of the need to fight for
human rights and democracy when it concerns the need to realize their own
interests? Then it seems everything is possible. There are no limits at
all.”[410]
It was not true, as Cheney claimed, that Russia’s tough stance in
negotiations with Ukraine on gas transit prices was a simple case of
imperialism. As shown in multiple international arbitration cases, their
accusations against Ukrainian companies for stealing gas and refusing to
pay their debts were valid.[411] The pipeline controversy came to a head in
2009 in a dispute over Ukrainian Naftogaz’s debts to Russian Gazprom and
Russian accusations that Ukrainians were diverting and stealing gas meant
for European markets. The Russians eventually cut off all gas exports
through Ukraine for a short time until they reached a temporary monitoring
deal, followed by a new price agreement with Tymoshenko, who was again
prime minister at the time. This is the agreement over which she was
eventually charged with treason, though it looks more like a simple battle
between oligarchs: those who controlled Naftogaz, close to Tymoshenko,
and others from RosUkrEnergo, close to Yanukovych and the Party of
Regions.[412]

Russian Pora

In December 2004, Andrei Sidelnikov, a former spokesman for Boris

Berezovsky, had founded Russian Pora for the explicit purpose of
attempting to create an Orange Revolution-type overthrow of the Putin
regime. They immediately made contact with Serbian Otpor, Ukrainian
Kmara and Georgian Pora. However, the dissenters had no credible
candidate. Grigory Yavlinsky of Yabloko and former Deputy Prime Minister
Boris Nemtsov were already proven losers. Chess prodigy Garry Kasparov
also showed to have little public appeal after a national speaking tour.
Former Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov had the backing of exiled
oligarchs Berezovsky in London and Leonid Nevzlin in Tel Aviv—whose
reputations as thieves and gangsters cost the man more than their money
could make up for. Kasyanov himself still carried his own negative
reputation for corruption during the Yeltsin years. Polls showed that people
would have preferred the Communists to the Western-tied oligarchs’
puppets.[413]

Russia’s War on Terrorism

The Pankisi Gorge

In 2002, George W. Bush sent an anti-terrorist mission to former-Soviet

Georgia to train the Georgian army to fight against Arab al Qaeda members
hiding in the lawless Pankisi Gorge in the Southern Caucasus Mountains,
[414] called the Georgia Train and Equip Program (GTEP). Alexander
Vershbow, a former American ambassador to Russia, said that considering
the involvement of al Qaeda there, “we’re working with the Russians to cut
off these external sources of support, and that includes intelligence-sharing,
and working with Georgia to tighten up controls.”[415] In early 2003, the
State Department finally designated three major Chechen groups as terrorist
organizations, the Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion
of Chechen Martyrs, the Special Purpose Islamic Regiment and the Islamic
International Brigade.[416]

Basayev’s War Against Russia

In 2002, the Russians assassinated Saudi terrorist leader Ibn al-Khattab with
a poisoned letter. Just one drop did the trick, apparently. But Shamil
Basayev (a.k.a. Abdullah Shamil Abu Idris) survived to carry on the war.
Though he had started out as more of a Chechen nationalist, under the
influence of Khattab and the other mujahideen, Basayev’s politics had been
converted to the bin Ladenite doctrine of international jihadist revolution.
[417]
Journalist C.J. Chivers wrote that “Mr. Basayev belongs to the older
generation but he trained in Afghanistan and from the earliest days of the
Chechen rebellion has inclined to more radical tactics.” He took credit for
the Dubrovka theater attack in Moscow[418] where Chechen terrorists took
almost 800 hostages, ringing the place with so-called “black widow” female
suicide bombers. It ended in a botched rescue where 129 hostages were
killed, along with the terrorists, by the knockout gas Russian forces pumped
into the theater.[419] Chechen President Aslan Maskhadov had officially
allied with Basayev two months before.[420] Basayev was also behind an
attack in the North Caucasus nation of Ingushetia, killing 47 policemen and
many other civilians in June 2004.[421] This was followed by the mid-air
destruction of two passenger planes by two Chechen female suicide
bombers which killed 90 people[422] and a suicide bombing at a Russian
subway station in August that killed 10 more.[423]

Beslan

Then on September 1, 2004, they launched the horrific school massacre in

Beslan, North Ossetia, in which 329 people, 186 of them children, were
slaughtered.[424] Basayev was happy to take credit for his “jihad” against
Russia, including these terrorist attacks against civilian targets, as well as
his association with bin Laden from his time spent at his Afghan training
camps.[425] His men were later also behind the 2010 Moscow Metro
bombings.[426]
Amb. Burns wrote in his memoir that when President Bush—who had
declared war against Islamist terrorists from Somalia to the
Philippines[427]—found deep nuance when it came to the bin Ladenites
among the Chechens, the Russian president was furious. “Putin saw Bush’s
response, which included warnings against overreaction and a dalliance
with ‘moderate’ Chechen elements to try to defuse tensions, as nothing
short of a betrayal.” Burns reiterated that the Russians were certain the U.S.
was gunning for them next.[428]
An article from the London Sunday Times on the third anniversary of
the al Qaeda attack on the United States, just days after the slaughter at
Beslan, represented the typical sentiments of the American and British
governments. As far as they were concerned, the Chechen suicide bombers
had no link to al Qaeda or international terrorism at all. They refused to
believe Arabs were involved or to seriously entertain deporting wanted
Chechen exiles like Akhmed Zakayev or Ilyas Akhmadov, who were given
asylum and overtly supported by the NED, Madeleine Albright, Zbigniew
Brzezinski and John McCain.[429] And they demanded that Putin negotiate
rather than crack down.[430]
This was the same government that falsely claimed secular Saddam
Hussein’s Ba’athist Iraq was joined at the hip to al Qaeda,[431] when they
had no working relationship whatsoever,[432] therefore supposedly
justifying the outright invasion of that country in the name of the terror war.
[433] But literal associates of bin Laden running a suicide bombing
campaign against the Russians?[434] Why, they were just moderate rebels.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher still insisted, unlike the
United States in its wars, that “the broader conflict in Chechnya cannot be
resolved militarily, and requires a political solution.”[435]
Just three days after Beslan, Putin addressed the Valdai Discussion
Club. Dr. Mark Bassin wrote about the event that “Putin came into the
meeting visually shaken by the events that were occurring. What was clear
from his answers was that he took a very American approach to Chechnya
—it was a case of ‘these people want to hurt us and they have to be
stopped.’” He compared the Chechens to al Qaeda, saying that “he did not
counsel the Americans to meet Bin Laden for talks.”[436] Stratfor wrote in
their client newsletter, “Visibly angered, Putin told his compatriots that
Moscow knew major foreign powers wanting Russia to collapse were
backing the terrorists.” They continued, “Though he did not name any
countries, nobody in Russia except a few pro-U.S. liberals doubted that
Putin meant Washington and its allies.” Their sources confirmed he
certainly meant “the United States and United Kingdom.”[437]
The next day, he challenged Washington’s hypocrisy: “Why don’t you
meet with Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House
and engage in talks? Ask him what he wants, and give it to him so he’ll
leave you in peace.”[438]
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius wrote that it was this moment
that permanently destroyed Bush and Putin’s personal friendship and trust,
and solidified Russia’s break with the West. He cited Secretary of State Rice
and the NSC’s Thomas Graham to support that view, and a “careful review”
by the Belfer Center at Harvard’s Kennedy School[439] saying Putin was at
least “partially correct” about U.S. support for Chechen separatists, noting
the asylum and financial backing granted to Foreign Minister-in-exile Ilyas
Akhmadov, whom Russia accused of planning the 1999 Chechen terrorists’
invasion of Dagestan. That support came over the objections of the
Department of Homeland Security, who called him a “terrorist” and
attempted to deport him,[440] though the academics denied finding
evidence of direct support for fighters on the ground.[441] As Zbigniew
Brzezinski’s nephew Matthew pointed out in the Post, this group of old
Cold Warriors was using Akhmadov “as a point on the sharp end of a wedge
forming between Washington and Moscow that could widen in the near
future.”[442]
For the sake of argument, imagine that Litvinenko’s nonsense about the
Russian FSB being the secret power behind al Qaeda had been true and our
government knew it for a fact too. How would Americans have felt and
acted in response to such treachery?
In 2015, Putin claimed that just after September 11, Bush had promised
to end America’s double game in Chechnya. After the Russians had
intercepted American spies in Azerbaijan in contact with Chechen fighters,
he brought it up with President Bush. He said Bush told him, “I’ll kick them
in the backside.” According to Putin, “Ten days later, the senior staff in the
FSB got a letter from their colleagues in Washington saying we’ve
maintained relations with all of the Russian opposition in the past and we’ll
continue to do so. . . . They were actually helping them, even with
transportation.”
Spouting American non-interventionist talking points, the Russian
leader warned, “One should never use terrorists to solve short-term political
or even geopolitical objectives. If they’re helped in one place, they raise
their heads elsewhere and attack the people who supported them the day
before.”[443]

Chitigov

Stratfor also said the Russians’ discovery of an American green card holder
named Rizvan Chitigov, who was minister of defense and military
intelligence in the Chechen insurgent hierarchy, killed in 2005,[444] “led
the Kremlin to believe that Washington directly influences and helps the
insurgency—even its Islamist wing—while using spies on the ground in
Chechnya.” This was due to Chitigov’s time allegedly spent in the U.S.
Marine Corps and participation in terrorist attacks inside Russia, such as a
bombing next to Red Square in 1999.[445] The Russians said Chitigov was
involved in terrorist attacks in Russia and Chechnya and the 1999
kidnapping and execution of four OSCE officials.[446] Chitigov’s CIA ties
may well have been overstated by the Russians,[447] though the Stratfor
authors were likely right that they believed it.
In 2009, the Moscow-supported Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov
accused the U.S. and Britain of continuing to back local mujahideen forces.
In an interview he said, “We’re fighting in the mountains with the American
and English intelligence agencies. They are fighting not against Kadyrov,
not against traditional Islam, they are fighting against the sovereign Russian
state.” He referred to Chitigov, saying, “he worked for the CIA. He had
U.S. citizenship. . . . When we killed him, I was in charge of the operation
and we found a U.S. driving license and all the other documents were also
American.”[448]
In 2013, after two Chechen terrorists blew up the Boston Marathon,
[449] U.S. Army Lt. Col. Robert W. Schaefer, author of The Insurgency in
Chechnya and the North Caucasus, said that “[p]rior to 2002, there was a
lot of support from Western governments for the Chechens and their bid for
independence. But around 2002, some of the Chechens started a terrorism
campaign—at which point pretty much all international support for their
operations dropped off. . . . Once the terrorism started—that changed
everything.”[450] But that does not seem to be the case. The policy
continued through some substantial part of the W. Bush years. Saudi money
and al Qaeda preachers and organizers remained central to the Chechens’
ongoing efforts against Russia until at least 2005.[451]
ACPC

In reaction to Beslan, a large group of Democratic and Republican foreign

policy hawks issued a joint letter demanding that President Bush cease
“embracing” Putin, confront him and side “unambiguously” with opposition
forces in Russia. It was signed by neoconservatives like PNAC’s Robert
Kagan, Bill Kristol and Randy Scheunemann, along with the American
Enterprise Institute’s Joshua Muravchik, former CIA director and Iraq–al
Qaeda conspiracy kook James Woolsey and the CFR’s Max Boot;
Stanford’s neocon Francis Fukuyama and liberal interventionist Michael
McFaul; Senator Joe Biden; Carnegie’s Anders Åslund; Brookings’s Ivo
Daalder; NED’s Carl Gershman; Lockheed Martin’s Bruce Jackson; former
Ambassador Richard Holbrooke; and even foreign hawks like then-former
Polish Deputy Defense Minister Radosław Sikorski.[452]
The neoconservatives Perle, Kristol, Kagan, Muravchik, Woolsey,
Norman Podhoretz, Gary Schmitt, Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman,
Midge Decter, Eliot Cohen, Stephan J. Solarz, Frank Gaffney, Michael
Ledeen, and their benefactor, Lockheed’s Jackson, in alliance with older,
more supposedly “realist” hawks like Brzezinski, former Reagan-era
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State Alexander
Haig, joined forces to create a pressure group called American Committee
for Peace in Chechnya, later renamed the American Committee for Peace in
the Caucasus (ACPC).[453]
As John Laughland wrote in the Guardian, unlike anti-American
terrorism, which must always be seen as motivated by the hatred of “radical
Islam” toward all good and decent things, when Chechen terrorists attacked
Russian civilians, Westerners were broadly encouraged by the ACPC and
the major media to focus on the “underlying causes” of Chechen violence
as a response to Russian oppression.
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Moscow Center
was widely quoted pushing this narrative after Beslan[454] and Laughland
reported they had “also been assiduous over recent months in arguing
against Moscow’s claims that there is a link between the Chechens and al
Qaeda,” while the ACPC “compares the Chechen crisis to those other
fashionable ‘Muslim’ causes, Bosnia and Kosovo—implying that only
international intervention in the Caucasus can stabilize the situation there.”
Laughland added that “[i]n August, the ACPC welcomed the award of
political asylum in the U.S., and a U.S.-government funded grant, to Ilyas
Akhmadov, foreign minister in the opposition Chechen government, and a
man Moscow describes as a terrorist.” He also said the fact that the
Chechen terrorists were based out of Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, when
Georgia is an American ally and had promised to eliminate the Chechens’
presence there years before, supported the notion that the U.S. was at least
indirectly supporting their fight against Russia. “Putin himself even seemed
to lend credence to the idea.”[455]
Just a couple of weeks after the Beslan massacre, on the third
anniversary of September 11, the director of ACPC, Glen Howard, spun
hard for Shamil Basayev, bin Laden’s partner’s protégé and the butcher of
hundreds of civilians in Moscow and Beslan: “Basayev has no ties with
international terrorism. He has no contact either with al Qaeda or with bin
Laden. I repeat, this is an official declaration. Moreover, Basayev has no
foreign bank accounts, he is not seeking a foreign visa. Basayev is a
warrior.” That was not true. As mentioned, he was connected to bin Laden
through Khattab and his own multiple trips to Afghanistan to meet the al
Qaeda leader and train in his camps, along with hundreds of his Chechen
followers.[456]
Howard continued that Basayev “is someone who is seeking
vengeance. He is using the same methods as the enemy, who uses those
methods against Chechen civilians. It is eye for eye. His chief target is the
principal structure of the Russian state, the FSB or ex-KGB.” Howard
revealed that he knew the terrorist leader personally. “Unfortunately, he and
I disagree about this. I say that it is necessary to fight Russia in an
organized way, with a unified diplomatic policy and unified military
strategy and tactics. I condemn methods which lead to the suffering of
innocent civilians. Basayev has his own methods.” Still, Howard assured
us, “he has nothing to do with international terrorism.”[457] He also told
the press that Putin and Russia were more “morally culpable” than the
terrorists who had done the Beslan attack.[458] Howard’s colleague at the
Jamestown Foundation, Brian Williams, also argued that, sure, the Chechen
Arab-based mujahideen are bin Ladenite terrorists in ideology—but “their
real enemy is Russia.” Like the KLA, they were no threat to the West. And
we were to believe they were totally different because they took hostages
and made demands instead of simply blowing stuff up, sometimes. Williams
did, however, acknowledge the very real danger of international jihadists
who had traveled to Chechnya to help in the fight.[459]
 In the summer of 2005, ABC News, evidently taking their cues from
the neoconservatives, framed the issue not with Russia in the same position
as the U.S.—desperately trying to prevent America, Britain and Saudi
Arabia’s former pet terrorists from slaughtering their own civilians and
destabilizing their state—but instead by interviewing Basayev,
sympathetically portraying him as a freedom fighter against the real enemy,
Russia. “Basayev admitted he was a ‘terrorist,’ but said that each Russian
had to feel the impact of war before it would stop in Chechnya,” they
stated. “Responsibility is with the whole Russian nation, which through its
silent approval gives a ‘yes’ [gives its consent],” Basayev told them.[460]
Well, that was just about exactly what Osama bin Laden said about the
U.S.,[461] but ABC would never air that due to pretended concerns about
“secret messages” to sleeper cells hidden in the text.[462] When it came to
the Russians, though, it turns out it was possible that their irresponsible
government had provoked this violence against them.[463] ABC apologized
after getting kicked out of Russia.[464]
Basayev was killed in July 2006.[465]

Double Game

And what about the British, who had their own interests in the Caucasus
and their own longstanding ties to bin Ladenite terrorist groups? Stratfor
noted, “Russian intelligence sources say that London, a close Washington
ally, was initially even more active than the United States in supporting
Chechens.” Apparently the British have been arming Chechens against the
Russians since the 19th century, while in the First Chechen War (1994–
1996), “retired UK special forces officers trained British Muslim recruits in
British territory to fight in Chechnya; some militants who attended that
training and were later captured told the Russian government.” Later, they
said, noting the British-Russian crisis of 1997–1998, when British
contractors supposedly teaching de-mining were accused by Russia of
training Chechen fighters,[466] the memo’s author said they were also
“displeased” with Washington’s double standard when it came to supposed
charities raising money for Chechen terrorists after they had clamped down
so hard on others after September 11. “Washington and London have
recognized and provide political support . . . for the rebel government of
[Chechnya], which represents the . . . insurgency’s nationalist wing as
opposed to its Islamist wing.” Though of course, the “nationalist and
Islamist wings of the Chechen militancy are intertwined,” making Russia
hesitant to give in to Washington’s demands to negotiate with the
nationalists. “Moscow fears that talking with one wing would lead to
talking to both wings and eventually put Russia in an untenable position,”
they said, “where making peace with Chechen militants would lead to
Russia’s withdrawal and, thus, complete defeat in Chechnya and the
Caucasus.”
After September 11, the Post reported that “Britain has become a hub
for Middle Eastern opposition movements,” including “dozens of activists
allegedly linked with bin Laden’s al Qaeda movement or associated groups.
Over the years, some dissidents suspected by foreign governments of
involvement in terrorist acts have been protected by the British government
for one reason or another from deportation or extradition.” This is how it
was supposed to work: “The dissidents were a valuable source of
intelligence and could be used as a subtle means of political pressure
against authoritarian regimes, from Libya . . . to Yemen.”[467] The Post
explained the other side of the ledger, and what they meant by “dissidents”
and “activists”: “By hosting the dissidents, the theory went, Britain was also
buying itself immunity from acts of terrorism on its soil.” But after
September 11, “[f]ears are growing that Britain could become a target for a
major terrorist attack, particularly if, as Prime Minister Tony Blair has
pledged, British troops join in U.S. military action against
Afghanistan.”[468]
Abu Musab al-Suri, a Soviet-Afghan war vet and bin Laden associate
who lived in London in the 1990s, explained the arrangement: “John
Major’s government was very clever and served the security of Britain and
the interest of its people by accepting our truce . . . that we would never
target Britain . . . as long as the security forces left us alone.”[469]
This included the al Qaeda-tied, Afghan war veteran-founded Libyan
Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG),[470] made famous when, after they
returned from fighting U.S. troops on al Qaeda’s side in Iraq War II, U.S.
President Barack Obama, UK Prime Minister David Cameron and French
President Nicolas Sarkozy took their side in the jihadist uprising against
Muammar Gaddafi in the Libya war of 2011.[471] Back in 1996, MI6 had
tried to use the bin Ladenites to murder Gaddafi, as exposed by MI5
whistleblower David Shayler.[472]
“The rules of the game have changed,” Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism
expert at St. Andrews University in Scotland, told the Guardian. “The
natural assumption was that, because Britain was such an important hub for
Arab opposition movements, terrorists would not want to do anything to
jeopardize their position here. But Britain’s role as a leader of the war
against terrorism means this assumption may not apply anymore.”[473]
The predictions about the danger of befriending such people and giving
them safe haven did come to pass, with the 7/7 subway bombing in 2005,
[474] the 2017 Manchester concert suicide bombing,[475] and numerous
smaller bin Ladenite terrorist attacks since.[476]

Abu Qatada

Abu Qatada was a longtime associate of Osama bin Laden and an al Qaeda
recruiter living in London. In 2001, police found £170,000 in his house and,
reportedly, an envelope labeled “For the mujahideen in Chechnya” with
£805 in it.[477] Though he was wanted on terrorism charges in his home
country of Jordan and the U.S. said they wanted him after September 11,
accusing him of being the “spiritual leader” of al Qaeda in Europe, the Brits
protected him.[478] When he then disappeared, French intelligence sources
openly accused the UK of hiding him.[479] The Guardian reported, “Some
French officials have gone so far as to brief newspapers that Qatada was
allowed to escape internment because he was an ‘MI5 agent.’ They also
allege that Britain was a ‘revolving door’ for Islamic militants because of
lax asylum policies.”[480]
The London Times confirmed Qatada was an MI5 agent all along. He
ended up being found hiding in an apartment near Scotland Yard. And they
kept using him. The Times reported, “Abu Qatada boasted to MI5 that he
could prevent terrorist attacks and offered to expose dangerous extremists,
while all along he was setting up a haven for his terror organisation in
Britain.” He had recently been in contact with the chief suspect in the
Madrid train bombings and Richard Reid, the attempted shoe bomber.[481]
Just after the September 11 attacks, in a lengthy piece explaining the
role of a Saudi-supported student group, Al-Muhajiroun, which had sent
numerous men to train in Afghanistan, the Guardian explained,
“Afterwards, some recruits volunteer for active service in regions like
Kosovo, Chechnya and Kashmir, while others return to Britain to help
recruit others to the cause.” They continued, “Earlier this year Russian
officials called on Britain to ban the organisation under the Terrorism Act.
They claimed a group of ‘mercenaries’ had been recruited from the London
School of Economics to fight in Chechnya in a ‘holy war’ against the
Russian army.”[482] Over a year after September 11, the London Times
reported, “European security chiefs still regard Britain as a safe haven for
al-Qaeda units.”[483]

Hamza al-Masri

Another al Qaeda recruiter living safely for years in England was Egyptian
Abu Hamza al-Masri, infamous hook-handed preacher at London’s
Finsbury Park Mosque.[484] Injured in an accident in 1993, he could still
raise money, and had traveled to Bosnia with the mujahideen three times in
1995. His recruitment videos depicted British Muslims fighting in
Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya.[485] He had been directly tied to
Zacarias Moussaoui, Richard Reid and Djamel Deghal—who plotted to
bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris—as well as Ernest James Ujamaa, who
had attempted to set up an al Qaeda training camp in Oregon.[486]
Al-Masri described his involvement in the Bosnian war in some detail
to author Evan F. Kohlmann.[487] He was finally convicted on terrorism
charges in the United States in 2014.[488] His assistant Haroon Rashid
Aswat was also behind the July 7, 2005, London train bombings.[489]
Former federal prosecutor John Loftus told Fox News they were all tied to
an “organization called Al-Muhajiroun, which means The Emigrants. It was
the recruiting arm of al-Qaeda in London.” He said that “they specialized in
recruiting kids whose families had emigrated to Britain but who had British
passports. And they would use them for terrorist work.” The group was
headed, Loftus said, by “Captain Hook [Hamza], the imam in London the
Finsbury Mosque, without the arm. He was the head of that organization.
Now his assistant was a guy named Aswat, Haroon Rashid Aswat,” who
was now “believed to be the mastermind of all the bombings in London.”
The problem was that “the entire British police are out chasing him, and
one wing of the British government, MI6 or the British Secret Service, has
been hiding him.” Further, Loftus said, the Americans accused “MI6 of
letting all these terrorists live in London not because they’re getting Al-
Qaeda information, but for appeasement. It was one of those you leave us
alone, we leave you alone kind of things.”
Aswat had tried to set up training camps in Oregon in the 1990s and
federal prosecutors wanted to indict him. But the Janet Reno Justice
Department ordered them to stand down since he was a British agent. MI6
then allegedly lied to the U.S., claiming Aswat was dead.[490] But that
definitely was not true because the Brits extradited him in 2014, and a year
later, the Department of Justice finally prosecuted him for the Oregon plot
and gave him 20 years in the penitentiary.[491]

Russian Red Lines

The BBC explained Putin’s reasoning for holding on to the restive, multi-
ethnic and multi-religious provinces in the North Caucasus Mountains. If
the bin Ladenites were able to seize power in Chechnya, they would then
threaten largely Muslim Dagestan and Orthodox Christian Ingushetia,
where major attacks,[492] including the Beslan massacre, had taken place.
This was not the Afghan-Pakistan border. It was inside Russia. It was going
to be war either way. They decided it would be better to win the fight inside
Chechnya before it spread.[493] They had real reason to worry. Just a few
years later, Chechens and Georgians from Pankisi headed off to join the
Islamic State (or ISIS) in Syria and their fight against the regime of Russian
client Bashar al-Assad.[494]
In October 2003, Akhmad Kadyrov was installed as president of
Chechnya in a rigged election, where the Kremlin took a page out of the
State Department playbook,[495] and through pressure and bribes took the
puppet’s main opponents out of the race before election day.[496]

Munich 2007

A Serious Provocation
In January 2007, the administration began formal negotiations regarding
installation of missile defense systems in Poland and Romania.[497]
Russian Foreign Ministry Affairs spokesman Mikhail Kamynin responded
that “the creation of a U.S.-European anti-missile base can only be regarded
as a substantial reconfiguration of the American military presence in
Europe. . . . [It is] a mistaken step with negative consequences for
international security.”[498]
The next month, Putin addressed the Munich Security Conference,
where he denounced the unipolar, U.S.-dominated international order and
its transgressions against international law and Russia itself. To the
apparently bewildered crowd of assembled national leaders, he denounced
NATO expansion and the violation of American, German and other
promises not to move the borders of the alliance eastward, and even
compared the new lines in Europe to the Berlin Wall, calling it a “serious
provocation.” He said he wondered why NATO was moving towards
Russia’s borders when the enemy was international terrorism.[499]
Putin then accused the U.S. of restarting the arms race by installing
anti-ballistic-missile systems in Romania and Poland. He said that since
they could hypothetically cancel the effectiveness of Russia’s nuclear
deterrent, he could either try to also build a defense system, or more and
more capable nuclear missiles, and that for financial reasons he had been
forced to choose the latter. He politely pretended to agree that the new
missile defense systems must not be intended for use against Russia, and
said he personally liked President Bush, but explained that he was forced to
react in this way. “I repeat once again that there are symmetries and
asymmetries here, there is nothing personal. It is simply a calculation.”
For good measure, Putin added a swipe against the NED-backed NGOs
interfering in Russia-friendly nations. Democracy, nothing, he said; this was
“simply one state exerting influence on another.”[500]
Fifteen years later, David Ignatius wrote, “I watched Putin’s speech
that day and have to admit: It didn’t make much of an impression. Sen.
Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) criticized it as a return of Cold War rhetoric,
but America was fighting two hot wars then, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and
Putin’s Russia seemed too feeble to worry about. Not anymore.”[501]
Senator McCain simply dismissed Putin’s rant as paranoid and insisted
the ABM systems were defensive and so should not be of any concern.[502]
Afterwards, William Burns, then ambassador to Russia, wrote to
Secretary Rice, “The Munich speech was the self-absorbed product of
fifteen years of accumulated Russian frustrations and grievances, amplified
by Putin’s own sense that Russia’s concerns are still often taken for granted
or ignored.” He continued that “Putin was giving voice to the pent-up
frustrations of many Russians, not just striking an expedient pose.”[503]
New Eurasia Foundation president Andrey Kortunov told Burns that
“Putin had clearly embarked on an ‘integrationist’ foreign policy at the
beginning of his second presidential term, which was fueled by the 9/11
terrorist attacks and good relations with key leaders like President Bush”
and other major NATO allies. “However,” he said, “a string of perceived
anti-Russian initiatives,” which included Bush’s withdrawal from the Anti-
Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and “further expansion of NATO,”
ultimately “dashed Putin’s hopes.”[504]
Years later, President Bush was pranked by Russian radio show hosts.
When asked about Secretary Baker’s promise not to expand NATO, Bush
just laughed and said, “That’s right. Listen, times change. Baker was
secretary of state for my dad, which was years ago.”[505] In fact, the
overall circumstances in which these countries were being added were
changing only for the worse. While France and Germany—“Old Europe,”
as Bush’s Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had called them—wanted
to prioritize peaceful relations with Russia, the new, smaller, weaker states
of Eastern Europe and the Baltics were much more anti-Russian in their
outlook and supported NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia next.
As Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Støre put it in an important
article in April 2008, this was “in order to clearly limit Russian dominance
and to better secure their own independence from Russia.” He also said that
“the newer members of NATO supported U.S. missile defense plans, not
necessarily because they supported the idea, but because they want the U.S.
present in their nations.”[506] The administration’s priorities may have
lined up with those of these smaller nations who were welcoming of U.S.
support, but the interests of the American people were with our older allies.
Russia suspended their implementation of the Conventional Forces
Europe treaty later that year in protest after the NATO countries refused to
ratify the 1999 update to the treaty until a final agreement could be reached
over Russian troops in South Ossetia and Abkhazia, two breakaway
provinces of former Soviet Georgia,[507] and Transnistria on the Moldova-
Ukraine border.[508] After negotiations stalled, the Obama administration
announced that they would “cease carrying out certain obligations” under it.
Russia quit the treaty altogether in 2015.[509]

‘Nyet’ Means ‘Nyet’

The Memos

In February 2008, Amb. Burns wrote a memo for Secretary of State Rice
titled “Nyet Means Nyet.”[510] In the memo, Burns wrote:

During his annual review of Russia’s foreign policy January

22–23, Foreign Minister Lavrov stressed that Russia had to
view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to
Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat. While
Russia might believe statements from the West that NATO
was not directed against Russia, when one looked at recent
military activities in NATO countries (establishment of U.S.
forward operating locations, etc.) they had to be evaluated
not by stated intentions but by potential. Lavrov stressed that
maintaining Russia’s “sphere of influence” in the
neighborhood was anachronistic, and acknowledged that the
U.S. and Europe had “legitimate interests” in the region. But,
he argued, while countries were free to make their own
decisions about their security and which political-military
structures to join, they needed to keep in mind the impact on
their neighbors. . . .

During a press briefing January 22 in response to a question

about Ukraine’s request for a MAP [NATO Membership
Action Plan], the MFA said “a radical new expansion of
NATO may bring about a serious political-military shift that
will inevitably affect the security interests of Russia.” The
spokesman went on to stress that Russia was bound with
Ukraine by bilateral obligations set forth in the 1997 Treaty
on Friendship, Cooperation and Partnership in which both
parties undertook to “refrain from participation in or support
of any actions capable of prejudicing the security of the other
Side.” The spokesman noted that Ukraine’s “likely
integration into NATO would seriously complicate the many-
sided Russian-Ukrainian relations,” and that Russia would
“have to take appropriate measures.” The spokesman added
that “one has the impression that the present Ukrainian
leadership regards rapprochement with NATO largely as an
alternative to good-neighborly ties with the Russian
Federation.”

Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO aspirations not only touch a

raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about
the consequences for stability in the region. Not only does
Russia perceive encirclement, and efforts to undermine
Russia’s influence in the region, but it also fears
unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences which would
seriously affect Russian security interests. Experts tell us that
Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in
Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic-
Russian community against membership, could lead to a
major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war. In that
eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to
intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.

Dmitriy Trenin, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow

Center, expressed concern that Ukraine was, in the long-
term, the most potentially destabilizing factor in U.S.-
Russian relations, given the level of emotion and neuralgia
triggered by its quest for NATO membership. The letter
requesting MAP consideration had come as a “bad surprise”
to Russian officials, who calculated that Ukraine’s NATO
aspirations were safely on the backburner. With its public
letter, the issue had been “sharpened.” Because membership
remained divisive in Ukrainian domestic politics, it created
an opening for Russian intervention. Trenin expressed
concern that elements within the Russian establishment
would be encouraged to meddle, stimulating U.S. overt
encouragement of opposing political forces, and leaving the
U.S. and Russia in a classic confrontational posture.
 With respect to Georgia, most experts said that while not as
neuralgic to Russia as Ukraine, the GOR [government of
Russia] viewed the situation there as too unstable to
withstand the divisiveness NATO membership could cause.
Aleksey Arbatov, Deputy Director of the Carnegie Moscow
Center, argued that Georgia’s NATO aspirations were simply
a way to solve its problems in Abkhazia and South Ossetia,
and warned that Russia would be put in a difficult situation
were that to ensue.

The GOR has made it clear that it would have to “seriously

review” its entire relationship with Ukraine and Georgia in
the event of NATO inviting them to join. This could include
major impacts on energy, economic, and political-military
engagement, with possible repercussions throughout the
region and into Central and Western Europe. Russia would
also likely revisit its own relationship with the Alliance and
activities in the NATO-Russia Council, and consider further
actions in the arms control arena, including the possibility of
complete withdrawal from the CFE and INF Treaties, and
more direct threats against U.S. missile defense plans.

Burns added in his personal comment at the end:

Russia’s opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and

Georgia is both emotional and based on perceived strategic
concerns about the impact on Russia’s interests in the region.
 It is also politically popular to paint the U.S. and NATO as
Russia’s adversaries and to use NATO’s outreach to Ukraine
and Georgia as a means of generating support from Russian
nationalists. While Russian opposition to the first round of
NATO enlargement in the mid-1990’s [sic] was strong,
Russia now feels itself able to respond more forcefully to
what it perceives as actions contrary to its national interests.
[511]

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sacrificed his life and liberty to the
darkest dungeons of the empire for years to bring us this information.[512]
In March, soon after the United States officially recognized Kosovo’s
“independence” under continued EU stewardship over Russia’s strenuous
objection,[513] Burns met with Putin, telling him that the U.S. would push
to offer a NATO Membership Action Plan (MAP) to Ukraine and Georgia,
but that this “should not be seen as threatening.” Putin responded:

No Russian leader could stand idly by in the face of steps

toward NATO membership for Ukraine. That would be a
hostile act toward Russia. Even President Chubais or
President Kasyanov [two of Russia’s better-known liberals –
Burns] would have to fight back on this issue. We would do
all in our power to prevent it. If people want to limit and
weaken Russia, why do they have to do it through NATO
enlargement? Doesn’t your government know that Ukraine is
unstable and immature politically, and NATO is a very
 divisive issue there? Don’t you know that Ukraine is not
even a real country? Part is really East European, and part is
really Russian. This would be another mistake in American
diplomacy.[514]

In a personal email to Secretary Rice from April 2008, Burns advised

her not to do it:

I fully understand how difficult a decision to hold off on

MAP will be. But it’s equally hard to overstate the strategic
consequences of a premature MAP offer, especially to
Ukraine. Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all
redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In more than
two and a half years of conversations with key Russian
players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the
Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find
anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than
a direct challenge to Russian interests. At this stage, a MAP
offer would be seen not as a technical step along a long road
toward membership, but as throwing down the strategic
gauntlet. Today’s Russia will respond. Russian-Ukrainian
relations will go into a deep freeze. . . . It will create fertile
soil for Russian meddling in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. . . .
The prospects of subsequent Russian-Georgian armed
conflict would be high.
 If, in the end, we decided to push MAP offers for Ukraine
and Georgia, you can probably stop reading here. I can
conceive of no grand package that would allow the Russians
to swallow this pill quietly.[515]

Burns said that though he thought Rice and Defense Secretary Gates
shared at least some of his concerns, momentum was still behind a “legacy-
building effort” to begin the process of bringing the two into the NATO
alliance. Burns later wrote in his memoir, recalling George Kennan’s
warnings against expansion in the 1990s, that he thought Kennan had
spoken too soon regarding the first and even second major wave of NATO
expansion under Clinton and W. Bush:

It damaged prospects for future relations with Russia, but not

fatally. Where we made a serious strategic mistake—and
where Kennan was prescient—was in later letting inertia
drive us to push for NATO membership for Ukraine and
Georgia, despite Russia’s deep historical attachments to both
states and even stronger protestations. That did indelible
damage, and fed the appetite of a future Russian leadership
for getting even. . . .

Yeltsin had gnashed his teeth over the first wave, but
couldn’t do much about it. Putin offered little resistance to
Baltic membership, amid all the other preoccupations of his
first term. Georgia, and especially Ukraine, were different
animals altogether. There could be no doubt that Putin would
 fight back hard against any steps in the direction of NATO
membership for either state.

In Washington, however, there was a kind of geopolitical and

ideological inertia at work, with strong interest from Vice
President Cheney and large parts of the interagency
bureaucracy in a “Membership Action Plan” (MAP) for
Ukraine and Georgia. Key European allies, in particular
Germany and France, were dead set against offering it. They
were disinclined to add to mounting friction between
Moscow and the West—and unprepared to commit
themselves formally and militarily to the defense of Tbilisi or
Kyiv against the Russians. The Bush administration
understood the objections, but still felt it could finesse the
issue.[516]

But the administration was whistling past the graveyard. In 2005, while
admitting that the population of Ukraine would not support joining the
NATO alliance, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian
Affairs Daniel Fried told Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, an adviser to
French President Jacques Chirac, wisely, that there was a distinct lack of
consensus for alliance membership in Ukraine. However, he added,
foolishly, that a minor issue like Ukrainian public opinion was a greater
impediment to the policy than the determination of the Russian president to
prevent it. According to a State Department summary, Fried “dismissed
prospects for Russia intervening militarily in the Ukraine, noting the
capacity of the latter’s army and cautioned against exaggerating the split
between Eastern and Western Ukraine.”[517]

French Plan for Ukrainian Neutrality

In September 2005, Gourdault-Montagne warned the ambassador that the

Russians were upset about the expansion and that “if there remained one
potential cause for war in Europe, it was Ukraine.” He also said that “one
could wonder whether the Russians might launch a move similar to Prague
in 1968, to see what the West would do.”[518] At least five more State
Department cables detailed French concerns about the U.S. seeking to move
forward on alliance membership for Ukraine.[519] Gourdault-Montagne
was sent to Russia in 2006 to meet with diplomat Sergei Prikhodko. There
they sketched out a deal for Ukrainian neutrality to be overseen by the
NATO-Russia Council. He said the Russian told him, “It’s very interesting
for us, because it solves the question of Crimea for us.” Gourdault-
Montagne said that when he showed it to Secretary of State Rice, she
angrily replied, “You, the French, for a long time you held up the first wave
of East European countries joining NATO, you will not hold up the second
wave.” This was also notable since this would have been the third, not
second, wave of expansion. As previously mentioned, that had gone
relatively smoothly in 2004.[520]

Bush Pushes Ahead

At times, the people in charge act as though NATO membership is just a
fancy cocktail party circuit for powerful international government
socialites. Instead, it is a mutual defense pact, a war guarantee.[521] Now
they were moving on to Ukraine and Georgia. The Bush administration had
already started the process with their announcement of a “NATO-Ukraine
Action Plan” toward alliance membership back in 2002, though progress on
implementing it had stalled.[522]
Defense Secretary Gates, who as retired CIA director in the 1990s had
opposed NATO expansion to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic,
later took a swipe at Bush. Not only did he oppose inviting Ukraine and
Georgia to join the alliance, but said after the first round of expansion, “I
believe the process should then have slowed. U.S. agreements with the
Romanian and Bulgarian governments to rotate troops through bases in
those countries was a needless provocation.” He noted, “The Russians had
long historical ties to Serbia, which we largely ignored,” and that “[t]rying
to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching. The roots
of the Russian empire trace back to Kiev in the ninth century, so that was an
especially monumental provocation.” He asked rhetorically, “Were the
Europeans, much less Americans, willing to send their sons and daughters
to defend Ukraine and Georgia? Hardly.” Gates concluded, “So NATO
expansion was a political act, not a carefully considered military
commitment, thus undermining the purpose of the alliance and recklessly
ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national
interests.”[523]
 The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was supposed to welcome in
Ukraine and Georgia, which are so far away that if they were much farther
they would start to get closer again from the other direction. So why the
move to bring in those two? Why not Morocco or Mauritania? They are at
least on the Atlantic Ocean. Perhaps it is because they offer no advantage
against Russia.[524]
After being rebuffed by the U.S. on his Gabala radar station proposal,
[525] Putin made himself clear to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko at
a joint press conference in February 2008, just a couple of weeks after
Burns’s “Nyet Means Nyet” memo was sent. “It is horrible to say and even
horrible to think that, in response to the deployment of such facilities in
Ukrainian territory, which cannot theoretically be ruled out, Russia could
target its missile systems at Ukraine. Imagine this just for a second,” he
said.[526]
France and Germany remained adamantly opposed, and for only one
reason: they considered it an unnecessary provocation against Russia.[527]
Bush himself acknowledged this, later writing in his memoir that “Angela
Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy . . . were skeptical. They knew Georgia and
Ukraine had tense relationships with Moscow, and they worried NATO
could get drawn into a war with Russia.”[528]
The Germans in particular were not enthusiastic about the missile
defense systems installed in Poland, Romania and the Czech Republic, but
still thought if it was to be done, the Russians should be “brought along” on
the project. They thought that if the alliance offered a new Membership
Action Plan to Ukraine and Georgia, it would undermine that more
important goal.[529]
Less than three months after Burns’s “Nyet Means Nyet” memo and
just days after his “knuckle-draggers” email to Rice—and despite all the
warnings from his own government, U.S. allies and Putin—at the urging of
then-NATO Ambassador Victoria Nuland,[530] Bush announced America’s
intention to invite Ukraine[531] and Georgia into the alliance at a summit in
Bucharest in April 2008.[532] The president also declared the creation of
the NATO-Georgia Commission[533] and an expansion of the NATO-
Ukraine Commission[534] to begin the process.
Bush had been pushing hard to announce a Membership Action Plan
for Ukraine and Georgia right then, but German Chancellor Angela Merkel,
supported by French President Nicolas Sarkozy, “put their foot down,” as
Professor John J. Mearsheimer said, absolutely refusing to go along.[535]
The alliance instead released an official statement declaring that
Georgia and Ukraine would both be put on a path to NATO membership.
[536] “NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations
for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will
become members of NATO. Both nations have made valuable contributions
to Alliance operations,” it said, adding, “We welcome the democratic
reforms in Ukraine and Georgia and look forward to free and fair
parliamentary elections in Georgia in May.”[537]
Putin had threatened to boycott the meeting if a full-fledged MAP was
offered to Ukraine and Georgia. Amb. Burns wrote in a secret cable to the
State Department that Andrey Rudenko, head of the NATO section at the
Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department of European Cooperation, told them
that Putin “had intended” to “give a positive signal” in Bucharest “that
NATO and Russia should cooperate further.” His speech would not be
“another Munich,” because Putin was seeking to “break the current
impasse” by focusing on areas in which they had successfully worked
together. However, the Russians saw the offering of MAPs to Ukraine and
Georgia as “a point of no return,” which would entirely change Russia’s
relationship with the U.S. and NATO as well as with Ukraine and Georgia.
The ambassador elaborated:

Defense and security experts note that NATO enlargement is

one of the few security areas where there is almost complete
consensus among Russian policymakers, experts and the
informed population: they are strongly against NATO’s
enlargement eastward, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia.
Aleksandr Belkin, Deputy Executive Director of the Council
on Foreign and Defense Policy, said Ukraine was the “line of
last resort.” If Ukraine becomes a member of NATO,
“Russia’s encirclement will be complete.” . . . He anticipated
that if MAP were offered to Ukraine and Georgia at
Bucharest, the GOR would feel obligated to cut off
cooperation with NATO. Putin did not want this, he added,
because Putin did not want to leave a negative heritage to his
successor or leave his post “as a loser.”[538]
 Since the allies decided that neither Ukraine nor Georgia would get an
official MAP at the NATO meeting, Putin did attend. He gave a speech
denouncing the half-measure Bush had announced, telling the Western
leaders, “We view the appearance of a powerful military bloc on our
borders, a bloc whose members are subject in part to Article 5 of the
Washington Treaty, as a direct threat to the security of our country.” He
continued, “The claim that this process is not directed against Russia will
not suffice. National security is not based on promises. And the statements
made prior to the bloc’s previous waves of expansion simply confirm
this.”[539] According to Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, Putin angrily
warned Bush in a private meeting, “Ukraine is not even a country. Part of it
lies in Eastern Europe, and the other, more significant part was given by us
as a gift! If Ukraine joins NATO, it will do so without Crimea and the
eastern regions. It will simply fall apart.”[540]
Foreign Minister Lavrov told reporters, “We will do all we can to
prevent Ukraine’s and Georgia’s accession into NATO and to avoid an
inevitable serious exacerbation of our relations with both the alliance and
our neighbors.”[541]
Bush’s half-measure was just as bad a provocation as an engraved
invitation would have been. As Zbigniew Brzezinski had said back in 1997,
“states that are in a position to begin and are invited to undertake accession
talks with the EU should automatically also be viewed hence-forth as
subject in effect to NATO’s presumptive protection.”[542] As we have seen,
the implied protection was not actually forthcoming, but the provocation
was evidently real enough.
 Citing Putin’s 2007 speech in Munich, Christoph Heusgen, German
Chancellor Merkel’s diplomatic adviser at the time, said that Merkel
believed that Putin would see NATO invitations as a direct and deliberate
threat. “She was also convinced Ukraine and Georgia would bring NATO
no benefits as members,” Heusgen said.[543]
Her deputy national security adviser, Rolf Nikel, warned the
Americans, “While Georgia was ‘just a bug on the skin of the bear,’
Ukraine was inseparably identified with Russia, going back to Vladimir of
Kiev in 988.” He and another Merkel adviser warned the European deputy
assistant secretary of state, David Merkel, that if the proposed MAP “were
pushed forward too quickly in Ukraine, where public opinion is bitterly
divided on the issue of NATO membership, it could prove destabilizing and
‘split’ the country.”[544]

Down Hill

Fiona Hill, a Russia expert from Bush’s NSC, now says that anyone
bringing up this history is just sadly falling victim to a Russian
“psychological operation,” which causes them to blame NATO or
Washington for provoking Russian reactions.[545]
But that is odd because she also told the New York Times that in 2008
the intelligence agencies recommended against declaring a path to
membership by Ukraine and Georgia, because so many of our NATO allies
opposed it, and that she, personally, and wisely, had warned President Bush
and Vice President Cheney not to do it.[546] She later claimed, according to
the Times, that she told Bush and Cheney the move could be “problematic
[because] . . . Russia viewed NATO with suspicion and was vehemently
opposed to neighboring countries joining its ranks.” Hill told Bush that
Putin “would regard it as a provocation, which was one reason the United
States’ key NATO allies opposed the idea.” She claimed Cheney then
stormed out of the room because of how bravely she was telling the truth
about their policy. President Bush simply responded, “I like it when
diplomacy is tough.” The Times declared that “Hill’s prediction” came true
when “[s]everal other leaders at the summit objected to Bush’s
recommendation,” forcing him to settle for the meager Bucharest
Declaration instead of real MAPs.[547]
Besides Hill’s blatant, self-serving hypocrisy on this issue, and
smearing of people who think the same things as she does, the more
important point is that if she is to be believed, Bush simply changed the
subject from Russia’s objections being the cause of German and French
concern, to the whole matter simply coming down to whether he can
persuade the leaders of the latter two nations, with no regard for the former
at all. Even then, he was sure the French would follow the Germans’ lead.
“This is about me and Angela,” Bush told his staff.[548]
Hill says she also warned that promises of alliance expansion could
cause war in Georgia. She told Bush that he was already pushing his luck
by bringing in the Baltic states and that it would be dangerous to push
further. In the very same article where Hill claimed one would be a victim
of a Russian “psychological operation” if they listened to her, understood
what she said perfectly and agreed, she went on to explain: “I think there’s
been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way, at least to
2007 when [Putin] put the world, and certainly Europe, on notice that
Moscow would not accept the further expansion of NATO.” She added,
“And then within a year in 2008 NATO gave an open door to Georgia and
Ukraine. It absolutely goes back to that juncture.” She said the National
Intelligence Council then did an estimate about Russia’s potential reactions
to the announcement of the “Open-Door Policy,” assessing that Putin could
launch preemptive wars against both countries.[549]

Russell’s Report

At the end of May, Chargé d’Affaires Daniel Russell wrote home from the
Moscow embassy that Bush’s declaration was an absolute disaster. “The
consensus here,” he wrote, “is that Yushchenko’s ‘clearly anti-Russia’
agenda and his ‘blind pursuit’ of NATO membership have hijacked
Russian-Ukrainian relations.” The Russians told the Americans that in
meetings with Ukrainian officials, they had threatened to use every means
available to prevent their entry into NATO, “including undermining
Ukraine’s territorial integrity.” Lavrov said they would have to do anything
possible to oppose their joining the alliance due to the “disastrous
consequences for Europe, Russian-Ukrainian relations, and NATO-Russia
relations” that would be certain to follow. Russell added that they were
extremely concerned about Yushchenko’s anti-Russian culture war, the
danger to Russia’s relationship with military-industrial firms in Ukraine’s
east and the future of their naval base at Sevastopol.
Russell said it was clear “their endgame is the status quo.” Russia had
accepted the fact of Ukraine’s moves toward Europe and partnership with
the alliance, “but NATO membership and the establishment of a U.S. or
NATO base in Ukraine remain clear redlines. Ideally, Russia aims to secure
a written neutrality pledge from Ukraine.” Russell warned if NATO pushed
ahead with a true Membership Action Plan, it could lead to a complete
break between Russia and the West, and that Russia could easily “weaken
Yushchenko’s grip on Eastern Ukraine,” or “fan the flames of separatism in
Crimea.” Russell concluded, “If Georgian Membership is Hard to Swallow,
Ukraine’s Membership. . .Impossible.”[550]

Worst of All Worlds

Amb. Burns and scholars Goldgeier, Charap and Sarotte all called the
Bucharest Declaration halfway deal the “worst of all worlds,” since it was
likely to provoke a violent Russian response without ever granting the war
guarantee that they thought would prevent one.[551]
Before the meeting, in March 2008, Merkel traveled to Russia to meet
and congratulate the new President-elect Dimitry Medvedev and then-
outgoing President Vladimir Putin. Medvedev had been a close associate of
Putin since their days together in St. Petersburg. Within a few months of
becoming president in 2000, Putin had placed the loyal Medvedev as
chairman of the board of the oil giant Gazprom, as he reconsolidated state
control over Russia’s most important and profitable company.[552]
According to a State Department document, during the visit, Putin once
again “argued strongly against extending the NATO Membership Action
Plan (MAP) to Georgia and Ukraine at Bucharest.”[553]
 In June, after Bucharest, Medvedev traveled to Germany to return the
visit with Merkel. U.S. Ambassador to Germany William R. Timken wrote
home in a cable about their meeting: “On foreign policy, he reiterated well
known Russian positions on NATO enlargement, missile defense, Kosovo,
and the centrality of the UN in international affairs.”
Medvedev then gave a speech in Berlin, demanding a new trans-
European security treaty that would preclude “bloc thinking.”[554] Chargé
d’Affaires Russell wrote in a secret cable to the State Department that no
one should make too much of it since he had not issued any specific
proposals. However, he said, “Behind Medvedev’s polite demeanor,
Russian opposition to NATO enlargement remained a red-line, according to
both conservative and moderate observers.” He added that “the new
Russian President provided no basis to conclude that old Russian objections
to NATO enlargement, U.S. missile defense plans, or CFE [Conventional
Forces Europe Treaty] had lapsed.”[555]
Nevertheless, as the NATO website informs us, the next year they took
measures toward reforms “aimed at implementing Ukraine’s Euro-Atlantic
aspirations, in line with the decisions of the 2008 NATO Summit in
Bucharest. . . . The NATO-Ukraine Commission (NUC) enables
consultation between the Allies and Ukraine on security issues of common
concern, and directs cooperative activities. The NUC also convenes prior to
a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council.”
Former Senator Bill Bradley, who had signed Susan Eisenhower’s
warning letter in 1997 and ran for president in the Democratic primaries in
2000, later said: “The United States made a fundamental blunder in the . . .
’90s by expanding NATO. We had already won the Cold War, and . . .
unfortunately, the idea of expanding NATO was pushed forward without
much consideration.” He said he had recently spoken with former Soviet
Premier Gorbachev, “where he mentioned that Jim Baker had assured him
there would be no NATO troops in what was then East Germany. However,
after reunification, NATO started to expand, going back on that assurance.”
He added that “this expansion caused concerns among Russians, who saw it
as a military alliance encroaching on their borders.” Bradley said that
NATO expansion had given cover to the return of authoritarians to power in
Russia. “It was a monumental blunder, as we could have chosen a different
path. A strategic partnership with Russia focusing on common threats and
long-term cooperation would have been more beneficial.” Instead, he
lamented that “we lost an opportunity to have Russia as a crucial partner . . .
[when] we could have avoided the tensions and challenges we face today.
It’s a missed chance for a better and more cooperative future.”[556]

Saakashvili’s War

Instigation

Bush administration officials later acknowledged how provocative and

counterproductive their actions had been. One said that “three train
wrecks”—recognition of Kosovo’s independence, installation of ABM sites
in Romania and Poland, and the continued expansion of the NATO alliance
—“Doing all three of those things in kind of close proximity . . . sort of fed
his sense of people trying to take advantage of Russia.”[557]
 Putin decided to draw his line in the Southern Caucasus Mountains in
the summer of 2008. The five-day Georgia conflict of August 2008 could
have turned into a very real war. Georgia’s President Mikhail Saakashvili—
victor of the U.S.-backed Rose Revolution of 2003—had long planned to
invade the breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, then
enjoying autonomy under the protection of Russian peacekeeping troops,
[558] just as Putin had long planned to force him back out again if he tried
it.[559]
Saakashvili had been incentivized to take bigger risks due to President
Bush’s Bucharest Declaration just four months before, U.S. military support
and vague security assurances the Bush government had given his
government that spring.[560] The U.S. began a massive joint training
exercise in the country on July 15, “Immediate Response 2008,” to
“increase the cooperation and partnership between U.S. and Georgian
forces.”[561] The mercenary group MPRI, who had trained the Croatian
military before Operation Storm in 1995,[562] trained Georgian special
forces just before this war as well.[563] Even Bush’s own staff later told the
press they worried Saakashvili had interpreted the president’s statements as
a “flashing yellow light,” indicating the U.S. would support him in a war
with Russia.[564]

Motivations

One of the stipulations of the NATO treaty is that no new country can join if
its borders are the subject of a dispute, even a dormant one, that could
commit the U.S. and our allies to war.[565]
 When the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, Georgia declared its
independence,[566] but so did the Southern Caucasus territories of South
Ossetia and Abkhazia,[567] which Georgia considered to be part of its
sovereign territory.[568] This was in reaction to Georgia’s attempt to claim
previously autonomous regions under the USSR and force the culturally
and linguistically distinct minorities who lived there to adopt the Georgian
language.[569] In fact, South Ossetia intended to sign the New Union
Treaty in early 1991, before the final unraveling of the Soviet Union in the
aftermath of the failed August coup.[570] They both had declared autonomy
from Georgia as the USSR was disintegrating in 1989. Georgia, beginning
under President Zviad Gamsakhurdia, went to war with them, South Ossetia
in 1991–1992[571] and then Abkhazia in 1992–1994. In 1992, the new
Georgian president, former Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze,
and Russian President Boris Yeltsin agreed to create the Joint Peacekeeping
Forces (JPKF) for South Ossetia. The Russians and Georgians came to an
agreement brokered by America’s European Union allies under which both
sides would deploy peacekeepers to the region to preserve the status quo.
[572] In May 1994, they reached a similar agreement over Abkhazia.[573]
But the Georgian government did not give up its claim to its lost
territories, and Saakashvili knew he would have to clear up this dispute
before his country could join NATO. So when NATO declared its intention
to add Georgia at Bucharest while this dispute was still ongoing,
Saakashvili decided he should take action on South Ossetia.
It is worth noting that while Vice President Cheney had pushed hard to
arm the Georgian military with Stinger shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles,
according to the New York Times, “Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice,
National Security Advisor Stephen J. Hadley and William J. Burns, the new
undersecretary of state for political affairs, argued that such a sale would
provoke Russia, which would see it as arrogant meddling in its turf.”[574]
They did, however, deeply embed the U.S. military, uniformed and
civilian side, along with the State Department, in training, equipping and
helping expand the Georgian army, including working out of offices in their
defense ministry and military. In 2004, U.S. Army Major Doug Peterson,
head of the Office of Defense Cooperation, said, “These military experts
work to restructure and reform the Ministry of Defense and General Staff,
as well as implement NATO compatible structures, systems and doctrine,
since Georgia is considered one of the real candidates for joining
NATO.”[575]
After Western recognition of Kosovo’s independence in February
2008,[576] the Russians responded with the symbolic acts of repudiating
previous limits on trade with Abkhazia and declared their intention to
expand travel, when both limits had never been enforced anyway. The
Duma also passed a resolution calling for Putin to recognize the province’s
independence. Saakashvili panicked and sent troops to the border and
expanded drone surveillance missions over the territory, leading to Russian
MiG fighter jets then shooting them down.[577]

He Started It

On August 7, after days of small skirmishes at the border between the

Georgian army and separatist forces,[578] Saakashvili pulled out of the
agreement Georgia had made with the Russians, withdrew Georgian
peacekeepers, and launched an attack on South Ossetia,[579] including
deliberate strikes against the capital of Tskhinvali and its civilian
population.[580]
The Russians, suffering casualties in the initial assault, quickly struck
back, destroying Georgia’s invading force and securing South Ossetia’s
final break from Georgian rule. Russia officially recognized both South
Ossetia and Abkhazia’s independence on August 26.[581]
Was this legal under international law? That depends whose side you
are on. Former nations such as Georgia are recognized as having a right to
secede from an empire like the USSR. However, as we learned from the
breakup of Yugoslavia, the Western-dominated international community,
invoking a sketchy precedent of uti possidetis (“As you possess, so shall
you possess”), will recognize one level of secession from a larger nation,
but not a smaller level of secession from there.[582] The separation of
ethnic-based enclaves is nowhere recognized, leaving this ultimately to be a
civil war which no foreign state has the right to intervene in—no more right
than Bill Clinton and NATO had in Kosovo, that is.[583] Then again, just
two years later, the International Court of Justice ruled that there was
nothing in international law that prevented secession in the case of Kosovo.
[584] They had apparently just invoked that rule against the Bosnian Serbs
in the previous war because they wanted to.
Regardless, in this war, Georgia lost badly, and so Russian President
Putin got to decide what the law said. And it turns out, they had all the fair
warning in the world. Burns described a private meeting between Secretary
Rice, Putin and Lavrov. After Rice warned Putin not to escalate tensions
there, Putin got up and wagged his finger at her. “If Saakashvili uses force
in South Ossetia, which we are convinced he is preparing to do, that would
be a grave mistake, and the Georgian people would suffer the most. If he
wants war, he will get it,” Putin warned, continuing, “Saakashvili is nothing
more than a puppet of the United States. You need to pull back the strings
before there’s trouble.” He warned that “[i]f Georgia causes bloodshed in
Ossetia, I will have no alternative to recognizing South Ossetia and
Abkhazia, and responding with force. . . . We could talk for ages about this,
but that’s the point I want you to understand. If Saakashvili starts
something, we will finish it.”[585]
Rice then passed on a word of caution to Saakashvili, but, according to
Burns, the hawks in the vice president’s office kept encouraging him.[586]
The “Kosovo precedent” cannot be undone. Every diplomat in the
West recognizes the chasm that Clinton had cut into the international law
with his aggressive 1999 war against Serbia. Burns wrote in his memoir
about a conversation he had with Putin in March 2008, just after Western
recognition of Kosovo’s independence and shortly before the Bucharest
summit. The Russian president told him, “Your government has made a big
mistake on Kosovo. Don’t you see how that encourages conflict and
monoethnic states all over the world? I’m glad you didn’t try to tell me that
Kosovo is not a precedent. That’s a ridiculous argument.” Burns wrote, “I
smiled a little to myself, grateful that that was one point I had persuaded my
colleagues in Washington to delete in the drafting process” for the
ambassador’s statement to Putin.[587]
 Russian peacekeepers were stationed in South Ossetia under a deal
sanctioned by international law, and at least two were killed in Georgia’s
initial assault on Tskhinvali. New Russian President Dimitry Medvedev’s
decision to intervene was inevitable at that point—though Russia
immediately called for a meeting of the UN Security Council to demand a
ceasefire, but the U.S. intervened to prevent it.[588]
Victoria Nuland’s husband, neoconservative theoretician Robert
Kagan, assured the public that “[t]he details of who did what to precipitate
Russia’s war against Georgia are not very important,” as he predictably
compared Russia’s defensive response in South Ossetia to Nazi Germany’s
invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938.[589]
“I know I speak for every American when I say . . . today, we are all
Georgians,” declared then-senator and Republican Party presidential
nominee John McCain.[590] But even David Ignatius, considered the man
at the Washington Post closest to the CIA,[591] wrote that Bush
administration officials did not believe Saakashvili’s claim that the Russians
had started the war by moving troops through the Roki Tunnel under the
Caucasus Mountains when Saakashvili launched his attack.[592] They
could be certain, since more than 100 American military advisers were
embedded with the Georgian military at the time, and even more civilians
within its government.[593]
Andrew Cockburn reported in Harper’s, “Saakashvili worked hard at
ingratiating himself with the friendly superpower, supplying a Georgian
contingent for the U.S.-led coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and offering
hospitality to American intelligence operations in Georgia itself.” He added,
“NSA interception facilities began sprouting on suitably sited hilltops. . . .
[T]he Georgian president basked in bipartisan favor among influential
figures such as Richard Holbrooke, as well as Senator McCain whose close
adviser was Saakashvili lobbyist Randy Scheunemann.”
“By 2008,” Cockburn wrote, “he was unabashedly provoking Moscow,
apparently confident that he could win a war with his immense neighbor.”
Saakashvili’s friend, Lockheed’s Bruce Jackson, told Cockburn that “Misha
was trying to flip us into a war with Russia.” Because Rice and National
Security Advisor Stephen Hadley were afraid Vice President Cheney might
convince Bush to intervene in the war, Hadley ordered his NSC aide, none
other than the very prescient Fiona Hill, to spy on Cheney and warn Hadley
if he was headed to the Oval Office “so that they could sprint to Bush’s side
and dissuade him from any dangerous notions dripped in his ear by the
vice-president.”[594] This is especially notable since Hadley, a former
partner in the law firm of Shea & Gardner which represented Lockheed and
Boeing, had been very close to the neoconservatives[595] and had been
identified as “Cheney’s mole” on the NSC during Bush’s first term by
Secretary Powell’s right-hand man Dick Armitage.[596]
Years later, Amb. Richard Miles admitted that Saakashvili started the
war and that he would not have done so if the U.S. had not sold him
“offensive weapons, self-propelled artillery systems, heavy-armor vehicles,
attack aircraft and other equipment.”[597]

Media Consensus
Another important part of the story was that the American media just went
along with the lie that Russia had “invaded Georgia.” It was simply a case
of “Russian aggression!” they all agreed, seemingly following the lead of
then-Republican candidate for president McCain.[598] His opponent,
Democratic Senator Barack Obama, echoed the same lie.[599] They all
must have known it was a lie, since the truth had been widely reported by
NPR and the European media in real time as the war began.[600] The New
York Times and AP caught up the next day.[601] For his part, George W.
Bush certainly knew that Georgia started the war. His Deputy National
Security Advisor James Jeffrey told him the news correctly the first time in
line at a ceremony at the Olympics in Beijing.[602] They all made a
decision to tell the American people another story.
The Times, which had been honest about it at first,[603] before
changing their story,[604] finally went back to admitting the truth almost
four months later: Saakashvili started the war. After noting his claims, they
said all credible indications were that after firing mortars into South Ossetia
and declaring their own ceasefire earlier on August 7, “Georgia’s
inexperienced military attacked the isolated separatist capital of
Tskhinvali . . . with indiscriminate artillery and rocket fire, exposing
civilians, Russian peacekeepers and unarmed monitors to harm.”
Reports from the OSCE were conclusive that on August 7 and 8,
“Georgian artillery rounds and rockets were falling throughout the city at
intervals of 15 to 20 seconds between explosions, and within the first hour
of the bombardment at least 48 rounds landed in a civilian area.” They
added, “The monitors have also said they were unable to verify that ethnic
Georgian villages were under heavy bombardment that evening, calling to
question one of Saakashvili’s main justifications for the attack.” The
Georgians announced they were invading South Ossetia in a defensive
move after the shelling of their own territory first. “According to the
monitors, however, no shelling of Georgian villages could be heard in the
hours before the Georgian bombardment,” the Times belatedly reported. “At
least two of the four villages that Georgia has since said were under fire
were near the observers’ office in Tskhinvali, and the monitors there likely
would have heard artillery fire nearby.” Ryan Grist, a former British Army
captain and senior OSCE representative in Georgia, told the Times, “It was
clear to me that the attack was completely indiscriminate and
disproportionate to any, if indeed there had been any, provocation,” and that
“[t]he attack was clearly, in my mind, an indiscriminate attack on the town,
as a town.”[605]
C.J. Chivers of the Times wrote a follow-up story two years later, after
Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks published State Department cables showing
how the U.S. ambassador to Georgia, John F. Tefft, and his staff had
identified too closely with their charges and allowed themselves to believe
Saakashvili’s propaganda: “The cables show that for several years, as
Georgia entered an escalating contest with the Kremlin for the future of
Abkhazia and South Ossetia . . . Washington relied heavily on the
Saakashvili government’s accounts of its own behavior.” While contrasting
their takes with those of diplomats assigned to other countries, Chivers
wrote, “In Georgia, diplomats appeared to set aside skepticism and embrace
Georgian versions of important and disputed events.” When Saakashvili
was moving his troops into position for the attack, the embassy wrote to
Washington that they were just “in a heightened state of alertness to show
their resolve.” But, Chivers again confirmed, “Georgia would launch a
heavy artillery-and-rocket attack on Tskhinvali, the South Ossetian capital,
at 11:35 p.m. on Aug. 7, ending a ceasefire it had declared less than five
hours before.” The next day, embassy staff simply repeated Georgian claims
that the Ossetians had begun the war by shelling Georgian villages in their
reports back home and ignored the OSCE’s information to the contrary.
[606]
The Georgian government tried to claim the Russians had invaded five
minutes before their artillery attack, but never provided any evidence for
this. Their own press release from early in the morning of August 8
mentions only paramilitary volunteers from North Ossetia, and they did not
change their story until 2:30 in the afternoon. The official excuse for this,
provided to journalist Hans Mouritzen, was that “the first [story] was meant
to provide a ‘fig leaf’ for the Russians, so they could withdraw without
losing face in front of the international community.”[607]
The German magazine Der Spiegel ran a revealing report explaining
how everyone at NATO headquarters agreed that Georgia’s “actions were
more calculated than pure self-defense or a response to Russian
provocation.” Regarding the small exchanges of mortar fire in the previous
few days, they thought that “by no means could these skirmishes be seen as
justification for Georgian war preparations.” Saakashvili had sent 75 tanks
and armored personnel carriers along with 12,000 troops in an attempt to
push through and close the Roki tunnel. They attacked with mortars, rocket
launchers and cluster bombs on the night of August 7. The Russians did not
get involved until early the next morning, when they fired one short-range
missile. Their troops did not start coming through the tunnel until 11 in the
morning. “This sequence of events is now seen as evidence that Moscow
did not act offensively, but merely reacted,” they reported.[608]
The International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, on
a mandate from the European Union, also proved that Saakashvili was the
aggressor, noting that at the start of the fighting, the commander of the
Georgian contingent to the Joint Peacekeeping Forces deployed in South
Ossetia “stated that the operation was aimed at restoring the constitutional
order in the territory of South Ossetia.” It was only “[s]omewhat later [that]
the Georgian side refuted [his] statement as unauthorized and invoked the
countering of an alleged Russian invasion as justification of the operation.”
On the question of whether the Georgian attack may have been a legal
act, the EU investigation concluded, “It was not.” In fact, “Georgia had
acknowledged that the prohibition of the use of force was applicable to its
conflict in South Ossetia in specific legally binding international
documents.” They said that even if the Russians had started the war, the
way Georgia waged it still would have been illegal. “It is not possible to
accept that the shelling of Tskhinvali during much of the night with GRAD
multiple rocket launchers (MRLS) and heavy artillery would satisfy the
requirements of having been necessary and proportionate in order to defend
those villages.” On whether it was legal for Saakashvili to attack Russian
peacekeepers in South Ossetia under the theory that the Russians were
building up forces in preparation for an attack on them, the EU investigators
ruled that “[a]gain the answer is in the negative.” There was no attack for
them to repel, and “Georgian claims of a large-scale presence of Russian
armed forces in South Ossetia prior to the Georgian offensive on 7/8 August
could not be substantiated by the Mission,” adding, “Consequently, the use
of force by Georgia against Russian peacekeeping forces in Tskhinvali in
the night of 7/8 August 2008 was contrary to international law.”[609] The
Moscow bureau chief of the U.S. government’s own Voice of America,
James Brooke, later ran a piece confirming the same facts.[610]
After being called out for their lies, State Department Deputy
Spokesman Robert Wood said it did not matter who started the war after all.
“I think we need to get away from looking at who did what first, because, as
I said, I don’t think we’ll ever really get to the bottom of that,” he insisted.
[611]
Former Soviet Premier Gorbachev was unequivocal. “Russia did not
want this crisis. The Russian leadership is in a strong enough position
domestically; it did not need a little victorious war. Russia was dragged into
the fray by the recklessness of the Georgian president, Mikhail
Saakashvili.” He was unfazed by Bush and Rice’s statements threatening to
kick the Russians out of the G8, abolish the NATO-Russia Council and
prevent their joining the WTO. “These are empty threats. For some time
now, Russians have been wondering: If our opinion counts for nothing in
those institutions, do we really need them? Just to sit at the nicely set dinner
table and listen to lectures?” he asked. “Indeed, Russia has long been told to
simply accept the facts,” Gorbachev complained. “Here’s the independence
of Kosovo for you. Here’s the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty,
and the American decision to place missile defenses in neighboring
countries. Here’s the unending expansion of NATO.” He continued, “All of
these moves have been set against the backdrop of sweet talk about
partnership. Why would anyone put up with such a charade?”[612]
Ambassador Burns later admitted that a sense of unreality based in
American hubris and arrogance had helped to bring on the war. After
winning the Cold War and the catastrophe of September 11, “[r]estraint and
compromise seemed unappealing and unnecessary, given our strength and
sense of mission. They seemed especially unappealing with Putin’s Russia,
a declining power with a nasty repressive streak.”[613]
Essentially agreeing with skeptics that Bush’s Bucharest Declaration
had been all provocation and no deterrent, Ambassador to NATO Kurt
Volker was adamant this had happened not because of the provocation, but
the lack of deterrent. “The German-led Allies argue that the Bucharest
decision on eventual membership provoked the Russian aggression, while
most others (including the new members and Canada) see it as we do: that
Russia interpreted the denial of MAP as a green light for action against
Georgia,” he wrote in a leaked State Department cable.[614]
Immediate consequences of Saakashvili’s folly included a deepened
reluctance on the part of European officials to include Georgia in NATO—
though the Bush administration remained just as determined on their way
out.[615] It also prompted Azerbaijan’s decision to increase oil sales to
Russia in order to diversify their risks[616] and a revamping of Russia’s old
naval base at Tartus on Syria’s coast, announced just after the end of the
war and Syria’s recognition of Abkhazian and South Ossetian
independence.[617]
In 2015, Stratfor’s George Friedman observed that the Russians did not
really care about Georgia, and that Putin’s feelings about Saakashvili were
irrelevant. The United States, Friedman said, “had staged a series of colored
revolutions throughout the Russian periphery, one of which was in the
Ukraine, the Orange Revolution.” The Russians, he said, “saw in this
Orange Revolution the intent of the Americans to destroy the Russian
Federation.” Drawing a line, especially for the purpose of warning Ukraine,
the Russians crushed Georgia to demonstrate to the former that “[t]his is
what an American guarantee is worth.”[618]
Elsewhere, he wrote that “U.S.-Russian relations never really
recovered.” Even though they all knew for a fact it was not true, “From the
U.S. point of view, the Russo-Georgia war was naked aggression,” while
“[f]rom the Russian point of view, it was simply the Russian version of
Kosovo, in fact gentler in that it left Georgia proper intact.”[619]
Certainly, Mearsheimer wrote in 2014, “Russia’s invasion of Georgia
in August 2008 should have dispelled any remaining doubts about Putin’s
determination to prevent Georgia and Ukraine from joining NATO.”[620]
But too few were listening.

A Heartbeat Away

Hadley and Rice’s idea to protect Bush from Cheney seems to have been a
good and necessary one. The vice president reportedly proposed missile
strikes against the Russian troops coming through the Roki tunnel under the
Caucasus Mountains—luckily, the much wiser George W. Bush had decided
better than to listen to Cheney by that late date.[621] Former Ambassador to
Ukraine Steven Pifer told the same story to an audience at Southern
Methodist University, though he later clarified that he had heard the
proposal was coming from someone on Cheney’s staff, rather than the vice
president himself.[622] Journalist Peter Baker reported it the same way in
Foreign Policy.[623] But former State Department official and journalist
Ron Asmus has it that Cheney himself was advocating for strikes.[624]
Apparently, the United States government did not expect the Russians
to react the way they did. That is what they had gotten used to—the
Russians might not like it, but they would not dare get in our way. Even as
it was, then-President Dimitry Medvedev’s forces did not march on Tbilisi
or disrupt the BTC pipeline. After driving tens of miles into Georgia, they
stopped,[625] and eventually pulled back to Ossetia itself.[626]
Rice took credit for this by describing the somewhat limited
intervention Bush did authorize, bringing Georgian forces home from Iraq,
and claiming that was what stopped the Russians’ march on Tbilisi, which
she called a “democratically elected government.”[627]
Russian Human Rights Ombudsman Ambassador Vladimir Lukin, a
liberal, revealed in a meeting with U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Beyrle
that they suspected that Saakashvili must have had a green light from the
United States to launch the war. Beyrle noted that even though he was
“someone disposed toward cooperation with the U.S.,” Lukin’s “statements
on recognition, Russian perceptions of one-sided American media coverage
of the war and U.S. culpability for arming Georgia under Saakashvili reflect
the thinking of the majority of Russian foreign policy elite.”[628]
In Ukraine, despite opinion polls showing the majority of the country
was against it, President Yushchenko demanded immediate accession to
NATO membership in reaction, while the Germans and French were more
determined than ever to deny it.[629] Senator McCain then called to bring
Georgia into NATO immediately, despite the fact it was illegal at the time
since they were at war, and even though doing so would be equivalent to a
declaration of war against Russia over a border dispute 6,000 miles east of
Washington. And for what? Imagine, Georgia, this tiny, weak nation in the
South Caucasus, between the Black and Caspian Seas, being included in the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization. You may have thought Turkey was
pushing it. But what value could Georgia possibly add to the alliance, other
than to get the people of this country into the worst kind of trouble over
issues that are absolutely none of our business?
So why is the U.S. government doing this? The obvious answer is that
Georgia is an important listening station for American high-tech
surveillance against Russia,[630] and sits right on real and potential oil
pipeline routes through the Caucasus Mountains or westward through
Turkey. They think the price is worth it.
Cheney visited Azerbaijan and Georgia just after the war to promise
billions in foreign aid and encourage the development of new pipelines to
bypass Russia.[631] “Azerbaijan and Georgia are both pivotal in plans for
the Nabucco pipeline, a project backed by Washington and Brussels to
break Moscow’s stranglehold on the transit of Central Asian gas by
shipping it to Europe around Russia’s southern flank,” Reuters helpfully
noted. Not that Moscow has a dominant position in the Caspian Basin. They
could have marched all the way to Tbilisi and cut the BTC pipeline right in
half while they were at it, but did not. That the Americans were upset about
their inability to cut Russia out altogether was plain enough.[632]

Sour Grapes

In the aftermath of Georgia’s defeat, Stratfor wrote that Russia may have
won this round, but never forget, we still have terrorists: “It will take some
time before the United States frees itself up from the Middle East to
effectively confront the Russians in Eurasia, but there are other options in
the covert world that U.S. intelligence can employ to keep the Russians
occupied.” Here comes the part about the liberal, rules-based international
order: “Such a strategy would likely involve three key ingredients:
Chechens, Tatars and Saudis.” So far, so good. “Russia’s internal security
largely depends on its ability to contain Muslim separatist aspirations in its
two main belts of Muslim populations: one in the mountainous Northern
Caucasus . . . and the other along the western side of the Ural Mountains.”
As luck would have it, “Chechnya borders the former Soviet state of
Georgia, which is always ready and willing to support (as it has in the past)
a Chechen insurrection against Moscow to weaken the Kremlin’s grip in the
Caucasus,” they wrote, reminding readers of U.S., Saudi and Turkish
support for Basayev and Khattab’s forces in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Not only should the U.S. and its allies return to supporting Chechen
terrorists, but “Tatarstan, in the Volga-Ural region, controls all of the
Siberian oil, gas, road, rail and transport routes [and] also is a prime
candidate for a covert strategy that aims to inflame Russia’s Muslim
minorities.”
The Stratfor analyst wrote that “[t]his Muslim belt is key because it
separates the ethnically Russian portions of Russia from sparsely populated
Siberia and runs through all of Russia’s transport networks (road, rail and
pipeline),” adding that “[i]f Tatarstan, which has become more independent
in developing its vast oil wealth, revved up a resistance movement against
Moscow, Russia would have no choice but to focus its efforts on quashing
the rebellion at home rather than spreading its influence abroad.” Though
Putin’s man in Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, seemed to have things under
control, “money talks in this region, and there are a fair number of
dissenters in Chechnya who would turn against Kadyrov for the right price.
Even Kadyrov himself has proven he can be bought.” If not, assassination
might help: “With Kadyrov as the keystone of the current Chechen power
structure, his removal (and he has had a fair share of death threats) could
very quickly cause the region to go up in flames.” Al Qaeda’s war against
the U.S. notwithstanding, “[r]amping up Muslim fighters in Chechnya and
Tatarstan is a logical step for the United States to take in coordination with
its Saudi allies,” Stratfor advised. “If Washington and Riyadh do decide to
play the Islamist militancy card, however, Moscow will be ready for
it.”[633]
It does not appear that the W. Bush administration took this advice at
that late date, but it goes to show the way the national security state thinks,
and the position that particular firm is coming from when confirming what
should be some of the most controversial accusations against them.

Democrat

Not long after its defeat, the Times explained that Georgia is not really a
democracy at all. Saakashvili was not a loyal and wonderful friend, but a
tyrant who sent armed thugs to shut down independent media and fired
rubber bullets at peaceful protesters against his “semiauthoritarian . . . one-
party state.” Even Soros’s Freedom House, the Times reported, “ranked
Georgia, in terms of press freedom, on a level with Colombia and behind
Nigeria, Malawi, Indonesia and Ukraine.” A Georgian investigative
journalist, Nino Zuriashvili, said, “The paradox is that there was more
media freedom before the Rose Revolution.”[634]
In 2007, Saakashvili was accused of ordering murders by his own
former Interior and Defense Minister Irakli Okruashvili. “Saakashvili’s
governing style has exceeded all limits [and] has made it an everyday thing
to have immorality, injustice [and] oppression of human beings.” He
claimed to be witness to the fact that “[d]aily repressions, destruction of
houses and churches, robbery of citizens, and murder—and I want to
underline murder—have become routine practices of our
government.”[635] Two days later, Okruashvili was arrested[636] and his
friends tortured.[637] After that, he recanted.[638] Saakashvili was later
accused by Georgian prosecutors of ordering the assassination of billionaire
Badri Patarkatsishvili,[639] an ally of Russian oligarchs Boris Berezovsky
and Roman Abramovich,[640] in London.
 In 2012, mass protests broke out across the country against the
systematic rape and torture of male inmates, revealed to the public by
leaked videos[641] and testimony of former prisoners and guards.[642] In
October of that year, the Georgians threw Saakashvili out[643] despite his
and his American allies’ attempts to suppress his opponent, Bidzina
Ivanishvili, his party and supporters.[644]

Thomas Graham’s Lament

You Want Information Dispersal, This Is Information Retrieval

Thomas Graham, then a National Security Council official, formerly chief

of the political unit at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in the Clinton years,
tried to warn the Bush administration that the Russians saw the color
revolutions as American-backed coups, and that they thought the U.S. might
try it in Russia next. But Graham was just given the same propaganda line
as everyone else: “All we’re doing is promoting democracy,” so it makes no
sense for the Russians to complain, and we do not have to listen.
“But you’re the Russia expert,” a reporter from the Times objected.
“But Ukraine is not a Russia issue,” Graham answered. “It’s a Ukrainian
issue. There’s a bureau for European affairs that oversees Ukrainian issues.”
During the Orange Revolution, the Europe desk at the NSC was run by the
anti-Russia hawk Daniel Fried,[645] who continued to push for more
American support for pro-American governments in Russia’s former sphere
of influence, particularly Georgia and Ukraine. The guy who knew better
was over in another department. “My main contribution was preventing
things from being worse than they could have been,” Graham insisted.[646]
He later wrote that U.S. support for the Orange Revolution was one of the
major issues that ended Putin’s friendship with W. Bush and convinced him
to change his mind about working with the United States.[647]
Graham later explained that when Putin came to power, he was intent
on restoring Russia’s global stature back to the rank of a first-rate power.
“His plan was to do that not in opposition to the United States, however, but
in partnership with it. Close ties with the world’s preeminent power, he was
convinced, would validate Russia’s own worth.” He wrote, “Putin’s initial
hopes thus presented the George W. Bush administration with an
opportunity to put U.S.-Russia relations on an enduring, constructive track.”
Graham knew this because, he “saw that firsthand as the president’s senior
Russia expert on the staff of the National Security Council from June 2002
to February 2007. . . . [G]enuine partnership [was] plausible for the first
time since the end of the Cold War.” He recalled Putin’s cooperation with
the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, providing American forces with bases and
intelligence to help with the war, and that “[a]t the Moscow/St. Petersburg
summit in May 2002, Bush and Putin issued a joint declaration that laid out
a framework for strategic partnership.” The two nations had agreed to work
together “on counterterrorism, the nonproliferation of weapons of mass
destruction, drug trafficking, transnational organized crime, the Middle East
peace process and other regional conflicts, missile defense, and nuclear
arms control.” They even “set up a group that would consult on strategic
security and pledged to develop a new relationship between NATO and
Russia.”
 But Bush messed it up. Despite the second round of NATO expansion
to the Baltic states in 2004, Graham wrote, “Putin was prepared to live with
the alliance—at least until the U.S. pushed for membership for Ukraine and
Georgia at the 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest.” That ruined everything,
since it “crossed a bright red line, threatening Russia’s preeminence in two
states that it considered critical to its own security and, in the case of
Ukraine, its very essence as a great power.”
And it pointed, Graham said, to “the decisive factor” causing the
tension between the U.S. and Russia: “Washington’s progressive
encroachment on Russia’s interests in the former Soviet Union.” The
Russians believed if they were cooperative with the United States on
terrorism and other issues, America would respect their influence in their
own near abroad. This was a mistake because “spheres of influence were
decidedly out of favor in Washington”—for any country other than America
and its allies anyway. Japan may continue to dominate Okinawa and
“allow” the United States to do the same, for example, because Japan is not
Russia.[648]
So instead of cooperating with Russia, the Bush administration
“redoubled its efforts” to limit Putin’s ambitions, beginning with expediting
work to complete the BTC pipeline to cut the Russians out. Then Bush
urged negotiations after Beslan and spent tens of millions of dollars
overthrowing the government of Ukraine in the Orange Revolution, which
Putin feared was a dress rehearsal for his own overthrow. Graham then laid
out the truth, which the Russians had inferred from the Bush
administration’s actions, and which he himself authoritatively attested to,
but spoke as though it was just some crazy conspiracy theory. “And so,
according to the Kremlin’s dubious logic, Beslan and the Orange
Revolution, seen against the background of mounting U.S. activism in the
former Soviet bloc, revealed the United States’ ultimate goals vis-à-vis
Russia.” This included “its eviction from the other former Soviet states, the
erosion of its territorial integrity, and regime change—in short, its demise as
a great power.” Graham said, “To be sure, Putin overreacted, conjuring up
conspiracies and threats far beyond anything Washington intended or was
capable of. But the key point is that he was reacting. He was not driving
events; the United States, by far the superior power, was.” And it did not
have to be this way. Even a recovered Russia was no threat to Eastern
Europe. Acceleration of NATO expansion and launching the color-coded
revolutions were needless provocations. “Rather, the United States could
have focused on building more constructive relations with Russia—which
was also Putin’s initial goal—and it could have given Russia time to adjust
to its new geopolitical circumstances.”
Graham also admitted to W. Bush’s treason on behalf of bin Ladenite
terrorists in Chechnya. The president had said to the world that they were
either with the United States or with the terrorists. But “Washington made
an exception for the Chechen rebels, many of whom were not, to be sure,
terrorists but were nevertheless cooperating with terrorist groups in their
struggle against Moscow.” By “terrorist groups,” Graham literally was
referring to agents of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri: Ibn al-
Khattab and Shamil Basayev and their Arab-Afghan army. Again, at least
10 of the al Qaeda hijackers who carried out the September 11 attack on the
United States had fought in, or at least traveled to, Chechnya in the years
leading up to the attack.[649]
“Washington could have prevented representatives of the Chechen
government-in-exile from operating freely in the United States,” Graham
continued. “It could have pressed moderates among the Chechen rebels to
cut their ties to known terrorist organizations.” He said, “Such steps would
have laid a firmer foundation for long-term counterterrorism cooperation
and debunked the view that Washington was using terrorism as a tool
against Russia.” But the administration thought it was more important to
abet bin Laden’s forces, who had slaughtered thousands of American
civilians, as long as they were killing Russians, who had not.
There is no indication that Putin ever accused the U.S. of being behind
the Beslan attack specifically, only that the Bush administration was still
supporting the people who were behind it. When his foreign minister,
Lavrov, complained about American and British support for wanted
Chechen exiles, he was as polite as could be. “We are far from accusing the
leaders of major countries . . . of deliberately preserving this double
standard” on terrorism, he said. Instead, Lavrov blamed automatic
processes of the government left over from the last Cold War, saying that
“the inertia is still very strong. . . . It is difficult to get rid of outdated
stereotypes, but, although I don’t want to look immodest, we are managing
to do this faster than our partners.”[650]
In Ukraine, Bush could have favored neutrality, his former chief Russia
analyst at the NSC complained. They could have also “ratcheted down its
democracy promotion programs in Russia, which were of marginal value
but raised fears in the Kremlin that Washington was seeking to erode the
regime’s domestic position.”
Graham also said Bush’s push to bring Georgia and Ukraine into
NATO in 2008 “was ill-advised at best” and “guaranteed to provoke a
powerful Russian backlash.” He noted that “[k]ey allies, notably France and
Germany, were adamantly opposed,” cited Amb. Burns’s warning that this
was the “brightest of red lines” for the Russians and blamed the move for
helping to start the Georgia war.
Perhaps Bush should have listened to his top Russia expert on the NSC
instead of the War Party in the vice president’s office.[651]

OceanofPDF.com
Barack Obama

“He who defends everything, defends nothing.”

—Frederick the Great

“Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find

himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad
but within Russia itself.”
—Carl Gershman

“The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path,

and the end result is that Ukraine is going to get
wrecked.”
—John J. Mearsheimer

“A lot of what we did set the stage for what Putin is

doing.”
—Joe Cirincione

“I don’t want to talk about the Azov Battalion.”

—Cathy Young

“Biden is willing.”
—Victoria Nuland

“Another barrier to combatting disinformation is that

certain Kremlin-backed narratives are factually true.”
—UK Foreign Office

“The demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy;

it is an alibi for the absence of one.”
—Henry Kissinger

OceanofPDF.com
 The Great Reset

Meet the New Boss

The Democrats especially attack Russia, but perhaps they should take
responsibility. President Barack Obama (2009–2017) continued down the
same destructive path as his predecessors. In the beginning, Obama and his
secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, made a big deal about their attempted
“reset” with Russia. In March 2009, Clinton held a ceremony with Foreign
Minister Lavrov where she gave him a big red plastic button meant to
symbolize leaving the bad old days of the Bush administration in the past. It
was supposed to read “reset,” but had been mistranslated and instead read
“overload.”[1] At that time, Hillary seemed to agree with later-President
Donald Trump that the U.S. should try to mend relations with Russia to
assist in the “pivot to Asia,” that is, China, which she declared America’s
top priority in a 2011 Foreign Policy article.[2] “We are ready to move
beyond Cold War mentalities and chart a fresh start in relations between our
two countries,” Obama and new Russian President Medvedev said in a joint
statement in April 2009,[3] though the administration mocked W. Bush’s
supposed gentle naivete, saying they would not be seeking to forge “some
buddy-buddy relationship” with Medvedev the way Obama’s predecessor
had tried with Putin.[4]
Obama and Medvedev were getting along at first. Russia joined the
WTO, worked with the West to pass UN sanctions against Iran in coercive
diplomacy toward a new nuclear deal and got the New START Treaty
signed and ratified. In his first year, Obama told Poland and the Czech
Republic that he was reversing Bush’s policy on missile defense in their
countries.[5] They also made an agreement to reopen the northern route into
Afghanistan when the Pakistanis got mad and closed the highway through
their country in 2012 after U.S. forces killed some Pakistani troops assisting
Afghan Taliban fighters on the border.[6]
In Medvedev’s few years as president, he saw through numerous
reforms liberalizing the electoral system especially, but also on corruption
and opening the media to opposition figures.[7]

Not Impressed

Obama later described his first trip to Russia as president and meeting with
Putin in the summer of 2009. The Russian leader slammed George W.
Bush’s record on Iraq, the ABM Treaty, missile defense, NATO expansion
and the color-coded revolutions in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan. “As
far as Putin was concerned, the Americans had been arrogant, dismissive,
unwilling to treat Russia as an equal partner and constantly trying to dictate
terms to the rest of the world. All of which, [Putin] said, made it hard to be
optimistic about future relations,” Obama wrote.[8] He put some effort into
making Putin simply sound petty, but all those points were sound. Bush had
made disastrous decisions. If he had been deliberately attempting to
sabotage America’s relationship with Russia, he would have done a pretty
good job. Why should it have been difficult for Obama to understand
Putin’s point of view? He had been nominated and then elected in reaction
to Bush’s leadership on everything. But after all, it was his superficial
differences and real similarities with Bush[9] that got him the job.[10]

Medvedev’s New Treaty

In November 2009, President Medvedev proposed a somewhat vague new

treaty to provide a common security system for Europe which would freeze
NATO’s growth while integrating it with the EU, OSCE, Collective
Security Treaty Organization (CSTO)[11] and the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS),[12] though not the GUAM, and giving Russia an
equal voice in deliberations on European security matters.[13] Medvedev
told the media, “I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved
until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts,
including Russia.” Rather than taking a chance on beginning negotiations
on a new structure that could prevent future wars, the allies dismissed the
proposal out of hand.[14] This was true even though Amb. Burns had noted
that numerous Russian analysts believed Russia was currently attempting to
consolidate the CSTO to balance against China and the growing power of
its Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Central Asia, which was
their higher priority.[15]
Shortly after Obama took office, a congressional delegation traveled to
Russia to meet with a group of national security officials. In their meeting,
Aleksandr Belkin of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy,
explained that while Georgia mattered a great deal to them, “it was not as
important to Russians as Ukraine.” He said he was worried that the people
in charge in the States did not understand the historical and cultural issues
involved. Further, he warned them that “[t]he U.S. pushing policies such as
NATO membership for Ukraine only helped the ‘America haters come to
power’ in Russia and gave legitimacy to the hardliners’ vision of ‘fortress
Russia.’”
Burns said another local expert had explained that Putin believed
Russia must engage with the United States, while new President Dimitry
Medvedev represented a faction which did not. “The ‘disengagers’ did not
want confrontation with the U.S., but neither did they see a need to work
with it,” the ambassador wrote. Instead, “[t]hey preferred to seek alternative
spaces where the U.S. could be kept at a distance.” This “explained Russian
interest in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Central Asia, as
well as the still evolving RIC (Russia-India-China) and BRIC (Brazil-
Russia-India-China) groupings.”[16] If the Americans would not have
them, they would begin to turn east.

New START

Presidents Obama and Medvedev signed the New START Treaty in April
2010. It went into effect in February 2011. The deal was a double-edged
sword because Congress, led by the Senate “ICBM Caucus,” insisted on
administration approval for a trillion-dollar renovation of America’s entire
nuclear weapons industry and arsenal in exchange.[17] It is certainly still
better than not having it. All the old agreements are dead. New START is
the last remaining treaty restricting U.S. and Russian stockpiles and
deployments of strategic nuclear weapons.[18] Or maybe was. Russia
suspended participation in the treaty in 2023.[19]
Hot Mic

Obama got caught on a hot microphone promising Medvedev he would

have “more flexibility” to remove the anti-ballistic missile stations in
Romania and Poland after he was safely reelected. “I will transmit this
information to Vladimir,” Medvedev had responded.[20] The program
eventually went ahead anyway and was officially inaugurated in 2016.[21]
What was one more broken promise at that point?

Overload

Round 3

President Obama chose not to see the reset through. In addition to the
installation of ABM systems in Eastern Europe, the administration
continued NATO expansion by adding the Balkan states Albania and
Croatia to the alliance in 2009. As absurd as the idea might be to Americans
that these nations could do anything to bolster our national defense, it was
probably only a minor irritation to the Russians. They had interests in
Montenegro,[22] but were not in any serious contest with the U.S. over
Croatia and Albania. Still, it was contrary to the administration’s attempts to
restore a positive spirit to America’s relationship with the Russian
Federation.

Libya
Obama and Clinton then turned around and made a chump out of the new
Russian president while Putin temporarily occupied the prime minister
position in the Duma. They lied him into abstaining on the 2011 Libya war
resolution in the UN Security Council. Obama’s government claimed that
NATO, operating far out of its “area” against a country that was not
threatening them, was only going to launch a “no-fly zone” to protect
civilians in the city of Benghazi in Libya’s east—against the pretended
threat that Gaddafi meant to slaughter the entire civilian population there,
which was a ridiculous hoax. He did not say that, and his men had not
massacred civilians in the towns they had already taken back from the so-
called “rebels.”[23] Obama and his allies then used the resolution as cover
to launch a nine-month-long regime change war on behalf of the Libyan
veterans of Iraq War II. That included those who had fought for al Qaeda in
Iraq:[24] the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), the same faction that
MI6 had tried to use to assassinate Gaddafi back in 1996,[25] and Ansar al-
Sharia, the group that attacked the U.S. consulate in Benghazi a year later,
killing Ambassador Chris Stevens, foreign service officer Sean Smith and
two CIA contractors.[26] Both groups have helped turn the country into a
free-fire zone in the decade since.[27]
Then-Prime Minister Putin complained about Medvedev’s decision, for
which the new president embarrassingly reprimanded him, buying himself
an imminent demotion.[28] Secretary Gates later wrote about how much the
Russians resented the way the Obama administration took advantage of
them: “The Russians later firmly believed that they had been deceived on
Libya. They had been persuaded to abstain at the UN on grounds that the
resolution provided for a humanitarian mission to prevent the slaughter of
civilians.”
Humorously, Gates added, as though he had simply been a spectator to
all this rather than second-in-command in launching an unconstitutional and
illegal aggressive war against a country which could never have threatened
America, and in fact had made a normalization deal with the previous
administration only seven years before,[29] “as the list of bombing targets
steadily grew, it became obvious that very few targets were off limits and
that NATO was intent on getting rid of Gaddafi.”[30]
Just like with Bush at Bucharest, Gates enjoyed criticizing his
presidents’ bad decisions, but he sure never resigned over them. Of course,
in Libya he was responsible for carrying out those illegal orders, and did so
unhesitatingly. Though he retired a few months into the Libya war, no one
considered it a resignation in protest. He had announced it a year before.
[31]
And though Obama had already publicly declared his intention to
abandon the anti-ballistic missile system in Poland,[32] along with his
overheard assurance to Medvedev, he changed his mind and delayed it over
political difficulties in Poland and Czechia.[33] “Russia’s attitude and
possible reaction played no part in my recommendation to the president on
this issue,” Gates wrote in the New York Times.[34] “While there certainly
were some in the State Department and the White House who believed the
third site in Europe was incompatible with the Russian ‘reset,’ we in
Defense did not. Making the Russians happy wasn’t exactly on my to-do
list,” he later wrote in his memoir.[35]
Martyr Made

So what difference at this point does it make? As historian Darryl Cooper

pointed out, though Putin was still exercising influence from behind the
scenes, it was significant that a leader as powerful as him would step down,
even for a little while. This raises the possibility in the public mind that
perhaps they need not be so dependent on their one great leader, but can get
by without him. He was also, by at least going through the pretense of
stepping down to obey the constitution, rather than simply overriding it,
seeming to show an intent to leaving something approximating a republican
form of government behind, even if he eventually died in office.[36] But
Medvedev was totally discredited after signing onto Obama and Hillary’s
2011 war against Libya, and so that was the end of that experiment. They
had proven Putin indispensable to the Russian state after all.[37]

Biden’s Big Trip

In early 2011, Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Russia to “build on” the
supposed reset. There he met with President Medvedev and Prime Minister
Putin, laid a wreath at the tomb of the unknown soldier and such.[38] Biden
then summoned all the top opposition leaders, including Vladimir Ryzhkov,
Leonid Gozman, Garry Kasparov, Grigory Yavlinsky, and Boris Nemtsov,
to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. He told them that he had “looked into
Putin’s eyes and saw no soul,” mocking W. Bush’s alleged naïveté and at
the same time insulting the power still behind the throne, whose face he had
just smiled in. Biden insisted Putin should not run for president again. A
sensational report in the Russian media claimed that Biden’s “main goal” of
the trip was to try to pressure Medvedev into running for a second term.
Perhaps not. But it was certainly a credible enough story in the context of
the rest of the visit to make it believable from their point of view.[39]

The Snow Revolution

Putin repeatedly accused the Obama administration—and specifically

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton—of bankrolling dissenters protesting the
Russian parliamentary elections of 2011.[40] Though Putin’s party United
Russia lost 77 seats, Secretary Clinton denounced the elections as unfair
anyway.[41]
The State Department admitted to the media that they and allied NGOs
spent money promoting the democratic process, but swear none of their
activities favored any particular group, which was not very believable since
their friends in major Western media even had an Otpor-style theme worked
out and everything. They called it the Snow Revolution and had protesters
wear white ribbons.[42] America’s favorite Russian dissident, Alexei
Navalny,[43] a right-wing nationalist who called Muslim immigrants
“cockroaches” and terrorists, and his buddy Eduard Limonov, leader of the
“National Bolsheviks,” attended, but the crowd of 30,000 did not seem to
indicate overall popular support behind their movement. Still, Navalny
threatened revolution. “I can see that there are enough people here to seize
the Kremlin and the [Russian] White House right now.” He continued, “We
are a peaceful force and will not do it now. But if these crooks and thieves
try to go on cheating us, if they continue telling lies and stealing from us,
we will take what belongs to us with our own hands.”[44]
Putin publicly blamed Clinton for the disruption. “I looked at the first
reaction of our U.S. partners. The first thing that the secretary of state did
was say that they were not honest and not fair, but she had not even yet
received the material from the observers,” he said, adding that “[s]he set the
tone for some actors in our country and gave them a signal. They heard the
signal and with the support of the U.S. State Department began active
work.”
Often when Putin refers to something he knows is conspiratorial-
sounding but true about the United States, such as American and British
support for terrorists in Chechnya, he will preface it with “We are all adults
here.” So he did in this case, continuing, “and we understand that some . . .
of the organizers act in accordance with a well-known scenario and in their
own mercenary political interests.” He claimed that “hundreds of millions”
of NGO dollars were being spent in the country, and said, “We need to work
out forms of protection of our sovereignty, defense against interference
from outside. . . . [O]ur people do not want the situation in Russia to
develop like it was in Kyrgyzstan or not so long ago in Ukraine.” He
continued, “We have to think of ways to tighten accountability for those
who carry out the aims of foreign states to influence domestic political
processes.”[45]
The Central Election Commission recognized 10 percent of complaints
about the Duma elections as valid. This was not perfect, but did not seem to
be indicative of wide-scale fraud by the ruling party.[46] Even the Times
acknowledged that upper-middle-class educated urban youth protests do not
represent overall public opinion.[47]
The Americans also endlessly promoted Navalny, the Russian media
dissident and later-alleged poison victim. The Washington Post could hardly
contain their excitement when he won 27 percent of the vote in the Moscow
mayoral race of 2013.[48] However, the Times also admitted Navalny was
not a liberal at all. He was far to the right of Putin. But that was still okay.
Apparently he could be a rabid Russian nationalist and still a traitor to his
country.
“In recent years, the nationalist movement has become large and
increasingly malignant, responsible for a pattern of racist violence against
non-Slavs that includes kidnapping, torture and murder,” the Times noted.
“Nationalists have taken responsibility for several beheadings.”
Nevertheless, “in the effort to drive out Mr. Putin, the opposition, driven by
liberal and middle-class Russians, has nonetheless reached out to
nationalists, seeing them as a vital bulwark at a critical moment.” Anatoli
Baranov, a leftist leader in the protest movement, told the Times, “Without
cooperation with the nationalists, this movement would not be possible.”
Though claiming it must be a cynical political stance, the Times conceded
that Putin represented a “soft” authoritarianism compared to the
nationalists, including their “undisputed leader” Navalny, and that Putin had
publicly denounced their ethnic separatism, such as their slogan, “Russia
for ethnic Russians.” The Russian president attacked “provocateurs and
enemies” whom he accused of trying to “rip out Russia’s core with false
talk of the rights of ethnic Russians to self-determination and racial purity.”
Putin wrote, “I am deeply convinced that attempts to propagate the idea of
building a Russian ‘national’ mono-ethnic state contradict all of our
thousand-year history.”[49] For all of their hyperbole about Putin’s alleged
Hitlerianism, this establishes him firmly as a center-right conservative, not
the kind of right-wing ethnic nationalist that America’s liberal foreign
policy establishment and its first-ever black president would have preferred.
The Obama administration also publicly complained about the lack of
opposition in the elections of 2012,[50] after which Putin kicked USAID,
the IRI and NDI out of Russia. Reuters complained that Putin was making
foreign-funded NGOs register as “foreign agents,”[51] which is exactly the
law in the United States, though it is selectively enforced since so much of
the population of Washington, D.C., is on the take in one way or another.
[52]
On his second day in Russia, new Ambassador Michael McFaul, along
with then-Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs William Burns, met
with the opposition, prompting Russian politicians and media to denounce
McFaul and accuse him of plotting another color-coded revolution.[53]
Burns later dismissed their concerns while acknowledging the role the U.S.
government had played in helping to create them.[54]
It may be hard to imagine Washington going so far as to attempt a real
color-coded coup in Russia to depose the president. But they certainly seem
to look for puppets to boost and opportunities to exploit wherever they can
find them, at the very least playing into Russian paranoia and making
cooperation that much harder.

The Once and Future President

Putin returned early to the presidency in May 2012 with broad public
support. In an American presidential debate later that year, Obama ridiculed
former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s statement that Russia was
America’s “number one geopolitical foe,” saying, “The 1980s are now
calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War’s been
over for 20 years.” But by then Obama himself had already helped push the
United States and Russia towards future confrontation and would continue
to drive us down that dark path.

Brzezinski Warns Ukraine

In 2009, Zbigniew Brzezinski sat down for an interview with Voice of

America for Ukraine. He denounced the post-Orange Revolution regime in
Kiev for its self-serving corruption and infighting. Obliquely referring to
Yulia Tymoshenko’s gas deal[55] after her split with Viktor Yushchenko,
[56] Brzezinski accused Ukraine’s elite of selling out the country to a
foreign power—Putin’s Russia. Scolding them for their corruption, he said,
“You [Ukrainians] cannot expect the Europeans west of Ukraine, or the
people here in America to be more Ukrainian than the Ukrainians.” He
warned there were elections approaching the next year and if the pro-
Western factions could not get their act together, they would lose, and from
there they could lose their independence or even pieces of their territory.
Brzezinski also warned that NATO could not accept Ukraine unless
there was “significant national unanimity” in the country, adding that “it’s
not going to help Ukraine because it will become itself a source of division,
which other powers [read: Russia] can exploit.”[57]
 Just a few months before, Brzezinski’s position had seemed to be
shifting in favor of recognizing the reality of rising Asian powers and the
limits of America’s ability to influence that part of the world. While
insisting the U.S. needed to do everything possible to remain dominant in
Europe and that the combined West should do everything it could to
influence the East, he said that we should “consolidate security in Europe
by drawing Russia into a closer association with the Euro-Atlantic
community, and to engage Russia in a wider web of global security that
indirectly facilitates the fading of Russia’s lingering imperial ambitions.”
He proposed a major new deal with them, saying the U.S. should sign
an agreement with Russia on security cooperation between NATO and the
CSTO. “In return for this concession—which Moscow has long sought,”
Brzezinski said, “such an arrangement should be made conditional on
provisions that confirm the right of current nonmembers to seek
membership of their own choice in either NATO or the CSTO.” Then,
rather than urging this new NATO-Russia entente to take on the Chinese, he
urged the same approach to them, saying the West should create a “joint
NATO-Shanghai Cooperation Organization council, thereby indirectly
engaging China in cooperation with NATO, clearly a desirable goal.” He
proposed that “given the changing distribution of global power, NATO
should soon consider more direct formal links with several leading East
Asian powers—especially China and Japan—as well as with India.”[58]
This call of Brzezinski’s for an early end to the new Cold War was a
far cry from non-interventionism, but it was at least a few notches below
the arrogance of the foreign policy community consensus of that time. Of
course, they do not listen when it is something they do not want to hear,
even from their most revered figures.

Yanukovych Returns

In July 2009, Vice President Biden traveled to Kiev and promised that the
new Obama administration would continue to support Ukraine’s bid for
NATO membership, saying the U.S. did not recognize any Russian sphere
of influence in Ukraine. The AP wrongly said this was complementary to
President Obama’s at least stated position that “NATO seeks collaboration
with Russia, not confrontation,” though they noted that a solid majority of
Ukrainian citizens were against joining the alliance.[59]
Viktor Yanukovych was elected to the presidency in a race ruled free
and fair by EU and other international monitors in 2010. Council on
Foreign Relations expert Jeffrey Mankoff admitted the election was widely
seen as a referendum on the results of the Orange Revolution, and American
ally Viktor Yushchenko’s rule in the years since. He was crushed in the first
round.[60]
Almost immediately upon assuming the presidency, Yanukovych
officially dropped the Ukrainian state’s goal of joining the NATO alliance,
saying, “Entry into NATO is not realistic for our country today. NATO
conditions would require us to have the support of the majority of the
population.”[61] Parliament soon joined him, passing a resolution to
officially abandon the nation’s NATO ambitions.[62]
According to Professor Mearsheimer, after Yanukovych won in 2010,
the National Endowment for Democracy “stepped up its efforts to support
the opposition,” the will of the people be damned.[63] A cable from 2006
also shows the State Department knew perfectly well that in Ukraine there
was “low public support for membership” in the alliance; thus they needed
to “become more actively involved in the public outreach and education
campaign about NATO and why it is in Ukraine’s national interests to join
the Alliance.” They wrote that “[t]he low level of public support for NATO
membership may well prove to be the Achilles’ Heel of Ukraine’s ambitions
to be invited sooner (in 2008) rather than later to join NATO.” They
admitted that “[t]here is an unusual chasm between the views of Ukraine’s
policy- and opinion-making elite, which overwhelmingly supports NATO
membership, and the general population, which currently does not.” Though
polls were somewhat sketchy, they concluded it was “safe to say” that only
30 percent or so of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO.[64] As Charap and
Colton noted, “Washington was thus going far beyond support for Ukraine’s
aspirations, as it often claimed. It was selectively reading those aspirations,
focusing on parts of the elite and not the public, and attempting to alter
them.”[65]
Yanukovych also signed a new 30-year lease deal with the Russians
over their naval base at Sevastopol, Crimea, in exchange for discounted
natural gas supplies.[66]

The Vaudeville Coup

In October 2016, the Kremlin allegedly attempted a coup d’état against

longtime president Milo Đukanović in Montenegro. The whole thing seems
quite unbelievable, though.[67]
 It all started when the Obama administration invited Montenegro, the
small Balkan nation on the Aegean Sea, to join NATO at the end of 2015.
At least that was allegedly the motive. Certainly the Russians were as angry
as ever about further expansion. “They are ready to admit even the North
Pole to NATO just for the sake of encircling Russia,” the chairman of the
Duma’s defense committee complained. He said it proved that NATO “was
and remains an adversary.” Russians have significant interests there.
Oligarch Oleg Deripaska’s company took control of their bauxite mine and
aluminum smelter in 2005, and he and his partners built a marina for
superyachts. The country is a major Russian tourist destination.[68]
The Times said that the star witness to the coup plot, Aleksandar
Sindjelic, “a former convict . . . [and] veteran anti-Western activist from
neighboring Serbia,” had become “a key informant” and “a suspect” in the
scheme. The prosecution’s claim was that two Russian military intelligence
officers plotted with as many as 500 others to sack the parliament,
assassinate the prime minister and install a pro-Putin regime that would
keep the country out of NATO.[69]
While the Russians have business interests there, and would probably
prefer the nation not join the Western alliance, it is the West that puts the
highest priority on their compliance. As the Times reported,
“Montenegro . . . controls the only stretch of coastline where warships can
dock between Gibraltar and eastern Turkey not already in the hands of the
alliance.” As far as the coup attempt, the Times said that even the country’s
pro-Western leaders thought that Đukanović’s move to join NATO was a
cynical ploy to preserve his own power, and they virtually all rejected the
story of a coup plot as a bad joke. “[W]hen Mr. Đukanović announced that
his government was the target of a Russian-backed plot in October,
opposition politicians—both pro- and anti-NATO—as well as much of the
news media and many independent observers dismissed the claim as a fairy
tale.” The government initially claimed 20 Serbs had been part of the plot,
but the Times seemed skeptical since “some . . . turned out to be elderly and
in ill health.”
They also noted that police and prosecutors failed to show the weapons
supposedly seized from the plotters and quoted the opposition saying their
decision to release prime suspect Sindjelic proved the whole event was a
“cheap . . . Vaudeville coup.”[70]
British intelligence officials insisted to the Telegraph that it was all
true, and that the plan was for Serbian nationalist conspirators to dress up
like police, infiltrate the building, assassinate then-Prime Minister
Đukanović and then massacre the crowd. They speculated that if the plot
was run by the two accused Russian agents, it must have been the Russian
state behind it, rather than some other financial interest, because “[y]ou are
talking about a plot to disrupt or take over a government in some way. You
can’t imagine that there wasn’t some kind of [official] approval process.”
They go on to say that the Russians had important interests in Montenegro,
though they did not say why it would have made sense for them to take over
the country in a bloody Balkan coup, and just weeks before the American
presidential election.[71] They also never explained why anyone should
believe the police and military would just accept the rule of their new
Russian overlords and carry out their orders, or why the plotters would have
believed they would.
Montenegrin prosecutors told the Telegraph they were not accusing the
Russian government at all, only Russian nationals.[72] Their lead
prosecutor later said it was the Russian government[73] before changing his
mind and saying it was not them again.[74]
Twenty people were arrested on the day of the election. Six of them
were released. They included a bunch of regular townspeople who were
obviously set up or falsely accused. The other 480 were never accounted
for.[75]
The story goes that a former policeman named Mirko Velimirovic, who
was hired to arrange the weaponry for the plot, turned himself in two days
before. He said he threw all the rifles in a lake. They were never produced
as evidence. Velimirovic later recanted his statement, then recanted his
recantation.[76]
Prosecutors later accused a CIA officer, Joseph Assad, of being part of
the pro-Russian coup. Why anyone should believe he would work so hard
in favor of Russia’s interests in the middle of a major political contest over
whether the tiny nation would be brought into the NATO alliance, or how
he could have possibly believed his bosses back in Virginia would not know
about it, was never explained. He and his supposed client, Israeli politician
Aron Shaviv, agree he was only there to provide basic security advice.
Assad had been working for Soros’s Freedom House since leaving the
agency.[77]
 After the trial, the government’s central witness, Sindjelic, was
deported to Croatia where he had been convicted of theft and murder in an
unrelated case.[78]
While locals staging such an event for public relations sounds as crazy
as the Russians actually doing it, it should be noted that Milo Đukanović is
a criminal. In fact, in 2015, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting
Project named Đukanović the international “Person of the Year in
Organized Crime and Corruption.”[79] Like Putin, he has engineered it so
that when he was not the president he was still the prime minister from
1997 to 2023, and has made millions from his association with various drug
lords and smugglers.[80] But when NATO officially invited Montenegro to
join in 2015, it caused massive dissention, and even threatened Đukanović’s
hold on power. There was a decent chance he could lose. On the other hand,
staging a fake coup on the day of the election, and hiring a cop and a CIA
officer to provide the guns and the escape route, seems like pretty bad
planning no matter who was behind it.[81]
Who really knows what happened? After a lower court convicted the
two Russian supposed agents in 2019,[82] an appeals court threw out the
whole case and released all the prisoners in 2021, saying the original
process was illegal and illegitimate. Even if that decision were purely
political—the lower judge accused the higher court of taking bribes in the
case—it would imply enough corruption in their system to raise the same
possibility on the lower court’s level too.[83]
This is important because Senator McCain and other hawks used it as
another talking point in their ongoing anti-Russia public relations
campaign,[84] and it helped to solidify Montenegro’s addition to the NATO
alliance in 2017.[85] From the Russian point of view, it must have been just
another example of the American government and its friends’ willingness to
lie against them any chance they had.

Culture Wars

Cultural and foreign policy critic Richard Hanania wrote an interesting

piece about the role Putin plays in the American center-left liberal
imagination. While it may have been overlooked by others with a focus on
geography and grand strategy, Hanania says that when the Russian
government arrested the leftist activist band Pussy Riot for desecrating a
church in 2012 and passed a law banning gay propaganda toward minors in
2013, “[t]he U.S. response . . . was nothing short of hysterical, and coverage
of Russia, a country that had previously been viewed largely with
indifference by American elites, has never been the same.” He added that
“as someone who was studying international relations at the time on a
university campus and who paid close attention to American politics, it felt
as if some Rubicon had been crossed and any move towards friendlier
relations was impossible.”[86]
It is true that Putin’s conservatism has certainly hurt him among
American liberals, many of whom seem to have internationalized their
partisan politics and used him as a stand-in for the Republicans they despise
here at home. Not that it has won him any but the most insignificant support
on the right. American conservatives tend to see Putin’s Russia as a rival if
not an enemy.[87]
 Sergei Magnitsky

An Important Accountant

A significant part of the current tension with Russia can be traced back to
the case of Sergei Magnitsky, a tax accountant who died in jail awaiting
trial in Russia in November 2009. In his name, in December 2012,
Congress passed and President Obama signed the Magnitsky Act, which
leveled an array of sanctions against 18 Russian officials and helped lead to
a severe worsening of tensions between the two countries. Putin retaliated
by banning adoptions of Russian children and passing sanctions against
several American officials.[88] In 2017, Congress passed and President
Trump signed the Global Magnitsky Act, authorizing sanctions against
countries for alleged human rights violations anywhere in the world. At
least four other nations have passed similar laws.[89] This was one major
reason for the unraveling of the reset.[90]

Browder

It all started with William Browder, the American hedge-fund investor,

former Putin supporter[91] and grandson of the former general-secretary of
the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA), Earl Browder.[92] The founder of
Hermitage Capital Management, at one time the largest foreign investment
firm in Russia, Browder had renounced his U.S. citizenship so he would not
have to pay income taxes after moving there. As admirable as it might be to
deny the U.S. government revenue, it seems likely that his motive was
simple greed. Browder got rich during the 1990s voucher auctions. The
New York Times called him “a foreign version of the Russian oligarchs who
earned their fortunes in the mass privatization after the fall of the Soviet
Union.”[93] It turns out that the same Republic National Bank from the
Money Plane story[94] was owned by Browder’s partner Edmond Safra,
Hermitage Capital’s original financier.[95] He was denied a visa to return to
Russia in 2005 and is accused by them of a $230 million tax fraud, for
which he claims he was framed by the authorities.[96]

Firestone Duncan

Sergei Magnitsky was an accountant[97] who worked for the law firm
Firestone Duncan, with which Browder’s firm often did business. Browder
has repeatedly claimed that Magnitsky was a heroic whistleblowing tax
lawyer who was helping him find the real fraudsters,[98] and said it was the
same two cops who were investigating him for tax fraud who perpetrated
this whole other massive tax fraud scheme right under his nose, then
imprisoned and murdered Magnitsky for accusing them of it.[99]

Der Spiegel

The German magazine Der Spiegel showed that Browder’s claim that
Russian authorities only began investigating him in 2007, supposedly for
retaliatory reasons, was false. His visa had been suspended over a tax
avoidance investigation back in 2005. The European Court of Human
Rights found that the investigation had begun back in 2004, “long before he
complained that prosecuting officials had been involved in fraudulent
acts.”[100]
Citing a 2006 letter from Russian tax authorities, Der Spiegel pointed
out that Magnitsky was questioned in the tax case the same year and
stipulated in his October 2008 interrogation that officers had requested
company documents in May 2006.[101] In their answer to Browder’s
response to their original article, Der Spiegel’s editors wrote, “Browder
describes Magnitsky as a crucial whistleblower. But that is a construct that
was concocted after the fact.” They added that “[s]everal people from
Browder’s team had leveled the same or similar accusations against Russian
officials, and some of them did so before Magnitsky.”[102]
They named three of Browder’s colleagues and cited articles in
Bloomberg News,[103] the Financial Times,[104] Wall Street Journal[105]
and New York Times[106] which were published early in 2008, months
before Magnitsky first mentioned the tax fraud case in testimony that
October. They conclude, “This timeline of events is one reason why
observers have their doubts as to whether Magnitsky was really murdered
so that he would cease making accusations against law enforcement
officials.” It made no sense, since “[t]he accusations against Russian
officials were already public, independent of Magnitsky’s testimony.”[107]
Referring to the dozens of major interviews Browder has given on the
subject accusing two Russian police officers—Artem Kuznetsov and Pavel
Karpov—Der Spiegel’s Benjamin Bidder noted other inconsistencies in
Browder’s story. In his book, Browder had written that after discovering the
fraud, Magnitsky had made an appointment and then “provided the
evidence and gave his witness statement, explicitly naming Kuznetsov and
Karpov.”[108]
But the “protocol” of the meeting does not support that claim.
Magnitsky mentioned the investigators’ names in the context of the search
of his law firm, “[b]ut at no point does he make a concrete accusation
against them personally.” Bidder also noted how the document showed that
he had been questioned as part of an investigation, “not . . . entirely of his
own free will,” and that in another interrogation on October 7, “Kuznetsov
and Karpov are not mentioned at all.”[109] Magnitsky was arrested shortly
after the second interrogation, in November 2008.

Motive Makes No Sense

Der Spiegel’s investigation showed that, if anything, the Russians were

trying to force Magnitsky to testify against or at least accuse Browder of a
crime. There is no real indication that they were trying to get him to retract
his accusations against anyone else, certainly not Kuznetsov and Karpov,
whom he never directly accused as Browder had claimed.[110]
The tax scam in question was based around a maneuver where three
firms managed by Hermitage Capital were supposedly re-registered by
fraudsters, who then filed for $230 million worth of tax refunds. In
Browder’s version of the story, in 2007, cops raided his company for the
sole purpose of taking all their stamps and original incorporation
documents. He says Magnitsky told him he had figured out what had
happened. The cops had transferred ownership of the companies to
themselves, opened accounts at two banks and immediately deposited
amounts equal to the taxes the companies had previously paid but then had
gotten refunded. So the cops and the mob hadn’t stolen from Browder’s
company, but from the state.
However, Moscow lawyer Andrew Pavlov claimed he had been hired
by a convicted felon named Viktor Markelov to get a court order based on a
fake liability for the Hermitage companies, which they could then use to
claim a tax refund. As journalist Lucy Komisar wrote, “At his trial,
Markelov testified that one of the people he worked with to secure the
fraudulent tax refund was Sergei Leonidovich,” which was Magnitsky’s
patronymic. She added that though Browder said he and Magnitsky had
found out about the theft of the companies in October 2007, they did not
immediately go to court to challenge those fraudulent re-registrations, and
that in addition, HSBC bank records showed money had been put aside for
those legal expenses by the end of July that year.[111]

Death in Jail

As far as the man’s death, an independent Russian commission found that

Magnitsky was denied medical care for an inflamed pancreas and was
probably beaten before he died,[112] though, as Der Spiegel noted, “the
report, however, makes no such assertion of an intentional killing.”[113] An
independent report by Physicians for Human Rights, hired by Browder to
confirm his claims, declined to do so. They concur with the Medical
Commission report that the man died of heart failure as a result of medical
neglect.[114] That is still wrong and a symptom of Russia’s inhumane
prison system. It is just that it is different from Browder’s more dramatic
claim, which was that the man was tortured to death, murdered to prevent
him from further implicating these cops for setting up Browder.[115] The
head doctor at the prison was charged with negligence in Magnitsky’s
death, but he was acquitted after the prosecutors dropped their case.[116]

USA v. Prevezon Holdings

In September 2013, the U.S. Justice Department filed a civil forfeiture

lawsuit against Prevezon Holdings based on their claim that its owner,
Denis Katsyv, was involved in tax rebate fraud. This claim in turn was
based on information provided by Browder. After numerous attempts to
serve him with a subpoena,[117] lawyers for the firm representing Prevezon
deposed Browder for seven hours in April 2015.
Browder was unable to produce key pieces of evidence to back up his
story, particularly a letter he claimed to have received informing him that
the tax case against him had been closed in 2005. Prevezon’s lawyers
showed that Magnitsky had been questioned about it in October 2006, and
as Der Spiegel noted, this was “long before Magnitsky is said to have first
exposed the big tax fraud that Browder says caused him to fall out of the
authorities’ good graces.” They also showed that the seals used in the fraud
were not the same ones taken in the raid, like in Browder’s story, and that
his associate Vadim Kleiner was aware of that fact. Browder also conceded
that his knowledge of the big meeting in Cyprus where the cops and tax
officials all met to conspire came from travel records that he could not find
that he said he got from a whistleblower who he could not identify.
 Browder, who never stops spinning to media figures and legislators,
when confronted by lawyers under oath, told them, “I don’t know,” “I can’t
remember” and “I’m not an accountant,” over and over again. Though they
settled, the agreement specifies that Prevezon’s owners and management
concede no part in the tax fraud or the Magnitsky case.[118]
Prevezon’s Russian lawyer, Nataliya Veselnitskaya, met with then-
candidate Donald Trump’s son and son-in-law at Trump Tower in June 2016
in an attempt to plead her case to get the Magnitsky Act repealed. This
meeting later became part of the years-long Russiagate scandal.[119]

Nekrasov’s Film

A man named Andrei Nekrasov, a critic of Vladimir Putin,[120] made a

documentary disputing Browder’s claims called The Magnitsky Act: Behind
the Scenes.[121] Nekrasov had been hired by Browder originally to make a
“docudrama,” a supposedly nonfiction film with reenactments by
professional actors to tell the story. But in the process of doing so, Nekrasov
says he realized he was being used for a lie and decided to tell the truth
instead. In the film it is clear that Nekrasov originally thought Magnitsky
was a martyr and Browder a hero. He says they also had a common enemy:
“the Russian regime” which had been after Nekrasov and his friends and
whom he hated and feared. He had previously made a film about the death
of Alexander Litvinenko.[122] Nekrasov consulted with Browder
repeatedly and had intended for him to narrate the film. He had already shot
quite a bit of material for the docudrama before changing his mind about it.
[123]
 Once finished, the film was suppressed in America in Soviet fashion.
showed once at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., it ended up at least
unofficially blacklisted and censored from the public debate. Browder, the
now-British citizen, in testimony before Congress, insisted the filmmakers
and those who hosted the screening of their film should be prosecuted for
violating the Foreign Agents Registration Act.[124] He threatened the
Newseum with legal action if they showed it, and used similar threats to
prevent a screening before the European Parliament.[125] Journalist Robert
Parry complained, “If the documentary is as flawed as its critics claim, why
won’t they let it be shown to the American public, then lay out its supposed
errors, and use it as a case study of how such fakery works?”[126]
One of the accused officers, Pavel Karpov, agreed to speak to
Nekrasov. He said he had no motive because he had never seen a single
piece of paper signed by Magnitsky accusing him of anything. Karpov
appeared to debunk the claim that he must have bought his Moscow
apartment at bubble prices with his stolen fortune, by presenting a title
which shows he put his money down on the place back in 2004, three years
before the alleged theft. Same for a car and two small plots of land. There
was no reason to believe the man somehow possessed a quarter of a billion
dollars in any form. He says they would not have had to raid Hermitage or
Firestone Duncan for the documents they needed, and that Browder’s story
was an elaborate scheme fit for Hollywood.
Karpov said he started investigating Browder in 2004, so Nekrasov
went back and got the 2008 documents. The first thing he found was that
the questioning of Magnitsky was an interrogation as part of a criminal
probe, whereas Browder had portrayed him as simply going down there
voluntarily to report a crime and make an official statement. When
Nekrasov asked Browder why the actual documents did not contain any
evidence or accusations against the two officers, Browder cut off contact.
Before the October deposition, a newspaper reported on the scam and
said it had started six months prior based on a tip by a woman, Rimma
Starova, a corporate figurehead. She said Magnitsky was a suspect, not an
informant. His June and October 2008 police interrogations would seem to
bear that out. Browder in an interview with Nekrasov said that she had just
been brought in by the bad guys as a smokescreen. But when challenged on
the timeline, he immediately pleaded ignorance.
Nekrasov also found that there was no violent raid at all. Browder had
embellished all that, even included using an old picture of Jim Zwerg, a
U.S. civil rights activist from 1961, to claim that one of his employees had
been beaten.[127]

UK Libel Suit

Pavel Karpov, one of the tax investigators accused by Browder, tried to sue
him for libel in England. The case was thrown out because the judge ruled
that Karpov had no local reputation to lose, but still seemed to think his
case had merit.[128] The justice wrote that Browder was a “story teller,”
and that he did not “come close to pleading facts which, if proved, would
justify the sting of the libel.” The judge said his verdict should be
understood as “a measure of vindication” of the officer.[129] It perhaps
seems odd that Browder did not wish to take the opportunity to have a trial
and demonstrate the guilt of his persecutor and accuser. Instead, he pushed
to have the case thrown out. It turns out even Magnitsky’s lawyer, Dmitry
Kharitonov, has said that Karpov was not involved in prosecuting the dead
accountant.[130]
In other words, there is no reason to believe Browder’s story that
Magnitsky had ever even accused the cops of being in on the fraud, the
alleged motive for his imprisonment and supposed murder.
The Der Spiegel reporter Benjamin Bidder met with Browder for a
four-hour interview in 2019. Browder handed over dozens of documents
that he said would bolster his case. But Bidder found that “[n]ot all of them
would stand up to further scrutiny.” This included an email that did not
show him to be a whistleblower, but a “stand-in for the CEO of a letterbox
company who investigators in Moscow had actually wanted to speak to,”
and an article that cited Magnitsky before his arrest that did not cite the
name of either cop, and did not otherwise seem to provide motive for it.
[131]
Again, for the sake of argument, assume it is all true, though there is so
little reason to believe it: Some Moscow cops stole money from the Russian
treasury, framed an ex-American for it and then killed his accountant to
help cover it up. So what? How in the world could our government be so
short-sighted to let such a non-event with no international implications play
such a large part in ruining the relationship between our countries? The fact
that they have done so based on such a thin series of claims is unforgivable.

XKeyscore
Tapping My Telephone

In the spring of 2013, Edward Snowden, a contractor with Booz Allen

Hamilton working for the National Security Agency, liberated a trove of
documents essentially proving that all the previous NSA whistleblowers
like Russel Tice,[132] Edward Loomis,[133] J. Kirk Wiebe,[134] Thomas
Drake[135] and William Binney,[136] and great journalists like James
Bamford, author of The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets and The Shadow
Factory,[137] had been right on and much worse. The NSA, Snowden’s
leak proved, was violating the civil liberties of virtually all Americans,
working with telecommunications and Silicon Valley firms to compile
endless amounts of metadata and cellphone location data, search, web
traffic, email and instant messenger histories.[138] This is all not to
mention their wide-scale surveillance of the rest of the people of the planet,
in cooperation with the “Five Eyes” of the Anglosphere alliance, which
includes Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand[139]—six if one
counts Israel.[140] Snowden’s leak to journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura
Poitras, Ewen MacAskill and Barton Gellman was a heroic service to the
American people and to mankind.[141] Snowden has said he was motivated
to do this when he saw National Intelligence Director James Clapper[142]
perjure himself before Congress,[143] falsely denying that the NSA was
collecting data on innocent Americans.
The U.S. government, which was apparently too busy keeping tabs on
all of us to take care of their own secrets or track down their missing
contractor, was embarrassed. So naturally they lied, claiming Snowden was
a spy working for Russia and China. Well, he had originally gone to Hong
Kong, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant he released
was the most recent version. You just have to imagine the rest of the case,
because those total non sequiturs were all they ever had beyond wild
anonymous claims.[144]

Stranded

To this day people accuse Snowden of being a Russian spy just because the
Obama administration deliberately stripped him of his passport while he
was stuck there on a layover in his attempt to make it to Ecuador.[145] The
Democrats decided that it would be better to leave him in Russia, where the
security services could presumably forcibly interrogate him about
everything he knows, just for the public relations mileage they would get
out of tarring his name with that of Putin and the Russian Federation. He
would have been much easier to arrest in Ecuador if they had let him
continue on his way. When they later mistakenly assumed he was escaping
on the Bolivian president’s plane, the administration ordered their Western
European clients to deny them entry to their airspace, forcing the plane to
land in Austria in what would have been an absolute outrage if any country
other than the U.S. had done it.[146] Then, after Putin granted Snowden
temporary asylum, Obama canceled a previously scheduled side meeting
with Putin at the G-20 meeting in September 2013, making this self-
inflicted diplomatic blunder another cause for worse relations between our
two countries.[147]
Importantly, Snowden denies that he has ever revealed a word about
his previous work for U.S. intelligence to Russian operatives. He has also
sworn he would return to the United States if Congress would amend
Woodrow Wilson’s Espionage Act of 1917,[148] which currently forbids
defendants from even attempting a “just cause” defense for violating the
law.[149] In other words, if he could get a fair, American-style trial in
America.
It is clear that Snowden is a patriot who liberated those documents out
of a public-spirited concern for the American people’s rights.[150] Those
who accuse him of serving foreign nations are simply desperate liars, and
those who accuse him of refraining from criticizing the Russian government
are wrong,[151] as even Michael McFaul has acknowledged.[152]
If it is true that Putin is taking the opportunity to provide the hero safe
haven from his U.S. government tormentors for public relations reasons,
[153] that is their fault. They could do the right thing and drop the charges
at any time.

Boston Strong

Dropped Ball

On April 15, 2013, two immigrant brothers from Dagestan, ethnic

Chechens, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 26 and 19 years old, set off
two bombs at the Boston Marathon, killing three people—including an 8-
year-old boy—and wounding 264[154] in a terrible example of backdraft
terrorism against the United States. The older brother, Tamerlan, widely
agreed to be the decision-maker behind the plot, was accidentally killed by
the younger brother, Dzhokhar, who ran him over trying to escape during a
shootout with police a few days later,[155] after they also murdered a local
campus cop.[156] Dzhokhar was then taken alive, tried and sentenced to
death for his crime.
The Carnegie Endowment had warned back in 2002 that the jihadist
movement in the Northern Caucasus Mountains was spreading and that
“[t]he next ‘soft target’ of North Caucasian terrorism could be a Western
one.”[157]
It turned out the Russian FSB had sent the FBI a warning and request
for information about the Tsarnaevs two years before the bombing, in
March 2011,[158] saying the brothers were tied to Chechen terrorist groups.
An FBI statement read that the Russians had requested information about
Tamerlan “based on information that he was a follower of radical Islam and
a strong believer, and that he had changed drastically since 2010 as he
prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join
unspecified underground groups.” A “senior law enforcement official” told
the New York Times that the Russians “had something on him and were
concerned about him, and him traveling to their region.”
In a strange show of cognitive dissonance in the immediate aftermath
of this domestic disaster, the Times maintained that “Chechen extremists
pose a greater threat to Russia than they do to the United States,
counterterrorism specialists say, though some of the groups have had ties to
Al Qaeda.”
But Tamerlan had already come to the feds’ attention. They had first
questioned him and his family in January 2011, apparently due to concerns
he had been looking at bin Ladenite websites. This entire section of the
department’s IG’s report is redacted.[159] Regardless, the Russian warning
would have come two months later, on top of whatever it was they had
found suspicious in the first place. NBC News summarized the FSB letter,
saying it “included contact information, with addresses and phone numbers,
for many of the members of the Tsarnaev family, including Tamerlan and
his mother,” and that it “warned that Tamerlan was known to have
associated with violent radical Islamists, including a Canadian Muslim
convert named William Plotnikov who was later killed while fighting for
the mujahideen in Dagestan.”[160]
His father said they had questioned Tamerlan “two or three times”
before he had ever left for Dagestan in January 2012.[161] According to the
IG report, when the FBI talked to him in April 2011, they did not ask him
about his move toward Salafi Islam or connections with any violent
Dagestani groups.[162]
In October 2011, a few months after their first warning, the Russians
again contacted the Americans, this time the CIA, who decided to put him
on the anti-terrorist watchlist.[163]

Trip to Dagestan

However, after the older brother took a trip to Dagestan for seven months in
2012, the FBI claimed to have not scrutinized him any further,[164] at first
maintaining they did not have cause to continue investigating, even though
obviously his returning home to bin Ladenite-ridden, civil war-torn
Dagestan for half a year would be reason enough.[165] Perhaps that is why
the bureau changed their story to say they did not even know Tamerlan had
left the country due to a spelling error in a security database. If not for an
extra letter “y,” they said he would have been detained at the airport on
return to the United States. The FBI also said they closed their investigation
of Tsarnaev in June 2011.[166] The IG report says the FBI had failed to
interview the man’s ex-girlfriend, wife, employers or anyone from the local
mosque he frequented. Nor did the feds ask his parents about his interest in
“separatist groups.”[167]
However, the Department of Homeland Security said that the system
had “pinged” them when Tsarnaev left the country, though he was not
pulled aside for questioning.[168] According to the IG report, the Customs
officer at JFK airport also almost certainly manually notified the FBI as
Tsarnaev was leaving the country in January 2012 as well.[169] It also turns
out they lied in claiming the FBI was not alerted to Tsarnaev’s travel. Then-
FBI Director Robert Mueller admitted that the bureau, and specifically
Tsarnaev’s case agent on the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), was in fact
notified as he was coming and going.[170] The FBI’s excuse about the
misspellings only covers his return trip, when, they claim, the first travel
alert with the correct spelling had already expired.[171] But that story only
works if the outgoing ping had not functioned as intended, which we know
it did. And he had no problem getting back into the country, even though he
did not even have a passport, having left his brand-new one behind in
Russia,[172] and paid cash for his ticket.[173] It was also false that the alert
on Tsarnaev had expired. Instead, it had somehow been changed to no
longer require Customs agents to pull him aside.[174]
 No one at the FBI, CIA or DHS told any local police agency about the
Russian information or their interviews with Tsarnaev or his family, or
anything about his trip to Dagestan, even though they all had members on
the JTTF.[175]
The unnamed FBI counterterrorism agent pleaded ignorant about
Tsarnaev’s trip to Dagestan, but told the IG that if he had known about it, he
still would not have reopened the investigation. But his also-unnamed
supervisor threw the agent under the bus, saying he would have done his
job and continued investigating if only his underling had told him about the
trip.
The IG also noted some meaningful information that the FBI, at least
officially, failed to collect while they were not investigating Tsarnaev,
which was only revealed after the bombing. That includes statements he had
made about wishing to “pursue jihad,” comments by his former girlfriend
about his shift toward religious extremism, anything about his time in
Russia or sharing terrorism-related videos online for almost a year before
the attack.[176]

No Ties

The FBI later claimed the two brothers had no ties to radical Chechen
individuals or groups, and instead were simply radicalized and learned how
to make their bombs by reading al Qaeda propaganda on the internet.[177]
However, staff from Representative William Keating’s office said they
“could confirm, from nongovernmental sources, reports from ABC News
and elsewhere that Tsarnaev had been in touch with at least two such
individuals, Mahmoud Mansour Nidal and William Plotnikov,” during his
time in Dagestan—both of whom were shot dead by Russian police in May
and July 2012.[178] Evidently, it was a Russian interrogation of the
Canadian Muslim convert Plotnikov that first led to their scrutiny of
Tsarnaev.[179] Tamerlan returned home two days after Plotnikov was killed
in a massive paramilitary police raid and shootout.[180]
ABC News called Nidal a “known militant recruiter,” said that
“Tsarnaev was repeatedly seen leaving a controversial mosque in
Makhachkala,”[181] and met with him at an apartment there numerous
times in 2012.[182] According to a Russian dossier about his stay in
Dagestan, they had the “date, address and apartment number where the
meeting took place,” and apparently an informant said the two talked about
how Tsarnaev could help raise money for Nidal’s group.[183]
His father confirmed they had gone to Chechnya during his visit as
well.[184] Officials also said they “believed that Mr. Tsarnaev posed a far
greater threat to Russia.”[185] Zaur M. Zakaryayev, a member of a Salafi
advocacy organization, the Union of the Just, stated, “He already had jihad
views when he came; I think because he was Chechen, he was rooting for
his homeland.” The Russians assumed Tsarnaev’s cousin Magomed
Kartashov had radicalized him, but the cousin and several others insisted
that he had tried to prevent Tsarnaev from “going to the forest”—in other
words, joining one of the groups fighting a guerrilla war against the local
police.[186] Kartashov told journalist Michele McPhee that Tsarnaev was
talking about “going to the forest” and then on to Syria from the moment he
arrived.[187]
 The locals said though he frequented the Salafi al-Nadira Mosque
while he was there—the same mosque that welcomed the later al Qaeda
leader Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1997[188]—they thought Tsarnaev had been
successfully dissuaded from joining local militia forces in the civil war.
Instead, he decided to take his fight to the people of Massachusetts in the
name of avenging innocents killed by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.
[189]
As a House Homeland Security Committee report later said, it
remained unclear whether local jihadi groups in Chechnya or Dagestan put
the brothers up to their Boston attack. “However, it is reasonable to assume
that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was at least inspired by their activity and ideology,
and driven to take part in the vision of global jihad which they share with al
Qaeda.”[190]

Informant?

According to the younger brother’s lawyers, the FBI had attempted to

recruit the elder brother as an informant.[191] His mother—seemingly not
the most reliable source—later said he had been in contact with the FBI for
five years.[192] He had been arrested in 2009 for assaulting his girlfriend.
Author Masha Gesson has speculated that he may very well have been
recruited then. She said it was highly suspicious that the FBI pretended not
to recognize the two men from the surveillance videos of the crime scene.
They did not release surveillance photos of the brothers for three days, then
asked the public to help identify them when they knew good and well who
they were.[193] They also ignored a tip from the brothers’ aunt positively
identifying them, and kept local police out of the information loop while
targeting the Tsarnaevs’ apartment in Cambridge before their shootout with
police.[194] They claimed not to know who the suspects were until after
fingerprinting the elder Tsarnaev’s corpse. Multiple local police officers
told McPhee they were certain the FBI knew who the suspects were for
days and refused to share the information, even with the suspects armed and
dangerous and on the run.[195] After the younger brother escaped, he only
drove the car about half a mile before pulling over and fleeing on foot.
When Boston police arrived with a dog to follow the perp’s blood trail, the
feds stopped them, ordering them to “keep beyond the perimeter.”[196]
Gesson reasons this was “because it needed to ensure that no other law
enforcement got to Tamerlan Tsarnaev before the FBI had captured—or
killed—him. In other words, the explanation that best fits the facts is a
cover-up.”[197]
Former FBI Executive Assistant Director Stephanie Douglas conceded
at least the likelihood of a relationship between the bureau and the terrorist,
telling CBS that after agents left their business cards, “Tamerlan did call.
He did call to set up that interview. So it wasn’t like we had to go hunt him
down. And I think he actually even volunteered to provide assistance if the
FBI ever wanted assistance in the future.”[198]
In her book Maximum Harm: The Tsarnaev Brothers, The FBI, and the
Road to the Marathon Bombing, McPhee concluded that the elder Tsarnaev
had been flipped into an informant in exchange for U.S. citizenship in late
2010,[199] which he could not otherwise get due to his domestic assault
charge,[200] a deal which FBI agents are trained to make.[201] An April
2011 FBI 302 form—used to document interviews with subjects—noted
how important American citizenship was to Tamerlan, and that he was
“open to all [future] contact with the FBI.”[202] Further, the Tsarnaevs
were originally granted resident status as asylum-seekers. For Tamerlan to
go back home for six months, typically, would cause an alert and possible
deportation. Instead, Tsarnaev’s application was apparently fast-tracked
despite his conflicts, being reopened in August 2012, just after his return
from Dagestan,[203] and getting through to the last stage of the process in
just five months instead of the usual year or two. When a U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services (USCIS) officer expressed concern over
Tsarnaev’s presence on a terrorist watchlist, FBI agent David Cedarleaf told
him, “There is no national security concern related to [Tsarnaev].” Since he
had no “derogatory information,” he had “no opposition to Tsarnaev’s
naturalization.”[204] McPhee told Boston’s WBUR radio that despite all the
stories of law-abiding Muslims with good jobs being unable to get
citizenship, here “you have an unemployed Muslim who’s on multiple
terror watchlists, who is connected to drug dealers, and this guy is the
perfect candidate that the FBI is pushing him through? It makes no
sense.”[205]
McPhee also showed that even though Tsarnaev had been
recommended for citizenship at his meeting with the USCIS on January 23,
2013, one supervisor still had to sign off on it and he was told no. Not
realizing how close he still was, Tsarnaev allegedly stormed out and,
perhaps feeling double-crossed by the FBI, within two weeks began buying
the fireworks he would need to cannibalize to build the bombs for the race.
[206]

Blaming Russia

The FBI also claimed that despite “several requests,” the Russians had
refused to share more information until after the bombing, such as a
conversation from an intercepted phone call where Tsarnaev had discussed
“jihad” with his mother. In a declassified summary of a Justice Department
IG report, they swore the FBI did “all they could,” even while claiming they
did not know he had left the country and acknowledging they had not
followed up after he returned.[207] The fact that the Russians had warned
the feds about the guy two full years before the bombing, and that he had
traveled to Dagestan where he hung out with terrorists in the meantime,
would seem to render that argument null and void. Further, McPhee
reported that the original Russian letters to the FBI and CIA were very
detailed, and went far beyond Tsarnaev mentioning the word “jihad.” It
described text messages between Tamerlan, his mother, and her second
cousin, Magomed Kartashov, a former Dagestan police officer who had
become a leader of the Union of the Just, which Russian authorities had
banned and considered an enemy terrorist group. The Russians also
provided detailed information, again, including addresses and phone
numbers for all of Tsarnaev’s family in the U.S.,[208] and warning that he
was preparing to join armed groups in the Caucasus.
McPhee quoted Boston cops who believed Tsarnaev must have been
sent to help “track and kill the men with whom he was in contact.” The
Russians did say they had an informant. This seems possible. It is notable
that the Russians allowed Tamerlan into the country at all since they were
the ones who first alerted the Americans about him. Or perhaps he was just
building up his reputation for when he got back and could return to the
Boston mosque? As McPhee noted, they had already picked up Plotnikov.
He was the one who told them about Tsarnaev in the first place, though
seemingly back before they had anything on him.[209]
The “Caucasus Emirate” group, led by Doku Umarov, the notorious
terrorist leader who picked up where Shamil Basayev had left off, released
a statement praising their dead martyrs after Plotnikov and his comrades
were killed.[210] The more likely explanation, in the words of a Russian
official quoted in the Novaya Gazeta newspaper, was that “[a]fter Nidal and
Plotnikov were destroyed and he lost his contacts, Tsarnaev got frightened
and fled.”[211]

Busy with BS

Trevor Aaronson is an investigative reporter and author of The Terror

Factory, about the FBI’s post-September 11 policy of entrapping American
Muslims into bogus, headline-generating terrorist plots[212]—for example,
the Detroit 5,[213] Liberty City 7,[214] Fort Dix Pizza Plot,[215] JFK
Airport fuel depot plot,[216] Portland Christmas tree plot,[217] Lodi pole-
vaulting plot,[218] one of the New York subway plots[219] (the other was
real),[220] the Newburgh Air Force Base and Bronx Synagogue plot,[221]
the Baltimore military recruitment station plot,[222] Garland cartoon
attack[223] and the Kansas City train station plot,[224] to name but a few.
Aaronson showed that in the case of the Boston attack, the local FBI office
had been busy entrapping someone in a fake terrorism case as the bombing
plot was unfolding under their nose. While the FBI had interviewed
Tamerlan and checked his internet history, they dropped that investigation,
therefore taking no notice of his communications with his brother about
“jihad” from Dagestan.[225] Meanwhile, they were entrapping an
American-born U.S. citizen, Rezwan Ferdaus, into an elaborate plot to
attack the U.S. Capitol in Washington with remote control airplanes in an
investigation initially based on the word of a heroin addict informant they
paid $50,000.[226] The operation almost certainly helped to distract agents
from the actual terrorists in their midst.[227]
Even if Tamerlan were a government informant, it does not appear the
Boston bombing was the result of such a sting. More significant is the way
the feds seemed to go easy on Tsarnaev in the time preceding the attack,
which would still constitute outrageous negligence if it was verified that
their earlier association was to blame.

Musa

But what about Musa Khadjimuradov? Voice of America reported that he

was a former aide to exiled Akhmed Zakayev and a former Chechen
“resistance fighter” who had been in contact with Tamerlan Tsarnaev less
than one month before the bombing, though he denied ever discussing
religion or politics with the man at all, which seems strange.[228]

No Motive
Humorously, Radio Liberty noted that even though the Dagestani insurgents
did not deny contacts with Tsarnaev, “the insurgency had no motive
whatsoever to attack the United States, especially given that Washington
has reportedly just added Chechen Republic head Ramzan Kadyrov’s name
to the Magnitsky list of people sanctioned by the U.S. government and
banned from entering the United States.” They also argued, really, that it
could not have been them because they like to commit their terrorist attacks
against innocent civilians indoors in more confined spaces, rather than
outside.[229]
Shortly after he returned from Dagestan, Tsarnaev posted videos
suggesting he had taken the side of the Wahhabi radicals against the
country’s traditional Sufis in the low-level civil war that was brewing in
that land after the insurgents’ defeat in Chechnya.[230] He also caused
trouble at his local mosque, interrupting a sermon to denounce the imam’s
mention of Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of nonviolent protest in the
same breath as a lesson from Mohammed.[231]

Motive

Just like 100 percent of anti-American terrorists of that era, those entrapped
by the FBI, so-called “lone wolves” and the occasional actual al Qaeda
member, the Tsarnaev brothers were motivated to attack the United States
as revenge for George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s wars in the Middle
East and South-Central Asia.[232] Surely believing he would soon be
killed, the younger brother scrawled on the inside of the boat where he was
hiding, “The U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of
you already know that. As a Muslim I can’t stand to see such evil go
unpunished. Now I don’t like killing innocent people it [sic] is forbidden in
Islam but due to said [bullet hole] it is allowed.”[233] Ruslan, their father’s
brother, blamed his sister-in-law: “[T]hey are all like their mother. Evil
spawn from an evil woman.”[234]

‘Trust Deficit’

The bottom line is that the attacks clearly could have been prevented if the
American national security state had prioritized working with the Russians
to protect American lives over keeping their pro-al Qaeda options open in
the North Caucasus Mountains. As the Times noted, the bombings “led to
increased cooperation between Washington and Moscow,” which they
called “a jarring shift” after “weeks of rancor over American criticism of
Russia’s human rights record.”
Reuters news service also noted what they called a “trust deficit”
between U.S. and Russian intelligence services when it came to
counterterrorism. Saying the Americans handled the Russian information
about the Tsarnaevs “professionally, although not as a top-priority matter,”
they quoted a senior State Department official who attributed this to the fact
that “[t]he Russians typically file spurious requests on people that are not
really terrorists, and that’s why somebody might have discounted it. One
wouldn’t automatically take what the Russians say at face value. You’d
always have to look for a second corroboration.” Just like with Zacarias
Moussaoui and the September 11 hijackers,[235] the U.S. national security
state’s sympathy for bin Ladenite terrorists in the Northern Caucasus again
had gotten Americans killed.[236]
By way of excusing the official negligence in allowing another deadly
terrorist attack against innocent civilians to take place on their watch,
instead of resigning in disgrace, James Clapper, Obama’s director of
national intelligence,[237] had the temerity to tell the American people,
including the families of the slain—“with a shrug,” according to Reuters—
that “[w]henever the Russians say something about arms control issues,
well, we’re very suspicious. We’re supposed to trust but verify, not accept
what the Russians say. But in this case, we [should] accept it, whatever they
say without question?”[238] Those things have nothing to do with each
other: promises about nuclear warhead stockpile reductions versus warnings
about individual bin Ladenite terrorists on our soil. Was he just bluffing
through his answer as he thought of it? No one said the FBI was not
supposed to verify the Russian warnings. The complaint was that they
should have done so and acted to protect the public.
Though this was the responsibility of the FBI counterintelligence and
counterterrorism divisions, it was Clapper’s as well. As DNI, he is supposed
to coordinate information-sharing and cooperation between the agencies,
including the FBI, to prevent terrorist attacks against the United States. No
government employees were held responsible for their failures in this case
in any way, especially not the people in charge.

Who Made the Bombs?

No one knows who made the explosives used in the Boston attack. Al
Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s Inspire magazine had run an article called
“Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.”[239] At the younger
brother’s trial, prosecutors argued Tamerlan had simply copied the
magazine. But the U.S. attorney had filed a motion stating, “These
relatively sophisticated devices would have been difficult for the Tsarnaevs
to fabricate successfully without training or assistance from others.”[240]
ABC News was told that “many within the FBI, law enforcement and
counterterrorism strongly disagree that they could have become good
enough to make the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) from online how-
to’s and suspect an expert taught or instructed Tamerlan on the craft of
bombmaking while he was overseas in 2012.” They said that, in fact, the
Boston bombs “had a much more sophisticated design than the one in the
online magazine, including differences in the initiators, power source and
switch/trigger, which utilized a toy car remote control.” Inspire had only
included instructions for using a motorcycle remote starter.[241] No black
powder was found at any Tsarnaev location.[242]
There were a few different friends and associates of the Tsarnaev
brothers that the feds seemed to take an extreme disinterest in. The most
compelling of these is the case of Daniel Morely. In June 2013, he attacked
and threatened his mother and stepfather, who called the police. After the
cops took him away, they found a veritable pressure-cooker bomb
workshop in his bedroom, including the same make of cooker and same
type of fuse used in the Boston attacks, along with numerous guns, rifles
and swords.[243]
 Morely had disappeared on the day of the bombing and for another day
afterwards, with an unlikely alibi that he had gone fishing with a friend.
Though there are no concrete ties between Morely and the elder Tsarnaev,
there are possible connections, since they went to the same community
college and trained at the same gyms at the same time. Morely later seemed
to incriminate himself to his mother when she asked about that friend,
saying he had done something “really bad” and, “I’m sorry for what I’ve
done . . . and I will have to answer only to God.” Perhaps the Department of
Justice had already given him his get-out-of-jail-free card. The man’s
stepfather, who immediately after the bombing had been suspicious that
Morely was involved, started receiving flyers from the same New
Hampshire vendor who sold Tsarnaev the fireworks used in the Boston
attack. Morely had searched the address of a gun range where the Tsarnaev
brothers went to practice 10 days later. The feds were still not interested.
[244]
On the night the local police officer was killed, April 18, someone
robbed a 7-Eleven clerk for less than $30 while talking on his phone. At
first the cops assumed it was the bomber brothers, but they later dropped
that accusation. When Michele McPhee showed the surveillance photos to
Morely’s stepfather and friends, they were all certain it was him. McPhee’s
theory is that the brothers were there at MIT that night to try to break into
the lab, where Morely formerly worked, to steal more explosive precursors,
and that Morely’s robbery of the store was meant as a deliberate distraction.
[245]

Unsolved Murders
It turns out the Boston Bombing case was really lousy with unsolved
murders, including of a witness who was shot to death by FBI agents while
he was being questioned in his apartment. Really.[246] The cops say the
man, Ibragim Todashev, implicated himself and Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the
murder of three men on September 11, 2011, before attacking and being
killed by his interrogators.[247] At least four different friends had
mentioned Tsarnaev’s name to police after the killings, and again when
Tsarnaev failed to show up for the funeral or memorial for one of the
victims who had been his good friend. But the police never talked to him.
Nor did they question the people at the victims’ regular hangouts.[248]
Referring to an ongoing case against Eritrean cocaine dealers with
alleged connections to al-Shabaab in Somalia, police sources told McPhee
that the reason they did not investigate Tamerlan for the triple murder was
that “he was too valuable as an asset working for the federal government on
a drug case with ties to overseas terrorism and as an informant who had
infiltrated a mosque around the corner from his house with ties to radical
Islam and convicted terrorists.”[249]

Lockdown

The governor of Massachusetts issued a “stay in place” order, and the

people of Boston, Cambridge and Watertown obeyed it. The Times
described the scene: “SWAT teams and Humvees rolled through residential
streets. Military helicopters hovered overhead. Bomb squads were called to
several locations. And Boston, New England’s largest city, was essentially
shut down.” That included the buses and colleges, trains, ballgames and
concerts all day and into the evening.[250]
It was a hunt for one young man who they knew had fled on foot from
his abandoned vehicle and could only be within one small isolated area.
Cops went door to door searching innocent people’s homes,[251] while
SWAT teams from every possible jurisdiction rolled up and down every
street, not searching for Dzhokhar, but simply making a show of force,
including pointing their rifles at homes, and specifically at citizens looking
out their windows.[252] “An elderly man left his home and was promptly
surrounded,” ABC News reported. “They had this robot go up and take
some things off him,” then-Boston Police Super-intendent William Evans
told them. “There were a lot of false alarms. People are running
scared.”[253]
Of course, the lockdown actually prevented the cops from finding the
younger brother. Only when they finally lifted it did local citizen George
Henneberry go outside to fix the tarp on his boat, parked on a trailer in his
backyard, which he had noticed hours before had been disturbed. Once he
was allowed to go into his own backyard, he finally investigated and saw
the suspect lying inside.[254]
Trigger-happy cops then unloaded 126 rounds on the unarmed suspect
and threw in multiple flashbang grenades, destroying the man’s boat and
still missing the younger Tsarnaev brother completely.

Solidarity
The Russians too were still dealing with bin Ladenite terrorism. In 2011, a
suicide bomber killed 36 people in an attack on Moscow’s Domodedovo
airport.[255] Putin told a local audience, “I just urge that this tragedy push
us closer together in stopping common threats, one of the most important
and dangerous of which is terrorism. And if we really unite efforts we
would stop such strikes and such losses.” Radio Liberty noted that “Putin
accused the West of providing ‘informational, financial, and political’
support to militants in the North Caucasus that Russia considers terrorists.”
They were reporting on the aftermath of a suicide bombing at a civilian
airport. “Russia itself has been a victim of international terrorism, one of
the first such victims,” Putin said. “And I have always been annoyed when
our Western partners and your colleagues from the Western media called
our terrorists—who committed brutal, bloody, sickening crimes on the
territory of our country—called them insurgents and almost never called
them terrorists.”[256]

The Maidan Revolution

OceanofPDF.com
Association Agreement

The war in Ukraine began in 2014. That is the view of the head of Ukraine’s
armed forces from 2021 to 2024, General Valerii Zaluzhnyi. He told the
Economist in 2022, “For us, for the military, the war began in 2014. For me
personally in July 2014.”[257] Even the New York Times commonly refers
to events in the 2022– war with the phrase “since the start of Russia’s full-
scale invasion,”[258] conceding implicitly that the fighting began well
before that. Well, who started it?
Too often, blind to history and context, many Americans see these
problems only through TV news anchors’ eyes—or those of the “current
thing” on social media. For example, most caught up in the modern
narrative about undiluted Russian aggression do not know that in 2014, the
U.S. government backed a violent street putsch against Viktor Yanukovych
—the elected president of Ukraine, the same man they had helped prevent
from taking power in the Orange Revolution of 2004—or how that led to
the current crisis. This so-called “Euromaidan Revolution,” or “Revolution
of Dignity,” was in fact the “most blatant coup in history,” in the words of
Stratfor’s George Friedman.[259]
“Freedom is being threatened by Russian aggression!” the narrative
went,[260] which could not have been further from the truth. It was a battle
over spheres of influence. Russia’s is inside their own borders only, and
only for the time being. America’s is the entire sphere.
Then-National Endowment for Democracy head Carl Gershman, a
card-carrying neoconservative from the Social Democrats USA and the
Committee on the Free World,[261] wrote in the Washington Post in
September 2013, just before the U.S.-backed Ukrainian Euromaidan
movement began, concerning America’s high-stakes contest with Russia for
influence in Eastern Europe. He declared that “Ukraine is the ‘biggest
prize’” in the negotiations, and acknowledged that President Yanukovych
was attempting to make the reforms necessary to strike a deal with the EU.
Gershman explained that the “restoration of [Russian] imperial
greatness . . . would be inconceivable if Ukraine joined Europe.” He then
threatened, “Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the
losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself.”[262]
Yanukovych, from the eastern Party of Regions, bullied and insulted by
the Russians and heavily lobbied by the EU, was dead set on signing[263]
an association agreement with the European Union.[264] According to three
witnesses, he told those in his cabinet who favored stronger ties with
Russia, “Forget about it . . . forever!”[265] The cabinet had already
approved the agreement.[266] The U.S. then issued an international warrant
and had the government of Austria arrest Dmitry Firtash, a major oligarch
patron of Yanukovych, on charges he had bribed an official in India. “If
Yanukovych were to be persuaded to change his mind, threatening to put his
sponsor Dmitry Firtash behind bars was a potent lever to apply,” journalist
Andrew Cockburn noted. “Four days later, Yanukovych signaled he was
ready to sign, whereupon Washington lifted the request to shackle his
billionaire ally.”[267] But the EU drove too hard a bargain.

EU Sabotage
Before signing the deal, the Europeans insisted on a severe austerity regime,
the freezing of government salaries and pensions, an end to subsidies for
heavy industry in Ukraine’s east, and huge hikes in utility rates. Both the
EU and IMF were reluctant to lend Ukraine nearly as much as they needed
to stay solvent.[268] The EU also demanded that Yanukovych release his
imprisoned political rival, the billionaire “Gas Princess” Yulia Tymoshenko,
short-lived co-victor of the 2004 Orange Revolution.[269]
Since Russia and Ukraine signed a new trade agreement in 2003,[270]
Putin’s government worried that a new deal between the EU and Ukraine
would flood the Russian market with cheaper finished goods from Europe,
undermining their own exports to Ukraine and industrial capacity.[271] This
caused concern among many decrepit old firms and the population in
Ukraine’s industrial east as well.[272] There was also a history of enmity
between the international financial institutions and Ukraine’s elected leader
because Yanukovych had refused to enact tax and pension reform bills and
gas subsidy cuts the IMF had demanded in 2011.[273]

Russian Hardball

The Russians told the Ukrainians that if they signed with the EU, their trade
pact would be canceled,[274] though Putin also at least publicly
contradicted that, saying he did not mind if Ukraine signed the EU
association agreement as well.[275] However, it was clear that any benefit
from a new deal with Europe would not come close to making up for all the
money Ukraine had to lose if their trade agreement with Russia fell through.
[276] Putin had ordered “quality checks” at the border that were already
severely restricting trade as an example of what would happen if they
continued on the path to an EU deal,[277] while ultimately offering a $15
billion loan and billions more in discounts on natural gas if Ukraine would
go with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) instead.[278]
Yanukovych had signed a $10 billion deal with Chevron to develop
Ukrainian shale oil on November 4. This may have been part of Russia’s
motive to drive such a hard bargain. “I’m very determined to cooperate with
the Ukrainian government in strengthening Ukraine’s energy independence.
There are several areas on the road to this goal,” Geoffrey Pyatt, the U.S.
ambassador to Ukraine, told the International Business Times.[279]
Ukrainian Energy Minister Eduard Stavytsky, who signed the deal, said,
“This is one more step towards achieving full energy independence for the
state. This will bring cheaper gas prices and the sort of just prices which
exist (elsewhere) in the world.” The reporters added helpfully, “Late last
month, Russia’s gas export monopoly Gazprom demanded Ukraine pay a
$882 million overdue gas bill urgently.”[280]
European Union officials had previously explained that Ukraine could
not sign an association agreement with the EU if they were members of
Russia’s customs union.[281] The EU was trying to force Yanukovych to
end his deal with Russia,[282] though this may have had the effect of
driving the Ukrainian president toward Russia without reassuring them
against the alleged threat of a flood of cheaper European finished goods.
Ben Aris, editor of Business News Europe, formerly with the UK’s
conservative Telegraph—who said he was “very sympathetic to the
protesters,” and that “Yanukovych is corrupt and should be voted out in
2015”—explained why the Ukrainian president backed out of the EU
association agreement: Kiev was bankrupt. The EU was only offering $160
million per year in loans, “while just the bond repayments to [the] IMF
were greater than that.” The Russians, on the other hand, offered $15 billion
and immediately handed over $3 billion of it. He said it was false that
Yanukovych was Putin’s puppet; it was just that “[h]ad Yanukovych
accepted the EU deal, the country would have collapsed.” The EU deal also
limited Ukrainian exports while forcing them to allow all imports.[283]
German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters, “I feel like I’m at a
wedding where the groom has suddenly issued new, last-minute
stipulations.”[284] But George Soros agreed with Aris, blaming Merkel for
the trouble. “True to form,” he wrote, “the EU under German leadership
offered far too little and demanded far too much from Ukraine,” causing the
deal to fall through.[285] Merkel then hinted that perhaps Ukraine could
sign a deal with the EU while keeping their free trade deal with Russia,
which the failed association agreement had forbidden. “It cannot be that a
situation arises where a land that lies between Russia and the European
Union must make a basic decision, that will always be seen as either for the
one or the other,” she belatedly acknowledged.[286]
The EU accord also contained a clause obligating Ukraine to
standardize its military with NATO, stating that they “shall aim at
increasing policy convergence and effectiveness, and promoting joint policy
planning.”[287]
The U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, had dismissed
Moscow’s concerns about the EU deal. It is just an association agreement,
and no cause for alarm, he had told them.[288] He failed to persuade. The
Russians offered a better deal. Accepting it on November 21, Yanukovych
announced a delay in signing the EU agreement.[289]

Maidan Protests Begin

The Maidan protest movement kicked off that night, November 21, after
Ukrainian activist Mustafa Nayyem, the co-founder of the USAID and
George Soros-backed[290] Hromadske TV, announced the onset of protests.
[291] On November 24, the anniversary of the Orange Revolution,
opposition leaders Vitali Klitschko, Arseniy Yatsenyuk and Oleh Tyahnybok
jointly coordinated a pro-EU march, which succeeded in bringing tens of
thousands out to the Maidan encampment.[292]
Contrary to the mythology that the Yanukovych regime struck first on
November 30,[293] the first clashes began the night of the 24th,[294] which
the pro-Maidan Kyiv Post said started when the protesters attacked the cops’
van.[295]
On the morning of November 30, the Berkut national police used
batons, tear gas and stun grenades to clear Independence Square, a major
gathering point for the demonstrators.[296] But the move backfired.
Protesters rallied, and tens of thousands more showed up, including people
bused in from cities across Ukraine’s west.[297] The Kyiv Post reported,
“Interestingly, the EU ambassador and nine ambassadors from EU countries
(notably, Poland, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Sweden, and
Finland) joined the demonstration, clearly on orders from their
capitals.”[298]
 On December 1, protesters smashed the windows of the city council
building and took it over, along with the Trade Union House. In their
attempt to seize the presidential administration office, neo-Nazi umbrella
group Right Sector and their allies attacked police with hammers, bricks
and Molotov cocktails. They also seized a bulldozer and used it to smash
through their lines and the front gate of the building. Approximately 100
officers were wounded, along with 50 protesters. The Svoboda Party’s Oleh
Tyahnybok called for a general strike and a “social and nationalist
revolution.”[299] On December 2, police withdrew, allowing protesters to
put up barricades and seize the city council building.[300] The next day,
Yanukovych survived a confidence vote in the Rada.[301]

Taking Sides

Victoria Nuland is the wife of neoconservative theoretician Robert Kagan.

[302] She had previously been chief of staff to Strobe Talbott in the 1990s,
deputy national security adviser to Vice President Cheney and then
ambassador to NATO in the 2000s, State Department spokeswoman under
Hillary Clinton in Obama’s first term (2009–2013),[303] and in 2014 was
assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs under
Secretary of State John Kerry. On December 10, Nuland went to Kiev to
meet with protest leaders and show her support. With Ambassador Geoffrey
Pyatt, she passed out cookies and sandwiches to the protesters and police,
[304] though it was the former group which got more attention.[305]
Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy stood on stage with Oleh
Tyahnybok of Svoboda and Arseniy Yatsenyuk of Yulia Tymoshenko’s
Fatherland Party, and announced that the U.S. government supported their
cause.[306]
The Americans openly admitted their success would be devastating to
Russia’s position. McCain told CNN, “There’s no doubt that Ukraine is of
vital importance to Putin. I think it was Henry Kissinger, I’m not sure,
[who] said that ‘Russia, without Ukraine it’s an eastern power, with Ukraine
it’s a western power.’ This is the beginning of Russia, right here in
Kiev.”[307] It was actually Zbigniew Brzezinski who wrote something like
that,[308] but he and Kissinger were virtually interchangeable anyway.
[309]

Nuland’s Big Claims

In the middle of it all, on December 19, 2013, Nuland gave a speech to

corporate big wigs at the U.S.-Ukraine Foundation in Washington, which is
financed by the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council, with a giant Chevron logo
behind her. After claiming “the people of Ukraine” want to be integrated
into Europe, she said the government’s clampdown on the protesters had
become a renewed reason for them, as well as a basis for threats from her.
“I spent more than two hours with President Yanukovych. It was a tough
conversation but also a realistic one,” Nuland said. “I made absolutely clear
to him on behalf of the United States that what happened December 10 and
more generally what has been happening in security terms is absolutely
impermissible in a European state, in a democratic state.”
She added, “I also made clear that the United States believes there is a
way out for Ukraine, that it is still possible to save Ukraine’s European
future, and that that is where we wanted to see the president lead his
country.” To that end she instructed him to restart negotiations with the EU
and IMF. Nuland told the assembled corporate chiefs that “the reforms that
the IMF insists on are necessary for the long-term economic health of the
country,” and that “a new deal with the IMF would also send a positive
signal to private markets and would increase foreign direct investment that
is so urgently needed in Ukraine.” Nuland added, “So it is time to finish the
job, as Vice President Biden said in remarks last night.”
Then she really started cutting loose: “While these are challenging
times in many ways, we also can’t lose sight of the fact that this is a time
for great optimism as well. You only have to be on the Maidan to feel the
energy; to feel the hope of Ukrainians coursing through the center of Kiev.”
She said that the United States had spent more than $5 billion since 1991
supporting supposed pro-democracy (read: pro-Western) groups[310] and
that they were now ready to choose their “pro-European future.” Nuland
could feel the Ukrainians agreeing with her, she claimed.[311] Except that
polls showed half of them did not agree.[312]
Her assertion that the revolution was simply a grassroots movement
that pitted “the people of Ukraine” against the evil Yanukovych regime was
just not true. Half the country supported him and opposed joining the EU.
He was elected twice, after all. That is why the most powerful country in all
of world history, ours, had to resort to this intervention—staging two phony
revolutions—in theirs.
Then-Prime Minister Mykola Asarov said that Nuland threatened that
Yanukovych had better not attempt to end the protests with force “or you’ll
fall.”[313]
The Washington Post went uncharacteristically hard against the
consensus with a piece they ran 10 days before the coup, certainly putting
the lie to Nuland’s claim to be channeling the will of the entire population.
“Ukrainians are pretty clearly divided,” they reported. No surveys “show a
significant majority of the population supporting the protest movement and
several show a majority opposed.”
They added, “The protesters’ inability to garner greater support is
surprising given the fact that Yanukovych’s popularity is far below 50
percent (although he is still apparently the most popular political figure in
the country).” They said that “[o]ne reason for this failure is that anti-
Russian rhetoric and the iconography of western Ukrainian nationalism
does not play well among the Ukrainian majority,” adding, “The anti-
Russian forms of Ukrainian nationalism expressed on the Maidan are
certainly not representative of the general view of Ukrainians.” They also
noted plurality support, but “hardly a clear mandate” for membership in the
European Union.[314] Further, far greater than a supermajority, 83 percent,
of the protesters on the Maidan were self-described Ukrainian speakers and
ethnically Ukrainian, and merely 2 percent were from the east or south of
the country.[315]
Just a quick look at a map of electoral results from 2004 and 2010
shows a stark representation of the ethnic, linguistic and political divide
inside Ukraine.[316] The sharp division in party and region goes to show
why the Americans favored one side over the other and why many in the
east reacted the way they did after the U.S. intervened against their same
elected president twice in 10 years.

Intercepted

On February 7, 2014, someone leaked an intercepted phone call between

Nuland and Ambassador Pyatt.[317] They were simply caught red-handed
deciding which major protest leaders would fill what positions in Ukraine’s
new government. Vitali Klitschko, the boxer, UDAR Party (Ukrainian
Democratic Alliance for Reform) leader, and later member of parliament
and mayor of Kiev, was to be kept out of leadership but in the public
spotlight. He was to be handled by Oleh Tyahnybok, the Hitler-saluting
former member of the Rada, former presidential candidate[318] and leader
of the Svoboda Party, formerly the “Social Nationalist Party” if you can
believe it.[319] In 2005, as a member of parliament, Tyahnybok wrote
several “open letters” to President Yushchenko demanding he stop the
“criminal activity of organized Jewry.”[320] One of his party’s demands
was for Ukrainian citizens to have their ethnicity printed on their passports.
[321] He told his group in 2004, “It’s time to give back Ukraine to
Ukrainians. [You are the ones] that the Moscow-Jewish mafia ruling
Ukraine fears most.” This led to his expulsion from Viktor Yushchenko’s
party, Our Ukraine.[322]
But “‘Yats’ is the guy,” Nuland declared, referring to Arseniy
Yatsenyuk, from Yulia Tymoshenko’s party, Fatherland, whom she wanted
to be prime minister. A State Department cable by Ambassador William
Taylor identified Yatsenyuk as being closely tied to oligarch Viktor
Pinchuk, who is the son-in-law of former President Leonid Kuchma and
close to the West.[323] His foundation gave at least $8.6 million to the
Clinton Foundation while Hillary was secretary of state in Obama’s first
term, for example.[324] Presumably it was the Russians who intercepted
and posted the audio on YouTube where everyone could hear it two weeks
before the overthrow. They just went through with it anyway.
The State Department did not deny the audio was authentic or claim it
was edited. Instead, they simply apologized for the foul language—“Fuck
the EU,” Nuland had said—a limited hangout if there ever was one.[325] It
was clear U.S. officials had been plotting a coup weeks before they finally
carried it out.[326]
Hawks often claim that, in fact, Nuland and Pyatt were talking about
compromising in a new deal with Yanukovych. Under pressure from the
Americans and Europeans, Yanukovych dismissed his prime minister and
cabinet in late January.[327] But the U.S., EU and UN forcing the president
to accept their hand-picked prime minister and hold early elections is still a
coup, even if the worst was still to come. It was major foreign powers who
were “midwifing,” “glueing” and “sticking” the transition, “making it sail,”
as Nuland and Pyatt said on the call. Besides, Yanukovych had already
offered to make Yatsenyuk the new prime minister, but this deal had been
rejected out of hand by the leaders of the Maidan. They were still holding
out for the president’s resignation while the U.S. continued to support them.
[328] And though Nuland and Pyatt are recorded discussing why they did
not want Tyahnybok in the new government, he had not been offered a
position in Yanukovych’s proposal, another indication they were not
considering that deal, but planning to force through their own. Tyahnybok
did, however, credit the role of his Svoboda party “ultras” on the side of the
Maidan for Yanukovych’s willingness to compromise, boasting, “We put the
squeeze on him.”[329]
The Christian Science Monitor’s Dan Murphy—certainly no Putin
apologist[330]—explained the context of the intercepted Nuland phone call:
“Her strong statement of preference for how Ukraine’s government should
be formed—and apparent confidence that the U.S. has major influence over
that—is a reminder of the disconnect between U.S. government assurances
that it doesn’t meddle in nations’ internal politics and its actual behavior.”
He added, “This was not a conversation analyzing unfolding events and
how to respond to what comes next. This was about molding a situation
according to U.S. interests.”[331]
Journalist Keith Gessen wrote, “What was remarkable about the
episode was the utter confidence with which Nuland seemed to speak for
the United States and its policy.” He added, “From the start of his
administration, President Barack Obama had tried to lower tensions with
Russia and refocus American attention on a rising China; he had made clear
he wanted no part in the problems of the post-Soviet periphery.” But, he
noted, the neocons do whatever they want: “Yet in the middle of the
uprising in Kiev, there was Nuland, encouraging protesters and insulting
European allies. And after the call leaked, it was Nuland, as much as
Obama, who came to personify American policy for everyday
Russians.”[332]
 That was written in 2018. But at the time, the Times went along with
the rest of the major media in crafting a meaningless narrative to explain
away the important truth that had been revealed: Nuland said a bad word on
a phone call. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour and other leaders of the news
narrative had their hook: “Top U.S. Diplomat Launches F-bomb on EU in
Leaked Recorded Conversation.”[333] And that was that.
But why was she cursing the EU anyway? Are they not our friends?
Was not the whole point to force Ukraine into an association agreement
with them? Nuland’s complaint was that the Germans were moving too
slowly and seeking compromise. So she decided to get Robert Serry, a
former Dutch ambassador to Kiev, who was Secretary-General Ban Ki-
moon’s new representative at the UN, and the men in Vice President
Biden’s office to “glue” the deal instead. Nuland told Pyatt she’d just heard
from Biden’s then- and later-national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, that
the vice president was “willing,” and said she would arrange a conference
call between him and the new pending regime so that Biden could give an
“attaboy” and “get the deets [details] to stick.” The Post confirmed Biden
and Yanukovych had spoken several times in January and February 2014 as
well.[334]
But once Yanukovych was forced to accept the deal in negotiations
with the UN and EU, overseen by the United States, he was quickly
deposed by local actors.

The Same Old NGO Scam

The NED’s Carl Gershman himself later referred to this revolution as a
successful “overthrow” of Yanukovych.[335] Apologists for this
intervention like to cry that accusers are “denying the agency” of the
Ukrainians who did the coup. But that is ridiculous. Every CIA- or NED-
backed coup plot in history has relied on local forces to agitate and then
ultimately take over the country. Domestic opponents who accepted U.S.
help to replace Shukri al-Quwatli, Mohammad Mosaddeq, Jacobo Árbenz,
Ngo Dinh Diem, Sukarno, João Goulart, Cheddi Jagan, Patrice Lumumba,
Rafael Trujillo, Gough Whitlam, Salvador Allende, Jean-Bertrand Aristide,
Vladimír Mečiar, Franjo Tudjman, Slobodan Milošević, Eduard
Shevardnadze, Askar Akayev, Manuel Zelaya, Muammar Gaddafi,
Mohamed Morsi, Evo Morales, Viktor Yanukovych, etc. all had “agency,”
alright: they were the sock puppets of “the Agency”—the American CIA
and their junior partners at USAID, the NED and the rest of the regime
change industry.
The question is regarding the motives behind and extent of U.S.
government intervention and whether it helped to make a difference in the
success of the regime change. As former CIA Director of Operations Ray S.
Cline put it, in reference to the successful 1953 Iran coup, what counted
was “supplying just the right bit of marginal assistance in the right way at
the right time. Such is the nature of effective political action.”[336] The
Ukrainians and their factions are the pieces, while major powers America
and Russia are the players in this game of chess.
For example, Center UA was a “civil society” group run by Oleh
Rybachuk, the former chief of staff of ex-President Yushchenko,[337] who
had been central to the CIA-MI6 scheme to work with the Ukrainian SBU
against Yanukovych during the Orange Revolution of 2004,[338] and
bankrolled by American oligarchs Pierre Omidyar—who donated $335,000
in 2011 alone[339]—and, though he later denied it,[340] George Soros. The
Open Society Foundation was happy to take credit where it was due. “The
International Renaissance Foundation played an important role supporting
civil society during the Euromaidan protests,” they boasted, adding that
they had paid for legal aid for “activists, protesters and journalists,” as well
as medical care and assistance to Hromadske TV and other pro-Maidan
media.[341] The Kyiv Post reported in 2014 that USAID gave Center UA
more than $500,000 in 2012 through an NGO called Pact Inc., adding,
“Nearly 36 percent came from Omidyar Network, a foundation established
by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife.” And, of course, Soros’s
International Renaissance Foundation and NED picked up the rest.[342]
With the help of USAID-backed Pact Inc., Rybachuk’s Center UA
organized approximately 60 different NGOs and provided grants to at least
80 more. Rybachuk also headed up the Civic Expert Council, advocating for
Ukraine to sign the new association agreement with the EU.[343]
As soon as Amb. Pyatt got to Kiev, he approved a $50,000 USAID
grant to Hromadske TV. Their editor-in-chief Roman Skrypin worked for
the U.S. government’s Radio Liberty and the also-U.S.-funded Ukrainska
Pravda. He got another $30,000 from Soros’s International Renaissance
Foundation. Skrypin also helped to set up the Channel 5 TV network with
money from the IRF in time for the Orange Revolution in 2004. USAID
gave Pact Inc. $7 million in 2013.[344] “Euromaidan Press,” official
mouthpiece of the Maidan movement, admitted two years later that they got
the vast majority of their funding from Soros’s Renaissance Foundation.
[345] Their website still reads, “Euromaidan Press is grateful for the
longtime support of the International Renaissance Foundation,” and for “the
past support of GPD Charitable Trust, British Embassy Kyiv, and National
Democratic Institute.”[346]
IRF beneficiary Viktoria Siumar from Hromadske Radio thanked Soros
for all his generosity, saying that “without those efforts the revolution might
not have succeeded. . . . Partners of the IRF were the main driving force and
the foundation of the Maidan movement.”[347]
This is how it works. As the Financial Times reported, “Kiev-based
New Citizen, headed by Rybachuk . . . played a big role in getting the
protest up and running weeks ago when Yanukovych backed out of signing
far-reaching association and free trade agreements with the EU.”[348] The
plan had been in the works for years. As Rybachuk told the Financial Post
back in 2012, “We now have 150 NGOs in all the major cities in our ‘clean
up Parliament campaign.’ . . . Facebook had 300,000 members a year ago
and now has two million. The Orange Revolution was a miracle. . . . We
want to do that again and we think we will.”[349]
Mustafa Nayyem, co-founder of Hromadske TV, explained in an article
for Soros’s Open Societies Foundation that he had kicked the protests off on
November 21 with a Facebook post asking people to meet at the Maidan.
[350] But as journalist Kit Klarenberg explained, “Nayyem was no ordinary
‘online journalist.’ In October 2012, he was one of six Ukrainians whisked
to Washington, D.C., by Meridian International, a State Department-
connected organization that identifies and grooms future overseas leaders,
to ‘observe and experience’ that year’s Presidential election.” The group
met with Senator John McCain among others while they were in town.[351]
Also interestingly, Klarenberg found that “[i]n the hours following
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, NED hurried to remove any and all trace of
its funding for organizations in Ukraine from its website.” He noted that
while the NED grants database for Ukraine returned no results, “a snapshot
of the page captured February 25th [2022] reveals that since 2014, a total of
334 projects in the country have been awarded a staggering $22.4 million,”
adding that “by NED President Duane Wilson’s reckoning, Kiev is the
organization’s fourth-largest funding recipient worldwide.”[352] Journalist
Will Porter found scrubbed NED records showing they had spent $4.5
million on 70 separate projects in 2013–2014 alone.[353] Is the NED
leadership not proud of the assistance they have given? Evidently they find
it preferable to keep their name out of the prehistory of this terrible conflict.
Forbes magazine dug even deeper into Hromadske TV’s funding and
found contributions from the U.S., Swiss and German embassies, various
Canadian and Swiss government agencies and assorted NGOs, as well as
the European Commission’s Ukrainian delegation office. “[D]onations from
the European Commission are a particularly interesting reveal,” Forbes
noted, “given the anti-Russian government news . . . coming out of
Hromadske.”[354] Rather than a grassroots effort of “the Ukrainian
people,” as Nuland claimed, USAID’s annual report from 2013 makes it
clear that Ukraine’s entire “civil society” was nothing but American and
Western European astroturf. Their NGOs spent at least tens of millions of
dollars picking and choosing winners across many different fields.[355]
Soros’s Freedom House even sent out a fundraising appeal based on
their intervention in this case. “More support, including yours, is urgently
needed to ensure that Ukrainian citizens struggling for their freedom are
protected and supported.”[356] No point in their being modest. The group’s
David J. Kramer had issued an official statement demanding Yanukovych
resign on December 9.[357]
Ukrainian oligarch Igor Kolomoysky, who controlled vast oil, gas and
banking interests in the country,[358] had an old grudge against
Yanukovych from previous fights over the semi-private oil company
Ukrtatnafta.[359] He quickly employed his TV channel 1+1 in service of
the protest movement.[360]

A Violent Putsch

The Radical Right

Down in the street where it counted, violent neo-Nazis were the

counterparts to the American superpower’s string-pullers from on high,
completing the overthrow of the Yanukovych government with violence and
credible threats to take his life.
Five days after the protests began, groups including Patriot of Ukraine,
Stepan Bandera’s Trident, the Ukrainian National Assembly-Ukrainian
People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO) and White Hammer joined forces to
create Right Sector.[361] Other Nazi militias on the street included
Common Cause and the Svoboda Party’s militia C14,[362] which is named
for the 14 words of American neo-Nazi David Lane’s slogan, “We must
secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”[363]
The brother of Soros’s Hromadske TV’s Mustafa Nayyem, who first called
for the Maidan protests in November 2013, is C14’s lawyer.[364]
Without a doubt, it was these groups who completed the overthrow of
Yanukovych’s government. This reality was covered by many Western press
agencies for years—it is a great news story—before they dropped it in favor
of the opposite narrative, that only pro-Russian partisans would ever tell
such a lie.[365] In that case, many major media outlets and other
publications, including numerous scholarly journals and books by
credentialed mainstream American and European academics who have
covered the Maidan Revolution, must have all been spouting Russian
talking points too. The New York Times admitted, “While foreign reports on
the unrest in Kiev often depicted peaceful scenes of tens of thousands
waving European flags, some of those hurt said it was always clear to them
that violence would be needed for real change.”[366]
Perhaps it is important to note here that though it is currently common
in American political culture for liberals and leftists to falsely characterize
anyone to the right of the so-called political center as a “fascist,”[367] the
reader can be certain that is not what is taking place here. These guys are
actually national socialists, white supremacists and ethnic nationalists who
admire Adolf Hitler and his agents—exactly the kind of people who show
those accusations[368] against American conservative and populist
Republicans[369] to be false.
 As Lev Golinkin wrote in The Nation in 2016, “Ukraine had an
established far-right movement long before the Maidan upheavals of late
2013–early 2014,” including the Social-National Assembly and Svoboda
Party, led by Oleh Tyahnybok, one of the big three opposition leaders that
Senators McCain and Murphy shared the stage with during the protests.
[370]
The New Yorker published a piece admitting that the openly declared
“fascists” of Right Sector (Pravyi Sektor) “played a crucial role, providing
muscle to protesters who were largely unequipped to do their own
fighting.”[371] And even Hannah Thoburn, a pro-Maidan hawk from
neoconservative ringleader Bill Kristol’s Foreign Policy Initiative, still
admitted that Svoboda and Right Sector were Nazis and potentially
dangerous to Ukraine’s Jews, all while still spinning for their side.[372]
Relatively early on in the process, the Times described Tyahnybok’s
Svoboda thugs as “among the most fearsome demonstrators [who] have led
some of the more provocative efforts to occupy buildings and block
government offices.”[373]
The BBC wrote about Right Sector in early February, just weeks
before the coup, calling them a “key factor behind the recent violence in
Kiev.” They were not afraid to fight the police either. “The group’s account
on the VKontakte social network that day encouraged members to come to
the scene, bringing bottles for Molotov cocktails and bombs.” The outlet
said that while Right Sector played a key role in the pro-EU protests, their
ultimate goal, in the words of one leader, “is not having closer ties with
Brussels but ‘staging a nationalist revolution.’”[374] Leading up to the
coup, Svoboda bused in 600 men per day to the Maidan in Kiev from Lviv
in Ukraine’s west.[375] On February 18, their political council member
Yury Noyevy also said they did not favor joining the European Union, but
wanted to use the unrest to finalize their turn away from the East: “The
participation of Ukrainian nationalism and Svoboda in the process of EU
integration is a means to break our ties with Russia.”[376]
Time magazine reported that Common Cause had seized the
Agriculture Ministry, the Energy Ministry and Justice Ministry buildings by
the end of January and that the more moderate protest leaders like Vitali
Klitschko had no control over the radical right in the Maidan.[377]

Uprisings Across the West

Right Sector seized dozens of local and regional government buildings

across western and central Ukraine in late January to help ensure the
success of the revolution, or to guarantee a base of insurgency were it to be
crushed.[378]
The Guardian reported on January 24 that they had sacked the regional
governor of Lviv Oblast and forced him to resign, adding that “[t]housands
also stormed regional administration headquarters in Rivne, breaking down
doors and demanding the release of people detained in the unrest there.”
They said, “In the town of Cherkasy, 125 miles south of Kiev, about 1,000
protesters took over the first two floors of the main administration building
and lit fires outside,” and that “[s]imilar action took place in Ternopil,
Ivano-Frankivsk and Khmelnytsky in western and central Ukraine.”[379]
 For months, photos came in of neo-Nazis among the crowd, picking
fights with police and waving their red and black Ukrainian Insurgent Army
(UPA) flags alongside those of Svoboda.[380]
Just as the demonstrators seemed to be running out of enthusiasm,
[381] on January 16 the Rada passed the so-called “dictatorship laws,”
essentially outlawing the protest movement. In response to this, Right
Sector, seeing a “chance to revolutionize the situation,” in the words of their
leader Dimitry Yarosh,[382] led a group of protesters toward the Rada, and
attacked the police with rocks and Molotov cocktails, setting the cops’
buses on fire. From at least that point on, Right Sector was the dominant
force on the Maidan.[383] Yarosh, co-founder of Stepan Bandera’s Trident
in 1994, is an avowed fascist, bent on revolution and the creation of an all-
powerful, “purified,” ethnic Ukrainian state.[384]

Just Imagine

What would Barack Obama or any other American presidential

administration’s police and military forces have done about a semi-
permanent encampment of thousands of protesters occupying federal
government buildings in the heart of Washington, D.C., knowing all along
that they were led by armed groups of Aryan Nations, the KKK and other
avowed white supremacist revolutionaries and financed by, say, Russia?
They would have used any amount of violence necessary to remove them is
what, on the second day if not the first. And the protesters would not have
to be neo-Nazis to provoke such a response. In 1932, President Herbert
Hoover sent soldiers to attack the World War I veterans’ peaceful Bonus
Army,[385] camped out across the Potomac River, forcing them out at
bayonet point. The vets had not even threatened to overthrow the
government; they were simply demanding their war bonuses early in a
desperate attempt to survive the Great Depression.[386] American police at
all levels use violence to break up protests regularly.[387]
But on February 19, President Obama insisted that Yanukovych let the
protesters win: “[T]hat includes making sure the Ukrainian military does
not step into what should be a set of issues that can be resolved by
civilians.” Obama continued, “Ultimately our interest is to make sure the
Ukrainian people can express their own desires and we believe a large
majority of Ukrainians are interested in an integration with Europe and the
commerce and cultural exchanges that are possible for them to expand
opportunity and prosperity.”[388]
Imagine America’s “interests” being defined so broadly as to include
making sure people in some country 7,000 miles away can “express their
desires” to sign an “association agreement” with another continent’s trade
pact, especially considering how this “large majority” of Ukrainians
favoring ties with the EU never existed. It was a good enough excuse to
intervene though.

Snipers

On February 20, 2014, protesters clashed with the security forces. Hidden
snipers also opened fire on police who then fired into the crowd. When it
was over, 102 protesters had been killed. They quickly became known as
the “heavenly hundred.” The U.S. government and allied media claimed the
shooting was all the responsibility of Yanukovych, who possibly had help,
or at least encouragement, from Russia.[389] But from the very beginning,
many different witnesses have suspected that the snipers were part of the
revolution, shooting people from both sides in order to heighten the crisis.

In the Conservatory with a Rifle

The initial firing on the police came from snipers placed in the Music
Conservatory building early in the morning of the 20th. Parliamentarian
Andriy Shevchenko said the police called him asking if he could do
anything. So he asked the Svoboda Party’s Andriy Parubiy to stop the guys
firing from the conservatory, obviously indicating they knew perfectly well
who controlled that building. “Later in the day,” according to ABC News,
they came looking for them.[390] Parubiy said he sent men to locate the
snipers but found none.[391]
Avowed Nazi groups like C14 and Right Sector certainly had the
capability and the motive to murder. In an interview with the BBC, Parubiy
did not deny the shooter’s claims that weapons were stashed in the post
office the night before.[392] The Times also reported “the arrival of guns
stolen from a government depot in the western Ukraine city of Lviv,” for
use by the protesters’ side.[393] Right Sector’s Yarosh admitted to Time
three weeks before the coup that they had amassed an “arsenal,” and that
his men were ready to carry on the fight if negotiations failed. “It is enough
to defend all of Ukraine from the internal occupiers,” he said, referring to
the elected government.[394]
 Foreign Policy ran a piece based on an interview with one of the
snipers, Ivan Bubenchik, who claimed to have shot at least two police
officers.[395]
The BBC also published a story about a sniper who said he was
recruited and armed by a Euromaidan group on the 19th, and that he had
stashed his weapons in the post office the night before. He admitted to
firing from the Music Conservatory building beginning on the morning of
the 20th. He said another man was with him, firing too.[396] Yet another
sniper told them he was recruited in January by an ex-military officer, who,
he said, advised him to refrain from joining a radical group on the street and
instead bide his time. He agreed with another BBC reporter that he was
being “groomed” for his role.[397]

Chronology

On February 18, the Social-National Assembly (SNA) attempted to storm

the building of the parliament, the Supreme Rada. They also set fire to the
Party of Regions headquarters in Kiev, blocking the exits, killing one
worker and seven Berkut and Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVS) police. It
was in response to these murders that Yanukovych approved a plan to clear
the square.[398] That night the Berkut raided Right Sector headquarters,
where they claimed to have discovered a cache of weapons,[399] and riot
police stormed the Maidan.[400]
The next day the big three protest leaders, Klitschko, Tyahnybok and
Yatsenyuk, signed a joint statement with Yanukovych calling for a truce.
[401]
 But the Nazis were not going to tolerate that. On the morning of the
20th, police used water cannons to force the crowd away from the major
government buildings, toward the Maidan. Interior Ministry troops, the
Berkut, then joined the riot cops, linking arms and driving the protesters
even farther back, appearing on the verge of clearing the Maidan square.
That was when the snipers opened fire on the police from the Conservatory,
forcing them to retreat. As they did, the crowd ran after them, apparently
intent on setting up barricades further up the hill. Some of the police began
firing as they withdrew. Reporter Graham Stack wrote, “The man
apparently in charge of the riflemen in the Conservatory was 27-year-old
Volodymyr Parasyuk. [T]oday [he is] an MP, but at that time [was] simply
leader of one of the ‘Hundred’ units, responsible for the defense of the city
center protest camp.”[402]
Parasyuk, a member of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists,[403]
confirmed his role to the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine.
“When the first men from the Berkut were injured, everyone rushed
forward. Everyone who was on the barricades began to storm Instytutska
Street. Our boys only used their weapons once, when they stormed,” he
said. But the violence got worse from there. The BBC also showed leaders
encouraging people to move forward toward the cops while they were still
firing.[404]
In total 102 demonstrators and 13 police officers were killed.[405]
While several officers were ultimately convicted for 31 of those deaths,
[406] people were still being shot by snipers after the police had ceased
firing. Multiple reports and footage from that day show continued gunfire
from the opposition-controlled Hotel Ukraine even after they had
withdrawn.[407]

The Hotel Ukraine

A BBC documentary has audio of the police identifying a sniper in the

window of the Hotel Ukraine.[408] Their reporter, Gabriel Gatehouse, also
reported sniper fire that morning, and had even seen the shooter himself.
[409] Gatehouse wrote that control of the hotel was in dispute as it was still
behind government lines, but his own and other footage from inside and
outside the hotel that day appears to show the entire building firmly under
the control of the protesters.[410] Gatehouse wrote that “[i]t seems clear
that, apart from Berkut and government snipers positioned on top of
buildings around the Maidan, and some protesters with guns shooting from
the conservatory building, there were also unknown gunmen shooting from
the hotel.” He added that “they seemed to be shooting at both sides. As to
who they were or how many they killed, I’m afraid I don’t know.” On the
question of whether police snipers had fired at protesters, he said “no idea
beyond what seemed to come out of their intercepted communications.
Which I must add I wasn’t able to independently verify.”[411] But the cops’
intercepted transmissions only showed their desperate effort to locate and
neutralize the snipers, whoever they were. Gatehouse observed that the
recordings show “confusion” as the sniper massacre begins, “and possibly
that they were not alone.”[412]
During the shooting, some journalists were tweeting about gunfire
from the hotel aimed at the police.[413]
Vladislav Surkov

President Petro Poroshenko[414] and the head of Ukraine’s state security

service, Valentyn Nalyvaichenko,[415] made completely unsupported
claims that Vladislav Surkov, then-adviser to Russian President Putin, had
personally coordinated the sniper operation. He did not even arrive until the
massacre was over.[416]
Svoboda’s Andriy Parubiy himself said that he thought shots were
being fired from the Hotel Ukraine, without admitting who actually
controlled the building.[417] Prosecutor General Oleh Makhnitsky
confirmed the same from the beginning.[418]
Would neo-Nazis murder protesters if ordered to? We are told police
officers would and did. Many local and major international media
organizations were in the Hotel Ukraine, and while there are plenty of
pictures and videos showing Ukrainian Maidan groups, no evidence of
outside infiltrators was ever shown. Russian or pro-Russian soldiers
sneaking into the hotel to murder protesters, in effect framing the Ukrainian
president they favored for doing so, would not seem to make much sense,
but that is what they would have us believe.[419]

Georgians

Later a group of Georgians—Zalogi Kvaratskhelia, Koba Nergadze and

Alexander Revazishvili—claimed in interviews with the Russian outlet
Sputnik,[420] Italian GM News[421] and Israeli documentarian Anna
Stephen[422] to have been hired by former Georgian President Mikhail
Saakashvili’s right-hand man, Mamuka Mamulashvili, later leader of the
Georgian Legion, and ordered by arms dealer Serhiy Pashinsky to shoot
police and protesters alike. While their story may seem too perfect to be
true, one of them also testified to it in a deposition for the lawyers of the
police officer defendants prosecuted for the killings, and seemingly credibly
so.[423]

Olga Bogomolets

A doctor from National Medical University named Olga Bogomolets, who

led a first aid team at the Maidan, told the BBC that she believed the snipers
must have been professionals because of the first 13 gunshot victims
brought in, all were shot “to heart, to neck, to lung,” leaving them no
chance to be saved, as she put it.[424]
It was her belief that both sides were being killed by the same snipers.
In early March, Catherine Ashton, EU high representative for foreign affairs
and security, like Nuland, had a private phone call intercepted and released,
presumably by the Russian government.[425] In this case, she was speaking
with Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet, who relayed an earlier
conversation with Bogomolets.[426] He told Ashton, “And, in fact, what
was quite disturbing, the same Olga told that, well, all the evidence shows
that the people who were killed by snipers from both sides, among
policemen and people in the street. That they were the same snipers killing
people from both sides.” He added, “And she also showed me some photos
and she said that as a medical doctor, she can say that it is the same
handwriting [and the] same type of bullets. And it’s really disturbing that
now the new coalition, that they don’t want to investigate what exactly
happened,” and concluded: “So that there is now stronger and stronger
understanding that behind the snipers, it was not Yanukovych, but it was
somebody from the new coalition.”[427] The Estonian government
confirmed the audio was authentic,[428] though Bogomolets later denied
telling Paet any such thing.[429]
Oleksandr Yakymenko, the former head of the SBU, blamed Parubiy’s
men, firing from the Music Conservatory and Hotel Ukraine.[430]

Consensus

One thing both sides agree on is that whoever was shooting was killing
people on both sides to heighten the tension. New Health Minister Oleh
Musiy told the AP that “the similarity of bullet wounds suffered by
opposition victims and police indicates the shooters were trying to stoke
tensions on both sides and spark even greater violence, with the goal of
toppling Yanukovych,” and that “I think it wasn’t just a part of the old
regime . . . but it was also the work of Russian special forces who served
and maintained the ideology of the regime.” The SBU deputy chief
Hennady Moskal contradicted the party line and blamed Russia. He said it
was the SBU and Interior Ministry who had done it, and that “snipers
received orders to shoot not only protesters, but also police forces,” which
was intended to “escalate the conflict” and “justify the police operation to
clear Maidan.”[431]
Andriy Parubiy agreed the snipers killed people on both sides. In one
interview, he said the snipers’ “task was to destabilize the situation as much
as possible, to incite confrontation, to create crisis situations at diplomatic
missions.”[432] But that seems counterintuitive. Why would the Russians
or Yanukovych, the sitting president, want things to be any less stable when
he was barely clinging onto power as it was?
Deputy Interior Minister Mykola Velichkovych also told AP that “the
similarity of the bullet wounds led him and others to conclude that snipers
were targeting both sides of the standoff at Maidan,” and that “the shootings
were intended to generate a wave of revulsion so strong that it would topple
Yanukovych and also justify a Russian invasion.”[433]
So Yanukovych ordered his troops to kill each other and the protesters
to deliberately get himself overthrown so that Russia could invade the
country—or the Russians did this to their ally who was already going along
with their wishes. This is supposed to be the more reasonable explanation?

If It Doesn’t Fit, You Must Acquit

In 2016, the Ukrainian government finally charged five men with ordering
and participating in the massacre.[434] After they were brought to trial, one
of the commanders, Dmitry Sadovnyk, escaped, leading the Reuters news
agency to side with him, saying the most likely explanation was that he
“was being framed, and saw flight as his best option.” They reported
“serious flaws” in the case against the man and his subordinates. “Among
the evidence presented against Sadovnyk was a photograph. Prosecutors say
it shows him near Kiev’s Independence Square on Feb. 20, wearing a mask
and holding a rifle with two hands, his fingers clearly visible.” The only
problem was that “Sadovnyk doesn’t have two hands. His right hand, his
wife told Reuters, was blown off by a grenade in a training accident six
years ago.” When the state introduced the image at a hearing in April,
Sadovnyk took off his glove and showed his stump to the judge. They also
pointed out that between February 18–20, 189 police officers suffered
gunshot wounds, 13 of them fatal ones, yet no one had been charged by the
new regime for any of those. Multiple witnesses also told them the
commander arrived too late to have given any orders to fire.[435]
In October 2023, a court convicted three police officers in absentia on
31 counts of murder and 44 counts of attempted murder, while acquitting
one and convicting another only of “an abuse of power” and letting him go
with time served.[436] But they also said the Hotel Ukraine was under the
control of the opposition, that snipers certainly did fire from it and that
“unknown persons cannot be ruled out” in eight deaths and at least 20
woundings that day.[437]
If it is stipulated for the sake of argument that there were no false-flag
killings of protesters at all, the proven attacks on the police from the Music
Conservatory building are still what provoked them to fire into the crowd
during their retreat, as is widely reported, and shown in the BBC
documentary. Even a conservative take on the evidence of Right Sector
snipers running wild would still leave us with a violent uprising against an
elected government. This is not to justify the Berkut’s overreaction and
killing of innocents, only to contrast the reality of the situation with the
common narrative American audiences were sold about the idealistic,
peaceful and pro-Western protest movement overcoming all odds to save
freedom.[438] There were many peaceful people on the Maidan. But they
are beside the point. Men with rifles, firing on police from hidden recesses,
make the nonviolent protesters irrelevant as far as the alleged moral
authority of the movement goes.
Or one might think. Instead, the massacre became the reason for the
final stage in the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych.

Legitimacy Lost

After the massacre, the EU, represented by the French, Germans and Poles,
as well as the Americans, insisted that Yanukovych sign a new agreement
with the protesters.[439] In it, the president agreed to revert to the old
constitution of 2004, which was more restrictive of the government’s
powers—and the Rada did so the next afternoon. The deal demanded that
the opposition be brought into the government and that they would all work
together on a package of constitutional reforms. Yanukovych also agreed to
hold new elections by December and to pull the police back from their
“confrontational posture” if the protesters would withdraw from their camps
and occupied buildings and surrender their illegal weapons: “Both parties
will undertake serious efforts for the normalization of life in the cities and
villages by withdrawing from administrative and public buildings and
unblocking streets, city parks and squares.” It also promised an
investigation into the sniper fire and killings on the Maidan.[440] The deal
was supported by Moscow, whose representative signed it as a witness.
[441] Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski later said that it was Putin
who convinced Yanukovych to sign the deal.[442] Putin and Obama spoke
on the phone that night and agreed on the need to implement it.[443]
No Sellout

But the Nazis did not respect their side of the bargain. As Svoboda’s
Parubiy later explained: “On February 21, there was a meeting of the Self-
Defense centurions, during which a military council was created, which
included representatives of the Self-Defense and the Right Sector.” He
continued, “At this council, we agreed that it was impossible to wait until
November, when Yanukovych was thinking of holding early presidential
elections. This was the decision of the institutional bodies of the
Maidan.”[444]
After the self-appointed protest leaders announced the deal with
Yanukovych, the fascist groups simply proclaimed a new deal of their own.
[445] When Vitali Klitschko spoke in defense of the deal, the crowd yelled
“Shame!” Then, the Times reported, “an angry radical who did not give his
name but said he was the leader of a group of fighters, known as a
‘hundred’” seized the microphone. He declared, “We gave chances to
politicians to become future ministers, presidents, but they don’t want to
fulfill one condition—that the criminal go away!” The man “vowed to lead
an armed attack if Mr. Yanukovych did not announce his resignation by 10
a.m. on Saturday.” The crowd shouted: “Yes! Yes!”
Right Sector leader Yarosh also denounced the deal. “The agreements
that were reached do not correspond to our aspirations,” he said. “Right
Sector will not lay down arms. Right Sector will not lift the blockade of a
single administrative building until our main demand is met—the
resignation of Yanukovych.” He added, the Times said, “that he and his
supporters were ‘ready to take responsibility for the further development of
the revolution’ The crowd shouted: ‘Good! Good!’”
The Kyiv Post elaborated on the mysterious man referred to by the
Times as the leader of the Hundred who threatened to kill Yanukovych:
“The man, who goes by the nickname Bandera (after legendary Ukrainian
nationalist Stepan Bandera who lived from 1909 to 1959), could not be
immediately reached.”[446] But they later added an editor’s note: “The man
who became famous for his warning is Volodymyr Parasyuk, currently a
member of parliament.” This is the same man identified by reporters
Graham Stack and Konrad Schuller as the commander of the snipers who
shot police on the morning of the 20th from the Music Conservatory.[447]

President Flees

But there was no need for a raid the next morning. According to Stack,
since the security forces had pulled back, it was likely Parasyuk’s threat that
had convinced Yanukovych to flee the capital. “Suddenly roles were
switched: Yanukovych was left almost entirely without security, while the
Maidan camp remained intact and had shown that it could shoot.” Parasyuk
has since been credited for this by those who celebrate the act. Reuters
called him the “toast of Kiev,” acknowledging his central role in forcing
Yanukovych to leave town.[448] There has never been a real investigation
into the matter.[449]
The leaders of the Berkut reportedly fled because of their belief that
Yanukovych would scapegoat them for the killings on the Maidan, due to
the promises of a criminal investigation in the EU-backed deal, as well as
reports of automatic weapons seized from armories in Lviv, rumored to be
on their way to Kiev. When the bosses fled, the mid-ranking guys also
decided to board buses and leave.[450]
Polish Foreign Minister Sikorski[451]—who had helped lead the EU
negotiations between Yanukovych and the protest leaders—told another,
more amusing version of what happened. He claimed Yanukovych had
simply and stupidly left the capital city for a previously scheduled meeting
the next morning, “without appreciating the psychological impact it would
have,” adding that under the deal, Yanukovych “had no obligation to
remove the security forces from the government buildings, and this allowed
the opposition to occupy them without firing a shot.”[452]
Either way, by foolishly bowing down to EU pressure to withdraw his
forces from the Maidan and leaving the capital, Yanukovych had evidently
signaled to his men that they should not bother to stay to guard the rest of
the government buildings either.
Once the police abandoned their posts, Right Sector and C14 walked
right in, seizing government buildings in downtown Kiev unopposed,
decorating them with Nazi banners, Celtic crosses and Confederate battle
flags,[453] and forcing Yanukovych to flee to the eastern Ukrainian city of
Kharkiv and ultimately to Russia. From Kharkiv, he claimed his car had
been shot at.[454] Once the cops returned to roust the C14 members from
the city council building, they took refuge in the Canadian Embassy.[455]

Nazis Take Credit

Though some academics play down the role of the far right in the protest
movement,[456] ultimately it was Right Sector and C14’s violence that
carried the day on the Maidan.[457] The Times approvingly quoted a Right
Sector leader taking credit for the coup: “Roman Koval, the head of the
Rivne branch of Right Sector, acknowledged that [violent] methods perhaps
played into Russian propaganda, but added that . . . peaceful protest alone
could not always bring real change.” They added, “Ukraine’s February
revolution, said Mr. Koval, would never have happened without Right
Sector and other militant groups.”[458]
In an interview with Ukrainska Pravda, the confessed Maidan sniper
leader Volodymyr Parasyuk explained how they essentially kidnapped
parliament and forced lawmakers to impeach Yanukovych. After Klitschko
announced he would begin the process to remove the president, “our people
simply went to the Verkhovna Rada [and] detained the Verkhovna Rada
deputies so that they would sit and work and not run away.”[459]
Svoboda leader Parubiy announced the complete takeover of the
government by his forces. “The Seventh Hundred is located inside the
Verkhovna Rada. Also there is a division of the Right Sector protecting the
cabinet.” He added, “The Nineteenth and Third Hundreds are guarding the
Presidential Administration. The Fifteenth Hundred guards the Ministry of
Internal Affairs.”[460]
Yevhen Karas, the leader of C14, later disputed liberal spin that Nazis
like him had been marginal. “Maidan was the victory of nationalist ideas.
Nationalists were the key factor there, and clearly at the frontlines,” he said.
“LGBT groups and foreign embassies are saying, ‘there were not a lot of
nationalists on Maidan, maybe about 10 percent of real ideological ones.’”
That was nonsense. “[S]uch a thing could only be said by a moron that
never was at war and doesn’t understand that those 10 percent—maybe
even less, 8 percent—but how much they are more effective in the
proportion of influence, how much their effectiveness was: endless,” he
continued. “If not for those 8 percent, the effectiveness [of the Maidan
movement] would have dropped by 90 percent.” He mocked a liberal group
playing down their influence: “‘There were that many nationalists, they had
that much influence.’ Influence? If not for nationalists, that whole thing
would have turned into a gay parade.” He also stipulated this revolution was
not about the EU, but Ukrainian nationalism. “The Maidan was a victory
for nationalist forces, unequivocally because it was under our banners, our
slogans. All the ‘Euro-integration’ and the rest of such banners disappeared
somewhere.”[461]
There is no other side to the story other than a bunch of intelligence-
insulting garbage. For example, PBS Frontline ran a documentary about
these events titled, “The Battle for Ukraine.” The report ignored the
dangerous influence of the Right Sector brigades, saying ‘some people’ call
them Nazis, implying the viewer should doubt it, right as they were
introducing a protest leader wearing Nazi symbols. Better, Frontline’s
producers actually made a conscious decision to give their narrator this line
to read out loud: “The clashes galvanized Yanukovych’s opponents, and
within days he fled across the border to Russia.” That was not just a set-up
line before telling the story; that was them telling it. One might get the idea
that no matter how hard they tried, the U.S. government-funded
propagandists at PBS could not figure out how to portray any part of this
bloody, avowed fascist-led street putsch as a democratic revolution, so they
simply skipped it.[462]
Liberal protesters later admitted they had to “collaborate” with the
“extremist groups” in their attempt to “vie for the attention of possible
recruits.”[463] One activist named Tetiana Vasylyk said, “They are radicals
but without them we would not have coped, it’s for sure. Because we were
too liberal. They understood what it could lead to, they predicted aggression
from the police.” She continued, “They understood all this stuff and they
were prepared for it. We were not. They knew how to organize the tent
camp, how to make fire in the barrels . . . how to defend it, how to put on
the guards and so on.”[464]
In other words, as the sympathetic leftist academic Volodymyr
Ishchenko[465] put it, “violent radicalization was a strategic solution for
Maidan protesters to the inefficiency of nonviolent protests that failed to
build sufficient leverage against Yanukovych’s government.”[466]
The argument that the Russian media made a big deal out of these
facts, therefore somehow nullifying their reality, is nothing but a red
herring.[467] Of course they did. It made their opponents look terrible.
Defending his institution from attacks by the Pentagon-funded
journalistic smear factory NewsGuard,[468] Joe Lauria, the editor of
Consortium News, wrote, “NewsGuard calls these events a ‘revolution,’ yet
revolutions in history have typically been against monarchs or dictators, not
against democratically-elected leaders. . . . Coups have been against both
elected and non-elected leaders. Revolutions change political systems,
usually from monarchies to republics. Ukraine’s political system was not
changed, only its leader.” Lauria concluded, “By any measure,
Yanukovych’s ouster was an unconstitutional change in government. His
‘impeachment’ without his party present for the vote came after government
buildings had been seized and after violence drove him from the
capital.”[469]
As Artem Skoropadskyi, a spokesman for Right Sector, explained, “We
are not democrats. We participate in elections only because they are a step
to revolution . . . We want to change the whole system. New people, new
order, new rules in the state system of Ukraine. We oppose Russia, and we
are against Ukraine joining the European Union and NATO.” He added,
“Our organization is designed to take power. If circumstances warrant, that
could happen by nondemocratic methods. Believe me, we are very capable
of acting in extreme situations. At the Maidan we had only 300 activists,
and look what we did.”[470]
As Lauria’s predecessor Robert Parry put it, “In the upside-down world
that has become the U.S. news media, the democratically elected president
was a dictator and foreign-sponsored coup makers who overthrew the
popularly chosen leader were ‘pro-democracy’ activists.”[471]
They called it the “Revolution of Dignity,” of all things, spearheaded
by a bunch of neo-fascist street goons who succeeded in installing
Oleksandr Turchynov, an agent of “Gas Princess” Yulia Tymoshenko’s
Fatherland Party,[472] as interim president.
The U.S. then had Austria reinstate the charges against Yanukovych’s
ally Dmitry Firtash, who immediately posted $174 million bail and cut a
deal for the notoriously corrupt billionaire candy oligarch Petro
Poroshenko[473] to take the presidency, and in which the boxer Vitali
Klitschko would assume the position of mayor of Kiev. Then—without
eastern voters to get in the way—they held an “election.” That was how
Poroshenko was chosen in the new, democratic Ukraine.[474] He ran on a
campaign promising peace with the people of the east.[475] In fact, part of
Poroshenko’s deal with Firtash for his backing in the presidential race was a
promise to end the war in the Donbas.[476] Instead he doubled down.
Sitting on top of the ladder of U.S. authority during this regime change
was none other than Vice President Joe Biden, who had been appointed to
lead Ukraine policy.[477] Detailing his heavy influence in 2016, Foreign
Policy magazine wondered what Ukraine would do without their “Uncle
Joe” there to help them along.[478]

One For the Books

Impeachment

On February 22, the Rada voted to impeach Yanukovych. However, Daisy

Sindelar, editor-in-chief of the U.S. government’s own Radio Liberty,
explained that the move was unconstitutional and illegitimate. After noting
that Yanukovych had initially returned to the 1996 constitution, but later
agreed to revert to the one ratified in 2004, she said both documents
allowed impeachment only if the president “commits treason or other
crime,” and required a three-fourths supermajority. They were 10 votes
short.[479]
 Ukraine’s rule of law seemed to be a meaningless concept to the
Obama administration officials working so hard to create a Western-style
constitutional democracy there. It may not have been their plan to have the
fascists storm government buildings and chase the president out of town,
but once Yanukovych fled the capital, American-picked puppets were
installed in a new “interim government,” with Arseniy Yatsenyuk in the
prime minister spot just as Nuland had wanted. And though Yanukovych
insisted he was still the president,[480] the new junta was immediately
recognized as “legitimate” by Secretary Kerry’s State Department. The
“interim president,” Oleksandr Turchynov, also from gas oligarch
Tymoshenko’s Fatherland Party, immediately announced a turn to Europe.
[481]
Stratfor founder George Friedman’s December 2014 interview with
Boris Berezovsky’s old outlet Kommersant on the question of America’s
policy in Eastern Europe is highly revealing. He said Russia did not want to
completely dominate Ukraine, but was intent on preventing them from
joining the EU and NATO. “The authorities of the Russian Federation
cannot allow a situation in which the Western armed forces will be located a
hundred kilometers from Kursk or Voronezh.” On the other side, he said,
“The United States was interested in forming a pro-Western government in
Ukraine. They saw that Russia was on the rise and sought to prevent it from
consolidating its position in the post-Soviet space.” This was all balance-of-
power geopolitics. Democracy and freedom had nothing to do with it. “The
success of pro-Western forces in Ukraine would make it possible to contain
Russia.” He added, “Russia calls the events of the beginning of the year a
U.S.-organized coup d’état. And it really was the most blatant coup d’état in
history.” The interviewer asked, “Do you mean the termination of the
agreement of February 21 or the whole Maidan?” Friedman responded, “All
together. The United States openly supported human rights groups in
Ukraine, including with money. And the Russian intelligence services have
missed these trends. They did not understand what was happening, and
when they realized, they could not take measures to stabilize the
situation.”[482]

Victory Laps

As soon as the putsch was complete, Amb. Pyatt declared it “[a] day for the
history books.”[483] Michael McFaul said his colleagues sent him “high-
five emails” celebrating their victory.[484] President Obama opened the
American people’s wallets, announcing $300 million in direct payments and
a $1 billion “loan guarantee,” which means U.S. taxpayers had to pay it
back.[485] When economist Jeffrey Sachs went to Ukraine right after the
coup, American NGOs boasted to him about their role in the
“revolution.”[486]
Around the same time, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post declaring, “Since Ukraine’s Orange
Revolution, the United States and Europe have tried to convince Russia that
the vast territory should not be a pawn in a great-power conflict but rather
an independent nation that could chart its own course.” By this, she meant
that now the United States and not Russia would chart Ukraine’s course.
Rice had to defend her record, being the secretary of state who pushed to
announce a future for Ukraine and Georgia in NATO back in 2008. Or
perhaps it had something to do with Chevron’s massive investment in the
country. She did, after all, once sit on their board of directors and famously
even had an oil tanker named after her.[487] Rice argued in the piece that
Europe should cease all imports of Russian oil and gas while predicting that
soon North American oil would flood the market and bankrupt the Russian
regime.[488]
Perhaps people make too much of the neoconservative movement’s
roots in the Trotskyite Communist left.[489] Perhaps not. The American
National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and its associated groups are in
a sense analogous to the Soviet Union’s old Communist International
(Comintern). As Justin Raimondo wrote, the dangerous new Cold War had
created a “role reversal” from the original. It was now the United States
supporting “revolution” all over the world and Russia positioned as the
more “conservative” force.
Raimondo wrote in the aftermath of the Maidan revolution, “This is
not to say there aren’t many sincere people in the ranks of the protesters—
undoubtedly the majority—who are tired of the corruption and just want a
better life. They are the biggest victims of this coup.” But, he predicted:
“The U.S. government has poured millions into the Ukrainian protest
movement, and they want their money’s worth—even if it means spilling
oceans of blood.” The War Party’s interests and those of the Ukrainian
people “are diametrically opposed: Washington’s manipulations can only
lead to yet another ‘revolution’ betrayed. The tragedy is that the long-
suffering people of that country may learn this lesson far too late.”[490]
 Raimondo thought the NATO expansionists would welcome
intervention by Russia. “If the West tries to impose its government on the
East, then you’re gonna see actual fighting. And then what will Putin do?
Will he call in the troops? Well, certainly, the neocons hope he will,” he
said.[491] Pat Buchanan said he believed there was a perverse nostalgia for
the Soviet Union within this apparatus: “I think there’s a real desire on the
part of some people really to get back to the Cold War. They were happy in
that kind of division.” There was nothing like the excitement of running
“[b]ack and forth, going to conferences and moving chess pieces around the
board and all the rest of it. They’ve missed it.”[492]
Citing the naming of Yatsenyuk as favored choice for prime minister in
the leaked Nuland-Pyatt phone call, Nuland and McCain’s participation in
the Maidan protests and Pyatt’s tweet celebrating after it was over, John
Mearsheimer wrote in Foreign Affairs that “[a]lthough the full extent of
U.S. involvement has not yet come to light, it is clear that Washington
backed the coup. . . . No wonder Russians of all persuasions think the West
played a role in Yanukovych’s ouster.”[493]
In April 2014, Vice President Biden told the Ukrainian parliament, “I
speak for the President of the United States, and he shares the same
opinion . . . that this is a second opportunity to make good on the original
promise made by the Orange Revolution.” Shortly after, the Rada reinstated
military conscription, which had been abolished by Yanukovych in 2013.
[494] Interim President Turchynov implemented it at the start of May.[495]

Mr. Funny Man

There is an insightful clip of Foreign Affairs editor Gideon Rose on The
Colbert Report on Comedy Central from February 24, 2014, bragging about
the Kiev coup two days before, how easy it was and how the U.S. was
stealing this important strategic asset from Russia while Putin was
distracted with the Sochi Olympics. Rose said Ukraine is formerly part of
“the old Soviet bloc,” and that “[i]t’s basically Robin to Russia’s Batman.
And the challenge here is to try to attract it to the West, to get it to flip
sides.”
Explaining Yanukovych’s decision to turn away from the EU
association deal, Rose compared Ukraine to a woman in a dysfunctional
relationship “with its boyfriend from the hood,” trading up to “a nice
Yuppie,” the EU, until Putin offered the Ukrainian government a bribe of
$15 billion. When Colbert confirmed the “good guys are winning now,” and
asked why Obama was not “spiking the football” and mocking Putin for the
success of the coup, Rose explained, “We don’t want Russia to intervene
and kick over the table like a game of Risk, and take Ukraine back.” Yes,
Putin could send troops, he conceded, but said that’s why the U.S. should
tell the Russians, “Oh, look, you got the highest medal count. You did really
well. And so focus on the Olympics.”
Colbert gleefully added, “Look, a shiny object, we’ll just take an entire
country away from you!”
“Basically,” Rose confirmed.[496]

Pwned
Just over a month after the coup, before any elections had been held, the
new prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, instituted the IMF’s austerity plan
without condition,[497] including, according to Forbes, “a 47 percent to 66
percent increase in personal income tax rates; a 50 percent increase in
monthly gas bills; a 40 percent increase on gas tariffs for heating
companies; and an increase in taxes on agribusiness.” He characterized this
as a “kamikaze mission,” destined to cause a massive drop in short-term
GDP and induce price inflation, but signed anyway.[498] “I will be the most
unpopular prime minister in the history of my country,” he predicted.[499]
In Biden’s speech to the Rada, he demanded they cut their old age
pension programs so they could afford to pay back Ukraine’s foreign
creditors rather than risk “tenuous support” from the international
community.[500] Due to high inflation and major cuts to the welfare state,
many Ukrainians saw their living standards collapse.[501] Meanwhile,
corruption prevailed, with the wealthiest allowed to avoid taxes while
officials embezzled as much as $15 billion of government funds in 2014
alone.[502] When the Rada prepared to vote no confidence in Yatsenyuk’s
leadership, Amb. Pyatt and Vice President Biden personally intervened to
prevent it and instead arranged for the prime minister to resign on his own,
so that he would not also bring down the rest of the cabinet and force early
elections, which could have helped the pro-Russian parties.[503] Biden
joked that he spent more time on the phone with Poroshenko than his own
wife.[504]
Oligarch Igor Kolomoysky was given the governorship of
Dnipropetrovsk Oblast and started using his TV channel 1+1 to attack
opponents of his oil interests in the Rada.[505] Another billionaire oligarch,
Serhiy Taruta, chairman of the massive steel firm ISD Corporation, was
made governor of Donetsk.[506]
Seven months after the coup, new President Poroshenko signed the
deal with the EU that his predecessor Yanukovych had rejected.[507] The
Ukrainian moratorium on foreign nations and corporations buying up land
in the “breadbasket of Europe” was ignored. At that time, Ukraine was the
world’s third-largest exporter of corn and fifth-largest exporter of wheat. At
IMF insistence,[508] the Poroshenko government allowed Cargill, Archer
Daniels Midland (ADM), Monsanto and other major Western multinational
agribusiness firms to consolidate control over millions of hectares of
farmland.[509]
By the end of the year, they had repealed Yanukovych’s neutrality law
and again officially set their sights on membership in America’s NATO
military alliance.[510]
In 2015, Bloomberg News’s Leonid Bershidsky wrote that “Americans
are highly visible in the Ukrainian political process. The U.S. Embassy in
Kiev is a center of power, and Ukrainian politicians openly talk of
appointments and dismissals being vetted by U.S. ambassador Geoffrey
Pyatt and even U.S. Vice President Joe Biden.” He quoted Ukrainian
investigative reporter Sergei Leschenko saying that “Pyatt and the U.S.
administration have more influence than ever in the history of independent
Ukraine.”[511]
The next year, Nuland boasted to Congress that the United States had
just about taken over the Ukrainian state, all in the name of the highest
American values, of course. The U.S., she said, had given over $760 million
in direct aid and another $2 billion in guaranteed loans. Almost
unbelievably, she said that “U.S. advisors serve in almost a dozen Ukrainian
ministries and localities and help deliver services, eliminate fraud and
abuse, improve tax collection, and modernize Ukraine’s institutions.”
American forces were training and equipping their police, soldiers and
guardsmen, paying the salaries of legal aid attorneys, and were deeply
“embedded” in Ukraine’s National Bank.[512] Despite or because of this,
and unlike in the promises of the “Revolution of Dignity,” Bershidsky
wrote that Ukraine was still run by “just another incompetent and corrupt
post-Soviet regime.”[513]

Putin’s Reaction

For his part, Vladimir Putin instructed his government to crack down on
foreign-backed NGOs inside Russia. In a speech to the FSB, he warned that
he would not accept a situation like that in Ukraine, where Western NGOs
supported “the nationalist and neo-Nazi groups and militants, who became
the shock troops in the anti-constitutional coup d’état.”[514]
Seven months later, Putin threatened European Commission President
José Manuel Barroso, an Italian, “If I wanted to, I could take Kiev in two
weeks.” Statements like these should have been taken much more seriously
at the time.

Chris Murphy Takes Credit

On February 25, 2014, just a few days after the successful coup, Senator
Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who had shared a stage on the Maidan with
Oleh Tyahnybok,[515] assuring the crowd of U.S. support,[516] told C-
SPAN’s Washington Journal, “With respect to Ukraine, we did not sit on
the sidelines. We have been very much involved.” He emphasized how “the
members of the Senate who have been there, members of the State
Department who have been on the square, the Obama administration has
passed sanctions—the Senate was prepared to pass its own set of
sanctions.” It was certain, he said, “that the clear position of the United
States has in part been what has helped lead to this change in regime.” The
senator added, “I think if ultimately this is a peaceful transition to a new
government in Ukraine, it’ll be the United States on the streets of Ukraine
who will be seen as a great friend in helping make that transition happen.”
After a caller asked about the danger of violent conflict with Russia,
Murphy conceded, “There certainly is some concern about what Russia is
going to do over the course of the next week or month.” However, he said,
“I think it’s irresponsible to talk about the potential for Russia to move
some kind of offensive force into the Crimea, which is the, um, coastal
region of Ukraine that has a Russian military base and a lot of the important
ports.”
It was “irresponsible” not for the U.S. to intervene and overthrow a
foreign government, leading to war, but for American C-SPAN callers to
raise the prospect of a reaction by Moscow. Murphy said, “That would be a
fundamental, grave mistake on behalf of the Russians. And I think they
know that that would essentially lead to a descent to madness.” Therefore,
he did not “worry that this is going to result in any kind of military
confrontation between the U.S. and Europe and Russia.” After dismissing
any danger, Senator Murphy went back to taking credit for the overthrow. “I
think America’s strong voice in support of the peaceful protest movement is
a big part of the story as to why there is an opportunity now for the
Ukrainian people to get what they want.” He added, “We came down hard
on Yanukovych when he violated that peace. . . . I think it was our role,
including sanctions and threats of sanctions, that forced, in part,
Yanukovych from office.”[517]
There, see? The U.S.A., under the command of President Barack
Obama, did, “in part,” overthrow the president of Ukraine in a coup d’état
in February 2014. But did the senator not know Crimea is a peninsula?

Yes, Nazis

Reds vs. Browns

It is an idyllic scene, repeated all over the former Soviet Union. This one is
from 2014: a massive statue of founding Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin lies
toppled on its back in a park in the city of Stryi, in Ukraine’s western Lviv
region. A crowd seems to be enjoying themselves at the sight. But on a
particle board sign behind them, someone has spraypainted SS lightning
bolts, along with a Celtic Cross, long a symbol of white supremacist groups.
[518] In America, Republicans and Democrats smear each other as
Communists and Nazis. In Ukraine, they really have a point.
 The War Party has put great effort into whitewashing the reality of the
Ukrainian very-far right, especially since the major part of the war broke
out in February 2022. They have achieved some success, therefore putting
the burden of overwhelming proof on non-interventionist critics.

Screwed at Versailles

So, just what in the world is going on here? Hitler-idolizing Nazis as a

major political and military force in Europe in the 21st century? Where do
these people even come from? The World Wars, of course.
Perhaps the analogy to the cold peace at Versailles is even more apt in
the case of Ukraine, since they were victims of the post-World War I order
in much the same way they have become victims of the post-Cold War
order. The League of Nations turned predominantly ethnic Polish Galicia in
western Ukraine—nearly seven million people—over to Poland after the
war at the Conference of Ambassadors of the allied powers in 1923.[519]
The minority ethnic Ukrainians’ new Polish rulers then outlawed the use of
their language in local government documents and proceedings, shut down
schools and gave away their property to returning Polish war veterans.[520]
These policies helped set the stage for Ukrainian nationalist revenge when
the tables turned in the next war.

Holodomor

Lenin established the modern eastern border of Ukraine by decree after the
post-Revolution civil war—in which the Communists severely persecuted
the Don and Kuban Cossacks of eastern Ukraine and Crimea.[521] In the
famine of 1921–1922, induced by Lenin’s “war communism,” five million
starved to death.[522] Correcting his massive error, Lenin then instituted
the New Economic Policy, which allowed people to own property and keep
some profits. But then under Joseph Stalin, between 1932 and 1933,[523]
the Soviet Union reversed that correction and inflicted what became known
as the “great famine,” or Holodomor (Ukrainian for “death by hunger”), on
the people of Ukraine, Kazakhstan and the Northern Caucasus Mountains.
Between four and five million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death
by the Communists in one of the greatest atrocities in history.[524]
They suffered terrible crop failures due to the inefficiencies of
collectivization under the Five-Year Plan of 1928–1933.[525] And in
January 1928, the Politburo unanimously passed a measure declaring an
“emergency” and the right to confiscate all grain from the “Kulaks”[526]—
a term with malleable definitions.[527] Typically, it meant any peasant
farmer with three or more cows or any hired hands.[528]
The famine was clearly the result of Communism. The main targets
were the Kulaks,[529] who made up between 3 and 5 percent of all peasant
farmers, but were responsible for as much as a fifth of all grain production.
[530] But to the Reds, even the poorest peasants on the steppe had indulged
in the evil of property ownership. So they had also been stripped of their
meager holdings and forced to work on collective farms. When robbing the
Kulaks was not enough to meet the central government’s quotas, they
simply robbed the poorest peasants—“sub-Kulaks”—as well.[531] They
took the people’s land, took their farm animals, took whatever food they
had grown and left them to starve.[532] In order to feed all the workers
forcibly moved to factory towns in his great industrialization, and to break
the will of the Ukrainian peasantry to resist Communist rule, Stalin simply
“requisitioned” their grain.[533] Those who resisted were exiled or shot.
[534] While farmers went hungry, the government exported what little food
they had produced to buy machinery and engines for the Plan.[535] The
Joint State Political Directorate (OGPU, the successor to the Cheka secret
police, precursor to the NKVD[536]) then prevented the starving masses
from fleeing to the cities or other countries.[537] By the onset of the worst
part of the famine, in early 1932, collectivization in Ukraine was more than
70 percent complete.[538]
Welsh journalist Gareth Jones wrote the truth about the catastrophe for
numerous publications, including a short book.[539] Unlike his fellow
Western journalists sitting at their comfortable hotels back in Moscow,
Jones went out to see the countryside. After a tour of the USSR in the
summer of 1931, Jones reported that people were already starving.[540] He
wrote in October 1932, predicting widespread famine in the coming winter,
that “the harvest is failed and the food is not there.” One young peasant told
Jones, “It’s a dog’s life now, ever since they’ve forced us into collective
farms. 1926 and 1927 were fine years when we still had our own land. But
it will be better to be under the earth than to live now.” He continued,
“Land, cow and bread they’ve taken away from us. Nearly all our grain—
and it was little enough—has been carted away and sent to the towns and
we’re afraid to speak. What will we do during the winter?”
 “He ended with a groan of despair,” Jones wrote. “That is what I heard
from the mouths of peasants in many parts of Russia. ‘Why should we
work?’ they asked, ‘When our land and cow have been taken away from us.
Give us our land back.’” He described the vicious cycle: after having lost
their own property to the state, “they do not cultivate the land so
thoroughly.”[541]
In another article, Jones showed how completely twisted and
thoughtless the Communists were when he talked to one confident young
commissar who boasted of his “great victory” in exiling 14 families to go
chop down timber instead of growing food.[542]
Jones said that even official government media, while blaming the
peasants, acknowledged that results were falling far short of the official
plan. So you can see why people were going hungry. But how did millions
starve to death? The Communists simply continued the policy for years.
The less the people produced, the more the government assumed they were
holding out and needed the whip cracked harder. Based on the theory that
ownership of anything is theft from everyone else (read: the government),
in August 1932, Stalin declared all collective farms were state property and
anyone guilty of such “offenses” would be considered an enemy of the
people and imprisoned or killed. Under this theory, it was a crime for any
peasant to keep (or “steal” back) virtually anything to eat, a little bit of
wheat, potatoes or corn.[543] Legions of government goons patrolled the
land, confiscating even the smallest quantities of contraband grain from
starving, desperate victims.[544]
 Jones took his last trip to the Soviet Union in 1933. Upon his return he
told the Evening Post: “Millions are dying of hunger. . . . Everywhere was
the cry, ‘There is no bread. We are dying.’” He predicted worse starvation
to come since there was not enough seed and the people were already too
weak to work. And they had no trust that the government would not simply
steal every last grain they grew again.[545] In another piece from March
1933, Jones wrote, “The main result of the Five-Year Plan has been the
tragic ruin of Russian agriculture. This ruin I saw in its grim reality.” He
said, “I tramped through a number of villages in the snow of March. I saw
children with swollen bellies. I slept in peasants’ huts, sometimes nine of us
in one room. I talked to every peasant I met, and the general conclusion I
draw is that the present state of Russian agriculture is already catastrophic
but that in a year’s time its condition will have worsened tenfold.” He said
all the peasants he spoke with agreed that the current famine was far worse
than 1921. That had been more localized. “But today the famine is
everywhere, in the formerly rich Ukraine, in Russia, in Central Asia, in
North Caucasia—everywhere.” He said, “The Five-Year Plan has built
many fine factories. But it is bread that makes factory wheels go round, and
the Five-Year Plan has destroyed the bread-supplier of Russia.”[546]
The Communists had also seized everyone’s horses and cattle,
collectivizing them. In the first place, this caused farmers to slaughter many
of them rather than give them up, and in the second, since the Communists
had no idea what they were doing, and were not prepared to handle large
new herds, they just let them starve or die in the elements. Collectivization
also meant that “six or seven millions of the best farmers (i.e., the Kulaks)
in Russia have been uprooted and have been exiled,” Jones wrote. Even
though the Soviets had declared victory over the Kulaks two years before,
they continued to crack down on poorer and poorer people. Any peasants
who owned property were deemed “the capitalists of the village,” Jones
said, continuing: “Their land and livestock taken away from them, they
have been condemned to the status of starving, landless serfs.”[547]
Though the story was heavily censored in the Western press, Jones’s
reporting was confirmed at the time by journalists Malcolm
Muggeridge[548] and Whiting Williams.[549] Later scholarship on the
issue is vast.[550] Historian Robert Conquest summarized the horror of
Ukraine in 1933: death rates in Ukrainian villages ranged from 10 to 100
percent. Typically, the areas with the highest death rates reached
approximately 20–25 percent; doctors, who were state employees,
consistently listed people’s cause of death as “sudden illness,” “senile
weakness,” “exhaustion” or “flux” to save their own lives. Corpses piled up
on the frozen ground with no one strong enough to dig the graves. Entire
towns were cordoned off and a black flag hung to indicate an epidemic had
struck. The dead were left in their homes to rot. People were reduced to
cannibalism. And in the end, many of the rank-and-file Communist
“activists” who had so zealously enforced collectivization and confiscation
were left to starve with the rest of them.[551]
“So the Ukraine now lay crushed: its Church destroyed, its intellectuals
shot or dying in labor camps, its peasants—the mass of the nation—
slaughtered or subdued,” Conquest concluded. No pun intended.[552]

Walter Duranty
Walter Duranty of the New York Times pretended to debunk Gareth Jones,
and assured the American people that everything was fine. On the same day
Jones published “Famine Rules Russia” in the London Evening
Standard[553]—this is late in the story, at the end of March 1933—Duranty
told Times readers in his article, “Russians Hungry But Not Starving,” that
sure, the Soviets had made a mess out of food production, “But—to put it
brutally—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”[554] Besides,
Duranty claimed, “Here are the facts. . . . There is no actual starvation or
deaths from starvation, but there is widespread mortality from diseases due
to malnutrition. . . . These conditions are bad but there is no famine.”[555]
He told the same lies in Time magazine.[556] Though Duranty’s Pulitzer
Prize was awarded for an earlier series, rather than his work pretending to
refute the famine,[557] those articles were terrible pro-Communist
propaganda too.[558]

The OUN

When the Germans and Soviets made their deal to conquer and divide
Poland in 1939, the USSR also conquered all the land in between, including
the Baltics and Galicia, subjecting those territories to the horrors of
communism for two years until Hitler changed his mind and betrayed Stalin
instead.
When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, many in Ukraine,
Crimea,[559] the Baltics[560] and other places took the opportunity to join
the German side to throw off their Communist oppressors.
 The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN, Ukrainian for
Orhanizatsiia Ukraïns’kykh Natsionalistiv) had been founded in the early
1920s,[561] originally for the purpose of killing any Polish or Ukrainian
leaders who favored compromise on the issue of ethnic Ukrainians living in
Poland.[562] Their campaign of terrorism against Polish and Jewish
civilians and officials continued through the 1930s.[563]
The group formed two major factions: the OUN-B, headed up by
radical nationalist agitator Providnyk (Leader) Stepan Bandera, and the
slightly less-murderous OUN-M under Andriy Melnyk.[564] In 1934,
Bandera and his partner Mykola Lebed assassinated the Polish interior
minister, Bronisław Pieracki, and were sent to prison.[565] It was during
this trial that OUN leaders coined their still-used salute, “Slava Ukraini!”
(“Glory to Ukraine!”).[566] They were allowed to escape when the Nazis
and Soviets invaded Poland five years later.[567] The two led the radical
faction after the split, serving the Germans in the SS (Schutzstaffel) and
occupation police forces.[568] Bandera organized the Nachtigall
(“Nightingale”) squadrons, while Lebed went to Gestapo training school.
The Nazis poured in money for the two years between the joint invasion of
Poland and the German invasion of the USSR.[569]
They were avowed fascists. Writing in the OUN’s journal Rozbudova
Natsii in 1929, author Iurii Mylianych described Ukrainian Jews as “an
alien and predominantly hostile body within our national organism.” The
journal’s editor, Volodymyr Martynets, later said Jews were “parasitical,”
“morally damaging,” “corrupting,” a “hostile element” and “racially
unsuited for miscegenation and assimilation.” He urged for all Ukrainian
Jews to be “totally isolated” from the rest of the population, assuring they
would emigrate or starve.[570]
OUN ideologist Iaroslav Orshan wrote that “Ukrainian nationalism
uses the term nationalism in the same way German and Italian nationalisms
use the terms ‘National Socialism’ and ‘Fascism,’” saying they were just
“different national expressions of the same spirit.”[571] Their doctrine held
that different “species” of humans, by which they meant nationalities, are in
“a constant struggle.” And they demanded ethnic purity, vowing to ban all
inter-ethnic marriage, stating: “We regard their very existence and the
making of such unions a crime of national treason.”[572] They also built
links with other fascist groups across Europe, from Italy to Germany to
Serbia and Croatia, and attended the Fifth Congress of National Socialists
Abroad in Stuttgart, Germany in 1937.[573] OUN Nazi collaborator Kost
Pankivsky later wrote that for years before the war, the OUN “had contacts
with the Germans, who were ideologically linked with fascism and Nazism,
who in word and in print and in deed had for years been preaching
totalitarianism and an orientation on Berlin and Rome.”[574]
One of their chief ideologists, Dmytro Dontsov, wrote that the rights of
the state must remain “above the life of any given individual, above the
blood and deaths of thousands, above the wellbeing of a given generation,
above abstract mental calculations, above universal human ethics, above
any imaginary concept of good and evil.”[575] He compared Hitler to Jesus
Christ and Joan of Arc.[576] Historian Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe wrote
that “Dontsov became one of the main propagators of anti-Semitism among
Ukrainian ideologists. On the one hand, he attacked Jews as a ‘race.’ On the
other hand, he adapted anti-Semitism to the Ukrainian situation by
associating Jews with the Soviet Union which he viewed as the main
occupier of Ukrainian territory and main enemy of Ukrainians.”[577]
Bandera’s OUN-B adopted Dontsov’s position outright. When they
published their tract, “Resolutions of the Second Great Assembly of the
OUN,” they repeated his accusations “almost verbatim,” according to
Rossoliński-Liebe.[578]
After Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, the OUN wrote up
a new constitution for Ukraine in which the state was to be a totalitarian
dictatorship, with one great leader holding a lifetime appointment, which
defined statehood in an ethnic sense and so guaranteed citizenship only to
ethnic Ukrainians. All other political parties would be banned—“One
nation, one party, one leader,” they wrote.[579] The OUN killed thousands
of Poles especially, but also Jews and other political opponents in Galicia
and Volhynia during this period.[580]
Just before the Nazi invasion, in April 1941, the OUN-B proclaimed
they would “combat Jews as supporters of the Muscovite-Bolshevik
regime.” They demanded “Ukraine for the Ukrainians!” and declared
“Death to the Muscovite-Jewish commune! Beat the commune, save
Ukraine!”[581] In May, their manual on The Struggle and Activities of OUN
in Wartime, written by Bandera and other top leaders of the OUN, including
Shukhevych and Yaroslav Stetsko,[582] identified their enemies as
“Muscovites,” “Jews,” “Asiatics” and “Poles.”[583] Historian John-Paul
Himka noted that Bandera’s call for interning all Jews did not come to pass
because they were simply murdered instead.[584]
 On orders from Nikita Khrushchev, who was then first secretary of the
Communist Party of Ukraine,[585] the Soviet NKVD massacred at least
15,000 political prisoners in Galicia as they withdrew in the face of the
Germans’ invasion, enraging the population, and especially their fascist
enemies.[586] Since the individuals responsible had withdrawn with the
rest of the Red Army, it was local Jews who took the blame and the
punishment for this atrocity when the Nazis arrived.[587]
Once the Third Reich reached Galicia in June, the OUN did not say to
resist the invaders, but instead distributed leaflets across Lviv urging people
to murder their own civilian countrymen: “Don’t throw away your weapons
yet. Take them up. Destroy the enemy . . . People!—Know this!—Moscow,
the Hungarians, the Jews—these are your enemies. Destroy them.”[588]

Declaring a State

Bandera attempted to declare his new state on June 30, 1941, seeking
recognition by their “natural allies,”[589] Hitler’s regime, and announced
that they would “cooperate closely” with the Germans. “The newly formed
Ukrainian state will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater
Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a
new order in Europe and the world and is helping the Ukrainian People to
free itself from Moscovite occupation.”[590]
A few days later, Bandera’s deputy Yaroslav Stetsko promised the new
state would “cooperate closely with National Socialist Greater Germany . . .
under the Führer Adolf Hitler.” He sent letters to Hitler, Mussolini, Franco
and Croatian Ustaše leader Ante Pavelić, declaring himself loyal to the new
order of fascist Europe.[591] They hung up banners across Lviv
proclaiming, “Long Live Stepan Bandera and Adolf Hitler.”[592]

Premeditation

Though Bandera specifically said that Ukrainian Nationalism was Ukraine’s

version of “Hitlerism,” this evidently did not fit with the German dictator’s
plans. He meant to colonize Ukraine, not ally with it.[593] After the Nazis
demanded the OUN withdraw the declaration,[594] Bandera eventually
surrendered to “honorary detention.”[595] However, he and the other OUN
leaders remained partners with the Germans and were allowed to continue
their organizational work from house arrest in Berlin until August 1942,
when Bandera was moved to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. While
there, he was held in far better conditions than the other prisoners.[596]
Bandera’s partner Mykola Lebed escaped to lead the OUN-B at war.[597]
Instructions to their militia said the war was their opportunity to start
murdering civilians: “In the time of chaos and confusion it is possible to
permit the liquidation of undesirable Polish, Muscovite, and Jewish
activists, especially supporters of Bolshevik-Muscovite imperialism.” They
continued, “Destroy the officer staff, shoot the Muscovites, Jews, NKVD
men, the political instructors, and all who want war and our death!” They
had explicit orders for how Jews and Poles were to be removed from their
jobs “to avoid sabotage” and said if they needed to enslave a Jew to work,
“one of our militiamen must be placed over him, and should liquidate him
for the slightest transgression. Only Ukrainians, not foreign enemies, can be
leaders in the various branches of life.”[598]
 The Ukrainian nationalists identified Jews with the Communists and
the terror of the Holodomor.[599] Omer Bartov, Israeli-born professor of
Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, wrote that “[i]n part,
the fact that Jews were indeed proportionally overrepresented among the
Communists encouraged this view; and in part, it also reflected the reality
that Soviet rule had provided opportunities for Jews—young Jews
especially—that the anti-Semitic Polish state had blocked.” He added, “The
consequences of this perception were of course disastrous when the Nazis
made the Jewish population the main target of persecution and
murder.”[600] Bandera’s partner Yaroslav Stetsko had written, weeks after
the torture and murders in the initial pogroms in Lviv had begun, “I . . .
support the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German
methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine, barring their assimilation and
the like.” According to author Marco Carynnyk, “The Council of Seniors
(Rada Sen’ioriv), which had been established in Lviv on 6 July 1941 to
advise the Stets’ko administration, took up the question of Jews and other
‘minorities’ in Ukraine at a session on 18 July.” At the meeting, the OUN-
B’s Oleksa Hai-Holovko said, “Jews are very insolent. . . . They have to be
treated very harshly. . . . We must finish them off. . . . I like the German
view very much.” The OUN-B’s propaganda chief, Stepan Lenkavs’kyi,
agreed. “Regarding the Jews,” he said, “we will adopt any methods that
lead to their destruction.”[601]
Bandera’s competitor in the OUN-M, Andriy Melnyk, was no less
slavish in his devotion, writing, “We collaborate closely with Germany and
invest everything in this collaboration. . . . Because we believe that Adolf
Hitler’s new order in Europe is the real order, and that Ukraine is one of the
avant-gardes in Eastern Europe, and perhaps the most important factor in
strengthening this new order. . . . Ukraine is the natural ally of
Germany.”[602]
In June 1941, when the Germans sacked Lviv, the OUN distributed
pamphlets to the city’s Jews which read, “You welcomed Stalin with
flowers. We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet as a grave.”[603] And that is
exactly what they did.

Helping the Holocaust

The OUN ultimately helped the Germans kill hundreds of thousands of

innocent Poles and Jews in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in the Holocaust,
butchering men, women and children in some of the cruelest ways
imaginable.[604] Historian John-Paul Himka wrote that the OUN were the
“key actors” in the first phase of the Holocaust in Ukraine, just after the
invasion, rounding up Jews, murdering them or turning them over to the
Germans to be enslaved in work camps or executed.[605] In the first two
days of July, they launched a massive pogrom against the Jews of Lviv in
the name of avenging those prisoners slain by the NKVD during their
retreat. Between 7 and 8 thousand were beaten, humiliated and otherwise
tortured, raped and murdered. The OUN-B and members of the Nachtigall
Battalion participated.[606] They did it again in late July, killing another
1,500.[607]
Professors Richard Breitman and Norman J. W. Goda are co-authors of
U.S. Intelligence and the Nazis[608] and Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War
Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War, both based on declassified
CIA and Army records. They wrote in the latter, “Indeed pogroms in East
Galicia in the war’s first days killed perhaps 12,000 Jews.” Back in Berlin,
Stetsko reported it all to Bandera.[609] Historian Per Anders Rudling, a
professor at Lund University in Sweden and researcher on Ukrainian
extremists, documented the OUN’s participation in the Holocaust in detail.
He says credible estimates of their murders of Jews in the summer of 1941
range between 13,000–35,000. “The Nachtigall Battalion, consisting almost
exclusively of OUN(b) activists serving in German uniforms under
[Roman] Shukheyvch’s command,” he writes, “carried out mass shootings
of Jews near Vinnytsia in July 1941.”[610] In Volhynia and Bukovina, it
was the same way. The OUN participated in as many as 100 pogroms
against Jews that summer, killing thousands.[611] Historian Alexander
Kruglov estimated that between 38,000–39,000 Jews were killed in
pogroms across Galicia and Volhynia that summer.[612]
In August 1941, in Kamianets-Podilskyi, in Khmelnytskyi Oblast, the
SS, with help from local nationalists, rounded up and executed 23,600 Jews.
[613] Just weeks later, in September,[614] the Nazis massacred more than
33,000 Jewish civilians over two days at the Babi Yar (or Babyn Yar) ravine
outside of Kiev. Ukrainian auxiliary police, predominantly members of the
OUN, participated.[615] Kruglov writes that between 61,000 to 62,000
Jews were shot by the OUN and especially the Germans in August 1941;
another 136,000 to 137,000 in September.[616] That was only the
beginning.
 The National World War II Museum notes, “Before the killing centers
opened at Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Majdanek, more than
1.5 million Jews had already been murdered by the Germans, their Axis
allies, and local collaborators in Ukraine, Belarus, and other USSR
republics.”[617] Some estimate an equal number of them were killed just in
Ukraine,[618] half in Galicia and Volhynia in the west.[619]
The OUN then joined the police in Galicia and Volhynia, where they
helped round up thousands more Jews for deportation to the death camp at
Belzec, or just took them out to be shot by them or their German masters.
[620]
At the end of 1941, the Germans organized the Ukrainian National
Militia into the new auxiliary police, the Schutzmannshschaften der
Ordnungsoolizei (or Schuma).[621] Early the following year, they enforced
the transfer of Jews from Galician and Volhynian cities into new ghettos,
murdering thousands along the way, then took jobs as guards outside the
ghettos and work camps. From the fall of 1941 through the summer of
1943, the Ukrainian police, heavily infiltrated by the OUN,[622] helped
round up Jews for the SS to massacre, or to be shipped off to Belzec to be
murdered there. And they participated in plenty of massacres themselves
too.[623] It was also their business to hunt down and kill individual Jews
hiding in basements, sewers and forests to turn over to the Germans or just
murder themselves.[624] Historians Alexander Prusin and Gabriel N.
Finder called them “the institutional epicenter of Ukrainian collusion with
the Nazis in this region in the destruction of the Jews,” and all to create
“Ukraine for Ukrainians.”[625]
 The Nazi occupation converted the First Division of the Ukrainian
National Army into the 14th Grenadier Division of the Waffen-SS, or the
“Galicia Division,” in early 1943. Its members swore allegiance directly to
Hitler.[626] Over 800,000 Ukrainian Jews were murdered by the Germans
and their agents, such as the OUN and Galicia Division during the war—
machine-gunned to death or buried alive.[627] Virtually the entire Jewish
population of Eastern Galicia was killed, about a quarter of a million of
them in camps, another quarter million shot in their own towns, “often in
sight and with the willing collaboration of their gentile neighbors,”
according to Professor Bartov.[628] In total, the OUN directly helped the
Third Reich murder tens of thousands of Jews and Poles from 1941 to 1943.
[629]

Justin Trudeau Toasts the SS

The Galician SS became a small controversy when in 2023, Ukrainian

President Volodymyr Zelensky, Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and
the Canadian Parliament honored an old war veteran named Yaroslav
Hunka who, the speaker read out, had “fought against the Russians” in
World War II.[630] They had seemingly forgotten that Canada proudly
fought as allies of the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany in that war, at the
cost of 45,000 of their lives,[631] and did not realize that Hunka, a veteran
of the First Ukrainian Division, a.k.a., the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division
of the SS,[632] was a likely war criminal whose unit had participated in the
Holocaust while serving Heinrich Himmler and his Führer.[633] In 2011,
Hunka described 1941 to 1943 as the “happiest years of my life.”[634] The
Poles immediately moved to have him extradited to be prosecuted for war
crimes.[635]
Ukrainian SS veterans were so prosperous in Canada they donated
hundreds of thousands of dollars to various universities in the country,
including the Volodymyr and Daria Kubijovych Memorial Endowment
Fund at Alberta University. Rudling said Kubijovych was a “chief
collaborator” with the Nazis, making Hunka look insignificant in
comparison.[636]
It was shown in 2017 that Chrystia Freeland, the former Financial
Times reporter, deputy prime minister of Canada and anti-Russia hawk, had
spent a lifetime citing the political influence of her maternal grandfather,
Michael Chomiak.[637] It turned out he was a Ukrainian Nazi propagandist
during the war who wrote for the Bandarist weekly, Krakivski visti,[638] a
publication that blamed the Jews for Soviet Communism and called people
to join the German Nazis to fight the “Jewish-Bolshevik threat.”[639] She
then lied and claimed this was Russian disinformation,[640] but it was not,
and she knew it, having helped her uncle write an article about it years
before.[641] It also was later revealed that Freeland herself got her start
writing for The Ukrainian Weekly, a nationalist paper which glorified
Bandera and the Galician SS.[642]
Perhaps this should not be surprising since Canada accepted thousands
of Ukrainian veterans of Hitler’s SS after World War II and to this day
maintains monuments to their legacy.[643]

The UPA
The Galician SS and OUN, under the leadership of German officers,[644]
created the Ukrainska Povstancha Armia, or Ukrainian Insurgent Army
(UPA), in 1942. Rudling writes that “[t]he new leadership consisted of
ruthless OUN(b) activists, most of whom were trained by Nazi Germany,
and many were deeply involved in the Holocaust.” He added, “The
Ukrainian gendarmerie, Hilfsfreiwillige (volunteers), and, in particular, the
so-called Schutzmannschaften [‘guard units,’ actually death squads], had
been central to the implementation of the Holocaust in Ukraine and
Belarus,” and this included “the commanders or chiefs of staff in at least
nine out of eleven military districts.”[645]
According to the Holocaust survivor and academic historian Philip
Friedman, “Sometime in the winter of 1942–1943 the various Ukrainian
partisan groups began an intense fight against all non-Ukrainians. Jews who
escaped from the ghettos were seized on the highways, in villages, or in the
forests, and were put to death.”[646] In the second half of 1942, the Nazis
began liquidating all the Jewish ghettos. The people were sent to Belzec or
shot. Ukrainian police made themselves useful the whole time, rounding up
Jews from lists and making sure no one escaped, and participating in
massacres along with the Germans.[647]
After the tide of the war turned against the Germans at Stalingrad and
Kursk in February and July 1943, large numbers of police left to join up
with the OUN-B and -M in preparation for the coming insurgency against
the returning Soviet Union.[648]
After another massive round of ethnic “cleansing” in 1944,[649] it is
estimated that the OUN-UPA murdered more than 100,000 civilians,[650]
and assisted in the killing of hundreds of thousands.[651] Breitman and
Goda wrote in Hitler’s Shadow, “Banderist guerrillas in western Ukraine
often killed Jews. Historian Yehuda Bauer writes that Banderists ‘killed all
the Jews they could find,’ surely ‘many thousands’ in all.” They continued,
“Moshe Maltz, a Jew living in hiding in Sokal, heard from a friendly Polish
contact ‘about 40 Jews who were hiding out in the woods near his home . . .
the Bandera gangs came and murdered them all.’” Once the Soviets had
forced a German retreat and had retaken eastern Galicia in the fall of 1944,
“there were few Jews there left alive. But Maltz recorded that, ‘When the
Bandera gangs seize a Jew, they consider it a prize catch. The ordinary
Ukrainians feel the same way . . . they all want to participate in the heroic
act of killing a Jew. They literally slash Jews to pieces with their
machetes.’”[652]
“We slaughtered the Jews, we’ll slaughter the Poles, old and young,
every one; we’ll slaughter the Poles, we’ll build Ukraine,” went the OUN
slogan. “Death, death, death to the Poles/Death to the Moscow-Jewish
commune/The OUN leads us into bloody battle . . . Each tormentor will
face the same fate/One gallow for Poles and dogs,” they chanted as they
marched.[653]
Historian Timothy Snyder, more famous for his fanatical support of
Ukraine in the 2022– war, wrote in 2010 that after the Soviets started
winning, the local police who had served the Germans “mass killing . . .
west Ukrainian Jews,” then “went into the forest.” These men, many of
them from the OUN-B, then formed the core of the UPA. “Two leaders of
Bandera’s organization, Mykola Lebed and Roman Shukhevych, brought
the UPA under the control of the OUN-B.” They spent the rest of the war
killing Polish and Jewish civilians as much as fighting an anti-Soviet
insurgency, slaughtering them by the tens of thousands, “most of them
women and children,” Snyder wrote.[654]
Murdering with “scythes, knives and pitchforks,” he added that the
UPA would ruthlessly butcher their Jewish and Polish victims, crucifying,
disemboweling and disfiguring their corpses to terrorize their victims’
survivors and neighbors.[655] They forced Ukrainian members of mixed
Ukrainian and Polish families to slaughter their own kin.[656] They also
cited Moshe Maltz, a Jew who was living underground in Sokal: “Bandera
men . . . are not discriminating about who they kill; they are gunning down
the populations of entire villages. . . . Since there are hardly any Jews left to
kill, the Bandera gangs have turned on the Poles. They are literally hacking
Poles to pieces. Every day . . . you can see the bodies of Poles, with wires
around their necks, floating down the river Bug.” Breitman and Goda
wrote, “On a single day, July 11, 1943, the UPA attacked some 80 localities
killing perhaps 10,000 Poles.”[657]
In 1943, under Nazi protection and leadership, Bandera participated in
a conference organized to set up an “anti-Bolshevik front” which they later
named the Supreme Liberation Council.[658] The Nazis released him from
protective custody in 1944, and he went right back to work for them.[659]
As the Germans retreated, they left thousands of tons of arms and
ammunition behind, which the OUN-UPA used to help delay Soviet forces
on their run to Berlin.[660] Bandera escaped to Austria, then West
Germany.[661]
Insurgency

After the Germans’ defeat, the OUN-UPA kept fighting an insurgency and
assassination campaign against the Soviets for nearly a decade from
hideouts in the Carpathian Mountains with help from the American military
and the new Central Intelligence Agency, which were impressed by
defectors’ claims that they still had as many as 100,000 men under arms.
[662] The Soviets’ answer was to forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands
from the civilian population out of which the insurgency was based.[663]
Stalin’s NKVD also engaged in genocidal “cleansing” and relocation
campaigns during and after World War II, killing 200,000[664] and moving
700,000 Poles out of Ukraine’s western Galicia region.[665]
Rossoliński-Liebe notes that by incorporating Galicia and Volhynia
into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and cleansing the remaining
Poles, Stalin was ironically accomplishing the nationalists’ goals for them,
as well as helping set the stage for further conflict.[666] Stalin also moved
pro-Russian Ukrainians out of Galicia and into the eastern Donbas region
after the war.[667] Migrant laborers moved to the Donbas from all over the
USSR after World War II. They mostly spoke Russian.[668]

The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt

Reinhard Gehlen had been Hitler’s chief of the Foreign Armies East (FHO)
in the later part of World War II, and therefore in charge of all military
intelligence in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Historian Carl
Ogelsby wrote: “FHO was connected in this role with a number of secret
fascist organizations in the countries to Germany’s east. These included
Stepan Bandera’s ‘B Faction’ of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
(OUN/B).” Soon Gehlen had effectively consolidated power as Nazi
Germany’s intelligence chief.[669]
With certain defeat looming, Gehlen came up with a scheme to keep
himself off the gallows. Since the U.S.-Soviet alliance would be sure to
collapse after the war, he would offer his intelligence services to the new
Western superpower in exchange for his freedom. Admiral William D.
Leahy, President Harry Truman’s chief of staff and national security adviser,
General Edwin Siebert, the head of Army intelligence in Europe, General
“Wild” Bill Donovan, director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS),
and Allen Dulles, the OSS station chief during the war and founding
director of the new CIA, among others, bought it.[670] As Ogelsby points
out, it was only three and a half months after the war in Europe had ended,
and just a week after the end of the war in the Pacific, that Gehlen made his
deal with the Americans to keep himself and his SS friends in business.
Ogelsby says it remains unknown whether President Truman knew anything
about the deal, though historian Christopher Simpson wrote that the fact of
the involvement of such high-level officials, plus Stalin’s complaints about
it at Potsdam, make it unlikely that he was unaware.[671] Gehlen himself
later described the arrangement in detail in his memoir, The Service. They
would reactivate their old networks to be the basis of a new German
intelligence agency to work “with,” not “for,” the Americans once the West
German government was ready, while the U.S. would pay for it all and
receive all the intelligence. And they agreed that “[s]hould the organization
at any time find itself in a position where the American and German
interests diverged, it was accepted that the organization would consider the
interests of Germany first.”[672]
Gehlen wrote that this was not a problem for the Americans since their
interests and those of West Germany were so closely aligned.[673] After
almost a year in America, Gehlen was sent back to Germany and got to
work for the new BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), the West German
intelligence agency, rehabilitating SS war criminals, such as Franz Six,
Emil Augsburg and Klaus Barbie, the SS “Butcher of Lyon,” and giving
them missions behind Warsaw Pact lines.[674] That included supporting
Ukrainian nationalists fighting the Soviets in a brutal insurgency and
counterinsurgency war[675] beginning in 1946[676] and continuing
through at least 1953.[677] A 1948 White House intelligence study, NSC-
50,[678] advocated increased relations with resistance groups in Soviet-
occupied Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, which resulted in further
cooperation with Gehlen in an attempt to infiltrate spies into Russia.[679]
“He is on our side, and that is all that matters,” new CIA Director Allen
Dulles said.[680] The operation was run by the Office of Policy
Coordination and cost $100 million per year.[681] By 1954 they had trained
and deployed as many as 5,000 agents. The State Department had to
intervene to allow at least 200 with Nazi connections to enter the U.S. on
national security grounds between 1948 and 1950.[682] Gehlen admitted in
his memoirs that Bandera and UPA forces had worked for him after the war.
[683] Bandera was assassinated by the KGB in Munich in October 1959.
[684] The project only heightened tensions, leading George Kennan, the
architect of Operation Rollback, to lament, “The political warfare initiative
was the greatest mistake I ever made.” He added, “It did not work out at all
the way I had conceived it.”[685]

Lebed and the CIA

This did not affect America’s Eastern European policy since Washington
preferred Mykola Lebed’s faction and, though they had protected him after
the war,[686] they had abandoned Bandera by the early 1950s.[687]
Historian Christopher Simpson wrote, “The convicted assassin Mykola
Lebed emerged after the war as one of the United States’ most important
agents inside the OUN/UPA.”[688] At first the U.S. military ignored Lebed.
Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) reports from 1945 and 1946
described him as “a well known sadist and collaborator of the Germans,”
and called him a thief and a murderer. But in 1947 they gave in to his
promises to reveal all about the inner workings of the USSR. Simpson
noted that when Lebed was secretly smuggled from Rome to Munich, the
operation was managed by the same American CIC agents who were
“running Klaus Barbie and Emil Augsburg’s network of fugitive SS men.”
They brought him to the United States in 1949.[689] At least 75 OUN
agents were parachuted into Ukraine between 1949 and 1954, though due to
deep infiltration by Communist agents, they were quickly neutralized or
turned.[690]
The OUN continued with an assassination and murder campaign based
out of West Germany that lasted well into the 1970s.[691] Lebed’s
relationship with the CIA continued the entire length of the Cold War.
Breitman and Goda wrote in Hitler’s Shadow, “In Project ICON, the CIA
studied 30 groups and recommended operational cooperation with the
[Ivan] Hrinioch-Lebed group as the organization best suited for clandestine
work.” They concluded that “[c]ompared with Bandera, Hrinioch and
Lebed represented a moderate, stable, and operationally secure group with
the firmest connections to the Ukrainian underground in the USSR.” The
Americans gave them “money, supplies, training, facilities for radio
broadcasts, and parachute drops of trained agents to augment slower courier
routes through Czechoslovakia used by UPA fighters and messengers.”
While Hrinioch remained in Germany, Lebed moved to New York, got U.S.
citizenship and began the covertly CIA-supported Prolog Research and
Publishing Institute. Breitman and Goda added, “In 1977 President Carter’s
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski helped to expand the
program [supporting Prolog] owing to what he called its ‘impressive
dividends’ and the ‘impact on specific audiences in the target area.’”[692]
The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) investigated
Lebed, and was told by Ukrainian expatriates that he was “one of the most
important Bandera terrorists . . . [responsible] for wholesale murders of
Ukrainians, Poles and Jewish [people] . . . in all these actions, Lebed was
one of the most important leaders.” At then-Assistant CIA Director Allen
Dulles’s insistence, the INS, which had been prepared to deport him,
suspended their investigation, eventually allowing Lebed to become a
naturalized citizen.[693] According to Eric Lichtblau, author of The Nazis
Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men,[694] after
serving the U.S. in the Cold War, “many, many thousands of Nazi
collaborators . . . got visas to the United States while the survivors did not.”
This was officially sanctioned “even though they had been, for instance, the
head of a Nazi concentration camp, the warden at a camp, or the secret
police chief in Lithuania who signed the death warrants for people.”[695]
A secret CIA history, declassified under the Nazi War Crimes
Disclosure Act, called Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship
with Ukrainian Nationalists, says that “[a]ccording to an OSS report of
September 1945, Bandera had earned a fierce reputation for conducting a
‘reign of terror’ during World War II.” Despite common spin about how the
OUN and UPA fought against both the Nazis and the Communists, the CIA
history admits about their allies: “Even though OUN’s enthusiasm
diminished after the Nazis failed to support Ukrainian statehood, many
Ukrainians continued to fight alongside the Germans until the end of the
war.”
Regardless, the CIA went right into business with them, receiving
official orders to go ahead in 1949. They gave them radio and cipher
training along with cash. The first CIA airdrop into Ukraine in September
1949 was a bust, but got CIA leadership interested and convinced them to
double down in their support of Lebed’s forces, while the British still
supported Bandera’s faction.[696] Though the CIA ceased its airdrops to the
UPA in 1953, the CIA’s own historian Kevin C. Ruffner wrote in a
declassified history that “[t]he Agency, however, maintained an operational
relationship with the Ukrainians that proved to be not only its first, but also
among its most resilient projects with, anti-Communist emigre groups.
Under Mykola Lebed, whom the CIA brought to the United States in 1949,
the ZPUHVR [a wing of the Supreme Liberation Council (UHVR)] turned
to other forms of resistance activity.” He added, “With Agency funding, the
Ukrainians established a research institute in New York and published a
number of anti-Soviet publications, including Suchasnist.”[697]
But they were still Nazi terrorists. Their idea of fighting communism
was murdering and maiming civilians. But their tactics made the population
resent them as much as their Bolshevik overlords.[698] Nonetheless, for a
decade the CIA still backed them, planning to use the UPA’s Carpathian
Mountain stronghold as a base for an insurgent army to take on the Reds in
World War III.[699]
“Your struggle is our struggle, your dream is our dream,” President
Reagan told Yaroslav Stetsko, who led the OUN-B after Bandera’s death at
the hands of the KGB in 1959, at a meeting in the Oval Office in 1983.
[700]
While in exile during the first Cold War, Western emigres descended
from the OUN-UPA had constructed their own nationalist historical
narratives about Ukrainian victimhood, the heroic sacrifices of their
members and the righteousness of the nationalist cause. During Premier
Gorbachev’s perestroika (“restructuring”) policy in the 1980s, they began
exporting their narratives and agendas to willing audiences in the ethnic
Ukrainian west.[701]

Continuity

The Social National Party (SPNU), which was later renamed Svoboda, was
founded in 1991, and is directly descended from the OUN.[702] Their
militia, Patriot of Ukraine, later became the core of the Azov Battalion.
[703] On June 30, 1991, Polish professor Georgiy Kasianov reports, they
held their first mass celebration of the anniversary of Bandera’s declaration
of statehood from 1941. For the rest of the year, local authorities across
western Ukraine sanctioned monuments to Bandera, Shukhevych and
“OUN and UPA heroes.” They also opened several Bandera museums
portraying him as a great national hero.[704] The next year they produced
new student textbooks that celebrated the OUN-UPA as national liberators.
“Preferring to create façade structures for political and cultural activities,”
as Kasianov put it, the OUN created the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists
in 1992, which worked through the 1990s and 2000s to rehabilitate the
image of the OUN-UPA.[705] Its founder was Slava Stetsko, Yaroslav
Stetsko’s widow, who had taken over the OUN in 1991. Rossoliński-Liebe
wrote, “In Kiev, OUN-B émigrés set up the Stepan Bandera Centre of
National Revival.” OUN leadership and their most important newspaper
and journal soon moved their operations there.[706]
A State Department cable from 2008 confirms that the Ukrainian
National Assembly-Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense (UNA-UNSO) was
“[o]riginally a coalition of nationalist groups that venerated Mussolini.”
Founded in 1990 “by Yuriy Shukhevych, son of Ukrainian Insurgent Army
(UPA) commander Roman Shukhevych,” it supported Yushchenko during
the Orange Revolution of 2004.[707] The Seattle Times also documented
the UNA-UNSO’s role in “providing much of the muscle behind the weeks
of protests in support of opposition candidate Viktor Yushchenko” during
the Orange Revolution, writing that “group member Andriy Bondarenko
said it was a key element right from the start. . . . [T]hey coordinated the
weeks-long blockade of outgoing President Leonid Kuchma’s office. It also
provided men to serve in Yushchenko’s personal security detail.” Their
reporter said that “the presence of the group . . . underlines concerns of
Yushchenko’s foes that his leadership will enflame nationalism and intense
anti-Russian sentiment.”[708]
In Ukraine, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the former Communist
Leonid Kravchuk had, much like his Russian counterparts, allowed the full-
scale looting of his country by other former Communists-turned-oligarchs.
[709] In 1994, President Kravchuk and his allies accused his opponent
Leonid Kuchma, George Soros’s man,[710] of wanting to rejoin Russia and
give away Sevastopol.[711] Out west, and in Kiev,[712] the Nazis started
coming out to rally for the current government. They threatened civil war
after Kuchma won,[713] and though they did not follow through that time,
it was a portent of things to come.[714]
Ten years later, the Orange Revolution coincided with a considerable
rise in violence by avowedly racist groups against Jews, Roma and other
minorities, while the government obfuscated and shut down the committees
and departments in charge of monitoring them.[715]
Supreme Rada member Oleh Tyahnybok became the leader of the
Social National party in 2004 and changed the name to Svoboda
(“Freedom”), which was supposed to be a softer presentation of the same
fascist ideology.[716] Still, their website makes their ethno-nationalism
clear: “We are not America, a mishmash of all sorts of people. . . . The
Ukrainian needs to stay Ukrainian, the Pole—Polish, the Gagauz—Gagauz,
the Uzbek—Uzbek.” Tyahnybok’s adviser Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn has said
the Holocaust was “a bright episode in European civilization.”[717]
Proving their rebranding was just for show, Tyahnybok got in trouble later
that year when he denounced the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia,” actually using
the more derogatory phrase Moskaly-Zhydy, which he claimed “ruled”
Ukraine.[718] He stood by the statement in 2012.[719] A U.S. State
Department officer explained in a leaked cable that Svoboda spin-off group
Patriot of Ukraine had “protested against Kharkiv court rulings making
Russian the second official language in the city,” adding, “Its official
ideology is Social Nationalism, a cult of the nation within a state, which is
anti-immigrant . . . anti-capitalist and anti-globalist.”[720]
In 2009, five years before the second Maidan coup, the Svoboda Party
was already establishing ties with ethno-nationalist groups across Europe,
officially joining the Alliance of European Nationalist Movements. That
same year they won their first parliamentary election in Ternopil in far-
western Galicia.[721] In May 2010, Tyahnybok was awarded the golden
cross “for his service to Ukraine” from the Canadian Brotherhood of the
Veterans of the First Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army—
the Galician SS.[722]
When Patriot of Ukraine’s Andriy Biletsky founded the Azov
Regiment in 2015, he did so explicitly invoking the name of the UPA.[723]
Other Azov-related Nazi groups include Tradition and Order, Karpatska
Sich, Wotanjugend, Freikorps and NordStorm.[724]

OceanofPDF.com
 Rewriting History

The Book of Facts

During Yushchenko’s reign, his government repeatedly moved to make

national heroes out of the OUN and UPA. They claimed these SS henchmen
were wonderful, inclusive organizations that not only saved Jews but fought
as their allies against both Hitler and Stalin.[725] They said all claims to the
contrary were Soviet Communist and later Russian propaganda. In fact,
Jewish members of the OUN during the war were essentially slaves. Only
skilled doctors, nurses, dentists and shoemakers were kept in concentration
camps while their families were murdered by their captors. When the
Soviets returned, they were all killed, too.[726]
While modern-day apologists for Ukrainian Nazis like to claim the
OUN and UPA also fought the Germans, that is almost entirely false. Lebed
was under explicit orders from Bandera to get along with the Germans as
well as possible, since “[t]he Ukrainian nationalists believe that German
and Ukrainian interests in Eastern Europe are identical.” This was because
they were “shaped in a sprit similar to the National Socialist ideas,” he
wrote.[727] After the German defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad in February
1943, Germany organized the Romanian Iron Guard, Hungarian Arrow
Cross and OUN into the so-called Committee of Subjugated Nations—
which was actually subordinate to the German military—and used them to
defend their rear guard as they retreated.[728] The Ukrainian nationalists
kept their relationship as servants of the Nazis until almost the bitter end.
While there were some limited clashes,[729] their leaders continually
forbade engagements against German forces, prioritizing their fight against
the Poles, Jews and Soviets. Then, knowing what was coming, they started
to rewrite history as soon as the tide turned against the Germans in the war.
This included creating a predated “Book of Facts” which falsely portrayed
them as refusing orders to participate in anti-Jewish pogroms in 1941.[730]
The UPA’s Western allies and expatriates have been playing this game since
the beginning of the last Cold War.[731] But even when they started
working for the CIA and had reason to limit their anti-Semitism to make
themselves more acceptable to the West, the post-war UPA underground
could not restrain themselves as they threatened the country’s remaining
Ukrainian Jews.[732]
Professor Rudling says the OUN-B censored documents that portrayed
their service to the German regime, including Stetsko’s declaration of
loyalty to Hitler from 1941. Their service in the SS was omitted from their
biographies or “their break with the Nazis predated.” Rudling wrote that by
1946, Roman Shukhevych, who had “actively opposed attacks on German
interests” during the war, began portraying the OUN as leaders of an
insurgency by “the entire Ukrainian people” against the German Nazis. He
added that other popular stories by Ukrainian nationalists about their
alleged resistance against the Nazis, “such as Kosyk and Stets’ko’s postwar
claims that the commander of the Nazi Stormtroopers (the Sturmabteilung,
or SA), Viktor Lutze, was killed by UPA unit in Volhynia in 1943, are
entirely fictional.” Many OUN-UPA refugees from the war took up
academic posts in the West, telling and whitewashing their own histories as
well.[733]
This Ukrainian lobby spent decades trying to revise the history of their
collaboration with the Nazis during the Holocaust. They argue that the
OUN-UPA were not anti-Semites at all, but welcomed their Jewish friends,
and if they did murder them it was only because all Jews and Poles were
Communists. You say 98.5 percent of Volhynian Jews were eradicated?
Sounds like a lot of them got away. How could that be true if we killed
them all? And by the way, that Lebed character maybe was a Jewish false-
flag leader sent by Zion to slaughter all those people just to make the
nationalist right look bad. Check out these great documents we forged. Says
here we rescued a bunch of Jewish doctors and gave them great jobs.
Stetsko never declared his loyalty to der Führer und Reichskanzler Adolf
Hitler. See: we edited that part out of his speech. Why, our guys never
worked for the Nazis for even one day after they refused to accept our
declaration of a state just after their forces arrived. And how can we be
fascists if we never controlled a state for everything to be within, huh? The
real German Nazis thought the OUN were not white enough to be their
allies, so definitely gotcha there!
But it is all lies. The West had switched sides in their war, and so the
Ukrainian Nazis had to lay the spin on thick to give the CIA and MI6
plausible deniability.[734] In fact, the OUN never once complained about
the killings of Jews in their newspapers or pamphlets, nor did they set up
any underground organization to assist them, as some Poles had done on the
other side of the border.[735] Instead, their standing orders had been to kill
every Jew they could find—along with anyone who dared to help hide
them.[736]

Springtime for Hitler

After Viktor Yushchenko came to power in the 2004 Orange Revolution,

these narratives invented by the diaspora about the heroism of Hitler’s loyal
Ukrainian henchmen were elevated to official status. While Yushchenko
himself was not exactly an ideological fascist, he was a member of the
board of directors of a private university[737] called the Interregional
Academy of Personnel Management (MAUP)—which the U.S. State
Department deemed “one of the most persistent anti-Semitic institutions in
Eastern Europe”[738]—and he welcomed the Congress of Ukrainian
Nationalists, direct descendants of the OUN-B, into his Nasha Ukraina
(“Our Ukraine”) coalition.[739]
They were trying to form a nation based on collective victimhood and
national hero worship. The victim narrative centered around the idea that
the Holodomor was essentially a Russian genocide against ethnic
Ukrainians, rather than a Communist plot against reason[740] and farmers
of all ethnicities from Ukraine to Kazakhstan,[741] a claim the Yushchenko
government attempted to make illegal to deny.[742] Since there were so
few heroes available, they decided instead to go with this pile of lies about
how Stepan Bandera and his associates in the OUN-UPA were a bunch of
great patriots, harmful only to Stalin and Hitler’s armed forces, never
innocent people like you may have heard.[743]
 Regarding Yushchenko’s mandate to Ukrainian historians to rewrite the
20th century, Rudling wrote that two major components were turning the
Holodomor into an ethnic genocide: exaggerated estimates of 10 million
people killed, and the rehabilitation of Bandera and the OUN as the
founding fathers of the nation. “Ignoring the OUN’s antisemitism, denying
its participation in anti-Jewish violence, and overlooking its fascist
ideology, [SBU chief and later-Rada member Valentyn] Nalyvaichenko and
his agency presented the OUN as democrats, pluralists, even righteous
rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust.”[744]
Yushchenko himself declared OUN-UPA leaders to be national heroes,
denigrated Russian and other languages and supported the east-versus-
further-east schism in the Orthodox Church.[745] Textbooks were rewritten
to portray the new narrative. Shukhevych and Bandera were featured on
postage stamps. Approximately 100 streets were named after Bandera,
while at least 17 monuments to him were erected across the east in the
Yushchenko years (2005–2010).[746]
“To establish the Galician interpretation of Ukrainian history as the
new national standard,” as Professor Nicolai Petro put it,[747] in 2006 they
created the Institute of National Memory, and Yushchenko hired an
associate of the Social Nationalist Party[748] of the Hitler-saluting
Tyahnybok[749] named Ihor Yukhnovs’kyi to run it. Soon thereafter they
created the Center for the Study of the Liberation Movement, a front for the
OUN-B and what Rudling calls “an important link” between a new
generation of nationalist activists and the Ukrainian diaspora, such as the
Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA), as well as the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the SBU.[750]
One story the modern revisionists keep pushing is that of “The Jewess
Stella Krentsbakh,” who was a “nurse and intelligence officer in the UPA.”
They claimed that in the spring of 1945, the NKVD captured a Jewish
woman by that name and sentenced her to death. But then the heroes of the
UPA had rescued her, helped her escape across the Carpathians to the
English zone in Austria, and from there she made her way to Israel and
became a great diplomat in the Foreign Ministry. Ms. Krentsbakh wrote in
her diary: “The reason I am alive today, and have been able to give all the
strength of my 38 years to the free Israel, I owe, apparently to God and the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army,” adding for good measure, “I became a member
of the heroic UPA on November 7, 1943. In our group I counted 12 Jews, of
which eight were physicians.”
The only problem is that the story is an utter and complete hoax. The
woman never existed. She was made up by liars to whitewash murderers.
Her story was a forgery, completely debunked by the historians Philip
Friedman,[751] John-Paul Himka[752] and Per Anders Rudling.[753]
They pulled a similar scam with the story of Leiba-Itsko Iosifovich
Dobrovskii, who wrote leaflets for the UPA in 1942 and 1943. He was
included in an exhibition at the Institute of National Memory. But his
legend was invented by the so-called historian Volodymyr Viatrovych in the
W. Bush-Yushchenko years. In fact, the man hid his Jewish identity from
the UPA because he was terrified they would murder him, as revealed by
the actual records examined by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. In fact, the
man himself also debunked their claims that they had fought the German
Nazis. They “did not kill a single local German leader in the area” of
Volhynia, he told his Soviet interrogators. “Did Viatrovych and his
supporters think that no one would ever read Dobrovskii’s arrest file?”
Haaretz reporter Jared McBride wondered.[754] Maybe next time.
In 2005, in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution, the UNA-UNSO—
again, direct descendants of the OUN-UPA—for the first time held a rally
in Kiev, instead of just the far west, to mark the anniversary of the founding
of the UPA, leading to violent clashes with pro-Russian leftist counter-
protesters.[755]

Erased

In 2007, scholar Omer Bartov published Erased: Vanishing Traces of

Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, which documents the obliteration
of Jews from the history of Eastern Galicia. He shows how in now-western
Ukraine, the right has made a concerted effort to erase the memory of the
previous Jewish population and what happened to them. While some of it
can be blamed on the Soviet Communists, who for example, paved over a
Jewish cemetery in Lviv,[756] or simple poverty and neglect in other cases,
[757] he also showed how the Nazis had made a park out of what had been
the Drohobych ghetto, featuring a giant statue of Stepan Bandera—that is
deliberate.[758] In Kosiv, where half the population had been Jewish before
the war, there is nothing to commemorate the Holocaust, but there is a
museum to the legacy of the UPA in the former home of the local rabbi.
[759]
 The EU Parliament had formally complained when Yushchenko
decorated Bandera with the “Hero of Ukraine” award in February 2010.
[760] Similar awards were also posthumously given to OUN-UPA members
Shukhevych, Stetsko, Olena Teliha and Oleh Olzhych.[761] Polish
President Lech Kaczyński denounced the move,[762] while protesters
marched on the Ukrainian Embassy in Warsaw.[763]
Yale’s Timothy Snyder thought this was why Yushchenko was defeated
in the first round of voting in the 2010 presidential election, “perhaps in
some measure because far more Ukrainians identify with the Red Army
than with nationalist partisans from western Ukraine.” He wrote that “[b]y
conferring the highest state honor of ‘Hero of Ukraine’ upon Stepan
Bandera . . . Yushchenko provoked protests from the chief rabbi of Ukraine,
the president of Poland, and many of his own citizens.” He added, “It is no
wonder. Bandera aimed to make of Ukraine a one-party fascist dictatorship
without national minorities. During World War II, his followers killed many
Poles and Jews.” Snyder could not understand it, wondering, “Why would
President Yushchenko, the leader of the democratic Orange Revolution,
wish to rehabilitate such a figure?”[764]

Reversed

When Viktor Yanukovych was elected in 2010, he had the courts declare the
designation of Bandera and Shukhevych as national heroes to be illegal and
repealed it. He fired the Social Nationalists from the SBU Archives and
Institute of National Memory, put a Communist in charge of it, then closed
it down.[765]
 The nationalists were down but not out. According to journalist Palash
Ghosh, “European and Israeli leaders expressed shock in October 2012,
when Svoboda gained more than 10 percent of the electorate in
parliamentary elections, entering the legislature for the first time. (In some
western regions of Ukraine, Svoboda gained as much as 40 percent of the
vote.)”[766]

Revenge of the Right

But after the 2014 coup, President Petro Poroshenko decreed October 14,
the anniversary of the founding of the UPA, to be “Defender of Ukraine
Day.”[767] Journalist Max Blumenthal wrote that “[w]hen the European
Parliament condemned Yushchenko’s proclamation as an affront to
‘European values,’ the UCCA-affiliated Ukrainian World Congress reacted
with outrage, accusing the EU of ‘another attempt to rewrite Ukrainian
history during WWII.’” On its website, the UCCA dismissed historical
accounts of Bandera’s collaboration with the Germans as “Soviet
propaganda.”[768]
The next year, the new Rada, led by the Nazis, passed supposed “de-
communization laws” that prohibited criticism of fascists in Ukrainian
history.[769] The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum issued a
statement saying they were “deeply concerned” about how this law would
be used to rehabilitate the OUN and UPA.[770]
Svoboda Party members were given jobs running the Institute of
National Remembrance and Archive of National Memory to force the
change in the nation’s official history through control of education and
regulation of major media.[771] The Lviv Center for the Study of the
Liberation Movement (TsDVR)—which had been founded by the OUN-
UPA and specialized in publishing books whitewashing their history of
atrocities and cooperation with the Nazis during World War II[772]—
received millions of euros from EU governments and hundreds of
thousands of dollars from USAID.[773] Volodymyr Viatrovych, who got his
start at the TsDVR, and was happy to defend the legacy of not just the
OUN-UPA, but also the Galician SS,[774] had previously been appointed
by Yushchenko to head the Security Service of Ukraine’s archives.
Poroshenko named him to run the Institute of National Remembrance. The
government then transferred millions of historical documents to his group
so that he could whitewash the history of the OUN-UPA.[775]
As Lev Golinkin documented in the Forward, after 2014, the new
government made glorification of the OUN-UPA a national phenomenon.
They began putting up shrines to “Nazi collaborators and Holocaust
perpetrators at an astounding pace—there’s been a new plaque or street
renaming nearly every week.” There were by then “several hundred
monuments, statues and streets named after Nazi collaborators in
Ukraine.”[776] Rossoliński-Liebe documented the same, noting dozens of
statues and hundreds of street name changes, and that the effort was led by
the “social nationalist” Svoboda.[777] Andriy Parubiy hosted the unveiling
of a massive Bandera monument in Lviv in 2007.[778]
In April 2015, Poroshenko signed a law recognizing the OUN and UPA
as “resistance fighters.” Forty historians signed a letter asking him not to.
The UPA “took part in anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine and, in the case of
the Melnyk faction, remained allied with the occupation regime throughout
the war,” they wrote.[779]
The coup government soon banned any media that cast relations
between the two countries in a positive light, including Russian movies,
[780] Russian language newspapers[781] and Russian songs on the radio.
[782]
In 2018, while Ukraine was undergoing an “unprecedented new surge
of anti-Semitism,” according to the World Jewish Congress,[783] the
government in Kiev passed a law rehabilitating members of the OUN and
UPA, giving them the status and social welfare guarantees of war veterans,
[784] and made Bandera’s birthday a national holiday.[785] The Simon
Wiesenthal Center’s Dr. Efraim Zuroff criticized the move: “Glorifying the
person whose men committed countless heinous crimes is an insult to the
victims and an unthinkable distortion of the history of the world’s most
horrific genocide.” He continued, “Unfortunately in recent years, Ukraine
has been one of the major propagators of a distorted version of Holocaust
history which seeks to hide or minimize crimes committed by Ukrainian
nationalists.” His colleague Mark Weitzman added, “It is clear that Ukraine
is choosing to rehabilitate antisemitism and to censor history.” He cited the
fact that the Ukrainian region of Lviv had declared 2019 would be “Stepan
Bandera Year,” and that a book criticizing politician Symon Petliura, who
led pogroms against Ukrainian Jews in 1919, was banned.[786]
Jochen Hellbeck wrote in The New Republic that “Ukraine makes
amnesia the law of the land.” He added, “One of the laws condemns ‘the
Communist and Nazi totalitarian regimes in Ukraine and bans propaganda
of their symbols.’ For the most part, however, the law focuses on the Soviet
era.” When it came to the Germans and the Holocaust, “All that it has to say
about Nazism is that its racial theories drove certain groups out of their
professions. It makes no mention of the mass murder of Jews, let alone the
participation of Ukrainians in these atrocities.” This was no accident,
Hellbeck wrote, recounting the role of the UPA in the Holocaust. “The new
law glorifying the UPA was drafted by Yuri Shukhevych, Roman
Shukhevych’s son.”[787]
Since it was founded in 2006, The Institute of National Memory (INP)
has promoted pro-Nazi revisionism. As Petro wrote, its first director, Ihor
Yukhnovskyi, “publicly supported the neo-Nazi, Social-Nationalist Party of
Ukraine, and argued that all government policies should be ‘based on the
Ukrainian idea.’” They pushed the lie that OUN-UPA was a friend of Jews
while building monuments to Bandera’s men at their memorial sites.[788]
Again, it is true that in a few isolated instances the OUN-UPA also fought
the Nazis when they were not collaborating with them. However, Bandera
and his followers subjected all sorts of different ethnic and political
enemies, including Jews, to ethnic cleansing, mass violence, crimes against
humanity and intentional genocide. Welcome them, they did not.[789]
INP leader Volodymyr Viatrovych was actually fired in 2019 for his
efforts to rehabilitate Bandera and his followers.[790] But he was replaced
by the philosopher Anton Drobovych, who in practice was no better. As
Drobovych told the story, “We now know that there were people in these
organizations who opposed both the Nazis and the communists, and also
cooperated with, for example, the partisans against the Nazis or with locals
against the Red Army.”[791] This was essentially a lie, since he omitted
Ukrainian nationalists’ direct collaboration with the Nazis to kill Jews,
Poles and other Ukrainians, and implied they were instead some neutral
third force, stuck in the middle and innocent of the others’ crimes.
In 2017, Vasily Vovk, a general with the Security Service of Ukraine—
their central intelligence agency—wrote that Jews “aren’t Ukrainians and I
will destroy you along with [Jewish-Ukrainian oligarch and MP Vadim]
Rabinovych.” He continued, “I’m telling you one more time—go to hell,
zhidi [kikes], the Ukrainian people have had it to here with you. Ukraine
must be governed by Ukrainians.”[792]
That same year, Eduard Dolinsky, director of the Ukrainian Jewish
Committee, wrote about his concerns in the New York Times. He recounted
the true legacy of the OUN’s atrocities during the war and its avowed hatred
of Jews and worried about Kiev’s campaign to “whitewash” this history and
glorify the guilty. He noted the 2015 law that threatened jail for anyone
disrespecting these supposed heroes, the renaming of streets after OUN-
UPA leaders, a proposed law to retroactively exonerate members convicted
of war crimes by the USSR and unchecked vandalism of Jewish cemeteries
and Holocaust memorials. “This is not just a fight over history. Virulent
right-wing nationalist groups have found new prominence in Ukrainian
politics in recent years,” he wrote, noting that politicians were already
afraid of provoking them by saying a word against Bandera or the OUN-
UPA. He also said that during a January 1, 2017, torch-lit march in honor of
Bandera, the marchers chanted “Jews out.” Rada member Nadia Savchenko
had recently said on Ukrainian TV, “I have nothing against Jews. I do not
like ‘kikes.’ Jews possess 80 percent of the power when they only account
for 2 percent of the population.”[793]
It is a wonder how the Times has never investigated itself for collusion
with Russia for posting so many too-late, but still-true articles about the
mess that Nuland made in Ukraine.[794] They could win a Pulitzer.[795]
Two months later, Dolinsky denounced the city of Lviv for holding a
festival in honor of Shukhevych.[796] They held a similar march the next
year, literally “honoring the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS,”
according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Dolinsky again condemned
this as “a scandalous event that should not be allowed to happen in Ukraine
in which murderers of Jews and others are glorified.”[797]
Imagine a European city with thousands of marchers demanding “Jews
Out!”[798] and instead of becoming a great crisis deserving authorities’ full
attention, it is treated like an embarrassing old skeleton in the closet, of no
real importance; or worse, just the dastardly lies of the Russians and their
all-powerful propaganda machine.
In 2017, over the strenuous objections of the Ukrainian Jewish
Committee, the Poroshenko government erected a statue of the OUN
propagandist and poet Olena Teliha at the Babi Yar memorial. She was shot
by the Nazis there. But she was a Nazi too. One might imagine how this
was taken—as a sign of equivalent victimhood by the descendants of the
OUN and a major affront by Ukrainian Jews whose forebears were
slaughtered there by the tens of thousands by her then-allies.[799]
Soon after, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, after
denouncing pogroms against Roma and desecrations of Jewish memorial
sites, also condemned “the continuing effort led by the leadership of the
government’s Ukrainian Institute of National Memory to praise certain
leaders of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the
Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and cleanse their murderous
records.”[800]

Russians Noticed, Too

Perhaps it is true that the Russian government embellishes this narrative of

Ukrainian fascism to smear Ukraine as “a nation unworthy of statehood,” as
one local critic put it.[801] But they hardly need to. The country does have
the largest number of influential Nazis in the world today. Nowhere else
compares, and as will be shown below, the reality has been bad enough to
serve as an inspiration to other neo-Nazi factions around the world. Unlike
the typical establishment foreign policy advice, the purpose here is not to
cry Munich and demand America invade Ukraine or support the Russians in
their current war. But it is clearly enough reason to avoid getting mixed up
in any conflict on the western Ukrainian nationalists’ side, as our
government has been so determined to do.

Aftermath

A Clean Nation

Gabriel Gatehouse, the BBC reporter from the Maidan documentary,

performed his own study of the post-revolution Ukrainian Nazi movement.
One young Right Sector fighter told him, “National Socialist themes are
popular among some of us. The idea of one nation.” He continued, “I like
the idea of one nation, one people, one country. . . . A clean nation. Not like
under Hitler. But in our own way, a little bit like that.”
Svoboda’s C14 leader Yevhen Karas added, “No I don’t think I’m a
Nazi. I’m a Ukrainian nationalist. . . . The main confrontation is that some
ethnic groups have control [of] many business structures, some economics
and political forces.” When Gatehouse asked, “Which ethnic groups?”
Karas replied, “Russians and Jews and . . . it may be some non-Ukrainian
group control a huge percent of some economic or political power.”
He showed a photo of members of Svoboda in parliament holding up
small signs that read “14” and “88,” code for David Lane’s slogan and
“Heil Hitler,” as “H” is the eighth letter of the English alphabet. Gatehouse
summarized: “It’s clear that it was the radical groups who kept up the
pressure on Viktor Yanukovych and many of them feel that this really is
their victory. The question is how much power will that give the far right in
the new Ukraine.” Leftist activist Maksim Butkevich warned that after their
success in the Maidan, and the outbreak of fighting in the east, the Nazi
fringe would have more influence than ever.[802]

Foreign Policy

In March 2014, the American establishmentarian journal Foreign Policy ran

an important article called, “Yes, There Are Bad Guys in the Ukrainian
Government.” Its authors, Andrew Foxall and Oren Kessler, are foreign
policy hawks associated with the neoconservative think tanks, the Henry
Jackson Society and Foundation for Defense of Democracies. But even they
had to admit, “The uncomfortable truth is that a sizeable portion of Kiev’s
current government—and the protesters who brought it to power—are,
indeed, fascists.” They noted the influence of Oleh Tyahnybok and his
party, and that “[t]oday, Svoboda holds a larger chunk of its nation’s
ministries (nearly a quarter, including the prized defense portfolio) than any
other far-right party on the continent.” This included the deputy prime
minister, prosecutor general and deputy chair of parliament. They wrote that
“Svoboda’s fresh faces are scarcely different from the old: one of its
freshmen members of parliament is the founder of the ‘Joseph Goebbels
Political Research Center’ and has hailed the Holocaust as a ‘bright period
in human history.’”[803] Svoboda’s deputy chief, Ihor Miroshnychenko,
wrote that actress Mila Kunis “is not Ukrainian, she is a Yid. She is proud
of it, so Star of David be with her.”[804]
The member of parliament mentioned by Foxall and Kessler was
Tyahnybok’s partner at Svoboda, Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn. He really did
found an institution called “the Joseph Goebbels Political Research
Center.”[805] After getting some bad publicity, he renamed it after the
German conservative war veteran and philosopher Ernst Jünger.[806]
Mykhalchyshyn had proclaimed at the Bandera memorial in Lviv, “Our
Banderite army will cross the Dnipro and throw that blue-ass gang, which
today usurps the power, out of Ukraine. . . . That will make those Asiatic
dogs shut their ugly mouths.”[807] Historian Rossoliński-Liebe noted that
Mykhalchyshyn’s “approach to Ukrainian history confused many patriotic
and ‘liberal’ historians and intellectuals who were accustomed to deny the
fascist tendencies of the OUN and UPA, or who understood Ukrainian
nationalism to be a ‘national liberation movement.’”[808]
When this guy says “everything within the state,” he means it. For
example, he approvingly reprinted the Ukrainian Nazi poet Yurii Lypa:
“Marriage is the duty of the woman to her own gender. The duty of the
state, in turn, is to assist her in this . . . the 300 ovulations of every
Ukrainian woman, as well as the 1,500 ejaculations of every Ukrainian man
are the same national treasures as, say, energy resources, or deposits of iron,
coal or oil.”[809] He was elected to the Rada in the new eastern and
southern regions-free vote of October 2014.
Foxall and Kessler railed in disbelief at Sen. McCain’s embrace of
Tyahnybok, the EU overseeing a deal including him and the State
Department dismissing the far right’s influence as Russian propaganda. The
U.S. denials came just as the Rada attempted to pass a law requiring all
government business to be done in Ukrainian, which led to a massive
backlash in Crimea and the rest of the south and east of the country. It was
not that they were about to seize total power. “In fact,” the two noted, “it
was the same French- and German-backed peace deal that gave Svoboda its
disproportionate share of the resulting government’s ministries. Western
governments, then, are at least partially complicit in facilitating Svoboda’s
rise.” They advised, “Sound policy . . . can only be based on sound analysis
of the players involved. That requires conceding the point—even when
made by the Kremlin—that more than a few of the protesters who toppled
Yanukovych, and of the new leaders in Kiev, are fascists.”[810]

Liberals
Instead, the Obama administration went to work to rehabilitate the
reputation of these Ukrainian Nazis. They talked to Reuters, saying they
would never have dealt with a guy like Tyahnybok, but this time it was
necessary “because he headed one of the three principal opposition factions
leading the Ukrainian protests.” How else were they supposed to force the
president from power? Besides, “[s]ince entering the Ukrainian Parliament
in October 2012, the Svoboda leadership has been working to take their
party in a more moderate direction and to become a modern, European
mainstream political party,” a senior U.S. official claimed.[811]
To America’s liberal Democrats, conservative Republican voters are
unrepentant, irredeemable, fascist white supremacists.[812] But actual
armed militias of avowed Hitler-loving, Jew-hating, national socialists, who
just launched a bloody street putsch to overthrow a democratically elected
leader? Hey, they are working hard at doing better.
Hawks like to emphasize that the Nazi parties did not do very well in
the October 2014 elections.[813] But the Nazis did. They just joined up
with larger parties to gain influence. Andriy Biletsky, the self-proclaimed
“White Ruler” (Bely Vozd),[814] formerly of Patriot of Ukraine and the
Social-Nationalist Assembly,[815] won his election for parliament as the
People’s Front party candidate. Shortly thereafter, he officially founded the
paramilitary Azov Battalion[816] alongside the interior minister, Arsen
Avakov, a close ally from his stint as the governor of Kharkiv[817] and the
Maidan protests.[818] Svoboda’s Andriy Parubiy joined Yulia
Tymoshenko’s Fatherland Party and became speaker of the Rada.[819]

10 Important Nazis
NBC News reported that “Svoboda . . . was given almost a quarter of the
Cabinet positions in the interim government formed after the ouster of
President Viktor Yanukovych,”[820] and reminded us that in 2012 the
European Parliament had passed a resolution that asked democratic parties
in the Rada “not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with this party
due to its racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views.” They added that
Parubiy’s appointment to secretary of the Security and National Defense
Committee has “raised eyebrows,” and went on to note, “Although now a
member of the liberal-conservative Fatherland party, Parubiy led anti-
Yanukovych street militias in Kiev in the wake of protests that erupted in
December.”[821]
Historian Per Anders Rudling told Britain’s Channel 4 News, “Two
weeks ago I could never have predicted this. A neo-fascist party like
Svoboda getting the deputy prime minister position is news in its own
right.” He continued, “There are seven ministers with links to the extreme
right now. It began with Svoboda getting 10 per cent of the vote in the last
election, it is certainly a concern in the long run,” adding, “According to
Svoboda’s website, the party’s ideology stems from Yaroslav Stetsko, a
former leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).”[822]
Rudling undercounted. As mentioned, Andriy Parubiy was given a
senior defense position[823] and later made the speaker of the parliament,
[824] a seat he held for five years.[825] Ihor Tenyukh, a member of
Svoboda’s political council, became the interim defense minister.[826]
Dmitry Yarosh from Right Sector was offered the role of deputy head of the
National Security Council,[827] and later deputy chief of the national
police,[828] before deciding to run and win a seat in the Rada instead.[829]
He is currently an adviser to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian
military.[830] Svoboda’s Oleksandr Sych was named deputy prime
minister.[831] Andriy Mokhnyk, the deputy head of Svoboda and envoy to
other European fascist parties, got the ministry of ecology and natural
resources.[832] Ihor Shvaika, a right-wing big-ag oligarch, became
agriculture minister.[833] Oleh Makhnitsky, a member of parliament from
Svoboda, became acting prosecutor general.[834] Serhiy Kvit, also from
Svoboda, was picked to lead the Education Ministry.[835] Andriy Biletsky,
the Azov Battalion’s founder, was elected to parliament, a seat he held until
2019.[836] Vadim Troyan, an Azov deputy commander and “leading
member” of the “Patriot of Ukraine” Nazi group, was appointed as police
chief of Kiev Oblast.[837] He was later promoted to deputy interior
minister under Arsen Avakov,[838] then to deputy chief of Ukraine’s
national police, a position he held until the autumn of 2021.[839]
That was 10 Nazis in major positions of power in the new government.

Proud Fascists

In his 2011 essay “Axioms of Social Nationalism,” Svoboda Party

ideologist Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn wrote that Ukraine’s Nazis were defending
against “a total and permanent national, class, and racial war of
destruction,” which “has been declared against the Ukrainians: they are
trying to liquidate us as a community of blood and spirit.” He outlined the
“positive values” of social nationalism, including: “force,” “hierarchy,”
“order,” “authority,” “discipline,” “passion” and “hatred.” He explained that
the social-nationalist worldview was formed “through opposition to
negative, anti-human, and anti-national phenomena of today, raising its
battle banners over the conquered strongholds of the enemy spirit: Anti-
bourgeoism, anti-capitalism, anti-globalism, anti-democratism, anti-
liberalism, anti-bureaucratism, anti-dogmatism.”[840]
Dimitry Yarosh narrated a recruitment video for Right Sector: “We are
the fighters of the Right Sector. This is just the beginning. The renaissance
of Europe begins with our Maidan against marginal and corrupt democracy,
against degeneration and totalitarian liberalism, for national morals and
family values.” He said, “For healthy youth in body and mind. Against the
cult of illicit gain and debauchery, against any form of integration that
would be imposed on Ukraine for the unity and greatness of the Ukrainian
nation, for a great Ukraine, a great European reconquest.”[841] That phrase
is the loudest alarm for America and Britain’s liberal media establishments,
[842] except when Ukrainian Nazis use it.
Is The New Republic’s Anne Applebaum an agent of a foreign power
posing as an American participating in the public debate like a regular
citizen or journalist might? She certainly has a massive conflict of interest,
being a dual citizen married to Polish politician Radosław Sikorski.
Applebaum endlessly writes hawkish screeds for American audiences that
seem to coincide with his views and interests exactly. Shortly after
Svoboda-C14 and Right Sector’s violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected
government, Applebaum, a self-identified liberal fighting against the evils
of right-wing authoritarianism everywhere except Ukraine,[843] took to the
pages of that most hawkish of American magazines[844] to promote
Ukrainian nationalism. Lamenting the failure of the Orange Revolution to
abolish corruption and chaos, she called for a new order in Ukraine.
“[N]ationalism is fundamentally emotional. In truth, you can’t really make
‘the case’ for nationalism; you can only inculcate it, teach it to children,
cultivate it at public events.” She said that “Ukrainians need more of this
kind of inspiration, not less—moments like last New Year’s Eve, when
more than 100,000 Ukrainians sang the national anthem at midnight on the
Maidan.” Applebaum added, “They need more occasions when they can
shout, ‘Slava Ukraini—Heroyam Slava’—‘Glory to Ukraine, Glory to its
Heroes,’ which was, yes, the slogan of the controversial Ukrainian
Revolutionary Army in the 1940s, but has been adopted to a new context.”
Controversial. She concluded, “And then of course they need to translate
that emotion into laws, institutions, a decent court system, and police
training academies. If they don’t, then their country will once again cease to
exist.”[845]

Torches Out for Bandera

On New Year’s Day in 2014, in the midst of the Maidan movement, USA
Today described a massive torchlight parade through the streets of Kiev.
“About 15,000 people marched through Kiev on Wednesday night to honor
Stepan Bandera, glorified by some as a leader of Ukraine’s liberation
movement and dismissed by others as a Nazi collaborator.” They added,
“Some wore the uniform of a Ukrainian division of the German army
during World War II. Others chanted ‘Ukraine above all!’ and ‘Bandera,
come and bring order!’”[846]
Jewish Leaders Concerned

The chief rabbi of Ukraine, Moshe Reuven Asman, urged Jews to flee after
several violent anti-Semitic attacks, the Israeli Embassy warned Jews not to
go outside[847] and canceled Hanukkah ceremonies out of fear of Svoboda
thugs among the protesters.[848] While Jews have not been targeted by the
ultra-nationalist groups in large numbers, there was no mystery why local
leaders were so concerned after the coup. The World Jewish Congress
called for an official ban of Svoboda, a member of the Alliance of European
National Movements, a group that includes the British National Party
(BNP) and French National Front.[849] In January 2021, Israeli
Ambassador Joel Lion condemned a torchlight march in honor of Bandera.
In response, the Nazis held a rally at the Israeli Embassy demanding that
Israel and “the Jews” apologize for Communism and the Holodomor.[850]
Renowned Nazi hunter Efraim Zuroff, head of the Simon Wiesenthal
Center’s Jerusalem office, said the promotion of Biletsky’s deputy Troyan
to police chief was “very worrying,” and “sends the worst possible message
about the intentions of the new Ukrainian government. If they are
appointing people like this to positions of such importance and power, it is a
very dangerous signal to the Jewish community of Ukraine.” He continued,
“This is a very strange way of convincing the justifiably concerned Jewish
world that there is no intention to encourage fascist sympathies or neo-Nazi
activities.”[851]
Oleksandr Feldman, president of the Ukrainian Jewish Committee and
a member of the Ukrainian parliament, wrote for the Jewish Telegraphic
Agency that he had been trying without success to get the Fatherland and
UDAR parties to break their alliance with Svoboda. He said that not only
were Svoboda and Right Sector worrisome, but that there were many other
anti-Semites among the Maidan movement, for example putting on an anti-
Jewish play on New Year’s Eve and Svoboda-sponsored torchlight parades
in honor of Bandera.[852] Washington’s own Radio Liberty described the
founding ceremony of the National Corps Party, which was based on
Biletsky’s group Patriot of Ukraine: “That inaugural ceremony arguably had
pomp more reminiscent of 1930s Germany than of postwar democracy. It
included nationalist chants, raised fists, and a torchlight march through
central Kyiv.”[853]
World Jewish Congress (WJC) president Ronald Lauder wrote a letter
of protest to the leader of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) in the
summer of 2013. He told the church’s Patriarch Filaret, “I was horrified to
see photographs . . . of young Ukrainians wearing the dreaded SS uniform
with swastikas clearly visible on their helmets.” He asked the church to
“prevent any further rehabilitation of Nazism or the SS” in Ukraine.[854] In
2016, the WJC complained—along with the Wiesenthal Center[855]—that
the government was renaming the most important boulevard in Kiev after
Bandera. The group’s CEO Robert Singer said that “[i]t is ironic and
perplexing that the Kyiv municipality would decide to honor a man whose
followers joined the German death squads in murdering the Jews of Ukraine
during the Holocaust,” noting that it was also at the same time “planning to
build Ukraine’s first Holocaust museum.”[856]
The Washington-based National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry
(NCSEJ), formerly known as the National Council for Soviet Jewry
(NCSJ), wrote to President Poroshenko to “protest in the strongest possible
terms” after the Ukrainian Order of Freedom was awarded to Vasil
Kvasnovsky, an anti-Semitic author who blamed the Holodomor on
Ukrainian Jews and had helped found the Spanish Svoboda party.[857]
They later put out a statement condemning recent anti-Semitic attacks in
Ukraine and asked the police to investigate them.[858]
Then-Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett released a report in
January 2018 saying there had been a major recent increase in anti-Semitic
incidents, including violent assaults, in western Ukraine, more than any
other nation in the former Soviet Union.[859]
In 2017, the Israeli liberal daily Haaretz worried when the western city
of Vinnitsa dedicated a statue to Symon Petliura,[860] the leader of the
Ukrainian People’s Republic at a time when as many as 50,000 Jews were
killed in pogroms during the Russian Civil War between 1918 and 1921.
[861]
This is the only country in the world where these questions are at issue.
Other major European nationalist parties like the French National Rally and
BNP do not go around making heroes out of Hitler’s death squads. In
Germany, a national party leader was criminally convicted in 2024 for
daring to cross that line by using a slogan of the Nazi party’s SA
stormtroopers, “Everything for Germany!”[862]

De-recognizing Russian

In 1991, the Rada had passed a Declaration of the Rights of Nationalities of

Ukraine, promising official status for any major minority language group in
the country. Ukraine’s 1996 constitution guaranteed “the free development,
use and protection of [the] Russian [language].”[863] But the Yushchenko
administration, after the 2004 Orange Revolution, launched a sort of
codified culture war of Galician Ukrainian nationalism against the
predominantly ethnic Russian people of the south and east. This included a
ham-handed attempt at Ukrainianization, including efforts to marginalize
the use of Russian in education and public documents.[864]
But under Yanukovych, in 2012, the Rada passed the Kivalov-
Kolesnichenko Law, which allowed the use of other languages in official
matters if regional parliaments agreed. Petro writes that “[h]alf of Ukraine’s
regions immediately voted to do so. The passage of this law, however,
similarly galvanized Ukrainian nationalists.”[865] After the 2014 coup, the
first act of the new Rada was to repeal Kivalov-Kolesnichenko, a top
demand of Svoboda.[866] Though ultimately Acting President Turchynov
did not sign it, this was still taken as a declaration of war against the people
of the east.[867]
Turchynov’s successor, Poroshenko, signed a similar bill in 2017 that
made Ukrainian the required language in all public schools from the fifth
grade up. Poles, Romanians, Hungarians and Russians, all of which have
large communities in Ukraine, tried to prevent it. Russia denounced the law
as an attempt to “forcefully establish a mono-ethnic language regime in a
multinational state.”[868] This came after a series of measures when the
Zhytomyr, Lviv and Ternopil regions banned movies, books and songs in
Russian,[869] and the national parliament mandated quotas for Ukrainian-
language broadcasting over TV and radio.[870]
 Our government insists the regime in Kiev is a democracy, but that is
little more than a hoax. Twice in 10 years, the U.S. directly intervened to
put their friends in power. Russian-leaning parties are separated from their
voters by the conflict in the east[871] or outright banned, and the new
regime has waged a full-scale culture war against them. Not that they had
much choice at that point. When parliament refused to honor Bandera and
the UPA in October 2014, approximately 8,000 members of Right Sector
and C14 descended on Kiev and attacked police guarding the building.[872]

Even Freedom House?

April Gordon from George Soros’s Freedom House, in a report about rising
nationalism and racialism across Eurasia, wrote that though the most right-
wing parties in Ukraine had not done so well in the 2019 election, “the
narrow vision of pro-Ukrainian nationalist orthodoxy and vehement anti-
Russian rhetoric championed by Svoboda and its allies became a dominant
political narrative” within “mainstream political discourse.” They had
already won. “With his slogan ‘Army, language, faith!’ former President
Petro Poroshenko helped to popularize an exclusivist brand of patriotism
that continues to draw significant support from both moderate and radical
segments of society.” She added, “Poroshenko’s political rhetoric ultimately
culminated in a series of severe legal measures purporting to preserve
Ukrainian identity, but which often infringe upon the rights of the country’s
minority groups.”[873] Not that they said they were sorry for installing
these people in power.
 Losing Crimea

Oops

Far from getting away with the coup cleanly, the reaction came right away.
On February 22, 2014, Reuters reported that the U.S. had warned Russia
not to invade in the aftermath of the coup after fistfights had broken out in
Crimea and some eastern cities between what they called “supporters of the
new, pro-EU order in Kiev and those anxious to stay close to Moscow.”
Obama’s National Security Advisor Susan Rice went on TV to try to talk
them out of it. The administration had won the first round. Now they were
trying to call “time out.”[874]

Crimean History

Russia, under Catherine the Great, won the Crimean Peninsula from the
Turks back in 1783, the same year Benjamin Franklin, John Jay and John
Adams negotiated America’s peace with Great Britain after the
Revolutionary War, four years before our Constitution had even been
written. It is part of Russia like Virginia is part of the United States of
America. Think about how important West Point is to New Yorkers or the
Alamo is to Texans. The Russians lost more than 200,000 soldiers fighting
to keep Crimea out of the hands of the Brits, French and Ottomans in the
Crimean War in the 1850s, an attempt to kick them out of their Sevastopol
base.[875] Crimea lost another 100,000 to the Germans and Romanians in
World War II, a sacrifice which may have helped to save the USSR from
being conquered by the Third Reich.[876] The peninsula hosts Russia’s
Black Sea Fleet at their only year-round warm-water port at Sevastopol,
granting direct access to the Mediterranean.[877] You could see why they
consider it important. Let some foreign power try to take San Diego away
from the U.S.A. and see what happens to them.
The only reason Crimea was under Ukrainian control at all was
because Soviet First Secretary and Premier Nikita Khrushchev gave it to
them in 1954 as a “gift” to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the
union between the two nations[878] and strengthen Ukrainian Communist
Party support for his own rise to power after the death of Stalin. He also
needed to consolidate Ukraine’s place in the Soviet empire after finally
crushing the U.S.-backed nationalist UPA uprising in the country’s west.
[879] At that time it made no real difference since the “republics” were all
answerable to the Kremlin first anyway.
Due in part to ethnic cleansing by Stalin’s regime in the 1940s,[880]
the population in Crimea is something like 60 percent Russian, 13 percent
Turkic Tatars and 25 percent Ukrainian.[881] In the generation between the
fall of the Soviet Union and the events of the last decade, Crimea had
maintained a great deal of autonomy from the central government in Kiev.

Post-USSR

In January 1991, more than 90 percent of Crimea’s voters chose to break

away from Ukraine and join the Union Treaty with Moscow.[882] But after
the failed Communist coup that August, Ukraine immediately declared
independence from the USSR and the Crimean parliament chose to stay
with Ukraine until attempting to declare independence themselves in a
short-lived political maneuver in May 1992.[883] At that time, the British
spy agency MI6 warned Prime Minister John Major that Ukraine would
surely intervene to prevent the election, which “will arouse passions among
nationalists in Kiev and Moscow and could stir up inter-ethnic conflict
within Crimea.” One analyst warned Major, “There must be a real
possibility that the situation will slip out of control. That could mean
violence in Crimea, and serious confrontation between Russia and
Ukraine.” Luckily the situation did not come to a head then, but it just goes
to show that Western leaders knew—or should have known—what kind of
fire they were playing with when intervening in such hotly contested
territory. Rodric Braithwaite, the former ambassador to Moscow, told the
prime minister, “It is not entirely clear, even to the Ukrainians, still less to
the Russians, that Ukraine is a real country. Hence the tensions between the
two. For Russians, the Ukraine is an integral part of Russia, its history and
its culture.”[884]
Sergei Stankevich, President Yeltsin’s envoy to the Soviet Republics in
the last days of the USSR, explained that they had made a handshake deal
with Ukraine’s new President Leonid Kravchuk to update the arrangement
over Crimea after independence: it would remain part of Ukraine, but with
almost complete autonomy from the central government, while Russia
would keep the Black Sea Fleet and lease the Sevastopol base. Yeltsin’s
priority was convincing Ukraine to give up the nuclear weapons left on
their territory and maintaining control of Sevastopol, so he decided not to
create a new controversy over reincorporating the peninsula under direct
Russian control.[885]
In May 1992, the Crimean Supreme Soviet, as it was still called,
pushed for a referendum on independence “in alliance with other states” to
be held in August. Nikolai Bagrov, the chair of the body, then clarified that
it was not a vote for secession from Ukraine, whose new constitution
declared sovereignty over Crimea. Kiev reacted harshly though, demanding
the referendum be canceled. Through negotiation they compromised.
Ukraine passed a new law recognizing Crimea as an “autonomous republic”
with the right to its own constitution, and Crimea canceled the
independence vote, amended its constitution and passed new laws to get
into compliance with Kiev.[886]
In the fall of 1993, Yeltsin made a deal with President Kravchuk
whereby Russia would forgive a $2.5 billion debt in exchange for Ukraine’s
part of the Black Sea Fleet and continued control of the Sevastopol naval
base. President Clinton approved of this deal, only worrying that the
Ukrainians would back out.[887]
In 1994, Crimea elected a president, Yuri Meshkov, who wanted to
separate from Ukraine and join Russia. Later that year, after Leonid
Kuchma became president of Ukraine, Crimea held a referendum to declare
more autonomy from Kiev, establish dual Ukrainian-Russian citizenship
and increase the power of the Crimean president. The Clinton
administration sent John Quigley of the OSCE to negotiate a deal. They
were very far apart, but Russia was too weak to get involved and
incorporate Ukraine, so Quigley came up with a plan for autonomy
including international supervision. He wrote it up as a treaty and proposed
it to the OSCE official in charge of minority issues. The boss was
“horrified” and killed it. Rather than resolving anything, the OSCE got
nothing done beyond holding one conference in Italy.[888]
The Ukrainian Rada then abolished Crimea’s 1992 constitution and the
presidency itself and otherwise strengthened Kiev’s control over the
peninsula.[889] With Yeltsin’s support, they sent special forces to arrest the
Crimean government and deport its new president to Russia.[890]
According to the State Department, there had been “overwhelming support”
for the Crimean president’s moves to allow dual-citizenship and assert more
power away from Kiev.[891] Ukraine and Russia continued to quibble
about their shared ownership of Sevastopol and the status of the Black Sea
Fleet for a few more years,[892] and in February 1998 Crimea held another
referendum on joining Russia, reinstating the 1992 constitution and
adopting Russian as the official language. But by October the Crimeans had
backed all the way down: they ratified a new constitution that made
Ukrainian the official language of the peninsula—even though 97 percent
spoke Russian—and reaffirmed its subordinate status to Ukraine. That was
the end of the major post-Cold War disputes over Crimea until 2014.[893]
After the successful Maidan putsch, which the Washington Post
editorial board supported, they still warned against the danger that Ukraine
“will split along geographic lines as Russian speakers in the east of the
country, perhaps supported by Moscow, reject the new political order.”
They said it was important that the new coup regime “adopt conciliatory
policies that reassure Russian-speaking Ukrainians that they will not face
retaliation or discrimination and that democracy and the rule of law will
prevail.” They added that “[m]embers of Mr. Yanukovych’s party ought to
be included in the new cabinet and criminal investigations of the ousted
regime limited.”[894] Their columnist Eugene Robinson also cautioned
Obama, saying he should “anticipate that if far-right figures shape the
policies of the new government, tensions between the eastern and western
parts of the country will get worse, not better.” He said that in eastern cities
they do not want to rejoin Russia, but that could change if Kiev
discriminated against them.[895] This sound advice was not followed.
Once the new government was firmly in power, the three former post-
USSR Ukrainian presidents, Kravchuk, Kuchma and Yushchenko, all called
for the government to break the Kharkiv Pact with Russia, which allowed
the Russian Black Sea Fleet to remain in Sevastopol on lease after the Cold
War.[896]
As recently as December 2013, in the midst of the Maidan protest
movement, the Russians were still offering discounted methane gas in
exchange for “better terms” for the stationing of the Black Sea Fleet at
Sevastopol, as they had done when they struck a bargain with Yanukovych
to extend the lease in 2010.[897]
Harvard Professor Graham Allison wrote just before the referendum
that Obama and the allies should propose what he called the “Belgian
solution”—permanent neutrality—for Ukraine to prevent the “special case”
of Crimea and eastern and southern Ukraine from blowing up into a war,
since “Ukraine’s current borders are both artificial and accidental.”[898]
Again, it is enough to show that things could have gone another way.
Korsun Bus Attack

On February 20, 2014, in the Cherkassy region, a group of counter-

protesters on buses traveling back to Crimea after losing the protest wars in
Kiev were ambushed by Right Sector, who broke all the windows, forced
the passengers out and set the buses on fire. People were beaten and
threatened. One man described his experience in a documentary, saying
they put a gun to his head and asked him, “Well, will you come to Kiev
again, Russian bastard?” He added, “They tore my passport and wrote
‘traitor’ in it. When I left the bus, I was batted in the head and fell into a
ditch. When I came to my senses, they brought me to my knees and forced
me to sing the national anthem of Ukraine and shout ‘Glory to the heroes!’”
Another told them, “[W]e will come to Crimea, and if you do not speak
Ukrainian we’ll slit your throats.”[899]

Little Green Men

Though Putin later said that he had decided to seize Crimea on the night of
the coup in Kiev,[900] it was not until after the former presidents’ threat to
kick the Russians out of Sevastopol that he moved to take control of the
peninsula. On February 27, armed men seized the parliament and oversaw
the supposed election of a new prime minister and passage of a resolution
declaring a referendum on autonomy, which was later changed to a vote on
rejoining the Russian Federation.[901] The next day, Putin ordered his men
to leave their bases and take control of the peninsula in a single, successful
coup de main.[902]
 Reportedly, four people were killed in total: two Ukrainian soldiers
apparently shot by Russian marines or sailors,[903] as well as one local
cop[904] and one Russian shot by a Ukrainian.[905] The Crimean Supreme
Soviet then held a referendum, and more than a supermajority of the people
voted to join the Russian Federation.[906] Contemporaneous exit polling,
[907] and later independent polling by American and European firms,
including Pew and Gallup, confirmed the results.[908] It is too bad for the
minority who didn’t want to change allegiance—the Tatars boycotted the
vote[909]—but these are nation states and supermajority votes are as close
as humanity can get to full consensus on such large questions involving
independence and sovereignty. Forcing all Crimeans to stay with Ukraine
despite overwhelming opinion against it could be even more unjust. Support
for independence and/or reintegration with Russia had remained above 50
percent since the end of the Soviet Union.[910] In 2017, the vast majority
of Crimeans surveyed said they preferred the status quo, or would vote to
rejoin Russia again if given the opportunity.[911]
Journalist Rick Sterling traveled to Crimea in March 2023 with the
Center for Citizen Initiatives (CCI), a group that has long promoted closer
ties between America and Russia. They are not supported by Russia, though
they used to take money from USAID in the 1990s. Sterling interviewed a
wide range of Crimeans, including some from the Tatar minority. All agreed
that they preferred to be part of Russia, citing the 2014 coup, language law,
Korsun bus attack and other provocations against them and their culture, as
well as infrastructure improvements that they say the neglectful Kiev
government never made. The change of sovereignty there may have been
illegal, but then, as Sterling points out, so was America’s support for the
breakup of Yugoslavia, the seizure of Kosovo and CIA-backed secession of
South Sudan.[912]
Crimean leaders and Putin referred to the “Kosovo precedent” to
justify their coup, with the Russian president directly quoting from their
arguments in the international courts. “We keep hearing from the United
States and Western Europe that Kosovo is some special case. What makes it
so special in the eyes of our colleagues? It turns out that it is the fact that
the conflict in Kosovo resulted in so many human casualties. Is this a legal
argument?” he asked. “The ruling of the International Court says nothing
about this.”[913] And of course they lied about those casualties to start that
war.[914]
Putin explained that “NATO remains a military alliance, and we are
against having a military alliance making itself at home right in our
backyard or in our historic territory.” He joked, “I simply cannot imagine
that we would travel to Sevastopol to visit NATO sailors. Of course, most
of them are wonderful guys, but it would be better to have them come and
visit us, be our guests, rather than the other way around.”[915]
For their part, the Obama administration and other Western leaders
focused their efforts on castigating Russia, demanding their withdrawal and
threatening consequences if they did not, rather than engaging in any good-
faith diplomacy to dial down tensions.[916] They kicked Russia out of the
Group of Eight Industrialized Nations (G8), closed the Russia-NATO
Council, suspended scheduled EU-Russia meetings and announced new
sanctions against Russian government officials and corporations.[917]
 Victoria Nuland all but declared that the purpose of the sanctions was
to achieve regime change in Russia in testimony to the U.S. Senate. Citing
various economic statistics showing their precarious position, she imagined
an entire chain of consequences. First, “the current nationalistic fever will
break in Russia,” which will then “give way to a sweaty and harsh
realization of the economic costs.” Next, “Russia’s citizens” will conclude
that the Kremlin had “squandered [their] national wealth on adventurism,
interventionism and the ambitions of a leader who cares more about empire
than his own citizens”—a polite way of saying the U.S. and its allies were
waging an economic war in an attempt to destabilize Russia as punishment
for their intervention in Crimea.[918]

Return of the King

Russia’s taking of Crimea was a major escalation which destabilized

Ukraine even further and made the country’s divisions that much deeper,
not to mention heightened the distrust between Russia and the Western
powers and eroded of the principle of national sovereignty.[919] But
Vladimir Putin is not trying to recreate the USSR or even the old Russian
empire. Professor Mearsheimer explained, “[T]here is virtually no evidence
that [Putin] was bent on taking Crimea, much less any other territory in
Ukraine, before [February 22],” adding that it took the Obama
administration “by complete surprise and appears to have been a
spontaneous reaction to Yanukovych’s ouster. Right afterward, even Putin
said he opposed Crimean secession, before quickly changing his
mind.”[920]
 President Obama himself—at once confessing to his government’s
intervention in Ukrainian affairs and dismissing propaganda that Putin was
determined to reestablish Russian dominance in all of Eastern Europe and
more—said, “Mr. Putin made this decision around Crimea and Ukraine, not
because of some grand strategy but essentially because he was caught off-
balance by the protests in the Maidan, and Yanukovych then fleeing after
we had brokered a deal to transition power in Ukraine.”[921] The president
elaborated, as paraphrased by The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “Ukraine is a
core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be
able to maintain escalatory dominance there.” The president told Goldberg,
“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be
vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do.” He
then challenged, “Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim
that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern
Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it.” Pretty rich for a
guy who just overthrew the government there, causing the crisis, but at least
he was not worse.[922]
Obama later told Politico: “There’s a reason why there was not an
armed invasion of Crimea: because Crimea was full of a lot of Russian
speakers and there was some sympathy to the view that Russia was
representing its interests.”[923] His hawkish former ambassador to Russia,
Michael McFaul, gave a similar interview to The Atlantic in July 2014.
They paraphrased him also admitting that the seizure of Crimea and the rest
of Russia’s anti-Western turn was a reaction to at least perceived U.S.
intervention against Russia and its interests: “The lavish Sochi Olympics
and the decision to release imprisoned Russian businessman Mikhail
Khodorkovsky were the actions of a nation trying to assimilate into the
world; the crisis in Ukraine imperiled Putin’s dream of creating an eastern
version of the EU.” He said it was the Russian president’s belief—based on
U.S.-financed protests in Russia in 2012, which Putin blamed on McFaul
himself, as well as the violent overthrow of Yanukovych—that “American
grand strategy was geared toward undermining him at every turn.” Only
then did Putin decide to react. “The good news is that this is not part of a
grand strategy where first they take Crimea, then eastern Ukraine, then
Moldova, and then a piece of Estonia. This was a response to the collapse of
the government in Kiev,” McFaul added.[924] Even then-CIA Director John
Brennan later acknowledged that Putin thought Russia’s loss of Ukraine
was a historical wrong, but admitted that “he felt as though he needed to
act,” because “Mr. Putin wanted to stop also what he thought was an eastern
march on the part of the Western powers, NATO [and the] EU.”[925]
Along these same lines, Russia expert and hawk Michael Kofman later
said that “the Russians are amazed that we think they want to take the
Baltics. They just find it incredible. They’re going to go into the Baltics—
which they have no use for—and take on the world’s pre-eminent military
alliance? It’s crazy.”[926] RAND Corporation experts Stephanie Pezard and
Ashley Rhoades wrote in 2020 that “Russia’s leaders likely did not
anticipate the crossing of one of their redlines as a result of the Euromaidan
revolution in Ukraine, and were likely in a reactionary mode rather than
implementing a predetermined strategy.”[927]
 UCLA Professor Daniel Treisman wrote an in-depth report for Foreign
Affairs showing why Putin’s move in Crimea was almost certainly a spur-
of-the-moment decision to protect the naval base at Sevastopol, and not part
of a long-term plan to recreate the Russian empire and absorb all ethnic-
Russian populations left behind in the former Soviet states. They were
completely unprepared, not even knowing whether the plan was autonomy
or annexation, or which local politicians to work with.[928]
As Mearsheimer later told a reporter, “What happened is that this
major crisis broke out, and we [the American foreign policy establishment]
had to assign blame, and of course we were never going to blame ourselves.
We were going to blame the Russians.” He added, “So we invented this
story that Russia was bent on aggression in Eastern Europe. Putin is
interested in creating a greater Russia, or maybe even re-creating the Soviet
Union.”[929]

Princess Fiona

In a perfect example of this mythmaking, once again boasting that she had
warned W. Bush not to promise NATO membership for Ukraine and
Georgia at Bucharest—after having declared that one must be a victim of a
Russian “psychological warfare campaign” to agree with her about how
provocative it was—Fiona Hill later had the courage to claim that just
months after Bucharest, “Russia invaded Georgia. Ukraine got Russia’s
message loud and clear. It backpedaled on NATO membership for the next
several years.” Not only that, but “in 2014, Ukraine wanted to sign an
association agreement with the European Union, thinking this might be a
safer route to the West. Moscow struck again, accusing Ukraine of seeking
a back door to NATO, annexing Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and starting
an ongoing proxy war in Ukraine’s southeastern Donbas region.” She
concluded, “The West’s muted reactions to both the 2008 and 2014
invasions emboldened Mr. Putin.”
Perhaps to save space the Times editors decided to omit the part about
Georgia attacking and attempting to reabsorb South Ossetia while killing
Russian peacekeeping troops there, as well as that whole violent overthrow
of the democratically elected president of Ukraine in the Western-backed
“Maidan revolution,” after Yanukovych opted not to sign that deal and
prominent leaders began threatening the status of the naval base at
Sevastopol. More likely, Hill simply preferred readers believe that Russia
invaded Georgia on a whim and annexed Crimea and “started” the war in
the Donbas in reaction to Ukraine’s attempt to sign with the EU. So she lied
instead.[930] It was also completely false that Ukraine “backpedaled” on
NATO membership after the Georgia war. In fact, Yushchenko had
demanded a MAP immediately.[931] The Times, which changes their mind
about who shot first in Georgia based on whatever mood reporter C.J.
Chivers is in on any given day,[932] uncritically relayed her disinformation:
American weakness in the face of unrelenting Russian aggression had
caused both conflicts.

Backdraft

If “blowback” refers to the long-term consequences of secret foreign

policies that catch the population off guard and leave them open to false
interpretations about the nature of a conflict,[933] “backdraft” is the short-
term consequences of overt policies blowing up right in our face. This is
borrowed from the term for when a firefighter kicks in a door, accidentally
providing oxygen to a heated and fuel-filled room, causing a massive
explosion.[934] Unfortunately, the story most often fed to the American
public resembles the omission-riddled takes from Fiona Hill and the Times
or PBS Frontline: Crimea is a piece of territory; Putin took it. They make
no mention of the coup in Kiev, the unique history of Crimea’s sovereignty,
Moscow’s important naval base, or any of the threats against the peninsula’s
special status or violence against its people.[935]
The War Party must truncate the antecedents in this story and pretend
the conflict began when Russia absorbed Crimea because it is their fault
and they do not want to take responsibility for their actions. So the
American people are led to believe, again, that trouble keeps finding us no
matter how hard our government tries to get along with everyone.
Then, worst of all, in their supposedly defensive reaction, they doubled
down and made things worse.

The New Cold War

In the aftermath of Crimea and the start of the Donbas conflict in April
2014, Obama announced the onset of the new Cold War in an interview
with the Times. That is what they called it, “an updated version of the Cold
War strategy of containment.” Obama wanted to “cut off [Russia’s]
economic and political ties to the outside world, limiting its expansionist
ambitions in its own neighborhood and effectively making it a pariah
state.”[936]
The late Russia expert Stephen Cohen and his wife Katrina vanden
Heuvel, publisher of The Nation, denounced Obama for leading America
down this path with such recklessness and dishonesty: “Future historians
will note that in April 2014, nearly a quarter-century after the end of the
Soviet Union, the White House declared a new Cold War on Russia.” They
added that “in a grave failure of representative democracy, there was
scarcely a public word of debate, much less opposition, from the American
political or media establishment.”[937]
The next year, Obama released his new National Security Strategy. The
reset was officially canceled. Instead of cooperation, the new document
described Russia only as a threat to be contained.[938]

Crystal City

Harper’s Magazine Washington editor Andrew Cockburn reported that he

had a source who had been at a big party in Crystal City outside of
Washington, D.C.—an area heavy with military contractors and lobbyists—
in March 2014, when it was announced that Russian sailors and marines
were seizing Crimea. The mood was “borderline euphoric,” as they all
started laughing and cheering and celebrating the escalation of the conflict.
Forget patrolling Pashtun peasants in Paktika Province, a massive buildup
against the renewed Russian Threat was exactly the conflict these men were
hoping for—endangering the future of our entire species so they can keep
making money for nothing.[939]
 Donetsk Dissent

Protests

After the coup, repeal of their language status and bus attack, large protests
broke out among mostly ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in
Kharkiv[940] and the Donbas[941] in eastern Ukraine.[942] Fistfights
broke out between opposing groups of demonstrators in both places.[943]
Protesters occupied government buildings in Donetsk and Luhansk starting
on March 1, 2014, refusing to recognize the authority of the new junta.
They soon held referendums declaring their intent to achieve autonomy
from Kiev.[944] Though they are almost always referred to as “pro-Russian
separatists” or “Russian-backed separatists” in Western media, former
Swiss intelligence officer and UN official Jacques Baud has clarified that is
inaccurate; they were suing for autonomy, not full independence.[945] A
protester told the New York Times: “After Maidan, the east of Ukraine felt
outside the political process. They wanted to put in their president and
didn’t ask us.”[946]

1994 Referendum

Back in 1994, Donetsk and Luhansk held referendums on federalism and

the status of the Russian language in the Donbas. Though it was referred to
as a poll and the results were never implemented, the votes revealed the
stark differences between east and west Ukraine at the time.[947] These
divisions have remained, highlighted by parliamentary and presidential
election results ever since.[948] Also very importantly, surveys over the
years since independence showed that Ukrainians in large numbers
identified much more with their city or their region—or with Russia—
rather than as Ukrainians. In 2010, only 51.2 percent identified themselves
as Ukrainians first, up from about 46 percent in 1992. Whereas in the
Galician west the most extreme form of nationalism is prominent, in the rest
of the country, especially the south and east, a real sense of national identity
was lacking, and there was much less sympathy for Svoboda Party-type
collectivism.[949]

The East’s Maidan

After the 2014 coup, Yanukovych’s Party of Regions fell apart, leaving
more marginal and radical figures to fill the power vacuum.[950] They held
a coincidentally preplanned “congress of people’s deputies” on February
21–22 in Kharkiv. Regional governors and mayors from the south and east
passed a resolution saying they rejected the new Rada and asked oblast and
local governments to assume all authority in Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk,
Dnipropetrovsk and Crimea Oblasts. They also recalled their members of
the Rada in protest and demanded a broad decentralization of power.[951]
“Many Ukrainians want Russia to invade,” reported Time’s Simon
Shuster, explaining that for “many in Ukraine, a full-scale Russian military
invasion would feel like a liberation.” He added that “across the country’s
eastern and southern provinces, hundreds of thousands of people gathered
to welcome the Kremlin’s talk of protecting pro-Russian Ukrainians against
the revolution that brought a new government to power.” He attributed this
to fear generated by Russian propaganda about the threat of the new regime,
what with Right Sector neo-Nazi Dimitry Yarosh and others embedded in
its national security apparatus and all.[952]
On March 1 in Kharkiv, a crowd stormed the regional state
administration building, beating up a pro-Maidan group that had attempted
to occupy the first floor, but were later forced out by SBU troops. On March
5, demonstrators in Donetsk, led by local leaders such as Pavel Gubarev
from the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, again seized the
administration building and announced that they refused to recognize the
legitimacy of the new regime in Kiev. Gubarev was arrested the next day.
[953]
On April 6, the protesters declared the “Donetsk People’s Republic”
and demanded that the legislative assembly schedule a referendum on
autonomous status. When the assembly refused, they formed their own, and
declared independence on the 7th.[954] The administration buildings in
Luhansk and Kharkiv were also temporarily occupied before being cleared
out by SBU troops.[955] In Nikolaev, they failed to occupy the
administration building, and their tent encampment was destroyed by a pro-
Maidan “People’s Militia.”[956]
On April 8, Acting President Turchynov publicly threatened to launch
an “anti-terrorist operation” against the dissidents “taking up arms” against
Kiev, even though no one had yet.[957] The regime then announced the
new SBU Antiterrorist Center and the team that would be leading the effort
to put down the potential insurrection, which included Svoboda’s Andriy
Parubiy, the new secretary of the National Security and Defense Council.
[958]
Even though Kiev launched their war against the east under the excuse
of a Russian invasion, all of this happened before any Russians ever arrived
on the scene.[959] Despite Russia’s role in Crimea, Kiev’s attack on the
east was aggression against those who rejected the rule of the new regime,
rather than defense against a Russian attack.[960]

Late to the Game

Igor Girkin, a.k.a. Igor Strelkov (“Shooter”), a retired Russian military

officer, was the first to seize buildings in Crimea before Russia’s so-called
“little green men” could be deployed.[961] He then seized Ministry of
Internal Affairs (MVS) buildings in the cities of Slavyansk and Kramatorsk
in Donetsk Oblast on April 12. Girkin/Strelkov would later be named
defense minister of the new “Donetsk People’s Republic.” When they
captured the MVS headquarters in Slavyansk, the mayor said the mob was
made up of locals, known to him, showing that they were not Russian
special forces like during the takeover in Crimea.[962]
According to Alexander Zhuchkovsky, who fought on the side of the
Donbas rebels in the summer of 2014, it was unclear exactly to what degree
Girkin/Strelkov was acting on direct orders from Russian intelligence,
though his efforts were backed by important Russian oligarchs, presumably
with the tacit support of the Kremlin.[963] Either way, let us not get carried
away and deny the agency of the citizens of the Donbas who came out to
support their cause.[964] After all, they were the ones who had won the last
election fair and square, thus necessitating the Western-backed putsch they
were reacting against in the first place. Three-quarters of those surveyed in
the east opposed Yanukovych’s forced exit from office, and they had been
protesting for a month already before Strelkov arrived on the scene.[965]
Nuland, however, insisted there was no comparison between the
armed, masked, foreign-backed, government building-seizing protesters of
the west and those of the east. The Maidan demonstrators had a permit. The
pro-Russian protesters of the east, on the other hand, had guns, wore
“baklavas” [sic], she said, and occupied government buildings. Nuland also
denied that Washington spent “any money supporting the Maidan. That was
a spontaneous movement,” quite different from that in the east.[966]
“There’s nothing grassroots-seeming about it,” Obama’s UN Ambassador
Samantha Power added.[967]
By the time Acting President Turchynov and his neo-Nazi infested war
cabinet launched their supposed “Anti-Terrorist Operation” (ATO) on April
15, 2014, there had been some incidents of violence at largely peaceful
protests across the Donbas.[968] But the only actual change in the situation
on the ground was when Strelkov took over government buildings in
Donetsk.[969] This was nowhere near a justification for the new regime to
go to war against the people of the east. But the next morning, Ministry of
Internal Affairs chief Arsen Avakov announced that he was sending forces
to clear out the occupiers, deploying 700 soldiers, 20 armored personnel
carriers and four helicopters to attack the rebels in Slavyansk.[970] Locals
pointed out that the air force had been flying fighter jets low over their
protests, threateningly, from the beginning, showing their willingness to use
force to crush the anti-Maidan movement.[971]
It was a drastic overreaction to events in the Donbas, but makes more
sense as a consequence of Russia’s seizure of Crimea in response to their
coup, and Kiev’s determination to prevent the same thing from happening
again. Rather than negotiating, they would simply crush the revolt. Like
Yanukovych’s various attempts to violently clear the Maidan, the effort
backfired, only driving more people in the region away from western
Ukraine and towards Russia.[972] It is ironic too, because the people of the
Donbas were far less amenable to breaking up with Ukraine or joining the
Russian Federation than the Crimeans. If Kiev had been willing to negotiate
in good faith with the dissenters in the east, especially promising to protect
their economic interests in dealing with the rival EU and EEU trading blocs,
it may have fatally undermined support for the new self-proclaimed
republics and their leaders.[973]

Nyet-Negative

It soon became clear that Putin had decided not to seize the Donbas the way
he had taken Crimea that spring. In late April, Moscow had urged restraint
by rebel forces taking control of eastern cities, but the rebels chose to
ignore them again.[974] This was apparently what led to Strelkov’s
replacement. He had put the Russians in a position of having to protect
those who had risen up under his leadership or watch them all be
imprisoned or hanged.[975]
 Not only did Putin refrain from sending his special operations forces to
seize the territory, but he essentially disavowed the separatists.
In mid-April, a few days after the major fighting started, the Russians
made a deal with Kiev that the eastern rebels would disarm and withdraw
from the government buildings they had occupied. The locals denounced
the deal and vowed to continue the fight.[976] On May 7, Putin told them
not to hold referendums on full autonomy within Ukraine. “We believe that
the most important thing is to create direct, full-fledged dialogue between
the Kiev authorities and representatives of southeast Ukraine,” he said.
“Because of this, we ask that representatives of southeast Ukraine,
supporters of federalization in the country, postpone the May 11 referendum
in order to create the necessary conditions for such a dialogue.”[977]
They ignored him and pressed on.[978] Denis Pushilin, apparently
self-appointed leader of the “We Have One Goal” party and the new
Donetsk People’s Republic, who had helped push for the referendums on
autonomy,[979] soon asked Putin to “absorb” the province into the Russian
Federation. Zhuchkovsky wrote that, by then, the “overwhelming fraction
of locals” supported Russian annexation of the Donbas.[980] Putin told
them to forget it.[981]
Aleksander Borodai, a Russian who had been an adviser to the prime
minister of Crimea, was named prime minister of the Donetsk People’s
Republic for the first few months after the rebels’ counter-coup in the east.
He resigned in August, saying he thought locals, such as his successor
Aleksandr Zakharchenko, should be in charge.[982] A cynic could read him
as meaning this for public relations reasons. Zakharchenko was assassinated
in a bombing by Ukrainian forces in 2018.[983]
In April 2014, the BBC went to interview the locals and find out what
motivated them. They referred to being called terrorists by the new
government. They had seen schoolchildren chanting “hang the Russians” on
Ukrainian TV and seemed mystified that divisions could have become so
sharp. The BBC reporter noted that “at a time when politicians are saying
they have agreed that the groups here will disarm, we are now learning that
in fact new armed groups are being created.”[984]
Valery Bolotov, the so-called “people’s governor” of Luhansk, declared
an ultimatum to Kiev’s forces in the province: swear allegiance to their new
army or be considered enemies. Though it was unclear who fired first, by
early May, the rebels had forcibly seized the state security agency building.
[985]
In August 2016, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko released
“the Glazyev Tapes.” These are alleged to be intercepted phone calls
between Sergey Glazyev, a Putin adviser, and Russian and Ukrainian
activists in southern and eastern Ukraine, from February and March 2014.
They purport to show that Russia was behind the referendums in Donetsk
and Luhansk, even choosing what percent the autonomy vote should come
to. These clips have not been verified, and have apparently been edited;
however, they seem like they are probably real.[986] But if they are
genuine, they appear to reveal a lack of coordination between the Russians
and the Donbas leaders more than a clear conspiracy between them. The
separatists seem to have no idea what they are doing, and are possibly
drunk, while the Russians are depicted complaining about a request for just
a few thousand dollars.[987]
In 2017, Reuters ran a piece saying local rebel leaders in the Donbas
had told them they were answerable to Putin adviser Vladislav Surkov
dating back to at least the summer of 2014.[988] However, the Guardian
reported on election day that “[t]here were huge queues of people, almost
all of whom said they were voting yes to separatism.”[989] Journalist Keith
Gessen wrote that hundreds of thousands turned out to vote yes.[990]
Even if it were true, that would not substantially change the case made
here. For the sake of argument, if we suppose that the majority of the people
of the Donbas wanted to remain under the control of Kiev, the point is still
that the U.S.-sponsored coup against Yanukovych, the new government and
Nazi militias’ violence, threats against the Russian naval fleet and
declaration of full-scale culture war against Russian speakers in eastern and
southern Ukraine are what motivated Putin to intervene to the extent he did.
It does not make it right. But it does make it the superpower’s responsibility
as much as that of its new client regime and the local hegemon.
In early May, semi-official CIA ombudsman David Ignatius wrote that
the administration was prepared to offer Russia a permanent assurance they
would not bring Ukraine into NATO on the Finland model.[991] They never
did. The United States government was not content with a neutral, buffer-
state status for Ukraine. They had to try to take it.

The Odesa Massacre

Protests had been held in Odesa for weeks after the coup in Kiev.[992] On
May 2, 2014, there was a demonstration against the new regime as well as a
large rally of Right Sector militiamen and football “ultras” nearby. The pro-
Russian faction began to march. At first the two sides created barricades
and threw rocks and bricks at each other. But then both started shooting.
One on Right Sector’s side was killed.[993] The pro-Kiev faction then led a
major assault on the pro-Russian camp in front of the Trade Union House. A
leader of Right Sector later stated, “That day, we had to finish what they
had started. They—this garbage. So, with my men, we decided to put an
end to the camp of the Maison des Syndicats for good.”
Leaders at the pro-Russian camp tried to get the people to go home
before Right Sector arrived, but they refused and attempted to hold their
ground.[994] The Nazis chased a group into the Trade Unions House and
set it on fire with Molotov cocktails,[995] killing 42 people.[996] Eight of
them died after jumping to escape the flames,[997] while the crowd laughed
and celebrated. At least 200 were wounded.[998] Teenage girls were filmed
happily pouring gasoline into beer bottles for firebombs that were used to
kill the people.[999] Survivors were beaten and arrested.[1000] Police did
nothing to stop the violence and firefighters did not respond for 45 minutes
while the victims burned to death.[1001]
Witnesses and journalists reported that as the building burned with
people inside, a crowd shouted, “Jump, you scum!”[1002] “Glory to
Ukraine!” and “Death to enemies!”[1003] Right Sector repeatedly boasted
about the mass murder on their website, calling it a “bright page of our
national history” and heavily implying Dimitry Yarosh’s direct
involvement.[1004] No one was ever held accountable.[1005] That same
day, Kiev launched a massive attack on Slavyansk in Donetsk.[1006]

‘Anti-Terrorist Operation’

Brennan Orders Attack

Why did Kiev refuse to negotiate? The dissidents of the east were simply
adopting their own extreme civil disobedience-type tactics until they could
be certain their rights would be protected. Their declarations of sovereignty
were not quite declarations of independence. The new prime minister,
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, had promised to negotiate as late as April 11, 2014.
[1007] But the U.S. government did not urge talks and a rapid resolution to
the crisis. CIA Director John O. Brennan came to Kiev on April 12 and 13.
[1008] Forbes magazine reported that “the covert war has begun.”[1009]
The overt one was on as well. Just one day later, Acting President
Turchynov declared their new “Anti-Terrorist Operation” against the
Donbas.[1010] The Obama administration demanded it. Kiev “has to
respond,” they publicly insisted.[1011] Obama sent CIA Special Activities
Division paramilitaries to train Ukrainian forces on sniper techniques,
Javelin anti-tank missiles, evasion, new communications equipment and
other irregular warfare skills in a program that continued until just before
the worse war broke out in 2022. A senior agency official told a reporter
this U.S.-trained Ukrainian cadre had become the “strong nucleus” of the
current larger army.[1012] In May 2014, the German magazine Bild
reported that the CIA presence was “intended to help Kiev terminate the
rebellion in the east of the country and build up a functioning security
structure.”[1013]
The Ukrainian civil war was also already a global conflict, a proxy war
between the United States and its NATO allies versus Russia.[1014] Obama
immediately sent Pentagon experts to set up a long-term system for
American military trainers and advisers to assist the new government in
their war.[1015] In September, at the NATO conference in Wales, members
declared that they “highly value Ukraine’s past and present contributions to
all current Allied operations,” their intent to advance military
“interoperability” with the alliance,[1016] and held a joint training exercise
in Lviv.[1017] British and Canadian troops soon joined them.[1018]
Following the Maidan coup and the outbreak of war in the east, “high-
level Russian diplomats” told foreign correspondent Eric Margolis that the
United States and Russia were the closest to nuclear war since the Cuban
Missile Crisis of 1962.[1019] Echoing Raimondo’s call for partition after
the 2004 Orange Revolution regime change operation, Margolis urged the
great powers to divide the country before the war got any worse.[1020]

CIA’s Secret War

Ten years later, in February 2024, the New York Times admitted the CIA had
moved in immediately after the coup and launched a covert war against
Russia. In a story handed to the Times by President Joe Biden’s White
House, based on more than 200 interviews with U.S. officials, and
seemingly meant to shore up support for Ukraine, they detailed how just
four days after the coup, the new head of Ukrainian intelligence called the
CIA and MI6 and asked them to help rebuild their agency “from the ground
up.”
The CIA sent “scores” of spies into the country, created 14 secret bases
“along the Russian border,” from each of which they ran operations inside
Russia. They describe watching the path of a drone on its way to strike
inside the Russian city of Rostov. In 2016, the agency created and trained a
new “commando force” called Unit 2245, which captured Russian drones
and communications equipment for the spies to reverse-engineer and crack.
Further, they revealed that the U.S. had trained an entire “new generation of
Ukrainian spies” operating across Europe and other places with large
contingents of Russian government employees. “U.S. officials were often
reluctant to fully engage,” they wrote, “fearing that Ukrainian officials
could not be trusted, and worrying about provoking the Kremlin.” In fact,
they say that in the beginning those were President Obama’s specific orders:
“strengthen Ukrainian intelligence agencies without provoking the
Russians.”
According to this narrative, the Ukrainians then created a new group
called the Fifth Directorate staffed with young men born after the fall of the
Soviet Union—presumably all from the country’s west—who had no
connection to Russia, and who despised all Russian speakers. The unit was
created “to deploy behind enemy lines,” to “conduct operations and collect
intelligence,” including for “targeted missile strikes,” as well as conduct
assassinations against leaders of the Donbas so-called separatist forces, of
which the agency denied all foreknowledge. When the Ukrainians botched a
covert operation at a Russian air base in Crimea, it was Vice President
Biden, still in charge of Ukraine policy for the Obama White House, who
called the Ukrainians to complain that “making arguments here is a hell of a
lot harder now,” the sources claimed. While some wanted to back off, CIA
Director Brennan argued the relationship was important because the
Ukrainians were helping him with the investigation into alleged Russian
meddling in the 2016 election.[1021]
Just like in Putin’s later accusations against the U.S. and its allies, the
Times reported that the CIA had organized a meeting at The Hague with the
British and Dutch where they agreed to work together. “The result,” they
concluded, “was a secret coalition against Russia—and the Ukrainians were
vital members of it.”[1022]

Putin Refuses the Donbas

Donbas is a portmanteau of “Donets Coal Basin.” The region is made up of

the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Though it is the most
industrialized part of Ukraine, much of it is old Soviet-era factories that
could never compete with modern technology in Western Europe. This is
part of the reason they resisted joining the EU. It is also why Putin was
reluctant to absorb the Donbas into the Russian Federation. He would have
been taking on a desperately poor region that would have consumed more
in subsidies and pensions than it could contribute to the gross national
product, at least in the short term.[1023]
It appears to be confirmed by the rebels themselves that Putin sent
deniable special operations types into the Donbas region to help defend it in
August 2014.[1024] Like that or not, up until the end of February 2022, for
eight years, they did not invade the country with any conventional force or
take any territory in the east. Again, when the Donbas region held a
referendum for autonomy and its leaders asked to join the Russian
Federation in May 2014, Putin refused.[1025] He would only help to
maintain their autonomy from the hostile regime in Kiev.[1026] By the
summer, the rebels were angry and denounced Putin for not helping their
cause or placing them under Russia’s protection.[1027] While solid
majorities in the Donbas preferred independence or union with the Russian
Federation, Moscow seemed content to use their presence to prevent Kiev
from consolidating power over the east. Putin even told the new Donetsk
and Luhansk “republics” to stop flying the Russian flag in September 2014.
[1028]

Status Quo Canceled

In the case of Crimea, the U.S. and its clients were threatening Russia’s
vital interest in their only warm-water naval port on the Black Sea. That is
the main reason Putin moved there. Though there had been political
controversy over Crimea since 1991,[1029] the status quo held for 23 years
after the USSR’s red flag came down, despite majority support there for
rejoining Russia.[1030] The Kremlin had been happy to lease the port and
otherwise stay out. It was the U.S. that forced the change in the situation,
and it blew up in their face.
Anthony Cordesman, an analyst for the Center for Strategic and
International Studies, a generally hawkish U.S. think tank, wrote about the
Russian point of view just a few months after the 2014 coup in Ukraine.
Perhaps most illuminating is his assumption, probably correct, that the
American foreign policy establishment has virtually no self-awareness and
must have everything spelled out from another trusted insider to begin to
understand things in realistic terms. Referring to Russian concerns about
color-coded revolutions past and future, he said they were perceived as a
new approach to war against their interests. The policy was “seen as posing
a potential threat to Russia in the near abroad, to China and Asian states not
aligned with the U.S., and as a means of destabilizing states in the Middle
East, Africa, Central Asia, and South Asia.”
Cordesman said that at a May 23 conference, “[k]ey Russian officers
and officials presented a view of the U.S. and the West as deliberately
destabilizing other nations for their own ends.” He added, “They describe
such actions as having failed, and as a key source of terrorism. They see the
West as rejecting partnership, and as threatening Russia along all of its
borders with Europe.” Almost amazingly, Cordesman wrote, “The end
result is a radically different reading of modern history, of U.S. and
European strategy, their use of force, and U.S. and European goals and
actions from any issued in the West and in prior Russian literature.” He said
Western leaders might rationalize that they are only saying this for various
other reasons; however, “[w]hat is critical is that the U.S. and Europe listen
to what Russian military leaders and strategists are saying. These are not
Russian views the U.S. and Europe can afford to ignore.”[1031]

Geneva Talks
In April 2014, the new Ukrainian government, the U.S., Russia and the EU
held talks in Geneva and adopted a “Declaration of Principles” for stopping
the war early, simply calling for an end to fighting, the withdrawal of
irregular armed groups from public buildings and areas and amnesty for
those involved. There was no enforcement mechanism; it was just a joint
statement.[1032]
When Petro Poroshenko was sworn in that June, he promised an end to
the war and autonomy for the Donbas.[1033] But political pressures west of
the Dnieper, including all the way to Washington, would not allow him to
follow through on those promises. Viktor Medvedchuk, a billionaire
oligarch who was close to Putin, and Nestor Shufrich, a Ukrainian
parliamentarian from a pro-Russian party, had been appointed by
Turchynov to lead the negotiations. According to Shufrich, the Donbas
rebel leaders only had three demands: to be able to use the Russian
language in official documents, and to be consulted on the appointment of
the local state prosecutor and the appointment of the regional governor. By
the middle of June they had worked out a process for reintegration of the
east,[1034] but just after his victory at the ballot box, the new president
declared, “I am not going to hold any dialogues with the criminals. You
don’t talk to terrorists. The anti-terrorist operation will not and cannot last
for months, it will last just for hours.”[1035]
Right Sector’s Dmitry Yarosh later boasted that his failed assault on the
village of Slavyansk on Easter, April 20, 2014—in which three rebels and
one Right Sector fighter were killed, and which Kiev and Right Sector
spokespeople insisted at the time was a false-flag attack staged by the
Russians[1036]—was still a success because it ruined the Geneva peace
talks.[1037] The ceasefire was canceled. Poroshenko then launched a
massive assault to retake the entire region.[1038]

Luhansk

Soon after Right Sector’s Easter Day attack, Luhansk held a popular
assembly which declared the creation of the Luhansk People’s Republic
(LPR) and scheduled two referendums on autonomy within Ukraine and
joining the Russian Federation. A week later, they issued their demands:
Kiev must recognize the new governor, grant amnesty to the protesters,
make Russian an official state language and hold a referendum on the status
of the oblast. Otherwise, they would join Donetsk’s insurgency. On May 11,
they voted to declare Luhansk a sovereign state.[1039] Across the region,
city councils recognized the LPR, and the rebels seized government
buildings in most of the cities and bigger towns.[1040]
At the end of May, the new Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk
People’s Republic (DPR) announced the creation of the Union of People’s
Republics (UPR) between the two.[1041]

Conscription

In April 2014, after war broke out in the Donbas, the already unprepared
Ukrainian military suffered large defections to the other side and a basic
unwillingness to fight on the part of the soldiers who remained.[1042] In
response, the new government instituted mass conscription of young men
and forced them to fight under the threat of criminal conviction and prison.
[1043] They even arrested a pro-Maidan, pro-Poroshenko journalist named
Ruslan Kotsaba who spoke out against the new war and the draft, saying,
“Don’t bother sending me a draft notice. . . . I would rather sit in jail for
three to five years than go to the east to kill my Ukrainian brothers. This
fear-mongering must be stopped,” and called for “all reasonable, adequate
people to refuse this mobilization.”[1044] They charged him with treason
and sentenced him to three and a half years.[1045] Amnesty International
deemed him a prisoner of conscience and called for his release.[1046] He
did 18 months before a court finally set him free.[1047] He was charged
again for the same crime in 2021.[1048]

The Azov Battalion

Patriot of Ukraine

In April 2014, so much of the army had defected or refused to fight the pro-
Russian militia that Turchynov, the former interim president, said he was
“forced to turn to Ukrainian patriots and ask them to voluntarily defend our
country,” by which he meant attack the people in the east. When asked
about whether some of these “patriots” were Nazis, he simply replied,
“Honestly, some of them had a dark side.”[1049] Right Sector and C14 took
the initiative early on, forming groups of “little black men”—as opposed to
Russia’s “little green men” in Crimea—and went around terrorizing
autonomy-seeking groups in the east beginning in March.
 The following month, Turchynov, Interior Minister Avakov and the
interim government’s secretary for national security, Right Sector’s Andriy
Parubiy, integrated the major Nazi militias into the newly formed Azov
Battalion, and sent them to the east to fight.[1050] They were backed in part
by billionaire oligarchs Serhiy Taruta[1051] and Igor Kolomoysky.[1052]
The Obama White House praised the move as a measured step toward
restoring law and order.[1053]
The militias quickly picked up the military’s slack and made
themselves indispensable on the battlefield and peaceful settlement
impossible. The new government released Nazis from jail—including
Andriy Biletsky, leader of the “ultra-nationalist” Patriot of Ukraine gang
and the Social-National Assembly (SNA), who had been charged in a plot
to blow up a statue of Vladimir Lenin[1054]—under the excuse they were
all “political prisoners.”[1055] The first thing he did was lead a group
which murdered two pro-Russian protesters in Kharkiv on March 14.[1056]
His fellow-convict in the statue plot, Right Sector’s Igor Mosiychuk, led a
gang of thugs to take over a city council meeting in Vasilkov and forced all
the members of the Party of Regions to resign. This was a scene repeated
across Ukraine in the lead-up to the Maidan revolution and its aftermath.
They attacked opposition mayors, governors, television stations and even
the Supreme Court. The governor of Kherson was forced to resign at knife
point. The mayor of Kharkiv was shot in the back.[1057] In mid-March,
SBU officials met with a group of football ultras in Donetsk and insisted
they arm themselves for war with their pro-Russian neighbors.[1058]
 Biletsky, leader of the new Azov Battalion under the auspices of the
Interior Ministry,[1059] soon recruited young militants and neo-Nazis from
across Europe, including Russians, and went to war against the anti-Maidan
rebels in the east.[1060] They led the assault on the eastern city of Mariupol
just after the coup,[1061] killing 22 in an attack with Right Sector and the
army on a dissident-controlled police station, successfully seizing the city
from pro-Russian forces.[1062] The Azov movement continues to cite this
victory as their first successful trial by fire and even claim it as a major
turning point in the war.[1063] Biletsky was awarded the “Order for
Courage”[1064] by then-President Poroshenko, and promoted to lieutenant
colonel of police in August 2014. That September, when Azov was
officially made a regiment of the national guard, he was promoted to
commander.[1065]
Professor Petro, a former State Department special assistant for policy
on the Soviet Union during the George Bush Sr. administration, wrote in
The Tragedy of Ukraine that when the Ukrainian military refused orders to
shoot at the locals, “[a]t this critical juncture, the Right Sector stepped in to
ensure that the conflict would not end in a negotiated settlement that gave
the region greater autonomy.”[1066] As Ron Paul Institute director Daniel
McAdams, an experienced chronicler of Eastern European politics, said that
July, “The Right Sector and these fascist groups, or neo-fascist groups, have
been subsumed into the National Guard because the regular Ukrainian army
has proven itself ineffective. It doesn’t have the stomach to fight against its
own citizens.” However, “the Right Sector types have no problem doing
this and so they are the ones that are in the National Guard. They’re the
ones that are moving on the East in the most aggressive way—the
stormtroopers.”[1067]
The Ukrainian government quickly became dependent on the Azov
Battalion in battle.[1068] The Times reported in August 2014 on the new
pattern of fighting by Kiev’s forces. “The regular army bombards separatist
positions from afar, followed by chaotic, violent assaults by some of the
half-dozen or so paramilitary groups surrounding Donetsk who are willing
to plunge into urban combat.” They said the militias are “angry and, at
times, uncontrollable. One known as Azov, which took over the village of
Marinka, flies a neo-Nazi symbol resembling a Swastika as its flag.”[1069]
PBS Frontline reporter James Jones caught up with the young neo-Nazi he
had interviewed back during the Maidan uprising out in Donetsk, then
fighting with Right Sector. He described their group attacking a building
full of separatists in the town of Kramatorsk, killing “a lot of them.”[1070]
In December 2014, the BBC’s David Stern warned against Russian
propaganda narratives that the Ukrainian government was dominated by
Nazis. However, he added, “Ukrainian officials and many in the media err
to the other extreme. They claim that Ukrainian politics are completely
fascist-free. This, too, is plain wrong.” After noting that Poroshenko
awarded a medal to a Belarusian fascist who had fought in the battle for the
Donetsk airport, and the Azov Battalion’s close relationship with the
security forces, he said that “although Ukraine is emphatically not run by
fascists, far-right extremists seem to be making inroads by other means, as
in the country’s police department.”[1071]
 The fact that these men proudly display swastikas, sonnenrads (black
suns),[1072] the “Wolfsangel”[1073] and the “Totenkopf” skull and
crossbones symbol of Hitler’s 2nd Waffen Schutzstaffel (SS) Das Reich
Panzer Division death squads all over their clothing and gear[1074]—the
same one on SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s hat[1075]—might have
been a tip-off as to what sort of men they were. Even the Times called them
“openly neo-Nazi” a couple of times before dropping it.[1076]
“Ukraine’s government is unrepentant about using the neo-Nazis,”
Tom Parfitt wrote in the Telegraph. Anton Gerashchenko, an adviser to
Interior Minister Avakov, told him, “The most important thing is their spirit
and their desire to make Ukraine free and independent. A person who takes
a weapon in his hands and goes to defend his motherland is a hero. And his
political views are his own affair.”[1077]
In June 2015, in response to an exposé in the Daily Beast about U.S.
forces training Nazi militias,[1078] Congressman John Conyers of
Michigan added an amendment to that year’s defense spending bill banning
“arms, training, and other assistance to the neo-Nazi Ukrainian militia, the
Azov Battalion.”[1079] But the next January, at the behest of the Pentagon,
the Democratic Party leadership stripped that provision from the new
version of the bill.[1080] However, even when the Conyers amendment was
thought to be in effect, it was still unenforceable. As Will Cathcart and
Joseph Epstein wrote in 2015, when they talked to Azov’s sergeant Ivan
Kharkiv, he “fondly” recalled all the training and support the U.S. had given
him and his men, even mentioning “U.S. volunteers engineers and medics
that are still currently assisting them.” He said they were grateful for the
support they were getting from the diaspora in America. They wrote, “U.S.
officials involved in the vetting process obviously have instructions to say
that U.S. forces are not training the Azov Battalion as such.” The reporters
were dubious. “They also say that Azov members are screened out, yet no
one seems to know precisely how that’s done. In fact, given the way the
Ukrainian government operates, it’s almost impossible.” This was because
“the Azov Battalion is nuzzled so deeply into the Ukrainian government
that they are nearly impossible to weed out.”[1081]
In a separate piece two years later, Cathcart and Epstein wrote of an
Azov fighter going by the name of Kharkiv who denied any ties between
his group at Nazism. “If we are fascist Nazis then why are people like
Georgians joining us to fight?” he asked them. They wrote, “As he speaks a
young soldier walks over. Kharkiv introduces him. While shaking hands a
large black tattoo becomes particularly visible on the young man’s extended
upper bicep. The tattoo is an image of the Nazi eagle atop a black
swastika.” But it was not just him. “[T]he numerous swastika tattoos of
different members and their tendency to go into battle with swastikas or SS
insignias on their helmets make it very difficult for other members of the
group to plausibly deny any neo-Nazi affiliations.” They said that “[t]he
U.S. government is knowingly training and arming neo-Nazi Ukrainian
ultranationalist paramilitary members in broad daylight in an unstable
country with an unclear future,” adding, “Nineteen million dollars of U.S.
taxpayers’ money is going into this. We are all paying for it. There is no
denying this one.” They warned that the governments in Washington and
Kiev were “gambling with the future of the Ukrainian people—one that is
not theirs to lose.”[1082]
In a piece called “Preparing for War With Ukraine’s Fascist Defenders
of Freedom”—“with” meaning “alongside,” not “against”—Foreign Policy
reported: “Pro-Russian forces have said they are fighting against Ukrainian
nationalists and ‘fascists’ in the conflict, and in the case of Azov and other
battalions, these claims are essentially true.” Their reporter noted that
besides the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag over Mariupol, “another symbol
is just as prominent: the Wolfsangel (‘wolf trap’) symbol that was widely
used in the Third Reich and has been adopted by neo-Nazi groups.”[1083]
Congress again attempted to ban support for the Azov Battalion in
2018.[1084] Though it was hopeless, it does at least show that they knew
who they were backing and for whom they were increasing support when
the war escalated in 2022.
One Azov fighter told the British Sky News that to join the battalion,
one must be “a proper white man. You can be nationalist, you can be fascist
or national socialist. It’s not the main thing. Our future is a war—a war with
Russia.”[1085] “Personally, I’m a Nazi,” an Azov fighter told the
Telegraph, explaining, “After the First World War, Germany was a total
mess and Hitler rebuilt it: he built houses and roads, put in telephone lines,
and created jobs. I respect that.” Homosexuality is a mental illness and the
scale of the Holocaust “is a big question,” he added.[1086] Journalist Shaun
Walker of the Guardian wrote in 2014, Biletsky’s “Azov fighters are
Ukraine’s greatest weapon and may be its greatest threat.” After he
interviewed many of their men, Walker concluded that the rank-and-file
revere Hitler, deny the Holocaust, and proudly wear swastika and
Wolfsangel patches and tattoos. But they were useful. When the under-
funded and under-prepared Ukrainian military could not match the
firepower of the separatist factions, or when they were having a hard time
recruiting and even enforcing conscription,[1087] the Azov Battalion would
often fill in to get the job done, making the military dependent on their
power.[1088]
“I have nothing against Russian nationalists, or a great Russia. But
Putin’s not even a Russian. Putin’s a Jew,” claimed a young fighter going by
“Dmitry,” who “waxed lyrical about Adolf Hitler as a military leader, and
believes the Holocaust never happened.” When a reporter asked if there
were Nazis in the group, another said, “Of course not, it’s all made up, there
are just a lot of people who are interested in Nordic mythology.” When
asked about his own political beliefs, he answered: “national socialist.”
Another said Ukraine needs “a strong dictator to come to power who could
shed plenty of blood but unite the nation in the process.”[1089] Azov
spokesman Andriy Diachenko admitted that 10–20 percent of them were
“self-proclaimed” Nazis.[1090]
“Centuria” is an order of neo-Nazi military officers, tied to the Azov
Regiment and embedded within the Hetman Petro Sahaidachny National
Army Academy (NAA), which is described as “Ukraine’s premier military
education institution and a major hub for Western military assistance to the
country.” They are not to be confused with the renamed “National Militia”
of vigilante street Nazis with the same name.[1091] The former group’s
members train with the U.S., UK, Germany, France, Canada and Poland.
[1092] In June 2018, the Azov Regiment met with the Canadian military.
The Canadians knew they were Nazis. A year earlier, their trainers in
Ukraine had produced a report saying they identified themselves as such.
Ottawa said they were not providing aid to Azov for that reason.[1093]

Biletsky’s Rant

Andriy Biletsky was the same guy who said in 2007:

The main mystical idea of Social Nationalism is the creation

[of] the National Supercommunity—a single biological
organism that will consist of New People—physically,
intellectually and spiritually developed persons. Of the mass
of individuals, [a] Nation should appear, and from a weak
modern man, Superman. . . . From the principle of Sociality
follows our complete denial of democracy and liberalism. . . .
All our nationalism is nothing—a castle on the sand,
without . . . the foundation of blood, the foundation of the
Race. . . .

Accordingly, the treatment of our National body should

begin with the Racial purification of Nation. . . . Ukrainians
are part of (and one of the largest and highest quality)
European White Race. . . . The historical mission of our
Nation, in this turning century, to lead the White Peoples of
the whole world on the last crusade for their existence. A
campaign against Semitic-led untermenschen. . . .
 Thus, Social Nationalism raises all the ancient Ukrainian
Aryan values forgotten in modern society. Only their revival
and embodiment by a group of fanatical fighters can lead to
the final victory of European civilization in the world
struggle.[1094]

The program of Biletsky’s Social-National Assembly calls for a

dictatorship of the “most talented” people, the prohibition of competing
political parties, “[d]ismantling the economic system of capitalism as such
which ensures the plundering of working classes of the population by
groups of economic and political parasites,” and the “[l]iquidation of all
institutions and forms of political democracy as a political system that
serves . . . capitalism.” They demand full nationalization of all “strategic
sectors” of the economy, censorship of what they call “non-objective and
manipulative information,” and go on to fantasize about creating a
Ukrainian superstate that would dominate Eastern Europe, including
Russia, and the Middle East through an alliance with Iran. “The ultimate
goal of Ukrainian foreign policy is world domination.” They write that
under their rule, “[p]reparation for army service will begin from childhood
through a network of youth paramilitary organizations, which will be
provided with camps and equipment at the expense of the State and will
cover all Ukrainian youth.”[1095]
It is pretty straightforward fanatical Nazi ideology.

OceanofPDF.com
War Criminals

The neo-Nazi militias, including the Azov and Aidar Battalions and their
allies in the Donbas and Dnipro Battalions—“our best warriors” and
“greatest heroes,” as Poroshenko later called them[1096]—are war
criminals. In 2016, the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights (OHCHR) accused the Azov Battalion of staging in civilian areas—
such as near hospitals, putting innocent people at risk—looting, raping,
torturing and “disappearing” detainees, as well as shelling civilian
neighborhoods in the Donbas region, blocking railways[1097] and shutting
off their access to food and water.[1098]
They are also credibly accused by major human rights groups of
torture, murder, blocking civilian food supplies to Crimea and the Donbas,
so-called “disappearances” and firing indiscriminately at civilian targets.
[1099] Salil Shetty, Amnesty International secretary-general, told the
Guardian, “The failure to stop abuses and possible war crimes by volunteer
battalions risks significantly aggravating tensions in the east of the country
and undermining the proclaimed intentions of the new Ukrainian authorities
to strengthen and uphold the rule of law more broadly.”[1100]
Local Tatar “activists” blockade Crimea, read the headlines. But in
fact, the text in the Times[1101] and USA Today,[1102] as well as the film
Ukraine: Masks of the Revolution,[1103] revealed that it was Right Sector.
The UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine accused the groups
of “disappearances, arbitrary and incommunicado detention, as well as
torture and ill treatment” with a “high degree of impunity.”[1104] In July
2014, Human Rights Watch complained that the militias were
indiscriminately firing rockets into populated areas.[1105]
A group calling itself the Tornado Battalion, like the others acting
under the auspices of Arsen Avakov’s Interior Ministry, went so wild they
were ultimately prosecuted for murder, kidnapping and torture, including
male rape and electric shocks.[1106] Their leader Ruslan Onishenko was
convicted and sentenced to 11 years in prison, along with seven of his men.
He was freed after only seven years by President Zelensky in 2022.[1107]
The pro-Democrat Vox.com wrote in early 2015 that at least the Azov
Battalion had signed up with the government and was under the partial
control of the Interior Ministry, whereas Right Sector was totally
independent, and noted that reports from the front said the militias would
not follow the military chain of command. “That is a worrying sign that the
government does not have full control over the volunteer militias now, and
that they could grow more independent in the future,” reporter Amanda
Taub wrote. She estimated there were approximately 30 of these
independent militias fighting the war in the east. She noted that Interior
Minister Avakov was supporting the groups and had appointed Azov’s own
Vadim Troyan, the chief of police, “for the whole Kiev region,” and that
Andriy Biletsky had been elected to parliament. Taub found that their
independence, with the backing of powerful oligarchs, effectively
challenged the state’s authority and worried the militias would be used to
“protect their interests from state interference.”
When questioning whether the president might attempt to disband
these independent militias, Taub worried that he may be too distracted to
solve the problem, and “it’s not clear that he has the political capital to do
so anyway. Avakov, his interior minister, backs the Azov Battalion, so
would be unlikely to support any policy that would undermine it.” Other
problems included Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s need to approve any
major change in policy regarding the militias and the danger that oligarchs
like Kolomoysky might refuse to give them up. Taub also pointed out that
“[t]he militias themselves might not go quietly either. In early February,
when Poroshenko was rumored to be considering disbanding the Aydar
battalion, the group marched on Kiev.” They blocked the Ministry of
Defense building with burning tires until the president backed down from
his threat. She quoted reports that fighters in the Donbas said they were
“almost all to be intent on ‘bringing the fight to Kiev’ when the war in the
east is over.”[1108]
The militias were not disarmed. Even after the Ukrainian military got
back on its feet and the Azov Battalion was said to have been integrated
into its ranks, former USAID official Joshua Cohen reported for Reuters in
2018 that the government still had prominent Nazis in positions of power,
and that armed groups were still training child soldiers at their camps and
actively recruiting men to leave the military and join their ranks instead.
The president could not do anything about it, Cohen explained, because he
was dependent on their power. “In an ideal world,” he wrote, “Poroshenko
would purge the police and the interior ministry of far-right sympathizers,
including Interior Minister Arsen Avakov, who has close ties to Azov leader
Andriy Biletsky, as well as Sergei Korotkikh, an Azov veteran who is now a
high-ranking police official.” But he could not do that because “Avakov is
his chief political rival, and the ministry he runs controls the police, the
National Guard and several former militias,” leaving him in a very powerful
position relative to the president. “Poroshenko has endured frequent verbal
threats, including calls for revolution, from ultranationalist groups, so he
may believe that he needs Avakov to keep them in check.”[1109]

Cathy Young

In a debate with the author in June 2022, Bill Kristol protégé Cathy Young
scoffed at all concerns over the Nazi sympathies of the Azov Battalion with
a dismissive reference to “White Ruler” Andriy Biletsky’s stated goal of
“leading the white races of the world in a final crusade . . . against Semitic-
led untermenschen.”[1110] Young insisted, “That was written by a guy who
co-founded the Azov Battalion. It is really not—I mean, the fact that there
were some bad people involved with co-founding what is currently a
regiment in the Ukrainian army really doesn’t mean that it’s a Nazi outfit
today. He doesn’t have anything to do with it today.”[1111] But she was
lying, or did not know what she was talking about, whichever is the more
favorable interpretation.
Forget that Biletsky is author of the book The Word of the White
Leader, which is about how much his movement hates blacks and Jews and
loves national socialism,[1112] or how for years after the revolution he
served as a parliamentarian in the Rada.[1113] Biletsky was only ever one
man, and one small part of the overall Nazism of the men of his Azov
Regiment. Biletsky himself is still a commander in the group—now the
army’s 3rd Separate Assault Brigade[1114] (they also still control the
national guard’s 12th Special Purpose Brigade)[1115]—and has been
prominently featured in their public relations throughout the war,[1116]
becoming a successful media personality.[1117] For the few years when he
was not officially in command of the Azov Regiment because he was busy
founding the National Corps party, he was still treated as the leader of the
entire movement.[1118] On August 14, 2023, Ukrainian President Zelensky
visited Biletsky and his men on the front lines near Bakhmut.[1119] In the
summer of 2024, he led Ukrainian forces against the Russians in Kharkiv,
[1120] and Zelensky awarded him for it. The press release stipulated, to
prevent any confusion: “The brigade was formed on the same principles as
the legendary Azov regiment and the entire Azov movement.”[1121]
Nothing has changed since a decade before, after his battalion was
made an official regiment of Ukraine’s national guard, and Biletsky
declared, “We have not moved away from what we are. Everything that is
behind ‘Azov’s’ soul comes from our right-wing ideology, from the heritage
of the Patriot of Ukraine.”[1122] Biletsky is the same guy who said in 2009,
“How can we describe our enemy? The authorities and the oligarchs. Do
they have anything in common? Yes, they have one thing in common: they
are Jews, or behind them are their real masters—Jews.”[1123] Young spins
for this murderous Nazi and his men.
Young took the Nazis’ side in a piece at Kristol’s website too, calling
them the “heroes of Mariupol”: “It is worth noting that the ‘neo-Nazi Azov
regiment’ has never been implicated in any actual extremist acts—with the
sole exception of credible reports of human rights violations, including
torture of detainees, by Azov fighters in the Donbas in 2015–2016.”[1124]
Sure, the Ukrainian Nazis tortured and murdered some folks, but so did
George W. Bush,[1125] and Young supported him, too.[1126]

Azov Not Changed

Journalist Lev Golinkin castigated American apologists for comparing

Svoboda and other Ukrainian fascist groups to the French National Rally
party, saying that while the former have relatively fewer seats in parliament,
“[w]hat Ukraine’s far right lacks in polls numbers, it makes up for with
things Marine Le Pen could only dream of—paramilitary units and free rein
on the streets.” He mentioned the increase in anti-Jewish violence,
vandalism and threats, complaining that “[n]one of these concerns have
been addressed in any meaningful way.”[1127]
Golinkin said no other country in the world had a “neo-Nazi formation
in its armed forces,” and that Azov was still run by avowed white
supremacist Biletsky, who also sat in the Rada and confirmed in 2016 that
his “values” had not changed, despite all the propaganda. Golinkin also
cited the Institute of National Memory and parliament featuring an exhibit
celebrating the OUN’s declaration of independence from the USSR and
alliance with the Third Reich. He noted official Holocaust revisionism in
the form of “government-funded seminars, brochures, and board games,
[and] the proliferation of plaques, statues, and streets renamed after
butchers of Jews, to far-right children camps, where youth are inculcated
with ultranationalist ideology.” He predicted that “[w]ithin several years, an
entire generation will be indoctrinated to worship Holocaust perpetrators as
national heroes.”
Even Bellingcat Agrees

Even Bellingcat, the notorious MI6 and NATO propaganda front group,
[1128] specialized for a time in exposing the danger of the Ukrainian Nazi
movement. In 2018, their reporter Michael Colborne wrote a scathing piece
for the Forward about Ukrainian fascist groups and their Western
apologists: “I can’t count the number of times I’ve been told Ukraine
doesn’t really have a problem with its far-right,” he said. “It’s all Kremlin
propaganda; you’re personally helping Putin by talking about it; other
countries have far-right problems too, so why single out Ukraine? I’ve
heard it all.” In reality, he said “Ukraine really does have a far-right
problem, and it’s not a fiction of Kremlin propaganda. And it’s well past
time to talk about it.” While their electoral results had not been great, that
did not matter because the Azov movement was hard at work building “a
state within a state”—creating their own study groups and running martial
arts gyms for the young and other programs for the old. “They’re also
trying to turn Kiev into a capital of the global far-right, inviting neo-Nazis
and white supremacists from around the world to visit.” He cited attacks on
peaceful people while the cops do nothing, especially by government-
funded street goons, questioned why they can hold a giant neo-Nazi music
festival without criticism and why Poroshenko borrowed their rhetoric and
ignored their crimes. He then wrote, “I’ll probably be told that I’m part of
Putin’s hybrid war (really?), that I work for the Kremlin (um, no), or that
I’m doing the Kremlin’s work (also no). But I didn’t invent Ukraine’s far-
right, and I certainly haven’t helped them gain the prominence they’ve got
heading in 2019.”[1129]
 Bellingcat’s Oleksiy Kuzmenko wrote in 2019 that Serhiy Bondarenko,
a former Azov fighter and deputy head of police for the Kiev region, had
made statements indicating that “incorporation of the Azov Regiment into
the National Guard of Ukraine didn’t affect the far-right ideology espoused
by the former’s members—and instead allowed Azov to obtain
sophisticated weaponry and build their own political party.” In 2015,
Bondarenko was quoted saying he was an operative of the far-right
movement, and that he was confident “all members of Azov have
permanent ideological views that won’t change.” He also happened to name
Azov member Vadym Troyan, the deputy-minister of Internal Affairs, as an
example of a loyal friend at the top of Ukrainian law enforcement.[1130]
This was five years after the Azov Battalion had become the Regiment and
were integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard to fight the war in the
east.
In March 2022, Colborne published a monograph called From the
Fires of War: Ukraine’s Azov Movement and the Global Far Right, warning
that Azov was the core of “the most ambitious and dangerous far-right
movements in the world.”[1131] Especially by 2022, this writing was
published “against interest,” as they say, since Bellingcat’s main focus at
the time was attacking Russia and justifying U.S. and other Western support
for Ukraine in the war.[1132] As we have seen, many Western publications,
including the U.S. government’s own propaganda outfit Radio Liberty, had
spent years since the 2014 coup warning against the influence of these Nazi
groups, though after 2022, mostly adopted the line that this was nothing but
Russian propaganda against a very democratic Ukraine.[1133]
 Colborne may have been torn about whether to throw all his hard work
in the trash or go ahead anyway, but he did publish it, and proved critics
right and that all his colleagues on the War Party’s side are wrong at best.
Colborne later told the Times that the problem was essentially one of public
relations. It is so difficult to get Ukrainians to understand how bad
Himmler’s Death’s Head looks to outsiders.[1134] He complained, “I think
Ukrainians need to increasingly realize that these images undermine support
for the country.”[1135]
But in the book, Colborne says that Azov includes “open neo-Nazis”
and that it is growing into a broader far-right social movement without
parallel anywhere else in the world. Comparing them to other far-right
nationalist groups in Europe, Colborne wrote, “The Azov movement is able
to operate with a level of impunity their friends in other countries could
only imagine: a literal ‘land of opportunity,’ as one Azov movement
representative once admitted to me.” He added that “this was all in plain
sight, on public social media profiles, in publicly written articles in
Ukrainian, Russian and English.”[1136] And by youth camps, he meant
neo-Nazi training camps straight out of the Hitler Youth.[1137] “Ukraine
above all! Death to enemies!” the boys shouted. “We are preparing future
warriors,” their counselor said.[1138] “We don’t count separatists, little
green men, occupiers from Moscow, as people. So we can and should aim
at them,” the kids’ instructor explained.[1139]
Humorously, Colborne still tried to downplay the violence by neo-
Nazis on the Maidan on February 20, very quickly summarizing it and
attempting to ridicule the Russians’ criticism of what they called, and what
Colborne himself admits in so many words was, a “fascist coup.” Perhaps it
was merely a coup by fascists. At least he also criticized others who wished
to play down the role of the Nazis and noted that after their violent removal
of Yanukovych, the fascist groups certainly considered themselves the
“vanguard” of the revolution, “a view of themselves,” he said, “that would
be solidified in the fires of war.”[1140]
And so they were. In the next year, 6,000 people would be killed in the
war between these Nazis and their victims: the people of the east of their
own country, most of them civilians.[1141]

The International Nazi

Former FBI counterterrorism agent Ali Soufan has documented an

international white supremacist network that includes Americans,
Europeans, South Americans and Australians. In 2020, he warned that “just
as jihadists exploited conflicts in Afghanistan, the Balkans and Syria, so too
are white supremacists using the conflict in Ukraine as a laboratory and
training ground.”[1142] Soufan further reported that more than 2,200 non-
Russian foreign fighters had gone to Ukraine to fight in the war between
2014 and 2019. He wrote that “Ukraine [is] emerging as a hub in the
broader network of transnational white supremacy extremism, attracting
foreign recruits from all over the world.” Comparing them to bin Ladenites
in the Middle East, Soufan wrote: “Where jihadis travel to fight in places
like Syria, white supremacists now have their own theater in which to learn
combat—Ukraine.” Soufan added, “the Azov Battalion has recruited 139
foreign fighters motivated by white supremacy and neo-Nazi beliefs,
including many from the West, to join its ranks and receive training,
indoctrination, and instruction in irregular warfare.”
The Azov Battalion has become a symbol of resistance for neo-Nazis
around Europe and the United States.[1143] They and their friends in the
National Corps and Right Sector are obsessed with leading the so-called
“Reconquista” of Europe from those they consider racial undesirables.
Olena Semenyaka, a spokesperson and international secretary for the Azov
Battalion and National Corps,[1144] has insisted the restoration of full
Ukrainian sovereignty from Russian control was part of the larger mission
of reinvigorating Europe and “the white race.”[1145] She also claimed in
October 2018 that “just within 4 years, the Azov Movement has become a
small state in the state.”[1146]
Semenyaka told Radio Liberty that in November 2017, she traveled to
Warsaw to participate in the “Europe of the Future 2” conference, which
was organized by the Polish white supremacist group and Azov Battalion
“ally” Szturmowcy (Stormtroopers). She had intended to speak alongside
notorious American white nationalist Richard Spencer. This was prevented
when Polish authorities barred Spencer from entering the country.[1147]
Greg Johnson, another prominent American white nationalist, was hosted
by the Azov Battalion, where he gave a talk about his white power
manifesto and made a special point to “listen” to Azov and learn the keys to
their success, which he would like to copy in the United States and Western
Europe.[1148] The same meeting was attended by neo-Nazis from Norway,
Italy, Germany and Ukraine.[1149] Semenyaka said she had been on a tour
meeting with white supremacist groups all around Europe in an attempt to
spread their ideals and prepare for a future where they could unite against
their common enemies.[1150]
It was this dedication to Hitlerian ideals that inspired young Nazis
from across Europe,[1151] and even the United States, to travel to Ukraine
to join or attempt to join the Azov Battalion at war in the east.[1152] Azov
founder Biletsky told the Telegraph that he had fighters from Ireland, Italy,
Greece and Scandinavia.[1153] The BBC did a piece on a Swedish Nazi
sniper fighting with the Azov Battalion.[1154] Brazilian police said that
members of the “Misanthropic Division” had been recruiting locals to fight
for the Azov Battalion in Ukraine.[1155] Soufan and Der Spiegel noted that
Germans and Australians have joined them as well.[1156] The Guardian
and The Week magazine reported on British and Polish neo-Nazis joining up
to go fight[1157]—including Mark Jones from the banned UK neo-Nazi
group National Action, who visited Azov headquarters in 2017.[1158]
Colborne also wrote of Azov’s ties to Croatian Nazis, some of whom had
gone to Ukraine to fight in 2014 and 2015, and their efforts to unite the
international white supremacist movement.[1159]
French police, at the urging of the Simon Wiesenthal Center,[1160]
banned an event in the city of Nantes for what the group called a “foreign
legion” of different Nazi groups from around Europe who had organized the
event to recruit for the Azov Battalion.[1161]
Bellingcat’s Oleksiy Kuzmenko also reported that Azov’s integration
into the military had “not led to [their] depoliticization or
dissolution.”[1162] After noting America’s vast influence in Kiev,
Kuzmenko wrote, “Apparently deradicalizing the Ukrainian military and
security forces of far-right elements is simply not on Washington’s wish-
list. The same applies to other Western governments supporting Ukraine.”
He insisted the U.S. and its allies should press the Ukrainian government to
rid its armed forces of these dangerous groups.[1163]
But Evelyn Farkas, who was Obama’s deputy assistant secretary of
defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia and later the executive director of
the McCain Institute, saw it differently. “They have right now existential
issues to deal with, and the far-right groups are helping defend Ukraine,”
she told Newsweek. “So at this moment in time, the Ukrainian government
needs all the help it can get from its citizens, regardless of their
ideology.”[1164] Consequences for Ukraine and the rest of the West will
just have to be addressed later. Soufan warned of the coming backdraft:
“Just as Afghanistan served as a sanctuary for jihadist organizations like
Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group in the 1980s,
so too are parts of Ukraine becoming a safe haven for an array of white
supremacy extremist groups to congregate, train, and radicalize.”[1165]
It has been claimed that Brenton Tarrant, perpetrator of the massacres
of 51 Muslims in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, had made trips to
Ukraine to train with the Azov Battalion,[1166] though that was not true.
[1167] Still, the Times, referencing the “sonnenrad,” or black sun patch,
said that “[o]n his flak jacket was a symbol commonly used by the Azov
Battalion, a Ukrainian neo-Nazi paramilitary organization.”[1168] Azov
approvingly translated and republished Tarrant’s manifesto and shared the
video of his massacre.[1169]
 In November 2022, Azov’s Italian associates, a neo-Nazi group called
the “Order of Hagal,” were rounded up and arrested by police who accused
them of stockpiling weapons and planning terrorist attacks, including
against police stations and a shopping mall. One of their members could not
be arrested because he was off fighting with the Azov Regiment in Ukraine.
[1170]

Unite the Right

At least two Americans from the Rise Above Movement (RAM) linked up
with the National Corps in Kiev, where they helped to attack an antiwar
protest before coming home and attending the infamous “Unite the Right”
rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, in which a counter-
protester was run over and killed. Scott J. Bierwirth, an FBI
counterterrorism agent, wrote in an affidavit in support of the indictment of
a member of RAM on “conspiracy to riot” charges that they had posted
pictures online of their meeting with Semenyaka, “the leader of the
International Department for the National Corps,” Azov’s political wing
formed in 2016. He added that Azov “is known for its association with neo-
Nazi ideology and use of Nazi symbolism, and which is believed to have
participated in training and radicalizing United States-based white
supremacy organizations.” Several of the RAM members attended the
Charlottesville rally and posted videos of themselves fighting and attacking
counter-protesters there.[1171]
Craig Lang and Alex Zwiefelhofer were two U.S. veterans who had
traveled to Ukraine to fight with Azov in the Donbas. They eventually
returned to the U.S., where they murdered a couple for the money to go
back again.[1172] Lang remains there to this day.[1173]
These Americans “came to learn our ways,” Semenyaka told Radio
Liberty.[1174] Journalist Mariana van Zeller told Newsweek she had
verified that U.S. extremists were traveling to Ukraine to gain battlefield
experience, having interviewed members of an American neo-Nazi terrorist
group called the Atomwaffen Division there.[1175] They reported that the
National Corps “has gone international on multiple fronts with known
contacts in Germany’s neo-Nazi Third Path . . . party, America’s Rise Above
Movement, Italy’s Casa Pound, etc.” The Newsweek authors noticed the
government was alarmed by U.S. Nazis’ attraction to the Azov movement
and had tried to disrupt their funding, “yet at the same time is totally fine
with the Regiment carrying on as a part of a Ukrainian government that
receives billions of dollars in U.S. assistance.”[1176]
Reporter and author Tim Lister wrote an important study in 2020 for
West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center, “The Nexus Between Far-Right
Extremists in the United States and Ukraine.” He called the war in the
Donbas the American and European far right’s “field of dreams,” and wrote,
“there is a broader relationship between the Ukrainian far-right, and
especially its political flagship the National Corps, and a variety of far-right
groups and individuals in the United States and Europe.” Importantly, he
noted that these groups were “bitterly opposed [to] any suggestion of
compromise with Russia over Donbas,” and protested later attempts at
concessions in 2019. “The emergence of such an overtly far-right white
nationalist militia—publicly celebrated, openly organizing, and with friends
in high places—was electrifying to far-right individuals and groups in
Europe, the United States, and further afield.” Lister noted an often-
overlooked fascist group called Karpatska Sich, “whose members . . .
attended a gathering of far-right groups in Rome in January 2019.” They
also twice attended the “Festung Budapest”—“a celebration organized by
Légió Hungária of the attempted breakout by Nazi and pro-Nazi forces
against the Soviet advance in 1945.” They too, he wrote, “have also been
enthusiastic proponents of the Ukrainian translation of the Tarrant
manifesto.”[1177]
In 2019, Time’s Simon Shuster investigated the internationalization of
the Azov movement. He warned that their leaders were Nazis, and that the
organization itself was based on an unmistakable ideology of fascism. He
went to a massive recruitment event featuring mixed martial arts, metal
shows and Nazi propaganda. He met a Swede by the name of “Mussolini”
who was very enthusiastic about staying to fight for the Aryan race.[1178]
Russian Nazis have also volunteered to fight in the war—some on
Ukraine’s side. Sergei Korotkikh, founder of the National Socialist Society
in Russia who was accused of filming himself beheading a Chechen
migrant there under a swastika flag, fought with the Azov Battalion against
Russian speakers in Ukraine’s east, where he had no problem scoring
NLAW anti-tank missiles from his friends in the British government.[1179]
In 2011, 12 members of his group were convicted of murdering 27 “mostly
darker-skinned labor migrants from Russia’s Caucasus region and Central
Asia, as well as Africans and South East Asians,” according to the
Associated Press.[1180]
 Jonathan Brunson, a former political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in
Ukraine, told Newsweek it was too bad the U.S. did not do more to “help
neutralize” the rising power of the Banderites before the war, since they
later became necessary in the fight, giving them a chance to burnish their
credentials as crucial heroes and allies. The West, he said, “could have
isolated the far-right, but blew it by delegitimizing all this as conspiracy
theories and propaganda, even after decades of documented covert and
overt support.”[1181]

We Can Do It Again

When Right Sector got angry with Poroshenko in October 2014, Dimitry
Yarosh credibly threatened to overthrow him. Though he said he did not
want to destabilize the government with the Russian threat still looming,
Yarosh added, “We’re all well aware that I can send several battalions to
Kyiv and resolve the government issue. That’s real. Our citizens dislike the
government so much that it would be easy for us to do.”[1182]
In 2015, they again threatened to overthrow Poroshenko.[1183] And he
took the threat seriously. It was not only a dispute over honoring Bandera.
Voice of America reported that after Right Sector got into a shootout with a
local politician’s bodyguards during an argument over smuggling routes,
Poroshenko called to disarm and detain the group pending an investigation.
The Nazis then mobilized approximately 10,000 members and started
referring to the new somewhat-elected regime as “an inner occupying
force,” just as they had labeled Yanukovych’s government, and said that it
was perhaps time to overthrow Poroshenko as well.
 Right Sector spokesman Artem Skoropadskyi told Voice of America,
“If there’s a new revolution, Ukraine’s President Poroshenko and his
teammates won’t be able to make it out of the country the way the previous
president did.” He added, “They can’t expect anything other than an
execution in some dark vault, carried out by a group of young officers of
Ukraine’s army and National Guard.” Dmytro Riznychenko, spokesman for
a newly-formed armed group that was backed by the government in Kiev,
told them, “The only issue is to find the right figure to be the country’s
dictator and savior.”[1184]
After his stint in parliament, Yarosh founded another hard nationalist
organization, the Ukrainian Volunteer Army. In 2015, he was appointed as
an official adviser to the commander in chief of the armed forces and
liaison between the military and the new Ukrainian Volunteer Corps
(DUK), the name for Right Sector’s militia after it was integrated into the
national guard.[1185] They partnered with Svoboda, Right Sector and the
National Corps in the 2019 election. That year, he maintained in an
interview that even though he now has Jewish friends, he still means to
accomplish Bandera’s vision for Ukraine. It happens to be the same
interview where he threatened to overthrow the newly elected Volodymyr
Zelensky if he were to try to negotiate an end to the war.[1186] In
November 2021, a few months before Russia’s invasion, Yarosh was again
appointed adviser to the commander in chief of the Ukrainian armed forces.
[1187]
The Azov Battalion was deployed in Kiev. There were no separatists in
the capital at the time. Nor are there now. But there was, and still is, a
regime there that will be crushed by the radical right if it deviates from their
ultra-nationalist agenda.[1188]

Domestic Terrorism

In the meantime, of course, Ukraine’s Nazis act just like the Brownshirts,
especially against Roma (or Gypsies),[1189] antiwar activists[1190] and
liberal protesters,[1191] as they march through the streets at night by the
tens of thousands in torchlight parades, honoring Stepan Bandera and their
other Hitlerian heroes.[1192] The BBC’s Jonah Fisher went on patrol with
the so-called “National Militia,” later renamed “Centuria,”[1193] who were
essentially young thugs deputized by the police to roam the streets at night
dispensing their own “justice.” The mayor of Kiev claimed, “If [Arsen]
Avakov decided that the National Militia with their balaclavas and uniforms
shouldn’t exist, then it wouldn’t exist.” Avakov is not a Nazi, but was very
happy to support them,[1194] along with his deputy Vadim Troyan, who is a
Nazi.[1195] BBC asked their spokesman about their clashes with cops and
smashing up businesses. He just deflected. They go to jail for that, he
claimed.[1196]
Even the U.S. State Department complained in their 2018 “Country
Report on Human Rights Practices” that the National Druzhyna
organization—established, they said, with “support from the National
Corps”—attacked a Roma camp in Kiev while the police stood by and
watched. They referred to credible reports that “C14 and National Corps, at
times committed arbitrary detentions with the apparent acquiescence of law
enforcement.” At a march held by a group called Ukrainian Order, Tetyana
Soykina of Right Sector declared, “We will restore order in Ukraine,
Ukraine will belong to Ukrainians, not Jews and oligarchs,” the State
Department report said, adding that she had used “a pejorative term for
Jews.” The interior minister, Arsen Avakov, known for his support of
various neo-Nazi groups, denounced her statement as something from “the
dark ages,” and opened a criminal investigation.[1197] The State
Department report said that “[t]he Ukrainian Jewish Committee condemned
an April 28 march sponsored by nationalist organizations honoring the local
volunteers who were in the Nazi Waffen-SS during the Holocaust. The
march featured Nazi symbols and salutes.”[1198] In 2021, they added
complaints about extrajudicial killings, torture, arbitrary and false arrests by
government agents, a corrupted judiciary, violations of citizens’ right of free
speech and free media, censorship and crimes against Jews, Roma, gays and
other minorities with complete impunity. The reports go on like that at
length. Not that all security forces in Ukraine are Nazis. But they sure seem
to behave in ways indistinguishable from how Nazis would act, according
to their own greatest benefactor, the U.S. government.[1199]
C14 and the National Druzhyna militia attacked a series of Roma
camps in 2018, including at Kiev’s Lysa Hora nature reserve on Hitler’s
birthday, April 20,[1200] and Holosiyivskiy Park on June 7.[1201] Near the
end of a YouTube video posted by the assailants, uniformed Ukrainian
police officers casually make conversation as the nationalists wind up their
raid. Christopher Miller, reporting for Radio Liberty, wrote that it was the
fourth attack in the previous six weeks. In the last, “Masked attackers
hurled stones and sprayed gas as they chased terrified Romany men,
women, and children from the makeshift settlement.” He added, “Police did
nothing until a video of the attack went viral online, forcing them to open
an investigation, the results of which remain unclear.”[1202] A few weeks
later, they killed someone,[1203] and the next month, they did it again,
killing two in what the Guardian said was the eighth such attack in recent
months.[1204]
After C14 near-fatally stabbed antiwar activist Stas Serhiyenko in
2017, former USAID official Joshua Cohen wrote that this was “just the tip
of the iceberg. More recently C14 beat up a socialist politician while other
ultranationalist thugs stormed the Lviv and Kiev City Councils.” He added,
“Far-right and neo-Nazi groups have also assaulted or disrupted art
exhibitions, anti-fascist demonstrations, a ‘Ukrainians Choose Peace’ event,
LGBT events, a social center, media organizations, court proceedings and a
Victory Day march celebrating the anniversary of the end of World War II,”
noting that “perpetrators enjoy widespread impunity.” Cohen explained,
“It’s not hard to understand why Kiev seems reluctant to confront these
violent groups,” since many of them “played an important role early in the
war against Russian-supported separatists.” And Poroshenko was scared
that “these violent groups could turn on the government itself—something
they’ve done before[1205] and continue to threaten[1206] to do.” He
pointed to Vita Zaverukha, a famous Nazi who was on house arrest awaiting
prosecution for killing two cops, yet still posted selfies with approximately
50 fellow nationalists from a restaurant in downtown Kiev, saying the case
demonstrated “the far right’s confidence in their immunity from
government prosecution.”[1207]
 Human Rights Watch denounced the Poroshenko government in the
summer of 2018 for failing to “respond adequately to the growing number
of violent attacks and threats promoting hate and discrimination in Ukraine
by members of violent radical groups.” In a joint letter, HRW and three
other international rights groups insisted authorities should “condemn the
attacks and carry out effective investigations.” They wrote that “C14, Right
Sector, Traditsii i Poryadok (Traditions and Order), Karpatska Sich and
others have carried out at least two dozen violent attacks, threats, or
instances of intimidation in Kyiv, Vinnitsa, Uzhgorod, Lviv, Chernivtsi,
Ivano-Frankivsk, and other Ukrainian cities.” Meanwhile, “Law
enforcement authorities have rarely opened investigations. In the cases in
which they did, there is no indication that authorities took effective
investigative measures to identify the attackers, even in cases in which the
assailants publicly claimed responsibility on social media.”[1208]
In April 2015, Amnesty International also noted the suspicious deaths
of at least eight allies of former President Viktor Yanukovych, some of
which the authorities were quick to label suicides or accidents, and
demanded real investigations. “Opposition politicians are facing mob
violence, often carried out by groups or individuals affiliated with the right-
wing,” they said.[1209]

#Banderites

In a very telling example of the neo-Nazis’ growing influence, in 2019, a

Kiev cop was caught on camera throwing a C14 protester to the ground and
calling him a “Banderite.” This caused outrage and a great round of self-
abasement by the authorities. Radio Liberty’s Miller reported that law
enforcement officials of all ranks jumped on social media to declare that
“[t]hey, too, are ‘#Banderites.’” As Miller put it, “Or, to be clear, supporters
of militant Ukrainian nationalists who collaborated with the Nazis during
World War II.” He continued, “National Police chief Serhiy Knyazev says
he is one. So does Interior Ministry and National Police spokesman Artem
Shevchenko. Interior Ministry adviser Zoryan Shkyryak is, too,” adding,
“From the top on down, cops and their bosses are lining up to air their
admiration for Stepan Bandera.” Kiev Police Chief Andriy Kryshchenko
issued a statement saying, “I personally, as the chief of police in Kyiv, want
to apologize to society for the actions of this officer. Out of conviction and
because of my understanding of the historical situation in Ukraine, I
consider it unacceptable.” He continued, “Undoubtedly, this employee will
be punished.” National police chief Knyazev wrote, “I apologize. I am a
Banderite, too! Glory to Ukraine!” Shkyryak of the Interior Ministry also
wrote on Facebook: “I am also a Banderite and I am proud of it! Bandera,
my hero!”[1210]
Joshua Cohen wrote another piece on the subject, this time for the
Atlantic Council, titled “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far-Right
Violence (And No, RT [Russia Today] Didn’t Write This Headline).” He
noted warnings from several human rights organizations that far-right
groups, acting with “a veneer of patriotism” and “traditional values,” have
enjoyed “near total impunity that cannot but embolden these groups to
commit more attacks.” Cohen added, “It’s not extremists’ electoral
prospects that should concern Ukraine’s friends, but rather the state’s
unwillingness or inability to confront violent groups and end their
impunity.”[1211]
Not surprisingly, many of the prominent leaders of these Nazi groups
have been accused, and some convicted, of murder and attempted murder.
They act as thugs for hire for rich oligarchs,[1212] torture and behead
Muslim migrant workers[1213] and stomp each other to death in business
disputes.[1214]

No, Not Everyone

No, not everyone in Ukraine is a Nazi. No one said that. And the presence
of these militias and their ongoing violence against the people of the
Donbas, by the author’s judgment, were still short of legitimate reasons for
Russia’s 2022 invasion. The argument is that there are too many Nazis and
Nazi sympathizers with too much influence in the Ukrainian government
and military, which is one good reason why the United States should not
support them. Many societies, including Russia, have far-right and even
racialist militias like Azov and C14. But how many of them outright
integrate these forces into their militaries?[1215] And how many have a
parliament run by them, where even presidents live in fear of fascist mobs
outside their doors? How many of their leaders get invited to speak at
official U.S. government events, like when C14’s Serhiy Bondar spoke
about the group at the U.S.-sponsored America House Kiev?[1216] How
many socialize with America’s political elite, like when in the summer of
2018 Svoboda’s Parubiy was brought to Washington, D.C., at least
twice[1217] to visit House Speaker Paul Ryan and Sen. McCain,[1218] and
be warmly received by Mike Pompeo’s State Department?[1219]
It is also important to understand why this coup led to catastrophe. It
was the end of compromise between major factions. The ethnic Ukrainian
nationalists who had seized power were determined to make the majority of
the people bow to their will or get the hell out if they did not like it.[1220]
When the east resisted, it was the vanguard of the neo-Nazi right who did
not hesitate to wage war against their own population, further solidifying
the division between them.
Ukrainian Nazis also threatened to murder Bellingcat’s Oleksiy
Kuzmenko and Michael Colborne for their journalism on this issue in a way
that really showed a lack of appreciation for the nuance with which both
men had treated the subject in their writing.[1221]

Ultraviolence

Liberal Fascism

The typical elitist liberal in Kiev felt the same way about it as the Nazis.
They explained their frustration with the people of the East getting in the
way of their desire to turn to the West. “This is what I heard from
respectable people in Kiev,” journalist Keith Gessen wrote. “Not from the
nationalists, but from liberals, from professionals and journalists. All the
bad people were in one place—why not kill them all?”[1222]

Kiev’s Murderous War

People talk as though Ukraine suddenly found itself in a war in the year
2022, but more than 14,000 people were killed in the 2014–2015 war and in
the “low-level” fighting which continued in the meantime.[1223] It was not
only the Nazis’ war crimes driving the Donbas toward Russia though. The
Ukrainian army repeatedly attacked civilian areas under rebel control with
airstrikes,[1224] heavy artillery[1225] and cluster bombs,[1226] with at
least the publicly expressed disapproval of the Obama administration.
Gessen, referring to air and artillery strikes in Donetsk in late summer
2014, wrote: “I never once saw an actual military target—the SBU, for
example—get hit, only civilian locations. Possibly the army had poor aim;
possibly the army was hoping to encourage the remaining civilian
population to leave. Or possibly the army didn’t care.”[1227] There was
widespread damage to civilian homes and infrastructure across the city of
Donetsk.[1228]
In a statement, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights
said he was “dismayed by persistent reports about cases of unlawful and
arbitrary detention . . . summary executions, torture and ill-treatment, and
lack of accountability.”[1229] The UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial,
summary or arbitrary executions similarly complained that groups like
Right Sector were acting “on their own authority” and with “complete
impunity,” threatening and committing acts of violence against “persons
holding dissenting views” and “the judicial system and on other methods of
accountability.” The UN rapporteur estimated that “nearly 8,000” people
had been killed already, mostly by “indiscriminate shelling” by both sides,
but singled out government forces for using “insufficiently precise”
weapons in urban areas while wielding precision weapons “without regard
to proper Standard Operating Procedures to guide targeting.” He also
complained about “secret detention,” “summary killings” of accused rebels
by Ukrainian forces, as well as the nationalist militias, and that there was a
standing order from the Ministry of Defense essentially banning any real
investigation into the killing of civilians in rebel-held areas.[1230]
President Obama described Kiev’s attacks on the Donbas as “an
incredible outpouring of democracy” in defense from “actions by Russia as
well as certain armed militias,” whom he accused of “violating international
law and international sovereignty.” Local militias that rejected the new coup
government were not violating international law or sovereignty by any
stretch. If Russia was doing so by backing them, the same would have to
apply to U.S. and allied help for the nationalists as well, certainly in the
lead-up to the coup, before they became the official internationally
recognized government.[1231]
On Kiev’s use of cluster bombs, John McCain conceded it was true,
but told Russian media that it was America’s “fault,” since Obama had been
reluctant to give Ukraine the other weapons they had asked for.[1232]
In September 2014, the pro-Obama news channel CNN was so bold as
to report from the Donbas, showing the government’s “devastating”
violence inflicted on the people and property of the region. “The husband of
a 34-year-old woman killed outside a block of flats last Wednesday
wouldn’t talk to CNN, saying he was in shock. He made it down to the
cellar with their small child but she simply didn’t have time. A 50-year-old
woman was killed with his wife,” they reported. By that time, more than
2,500 people had been killed and a quarter of a million had been forced
from their homes. “We are Ukrainian but they kill us, so we probably need
our own country,” one man told the outlet. “Because these people in Kiev,
they are not brothers for us.”[1233]
Regarding the killing of civilians, the International Crisis Group wrote
that a “frequent comment offered by the military was that local people were
getting what they had asked for in the May 2014 separatist-organized
referendum on self-determination.”[1234]
In 85 Days in Slavyansk, Alexander Zhuchkovsky, who fought on the
side of the rebels, wrote that after May 20, “the Ukrainians began to
terrorize Semyonovka with artillery, and by the end of the month Slavyansk
itself. . . . [T]he Ukrainians fired mostly on civilian areas, using shells of all
calibers on both the suburbs and the most densely populated parts of
Slavyansk.” They did this clearly because they “wanted to instill fear in the
locals, encourage them to flee the city, and to cause them to blame the
militia for their misery.” Zhuchkovsky added, “It was interesting to watch
how the Slavyansk locals responded to the increase in hostilities. At first,
they could not accept that Ukraine, the state they had lived under for a
quarter of a century, was behaving as an invader rather than a liberator.” He
said that “[a]s the Ukrainians brought more artillery to Slavyansk, they
repeated their disbelief more and more.” He also said he understood how
the longer the fight went on, the more frustrated Kiev would become over
mounting casualties and lack of progress. “It is not surprising that after a
month and a half they began to terrorize the city with all the weapons they
had available: combat aircraft, MLRS [Multiple Launch Rocket Systems],
and white phosphorus among them. The Ukrainians had begun a war of
destruction.” He added that “[t]his was especially obvious in the last days of
the siege, before the Russian retreat. The Ukrainians surrounded the city
with barbed wire, mined the outskirts, and used their artillery to its fullest
capability.” They killed numerous civilians, including journalists, and set
the city ablaze.[1235]
According to the UN, the vast majority of civilian casualties in the
Donbas war between 2018 and 2021, approximately 81.4 percent, occurred
in rebel-held areas, while 16.3 percent were in Ukrainian government-
controlled territory.[1236] Forget the truth; the narrative is all that counts on
TV. Except in this case there is hardly even a narrative at all, just the
endlessly repeated slogan “Russian aggression” without any explanation or
context. Even if you take the worst interpretation of Russian intervention in
the east—granting that their plan was to maintain the war on a low level
just to keep the country destabilized and unable to join NATO—that would
still represent a regretful reaction to a reckless American policy, and it
remained far short of the Russian army smashing Mariupol and driving all
the way to Kherson, which eventually did happen in 2022.

Russians Not There Yet

In May 2014, Times reporter C.J. Chivers, a retired Marine captain and
arms expert,[1237] traveled to Ukraine to investigate Russia’s role in
supporting the “Russian-backed separatists” in the east. He said they were
locals, though ethnic Russians, and in many cases Soviet army veterans and
people with relatives on the other side of the border. A local commander
laughed at claims that he was under the control of Russian intelligence. “We
have no Muscovites here. I have experience enough,” he told the Times.
Chivers also found the local Donbas fighters were armed with weapons
given to them by Ukrainian army divisions who had defected to their side,
not the Russians.[1238] The Australian group Armament Research Services,
[1239] the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)[1240]
and Zhuchkovsky also demonstrated this at length.[1241] In late summer
2014, Gessen reported an estimated 10,000 local fighters with only small
numbers of foreign “volunteers” mixed in.[1242] Two years later, the
International Crisis Group quoted Ukrainian military sources admitting that
“many of their adversaries [were] poorly trained locals, with little
inclination to fight and drawn more by the pay,” rather than Russian
regulars, though they did claim that Russian officers were making all the
important decisions.[1243]
They later wrote, “The conflict in eastern Ukraine started as a
grassroots movement, albeit one that Moscow inspired and then
aggressively exploited,” adding that the “demonstrations were led by local
citizens claiming to represent the region’s Russian-speaking majority.”
They were upset about the “political and economic ramifications of the new
Kyiv government and about moves, later aborted, by that government to
curtail the official use of Russian language throughout the country. They
were joined by activists and volunteers from Moscow.”[1244] In September
2016, the secretary-general of the OSCE, Lamberto Zannier, said that “there
are no Russian units as such.” However, the Russians did seem to continue
to resupply local fighters with military equipment, fuel and ammunition.
And Russian fighters were there, though they always denied working
directly for the military.[1245]
Alexander Hug, deputy head of the OSCE’s observer mission in
Ukraine, told Foreign Policy in 2018 that he had seen Russian equipment,
but not soldiers, in the Donbas. Humorously, the magazine decided to edit
his comments to fit their party line. “If the question is what we have seen on
the ground . . . we have seen convoys leaving and entering Ukraine on dirt
roads in the middle of the night, in areas where there is no official
crossing.” What Hug actually said was that “we have not seen direct
evidence” of Russian troops in Ukraine. But the editor fixed that for us with
an ellipsis and a supposed correction at the bottom: “In an earlier version,
Hug stated that OSCE had not seen direct evidence of Russian involvement
in eastern Ukraine. We have removed this remark, as it did not convey his
intended view.”[1246] He issued a statement clarifying that the OSCE does
not draw conclusions or provide evidence, saying, “The facts speak for
themselves.” In response to follow-up questions, Hug simply repeated
himself and again cited the same indirect evidence he had explained to
Foreign Policy. This is hardly a retraction on the facts. It sounded more like
he got in trouble at work for saying more than he should have and
undermining the party line. In fact, there was plenty of reason to think
Russian troops were there, just not in the numbers the magazine’s editors
would have had us believe.[1247]
Former Swiss NATO military analyst Jacques Baud explained that in
the first few months of the war, despite claims by the Poles, they did not
observe direct Russian intervention or delivery of arms, which only came
later. Major parts of the military—“entire tank, artillery or anti-aircraft
battalions”—defected over to the rebels’ side, he said.[1248] NPR News
documented the same in April 2014.[1249]
London Sunday Times reporter Mark Franchetti embedded with the
Vostok (East) Battalion in Donetsk for three weeks in early summer 2014.
He said it was mostly made up of civilian volunteers from the Donbas and
Russia. The group’s founder was one of the only members with any military
experience. “I saw with my own eyes how extremist those [Maidan]
demonstrators were, attacking the police and hurling petrol bombs at them,”
he told Franchetti. “When Yanukovych was ousted, I understood they would
come here to the east to fight. So I founded Vostok to fight them back.” A
mechanic named Viktor told the reporter, “I couldn’t just sit at home and do
nothing when I saw the violence spreading. We’re protecting our homes
from a bunch of fascists who are backed by the West.” When they retreated
to a Russian border crossing, they were not welcomed and supported, but
disarmed, arrested, questioned and jailed.[1250]
Later, Franchetti was interviewed on a Ukrainian TV show, telling the
host, “I don’t want to represent a position here. I just want to report what
I’ve seen. You can say that they are terrorists, that they receive weapons and
funding from Russia. But that is not true.” Instead of representing a foreign
invasion, he said the fighters of the “East Battalion” were “miners and
ordinary people . . . without any military experience . . . who are convinced
they have been attacked by fascists.” Further, he noted that they had few
weapons, and at the time were “completely convinced Russia will come to
their aid at some point. They are waiting for them.” In other words, it had
not happened yet. Franchetti said he could “not confirm” whether the
militia was “well armed, that there are Russian military officers among
them,” nor did he locate long-rumored battalions of Chechen fighters
supposedly sent to help the rebels.[1251]
This does not mean that Russian troops never fought in the Donbas
war, but it casts severe doubt on Ukrainian government claims that conflict
war was waged by Russian regulars, as opposed to local residents and
military defectors, indicating small numbers of deniable clandestine
Russian forces involved, at most, in the early months of the war.[1252] Just
before the full-scale war broke out in 2022, RAND’s Samuel Charap wrote
in Foreign Policy that Ukraine had been fighting Ukrainians, not Russian
soldiers. “Russian armed forces engaged directly in the fighting only twice
—in August–September 2014 and January–February 2015—and with
limited capabilities, although both episodes ended in crushing Ukrainian
defeats.”[1253] In fact, Kiev had accused the Russian military of directly
intervening in August 2014, though even then their role may have been
exaggerated since hard evidence of their presence was lacking at the time.
[1254] In any case, the Donbas rebels were almost entirely local fighters,
supported by at least a major segment of the local population. Even the
Ukrainian interior ministry accused 17,000 policemen of joining the fight
on the rebels’ side, putting the lie to their narrative that it had all been
contrived by the Russians.[1255]
However, if the new regime thought they would be greeted as
liberators, or win quick and easy, they sure were wrong. After the first six
months of fighting, those in the Donbas who believed Russian intervention
was justified and those favoring separation from Kiev had both increased
dramatically.[1256]

Horton’s Law

Reliable interventionist hawk Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had warned in the

1990s about the likely consequences if policymakers followed his bad
advice about expanding NATO into Russia’s former sphere of influence,
[1257] now recommended neutrality for Ukraine,[1258] but still took the
lead in advocating weapons transfers to their military fighting their
supposed countrymen in the east under the excuse that they would be
reserved for use against Russian invaders.[1259] He reasoned that if the
U.S. were to send more shoulder-fired missiles, it would “permit more
effective operations” to “terminate violence” and “deter” Russia.[1260]
However, Brzezinski still said alliance should be out of the question.
“There should be clarity that Ukraine will not be a member of NATO. I
think that is important for a variety of political reasons.” He had finally
seen the Russians’ side of the story. “If you look at the map, it’s important
for Russia from a psychological, strategic point of view. So Ukraine will
not be a member of NATO.”[1261] He advised neutrality “along the lines of
the relationship that Russia has with Finland, which is not a member of
NATO but enjoys full participation in Europe as best it can, even as it
enjoys also a normal relationship with Russia.”[1262]
Horton’s Law says that you can count on politicians to break all of
their good promises and keep all of their bad ones.[1263] The new corollary
says you can always count on a politician to take the worst hawks’ foreign
policy advice but ignore even their own warnings.

Suicide Economics

Beliefs can be powerful things. Professor Petro wrote about Kiev’s

economic war against the people of the east prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion
in his book The Tragedy of Ukraine: “From the standpoint of Ukrainian
nationalists, the attraction of defunding Ukrainian industry is that it
significantly reduces Russian investment in Ukraine.” He further explained
that “[t]he government has therefore systematically dismantled Ukraine’s
industrial base, which is disproportionately concentrated in Maloross
[south-eastern, pro-Russian] Ukraine, partly in order to prevent those
regions from recovering the wealth and political influence they once
had.”[1264] According to Petro, the Kiev regime is engaged in “suicide
economics” intended to hurt the Russians, but which has only harmed
Ukrainians instead.[1265] “Ukrainian foreign and defense policy is trapped
by its own rhetoric, just as its economic policy is trapped into buying
Russian gas at much higher prices across the border in Slovakia, to avoid
calling it ‘Russian gas,’”[1266] and buying its coal directly from Russia to
avoid buying it from the Donbas, who were doing just fine exporting it to
other countries anyway.[1267]
Exports had fallen more than 40 percent by December 2015; total
industrial production was down by 22 percent. While agriculture was being
subsidized in the west, the industrial Donbas was hit the hardest.[1268]
Gross domestic product per capita fell to $1,600 per person in 2016, down
from $3,900 in 2013, due to a massive debasement of Ukraine’s currency
and the ongoing fighting in the east.[1269] Trade between non-Donbas
Ukraine and Russia virtually ceased. Price inflation was 25 percent in 2014
and 13 percent in 2015. The Donbas had accounted for 16 percent of the
country’s GDP the year before the Maidan revolution.[1270] Its production
was now almost entirely lost to both sides.

2014 Wales Declaration

In September 2014, NATO issued their Wales Summit Declaration, which

pretended that history began earlier that year, not with the West’s illegal
coup against a democratic government, but instead with “Russia’s
aggressive actions against Ukraine [which] have fundamentally challenged
our vision of a Europe whole, free, and at peace.” Stipulating their demand
that Russia leave Crimea and cease all support for the rebels in the Donbas,
they also reiterated their interest in bringing Ukraine into the alliance.
[1271]
Hillary Clinton later complained, “Moscow has taken aggressive
military action in Ukraine, right on NATO’s doorstep.” Apparently, there
was no irony intended.[1272]

Obama Afraid

Barack Obama had supported regime change and encouraged[1273] the

Poroshenko government to continue its brutal war[1274] against the people
of the east,[1275] but was now reportedly afraid to arm the new government
due to the danger of further provoking Russia.[1276]
According to a “senior Defense official” cited by reporter Joshua Yaffa,
Obama worried that “if we escalated, the Russians would counter-escalate,
and the conflict would spiral.” Vice President Biden wanted to send
weapons, and “had the position that if Putin had to explain to Russian
mothers why caskets were coming back home, that could affect his
calculus.”[1277] Moreover, “[a]ny weapons deliveries to Kiev will escalate
the tensions and would unhinge European security,” Nikolai Patrushev, the
secretary of Russia’s national security council, warned in February 2015.
[1278]
Former Obama NSC official Derek Chollet wrote that everyone was
for it except the president. “He had many reasons. Because Russia would
simply counter with even more of its own assistance to the rebels, the
president was skeptical that providing lethal support would make a huge
difference in changing the military balance.” Further, “he was most worried
that such support would escalate the crisis, only increasing the bloodshed,
or, worse, giving Putin a pretext to go further and invade all of Ukraine.” It
was not only him. “Such concerns were shared by key European
governments, especially the Germans (who were vital to sanctions and
diplomacy) but even the usually hardline Baltic countries, who feared
Russian retaliation.” He added, importantly, “Obama has never been
comfortable with [Ukraine’s leaders].”[1279]
But Obama did send plenty of “nonlethal” equipment,[1280] including
MREs, body armor, night-vision goggles[1281] and army rangers to train
the Ukrainian military from the very beginning of the war in 2014.[1282]
The FBI was also helping to track down and seize the assets of former
President Yanukovych,[1283] while the Financial Times confirmed the U.S.
was providing “crucial intelligence and advice on strategy” in the war from
the beginning.[1284]
Obama found loopholes in his own policy, licensing the private export
of arms to the battlefield. In 2015, his state and defense departments
authorized approximately $68 million worth of military aid, including
weapons such as sniper rifles and RPGs. In 2016, they licensed another
nearly $27 million.[1285] George Friedman noted that the U.S. was going
around NATO and European unanimity to do it. Obama had a higher
priority. “The United States is prepared to create a cordon sanitaire around
Russia. Russia knows it. Russia believes that the United States intends to
break the Russian Federation.” He added, “I think that as Peter Laurie put it
‘We don’t want to kill you, we just want to hurt you a little bit.’ Either way
we are back at the old game.”[1286]
The president knew this was all a bad idea while doing it anyway. In
September 2014, after thousands had already been killed as a consequence
of his own policy months before, he expressed second thoughts to a group
of hawks he invited to the White House for dinner. “Will somebody tell me:
What’s the American stake in Ukraine?” Obama asked. Strobe Talbott was
shocked. “Preserving the territorial integrity of states liberated from the
former Soviet Union was an article of faith in Washington,” journalist Mark
Landler wrote. But if Americans are truly obligated to defend the borders of
any nation that was ever part of the USSR, then what is the difference
between being a member of NATO and not? Is an “article of faith” not just
a cheap excuse for having no argument? Obama at least said so, though he
never acted like it: “Well, I see it differently than you do. My concern is it
will be a provocation, and it’ll trigger a Russian escalation that we are not
prepared to match.”[1287] His government kept selling Ukraine weapons
anyway.

MH-17

On July 17, 2014, someone brought down Malaysian Airlines Flight 17,
from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, with a Buk surface-to-air missile,
killing all 298 people aboard. Eight years later, a Dutch court convicted
three Donbas rebels in absentia, sentencing them to life in prison.[1288]
One defendant was acquitted.[1289] The court ruled that it must have been
an accident. “It seems that the crew thought not to fire the missile at a
civilian aircraft, but at a military aircraft,” they wrote, but said that due to
the denial of the presence of Russian forces, soldier immunity does not
count, and it remains a criminal act.[1290] Rebel commander Girkin
reportedly took credit for downing the plane before it became clear it had
been a civilian aircraft.[1291] Even though Ukrainian military planes had
been shot down just days before, the airspace remained open to civilian
airliners, officially due to simple carelessness.[1292]
Secretary Kerry repeatedly promised the U.S. would release satellite
footage proving the missile’s origin of fire, but never did, which only fueled
the controversy. Still in the first days, U.S. intelligence analysts said they
inferred that pro-Russian forces had done it accidentally, but said they had
no hard evidence, nor did they know whether those firing the missile were
trained by Russia or had previous experience in the Ukrainian military.
[1293]
The Joint Investigative Team (JIT) probe was not perfect, but
alternative explanations, such as the Russians blaming a Ukrainian fighter
jet,[1294] did not hold up.[1295] Still, there was a legitimate question as to
the origin of the missile. Though Bellingcat seemed to show the Russian
origin of the truck,[1296] on June 29 the Ukrainian government itself had
said that the rebels had captured a Buk missile system from them.[1297]
German intelligence blamed the separatists, but not Russia, saying they
knew for a fact the rebels had seized the Buk truck from a Ukrainian base,
rather than having been given it by the Russians.[1298]
It was Obama and Brennan and especially Poroshenko’s fault too. They
had been launching airstrikes on eastern Ukraine for months. As Obama
noted, the separatists had shot down three military aircraft attacking them
just in the preceding few weeks.[1299]
If Ukraine had done it, the U.S. would have also blamed Russia for
putting them in that situation. Obama did blame Putin on that basis: “Russia
has urged them on. Russia has trained them. We know that Russia has
armed them with military equipment and weapons, including anti-aircraft
weapons. Key separatist leaders are Russian citizens.”[1300]
The shootdown was a huge error, and a terrible tragedy for the victims.
But the massive, coordinated propaganda campaign blaming it on Putin—as
though he had ordered the deliberate mass murder of a plane full of
innocents, rather than his men making a bad choice to hand over such a
weapons system to militia amateurs defending themselves from air assault
by an illegitimate government—was obviously meant to serve a purpose.
[1301]

The Minsk Peace Deals

Minsk I

Though Russia’s multiple 2014 and 2015 invasions were mostly an

invention of Ukrainian and NATO propaganda,[1302] after four months of
bitter fighting, Moscow did intervene to help the eastern rebels defeat the
Ukrainian army at Ilovaisk in August 2014.[1303] Up until that point,
Kiev’s forces, especially since being bolstered by the Azov Battalion, had
the advantage against the rebels, defeating them at Slavyansk and the
Donetsk airport. But after they seized the center of Ilovaisk in Donetsk
Oblast, the Russians intervened with approximately 1,200 soldiers and a
few dozen tanks and armored personnel carriers, giving the rebels enough
support to force Kiev’s troops out. Despite all the hype about tens of
thousands of Russian regulars in the area for months, this far more limited
incursion was Moscow’s first, and came months into the war.[1304] Roman
Zinenko, a Ukrainian veteran of Ilovaisk, admitted to the BBC that he did
not see any Russian soldiers, but said that he had seen a more modern T-
73B3 tank and armored personnel carriers that could only have come from
Russia. Another survivor of the battle, Vadym Yakushenko, swore that he
had seen at least a few members of the Russian army there.[1305] The
Telegraph later identified “several” Russians there as mercenaries with the
Wagner Group, a.k.a. PMC (Private Military Company) Wagner.[1306]
At that time, coup participant Radosław Sikorski’s wife, the centrist
Washington war hawk Anne Applebaum, went crazy. “War in Europe!” she
declared. “Putin has invaded Ukraine. Is it hysterical to prepare for total
war with Russia? Or is it naive not to?”[1307]
On September 5, reeling from their defeat at Ilovaisk,[1308]
Poroshenko’s men, along with representatives from Germany, France and
Russia, met in the capital of Belarus and hammered out what became
known as the Minsk I deal.[1309] It included a ceasefire, prisoner
exchange, withdrawal of heavy military equipment and fighters from
eastern Ukraine, all to be monitored by the OSCE. There was also a
promise by Kiev to a reconstruction program for the Donbas, a new “special
status” of autonomy and local elections. But the fighting went on.[1310]
Thousands had already been killed.[1311] Two weeks after the meeting,
participants signed an addendum banning the use of fighter jets,
mercenaries and offensive operations, also creating a new “buffer zone”
between forces.[1312] The deal did not have its intended effect. The war
continued, and the military kept using cluster bombs against civilians.
[1313]
The fight over the Donetsk airport was a massive, unnecessary battle
which lasted for eight months after the rebels seized control, and the
national army took it right back at the end of March 2014. Kiev used it as a
base to shell the city of Donetsk, while the rebels fought to take it again,
which they eventually did in early 2015, completely destroying it in the
process. This was especially wasteful since the rebels had no air force, the
runways had already been bombed to uselessness and the military could
have shelled the city from nearby woods without endangering the airport.
They were supposed to withdraw under Minsk I, but stayed an extra few
months since retreat would have been bad public relations.[1314]
Ukraine also lost a major battle at the strategically important city of
Debaltseve in January–February 2015, ending in a humiliating, bloody and
disorganized retreat from the northern Donetsk town.[1315] As in Ilovaisk,
the Russian military was said to have bolstered rebel forces in the city,
again reversing their fortunes and driving out Kiev’s troops, though
Moscow denied their involvement, insisting that if this was so, they must
have been mere “volunteers.”[1316] However, Russian regulars admitted
they were deployed in the battle.[1317] Major Amos C. Fox of the U.S.
Army later wrote a study of the battle of Debaltseve, saying the purpose of
Russian tactics was to force Ukraine to negotiate and secondarily, to force
them to exhaust resources in protracted battles. He concluded that “[t]he
battles of Ilovaisk (Aug. 7–Sept. 2, 2014) and Debaltseve demonstrate the
effectiveness of this approach as they resulted in the Minsk Protocol and the
Minsk II agreement, respectively.”[1318]

Minsk II

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President François Holland

returned to Belarus in February 2015 to sign the Minsk II agreement. While
largely rehashing the points regarding the military situation, the deal
elaborated on Donetsk and Luhansk’s special status, detailed OSCE
responsibility for monitoring the ceasefire and also essentially demanded
the Ukrainian constitution be rewritten to establish stronger federalism for
the region and protections for the Russian language.[1319] Kiev never lived
up to it. The Rada quickly passed a law which made implementation of
Minsk II impossible by requiring Russia to transfer control over Ukraine’s
eastern border before new elections were held, contrary to the terms of the
agreement they had signed—and a definite deal-killer.[1320] They ignored
the mandate on local elections, as well as the requirement to pass a new law
describing Kiev’s adjusted relationship with the Donbas or anything else.
Rather than implement the deal and make peace, they essentially just pulled
back the heavy weapons and turned the war into a frozen “low-level”
conflict for the next seven years.[1321]
The Nazis considered the deal null and void. Right Sector leader
Yarosh vowed to ignore it and fight on “against the Kremlin empire,
Ukraine’s perpetual enemy.”[1322]
Hawks complain that the increased autonomy for the Donbas in the
Minsk II deal amounted to a Russian “Trojan horse” inside Ukraine,[1323]
and that they never truly implemented it due to those objections,[1324] but
that was the deal Kiev, and our closest allies in Paris and Berlin, signed to
try to end the war Washington had caused.[1325] Obama approved it,[1326]
and the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2022 putting their stamp of
approval on it as well.[1327] Is that not what the liberal, rules-based
international order is all about? Winning back the territory through victory
in battle was evidently never in the cards, so the choice was either sharing
the country with those who favored Russia, or just letting them go.
 Though they later said they were stalling for time, Berlin and Paris
seemed determined to find a way to press Ukraine to live up to their end of
the bargain. French diplomat Pierre Morel proposed a deal whereby the
rebels would hold their elections under Ukrainian law to get the process
moving toward a final settlement. The Germans supported the plan,[1328]
but Poroshenko dismissed it out of hand as merely “Morel’s personal
opinion.”[1329]

Extreme Gerrymandering

Instead, Kiev’s strategy was to keep the stalemate going since the conflict
forced the other side to divert resources from economic development
toward war and supporting the local population.[1330] Some favored
waiting until forces could be prepared to fully invade and reconquer the
Donbas, which they called the “Croatian Option,” after Operation Storm
and the ethnic cleansing of the Krajina in 1995.[1331]
Further, continuing the war, as the Crisis Group report noted, would
mean “[r]emoving the [Donbas] entities from the voting process for several
years would neutralize the votes of a million or more Ukrainians who, many
politicians and analysts believe, would be little inclined to support the
country’s present leadership.”[1332] Supposedly Poroshenko even offered
the Donbas to Russia, though even if Putin did misunderstand the statement,
the important point is that the Russian president told them to keep it, just
make peace.[1333]

Ivo Daalder
For a taste of the so-called “thinking” that is the Washington, D.C., foreign
policy blob[1334] consensus, one might observe the statements of former
ambassador and Iraq War II supporter[1335] Ivo Daalder in a February
2015 interview with National Public Radio (NPR), just before Minsk II was
signed.[1336] It was on the subject of a new Brookings Institution study he
had co-authored with, among others, President Clinton’s Russia hand Strobe
Talbott, Admiral James Stavridis and Michèle Flournoy—the failed Afghan
War “surge” proponent and implementer, former deputy secretary of
defense for policy, newly wealthy “consultant” for WestExec Advisors and
an “independent director” at Booz Allen Hamilton. They did not want a
peace deal. They wanted war. After conceding they did not believe Ukraine
could win, Daalder confirmed the goal was simply to “inflict more losses”
on the Russian side. Not necessarily more than the Ukrainians, just more
than before. He said the purpose was to “raise the cost” for the Russians,
“preferably” to pressure them to negotiate a political solution, which, of
course, they already had in the form of the Minsk I deal. When asked what
would happen if Russia called his bluff and simply escalated, Daalder
responded that they would just have to kill more Russian soldiers because
“we know from the history in Afghanistan and other places that when
Russian soldiers die, then the cost and the debate in Moscow and in the rest
of Russia will go up.”
Of course, U.S. intervention before Crimea was omitted and the
listener was meant to believe Russia started the conflict by seizing the
peninsula and supporting separatist forces for no reason, and that Russia
had actually invaded the country. That was a lie, though one obviously
necessary to make the “defensive” weaponry the U.S. was to supply seem
like a simple choice: to increase Russian casualties and make the debate in
Russia “go up.”[1337] If that heightened debate in Russia led the
government to conclude lethal force was necessary instead of retreating,
“hopefully, the defensive arms that are being provided would then inflict
the kind of cost on Russia that would have an impact,” he said.
But Daalder’s own study conceded that “even with enormous support
from the West, the Ukrainian Army will not be able to defeat a determined
attack by the Russian military.” As he told the host, to “raise the cost” for
the Russians as they “achieve their objective” is victory enough.
Daalder and the other Brookings authors wanted a billion per year in
weapons, plus more from allies, including counter-battery radars, drones,
electronic warfare devices for enemy UAVs, radios, Humvees and medical
equipment. This was all to be used in the Donbas to deny the people
independence with deadly violence, not protect Kiev from being conquered
by Russia.[1338]
The Nazis were angry too. The ink on the Minsk II deal was not even
dry when they announced that they did not consider themselves bound by it
and went right back to war. When reading mainstream media from this time,
it is interesting to see how much reporting has changed ever since the CEO
of MSM Inc. handed down the memo that no one is supposed to worry
about what Nazis the Azov Battalion and their friends are anymore. Back
then, Reuters identified Azov as the group whose insignia “resembles a
black swastika on a yellow background,” and said that “the use of symbols
echoing Nazi emblems have caused alarm in the West and Russia, and could
return to haunt Kiev’s pro-Western leadership when fighting eventually
ends.” One might think.[1339]
At the end of August 2015, when the Rada was considering
constitutional amendments regarding autonomy for the Donbas, Oleh
Tyahnybok, Nuland and McCain’s friend from the Maidan Revolution,
along with his Svoboda Party thugs, attempted to storm parliament. They
fought with riot police until one of the insurrectionists threw a hand grenade
at the cops,[1340] blowing off part of one policeman’s foot, and wounding
14 more. At the same time, Right Sector attempted to block the roads to the
building to prevent parliamentarians from attending.[1341] The BBC said
one national guardsman was killed. They did not say which side he was on.
[1342]

Soros Hacked

In August 2016, emails from George Soros’s International Renaissance

Foundation were hacked and posted online. Though the Russians may have
been behind it, the foundation confirmed the documents were genuine.
[1343] One site that hosted the files altered them to implicate Soros in
backing Russian dissident Alexei Navalny,[1344] but those changes are not
in question here either way.
In a December 2014 letter to Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, Soros wrote
in favor of a “big bang” approach to privatizing Ukraine’s corrupt
government-controlled entities and that they needed to shrink the civil
service and cut gas subsidies so they could qualify for more IMF loans. He
asked them to get a firm commitment from German Chancellor Merkel for
a $15 billion aid package and said, “I am ready to call Jack Lew of the U.S.
Treasury to sound him out about the swap agreement” on their behalf.
[1345]
The leak also revealed that Soros, who called himself a “self-appointed
advocate of the new Ukraine,” had written a proposed strategy for Kiev and
its Western allies to bolster the nation’s economy and military to keep
Russia at bay. He insisted the allies “treat Ukraine as a defense priority. . . .
They should declare that they will do whatever it takes to help the new
Ukraine succeed short of getting involved in direct military confrontation
with Russia or violating the Minsk agreement.” He also advocated different
schemes for raising funds from the EU and said he would invest a billion of
his own money in an effort to convince other interests to join him.
Further, Soros said, “The allies must imitate Putin in the practice of
deniability to deprive him of his first-mover advantage.” Appearing to
reference a decision that had already been made more than making a
suggestion, Soros wrote, “General Wesley Clark, Polish General
[Waldemar] Skrzypczak and a few specialists under the auspices of the
Atlantic Council will advise President Poroshenko how to restore the
fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement.”[1346]
Soros also predicted, “Constitutional reform will likely be stalled
because the separatists will insist on a federal constitution and Kyiv will
resist it.” He did not suggest that they should live up to their end of the
bargain, but instead focus on strengthening their economy in order to
frustrate Putin’s plan to leave them broken without the industrial east.
 Also released in the leak were notes of a breakfast meeting between
Soros and the leadership of his International Renaissance Foundation and
Ambassador Pyatt at the end of March 2014. When Pyatt suggested that
they “figure out how to move forward with decentralization without feeding
into [the] Russian agenda,” Soros rejected the idea, saying the
“[f]ederalization plan being marketed by Putin to Merkel and Obama would
result in Russia gaining influence and de facto control over eastern regions
in Ukraine,” and that “[t]here is no good positive model for federalization in
[the] region, even models of decentralization are very poor because the
concept is not very common.” Soros insisted that “Obama has been too soft
on Putin,” and demanded the U.S. impose sanctions until the Russian
president “recognizes the results of the presidential election,” which they
were about to hold without the participation of the east.[1347] Surprisingly,
Soros also revealed himself to be a ridiculous center-left conspiracy kook
when he told Pyatt that he thought Right Sector was an “FSB plot . . .
funded to destabilize Ukraine.” Pyatt politely agreed and then said the
question was how to “demobilize and disarm the Pravy Sector.” Instead,
they sent them to war against the citizens of the Donbas.
In a meeting with the leadership of the Ukrainian branch of his IRF,
Soros said they needed to improve their “strategic communications” to
bolster “his own grand vision . . . to utilize the EU to save Ukraine, but also
to use Ukraine to save the EU.”[1348]
The leak, which also included notes of meetings with Acting President
Turchynov, Minister of Foreign Affairs Andriy Deschytsia, Minister of
Justice Pavlo Petrenko and many others, just goes to show how deeply
involved Soros still was in Ukraine’s politics,[1349] as he had been since
helping Leonid Kuchma win the presidency back in 1994.[1350]
The same hackers apparently nailed General Breedlove, then supreme
allied commander of NATO forces in Europe. He was revealed to have
sought meetings with former Secretary of State Powell to get advice on how
to pressure Obama to escalate arms transfers to Ukraine. He was frustrated
because to the president, “Frankly I think we are a ‘worry,’ . . . i.e., a threat
to get the nation drug into a conflict.” So he wanted Powell’s counsel on
“how to frame this opportunity in a time where all eyes are on [ISIS] . . .
and two . . . how to work this personally with the POTUS.”
Harlan Ullman from the Atlantic Council advised Breedlove that he
should talk to Vice President Biden, Gen. Douglas Lute, Secretary of
Defense Ashton Carter and Sen. McCain to add pressure on Obama:
“[Y]ou . . . might be able to fashion a NATO strategy to leverage, cajole,
convince or coerce the U.S. to react. Given Obama’s instruction to you not
to start a war, this may be a tough sell.”[1351]

It’s Sabotage

Just before the second Minsk deal was negotiated, in late January 2015, the
U.S. announced that it would send an additional group of army
trainers[1352] to help continue the war. It raged on for seven more years as
a “low-intensity conflict,” which meant plenty of artillery fire was traded
across the buffer zone, killing another three or four thousand people,
fighters and civilians,[1353] though the lines did not change much.
 In December 2015, Vice President Biden inaugurated the official
American and Ukrainian mis- or dis-understanding of the Minsk II deal in a
speech to the Rada, insisting Russia must return control of the Donbas to
Kiev, including the border, before any elections were held.[1354]
Poroshenko later adopted the same framing. Instead of abiding by
Minsk II, his government creatively reinterpreted it to mean that Russia
would have to give up control of the border before elections were held,
even though Ukraine had failed to implement the constitutional changes by
the deadline established in the deal. In January, he said he had convinced
the Americans and European allies to turn the agreement upside down.
Now, only after “undeniable progress” on a “ceasefire, withdrawal of
Russian troops and equipment from the occupied territories, disarmament of
militants and finally, restoration of control over our border,” would they
consider the constitutional changes the deal required.[1355]
All through 2014 and 2015, including in the time immediately after
Minsk II was signed, the supreme allied commander of NATO forces in
Europe, Gen. Breedlove, and other military sources repeatedly lied to the
press, claiming Russia was escalating the war when they were in fact
abiding by the deal and pulling back.[1356] The Germans were so upset
about it that they ran a major article in Der Spiegel complaining that NATO
and some in the U.S. government were putting out “dangerous propaganda”
to undermine Chancellor Merkel’s diplomacy, which had been authorized
and blessed by President Obama. Undersecretary Nuland was also
described by the Germans as a hindrance in their search for a diplomatic
solution, denigrating the chancellor’s efforts as “Merkel’s Moscow stuff”
and working with NATO to undermine European efforts at diplomacy.
According to the German outlet, at the Munich Security Conference,
Nuland and Breedlove, rather than trying to pull people together to figure
out how to end the war, instead practiced their pitch for getting the
Europeans on board for sending more weapons to Ukraine: “It is defensive
in nature although some of it has lethality,” Nuland said. Breedlove added,
“If we can increase the cost for Russia on the battlefield, the other tools will
become more effective. That’s what we should do here.”
After all, Der Spiegel reported: the Americans and Europeans had
entirely different goals in mind. The French and Germans wanted to end the
war, while “it is Russia that concerns hawks within the U.S. administration.
They want to drive back Moscow’s influence in the region and destabilize
Putin’s power. For them, the dream outcome would be regime change in
Moscow.”
A German official complained that “following the visit of American
politicians or military leaders in Kiev, Ukrainian officials are much more
bellicose and optimistic about the Ukrainian military’s ability to win the
conflict on the battlefield,” adding “We then have to laboriously bring the
Ukrainians back onto the course of negotiations.”[1357]
When Nuland testified before Congress in March 2016, she claimed
she was helping to “facilitate implementation of both the security and
political aspects of Minsk.” But, sounding like one of her pet neo-Nazis, she
declared that “we must be no less rigorous than the Ukrainian people
themselves in demanding Kyiv’s leaders take their responsibility now to
deliver a truly clean, strong, just Ukraine while they still have the
chance.”[1358]

Low-Level Casualties

By the time of the Russian invasion of February 2022, the Office of the
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights had tabulated the
casualties as: “14,200–14,400 killed (at least 3,404 civilians, estimated
4,400 Ukrainian forces, and estimated 6,500 members of armed groups),
and 37–39,000 injured (7,000–9,000 civilians, 13,800–14,200 Ukrainian
forces and 15,800–16,200 members of armed groups.)”[1359]
At virtually any point after March 2014, Putin could have ordered the
invasion and absorption of the Donbas into the Russian Federation. The
Ukrainian military was certainly far less prepared then. For a man who was
said to be in a hurry to conquer all of Europe, Vladimir Putin was sure
taking his time. Or in his analysis, the costs still outweighed the benefits.

H2O

Crimea’s access to fresh water has been under constant dispute since the
coup and outbreak of war. On April 26, 2014, in an act of collective
punishment against the civilian population, which is illegal under the
Geneva Conventions,[1360] Ukraine cut off water by way of the North
Crimean Canal from the Dnieper River. Crimea received 85 percent of its
fresh water through the canal,[1361] which was built in 1961–1971 and
stretches from the Kakhovka Reservoir to Kerch. Crimean Prime Minister
Sergei Aksyonov said that “Ukraine’s act of sabotage to limit the supply of
water to the republic through the North Crimean Canal is nothing but a
deliberate action against Crimeans.”[1362]
Though Russia could make up for the population’s domestic
consumption, the deficit of fresh water essentially destroyed Crimea’s
agriculture industry,[1363] driving up prices for inferior crops and severely
damaging the economy.[1364] In July 2021, Russia brought a complaint
asking the European Court of Human Rights to “suspend the blockade of
the North Crimean Canal.” The court dismissed the request two days later.
Economist Helena Vladich told The Hill that the repeated “attempts to
somehow negotiate this issue” had failed since the Ukrainians refused to
talk.[1365] After Russia invaded eight years later, they blew up the dam the
Ukrainians had built and restored fresh water supplies to the peninsula.
[1366]

Money for Nothing

Natalie Jaresko

Ukraine’s minister of finance between December 2014 and April 2016,

Natalie Jaresko, is a thief who stole more than $1.7 million in “bonuses”
from a U.S. government-financed investment fund meant to kickstart
businesses in Ukraine and Moldova. This was at a time when her actual
salary was capped at $150,000, and while the fund was losing tens of
millions. As Robert Parry explained, “Jaresko’s arrangement was something
like taking someone else’s money to a roulette table, placing it on black,
and claiming a share of the winnings if the ball stopped on black.” Sounds
controversial for a civil servant. But he continued, “However, if the ball
landed on red, then the someone else absorbed the loss, except in this case
the winners were Jaresko and her associates and the losers were the
American taxpayers.”
She even used the fund to finance her own new business, Horizon
Capital, which she put in charge of the fund, later using its wealth to buy up
other major firms for herself.[1367] Instead of going to prison, this criminal
was granted Ukrainian citizenship and named finance minister, after which
Vice President Joe Biden helped her arrange $17.5 billion in IMF loans to
Ukraine.[1368] From there she went on to head Promesa, the board in
charge of administering aid to Puerto Rico after it was hit by Hurricane
Maria in 2017.[1369]

Yats’s War on Corruption

Yatsenyuk’s war on corruption was a joke. His closest political partners and
patrons were among the most crooked people in the country. His new party,
the National Front, lost terribly in the elections of October 2015, and he was
forced out by the next spring.[1370]
More than a decade after the Orange Revolution, Ukraine was ranked
the most corrupt government in Europe—by far. Transparency
International’s 2014 “Corruption Perception Index” report showed Ukraine
still qualified as a “corruption disgrace.”[1371] The NGO wrote, “This year,
Ukraine scored 26 of 100 and took 142nd place of 175 in the CPI. . . . Again
Ukraine shares scores with Uganda and the Comoros as one of the most
corrupt countries in the world.”[1372]

Syria

Thanks, Obama

Without question the worst things the Russian government has done in the
21st century have been their wars in Ukraine and Syria. But it is worth
emphasizing that in both cases the United States started it.
The various armed uprisings against the Bashar al-Assad regime in
2011 and 2012 would have been quickly destroyed if the U.S., Britain,
France, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar and Israel had not intervened on behalf
of the supposed revolution.[1373] Though they claimed to only be backing
the Free Syrian Army (FSA) of so-called “moderate rebels,” the uprising
very quickly came to be dominated by the jihadist followers of Abu Musab
al Zarqawi’s merciless terrorist group al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI, or ISI for
Islamic State of Iraq), which had crossed the border to continue the fight
after Iraq War II.[1374] As then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria
Nuland correctly admitted in 2012, Jabhat al-Nusra was just an “alias” for
AQI.[1375] The Obama administration, as well as their European and
Middle Eastern allies, continued to back them for years anyway.
This intervention on behalf of the bin Ladenites, motivated primarily
by an animus against the Assad regime for its alliance with Shi’ite Iran, led
directly to the rise of the Islamic State in 2013 and 2014.[1376] By the
latter half of 2015, there was a real threat the Syrian state could fall under a
combined assault by advancing terrorist forces. Only then, after the Obama
administration and allies’ treason threatened a final victory for al Qaeda
and/or ISIS in Damascus, did Russia finally enter the war in November.
[1377]
A secretly made recording of Secretary Kerry admitting to these facts
was leaked to the press in 2016.[1378] There is no excusing the massive so-
called “collateral damage” inflicted on the people of Syria by the Russian
air force flying on behalf of their government,[1379] but again, none of this
would have happened if the U.S.A. and its allies didn’t create such a
dangerous situation in the first place. And the rates of civilian casualties
caused by their airstrikes were no greater than those inflicted by the U.S.
coalition in the anti-ISIS war in Iraq and eastern Syria at the very same
time. As the experts Chris Woods and Samuel Oakford from Airwars.org
have shown, it is the population density below, not the type of munitions
and techniques used in dropping them, that determines civilian casualty
rates from airstrikes.[1380]
Amb. Burns admitted in his memoir that the U.S. and its allies simply
could not come up with a plausible replacement for Assad’s Ba’athist
regime. “In conversations with Secretary Clinton and me, Sergey Lavrov
asserted that Russia was not ‘wedded’ to Assad, but would not push him
out, and worried about who or what might come after him,” he wrote. “We
simply could not convince the Russians that we had a plausible theory of
the case for the day after Assad.”[1381] The Syrian National Council,
originally set up by then-State Department official Liz Cheney, and the
Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, along with various other attempts to create a
government-in-exile for the country, such as Hillary Clinton’s National
Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, all eventually
fell apart.[1382]
If you listen to them now, the hawks are very upset that Russia has
returned to the Middle East after 25 years, but since it is their fault, we
should not listen to them. Half the time the same people boast that the
Russians cannot afford the intervention and that they like to see them
bogged down in an expensive fight far from home, even explicitly
comparing it to the Afghanistan trap of the 1980s.[1383]
Importantly, all three major chemical attacks blamed on Assad’s
government in 2013, 2017 and 2018 were hoaxes perpetrated by the bin
Ladenites to increase U.S. support for their cause. In the latter two cases
they got it. In the former, Russia brokered a deal to allow the Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to destroy Syria’s
chemical weapons stocks as a compromise to avoid war after Obama’s set
his “red line” for full-scale intervention there.[1384] It is also worth
considering Russia’s help in getting the Ayatollah to sign on to the much-
maligned Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA or Iran nuclear deal)
of 2015, which in fact vastly scaled back Iran’s nuclear program and
expanded the international inspections regime[1385] in exchange only for
returning some of their own money that the U.S. had “frozen” during the
Carter administration.[1386] Russia’s assurances to Iran during the
negotiations were said to be crucial to their success.[1387]

Kosovars
More than 300 Kosovar Albanians went to fight on America and al Qaeda’s
side in the dirty war in Syria.[1388] A UN Development Program report
said that Kosovo had supplied the highest number of foreign fighters per
capita in Europe and “the third highest number of foreign fighters per
number of population of Islamic denomination.” After two Kosovars
committed suicide attacks in the ISIS war in Iraq and one was filmed
beheading a man, the local authorities, backed by the UN, cracked down
and arrested 78 men they said were involved in recruitment there.[1389]

Omar the Chechen

The infamous red-bearded ISIS commander Omar “the Chechen” Abu al

Shishani (a.k.a. Tarkhan Batirashvili) was the son of a Christian father,
Temur Batirashvili, and a Muslim mother. He had been a military
intelligence officer in the Georgian army and deployed on reconnaissance
missions in the war of 2008. After being discharged from the military, he
was falsely charged with a crime[1390] and then met an imam in prison
who set him on the path toward terrorism and martyrdom in Syria.[1391]
Journalist Mitchell Prothero had interviewed Batirashvili back when he
was being trained by American Army Rangers to fight the sometimes-U.S.-
backed bin Ladenites then based in the Pankisi Gorge in northern Georgia.
Prothero later covered the soldier after he switched sides and helped lead
ISIS’s fight in Syria, including their important success against Assad’s
forces at the Menagh Air Base in 2013.[1392] Batirashvili was later killed
by a U.S. airstrike in Iraq War III.[1393]
 Reuters ran a piece about the importance of the Chechens’ battlefield
experience in the war against Assad. An opposition source told them the
Chechen fighters “are very significant, in some areas they are leading the
fighting and some of them are leaders of Brigades. They are experienced
fighters and also they are fighting based on ideological belief, so they do
not want anything in return.” Another source told them that among foreign
fighters who had come to help the jihadists, the Chechens were second only
in number to the Libyans who had come after their U.S. and NATO-
supported victory in the 2011 war there.[1394] Journalist Marcin Mamon
interviewed a Chechen fighter in Syria named Abdul Hakim who “says his
aim is to liberate Chechnya. He ultimately wants the Chechens to return
from Syria to the Caucasus and rise again united against Russia.”[1395]

Bandar Bin Sultan

In 2013, Reuters reported that Doku Umarov’s bin Ladenite terrorists had
“promised” to attack the Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. They also took
responsibility for a January 2011 suicide attack at Moscow’s Domodedovo
airport and a 2010 double suicide bombing in the Moscow subway.[1396]
The notorious Saudi diplomat and intriguer Prince Bandar bin Sultan met
with Putin at his home outside Moscow, reportedly to offer a new
arrangement with Saudi Arabia’s OPEC oil cartel in exchange for Russia
backing off support for Assad. And he allegedly also threatened Putin.
According to Al-Monitor and backed up by other reporting as well, Bandar
told Putin the Chechen fighters in Syria were controlled by Saudi Arabia
and he would make sure they would not attack Russia during the games.
 Instead of reaching out and cutting the man’s throat, Putin is reported
to have politely responded, “We know that you have supported the Chechen
terrorist groups for a decade. And that support, which you have frankly
talked about just now, is completely incompatible with the common
objectives of fighting global terrorism that you mentioned.” And allegedly
concluded, “We are interested in developing friendly relations according to
clear and strong principles.”[1397]

Insubordination

In September 2016, President Obama had Secretary Kerry make a deal with
Putin to join forces against ISIS in eastern Syria.[1398] But then-Secretary
of Defense Ashton Carter and the DoD attacked Syrian troops in what may
have been a deliberate act of insubordination, ruining the deal and leading
to major ISIS gains at the town of Deir ez Zor in the country’s east.[1399]
Still, even when the U.S. and Russia had some run-ins in Syria, such as
when U.S. special operations forces killed approximately 200 Russian
mercenaries in February 2018, the Russian Foreign Ministry played it
down. Then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis later said, “The Russian
high command in Syria assured us it was not their people,” giving the
Americans the green light to blow them away.[1400]

After Iraq War III

Still, by that point U.S. special operations forces and air power, assisting
Shi’ite troops, at times led by Iran on the ground,[1401] had made major
progress in destroying the Islamic State (ISIS) Caliphate they had created.
By the summer of 2016, feeling the heat in Iraq, some terrorists were
looking for somewhere else to fight. An Islamic State fighter vowed,
“Listen Putin, we will come to Russia and will kill you at your homes . . .
Oh Brothers, carry out jihad and kill and fight them.”[1402]

Ukrainian Jihad

Speaking of growing relationships, when bin Ladenite terrorists from across

the Middle East and the Caucasus were getting bombed by Russian and
American air forces in Syria in the later part of the 2010s war, they realized
they could strategically retreat to ground closer to their Russian enemies, in
Ukraine, while being protected from airstrikes under the Minsk accords.
Many of them took the opportunity. A commander of one of three Chechen
battalions fighting for Kiev, subordinate to Right Sector, told the New York
Times, “We like to fight the Russians. We always fight the Russians. . . . I
am on this path for 24 years now. The war for us never ended.” The Times
reporter explained that Right Sector and the Azov Battalion were “openly
neo-Nazi,” and implied he had challenged the Chechen jihadis about that
potential moral stain on their otherwise holy war.[1403] Perhaps the
Chechens were just repaying the favor, since the UNA-UNSO had fought
on their side in the war against Russia in the 1990s and 2000s.[1404]
The French arrested two members of one Chechen brigade, accusing
them of being members of ISIS.[1405]
The journalist Marcin Mamon wrote a series in 2015 about fighters
from the Dudayev Battalion, named after the first self-declared president of
Chechnya in the 1990s wars with Russia. “In eastern Ukraine, the green
flag of jihad flies over some of the private battalions’ bases. . . . For many
Muslims, like Ruslan, the war in Ukraine’s Donbas region is just the next
stage in the fight against the Russian empire.” Mamon witnessed “Dima,” a
young millionaire connected to Igor Kolomoysky, give the group $20,000
and offer to buy all their black-market amber.[1406]
One Chechen fighter spoke to the Guardian from a base they shared
with Right Sector. “Why are Chechens fighting for Isis, why are they
fighting against Kurds who have never done us any wrong? For Kobane,
which they had never heard of before? That is not a Chechen war. This, here
in Ukraine, is a war for Chechens. If we defeat Russia here, we are closer to
freeing our homeland.”[1407]
Another fighter, calling himself only “Muslim,” justified Chechen
terrorist attacks on the Nord-Ost theater and Beslan school in North Ossetia:
“You ask us why we killed peaceful people? Thirty per cent of our whole
nation was lost; 300,000 people. We wanted them to feel the same pain that
we did when our relatives died.” Still another explained they executed all
Russian prisoners: “If you capture one of them, it’s too risky to bring them
back across the lines, so you just give them time to say their prayers, and
the last words they will hear on this earth are ‘Glory to Ukraine!’”
Right Sector’s Oleksandr Muzychko, who was apparently killed by the
government just weeks after he helped launch the coup of 2014,[1408] had
fought the Russians in Chechnya under Shamil Basayev. Now at least some
Chechen fighters felt like repaying the favor.[1409] Right Sector’s Yarosh
had asked Doku Umarov, the “Emir of the Caucasus Emirate,” to come to
Ukraine to fight.[1410] Mamon wrote, “The battalion is not strictly Muslim,
though it includes a number of Muslims from former Soviet republics,
including Chechens who have fought on the side of the Islamic State in
Syria. It also includes many Ukrainians.”[1411]
Dmytro Korchynsky was a Ukrainian Nazi who fought in the Chechen
wars. His group is called the “Jesus Christ Hundred.” They tried to start the
coup a little too early. On December 1, 2013, they stormed government
buildings but were repelled by police. After the loss of Crimea, Korchynsky
and his associates formed the St. Mary’s Battalion to fight the rebels in the
east. “We need to create something like a Christian Taliban. The Ukrainian
state has no chance in a war with Russia, but the Christian Taliban can
succeed, just as the Taliban are driving the Americans out of Afghanistan,”
he told Mamon. “We will fight until Moscow burns.”[1412] That may have
been their slogan since they repeated the same thing to Reuters.[1413]
Tragically, Stratfor’s George Friedman said it was Putin’s intervention
to save Bashar al-Assad in the Obama years that made the impossibly self-
righteous Americans believe Russia was taking a more aggressive stance in
the Middle East and Europe, convincing themselves they were the ones on
the defensive.[1414]

Reasonable Doubt

That Settles It Then

Neutrality was the official stance of the Ukrainian government until Viktor
Yushchenko canceled it following the 2004 Orange Revolution. After he
was humiliated by Viktor Yanukovych in the parliamentary elections of
2006, Yanukovych was made prime minister under a deal that said Ukraine
would not seek NATO membership.[1415] Yanukovych then ran on
neutrality as one of his planks in the 2010 presidential election,[1416] while
his opponent Yulia Tymoshenko supported joining the alliance. If the issue
were ever up for a vote, it was then—six years after the Orange Revolution
and two years after W. Bush’s Bucharest Declaration—when the lines were
very clear. In September 2009, the American polling firm Pew Research
found that “half of Ukrainians (51 percent) opposed their country’s
admission to NATO, while only 28 percent favored such a step. Moreover,
given the opposition to membership, it is not surprising that about half of
Ukrainians (51 percent) gave NATO an unfavorable rating.” Opposition was
highest in the south and east, while a solid majority in the west supported it.
[1417] These numbers were consistent across time and different survey
companies.[1418]
Once elected, Yanukovych reinstated the policy of neutrality, and the
Rada quickly passed a resolution supporting him.[1419] He did, however,
continue working with NATO under the previous agreements,[1420] just as
he had maintained cooperation after becoming prime minister in 2006.
[1421] Neutrality was, as Russia expert Richard Sakwa says, the actual
Ukrainian tradition[1422] until America’s intervention changed it.[1423]
The Ukrainian people had tried to “close the door” to NATO with their
majority vote, but they could not stop the power of democracy. The State
Department knew the people of Ukraine did not support the policy, so they
launched an at least $8.5 million “NATO Yes” public relations campaign to
try to shore up support, including bringing their journalists, academics,
NGO representatives and politicians to the U.S. on field trips.[1424]
Yanukovych’s successor, post-coup president Petro Poroshenko, had
again repealed the neutrality law after America’s second successful coup in
2014.[1425] He later admitted that only 16 percent of Ukrainians wanted to
join NATO when he took office in 2014. It was only after the war he
launched against the people of the Donbas that the number grew, he
claimed, to a majority.[1426]

The Budapest Memorandum

The reader may wonder about the Budapest Memorandum of December

1994, in which America promised to go to war to protect Ukraine if they
gave up the nuclear weapons left behind by the USSR.
But the Budapest Memorandum does not say that. It contains security
“assurances,” not a guarantee. The most the signatories promised was to
“reaffirm their commitment to seek immediate United Nations Security
Council action to provide assistance to Ukraine . . . if Ukraine should
become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of
aggression in which nuclear weapons are used.”[1427]
This amounts to essentially no promise at all. Russia has a seat on the
Security Council. They can veto any resolution America and its allies
submit. “Assistance” can mean anything or nothing. This is simply not a
treaty obligating the U.S. to intervene for Ukraine, much less go to war for
them. That is exactly the difference between being a member of NATO or
not. In fact, even NATO’s Article 5 itself is rather vague on just what
member states must do in the event one of them is attacked: “Parties
agree . . . each of them . . . will assist the Party or Parties so attacked by
taking forthwith, individually and in concert with the other Parties, such
action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”[1428]
The Ukrainians understood the deal. They told administration officials
they simply wanted a basis upon which they could “appeal for assistance in
international fora when the Russians violate the agreements.”[1429]
The nuclear weapons Ukraine gave up at the time have unfortunately
become the perfect question-begging talking point for the War Party: if
Ukraine had not given up “its” nuclear weapons it would not have a
problem with Russia today.[1430] But they did not belong to the Ukrainian
government, but to the Soviet regime in Moscow.[1431] Without the
Russian military’s codes, they were useless as weapons anyway.[1432] As
Yuri Kostenko, Ukraine’s minister of environmental protection and nuclear
safety, explained, “Ukraine did not really know the specific characteristics
of the nuclear stockpile (the world’s third largest) it had inherited.”[1433]
The missiles in question—liquid-fueled SS-19s and solid-fueled but
still very complex SS-24 ICBMs—were expensive to maintain and would
have been difficult to aim at targets inside Russia even if the Ukrainians
figured out how to take control of them.[1434]
If they had somehow made them operational, or by another means
acquired nuclear weapons, that may well have provoked a Russian military
response much sooner to preempt the threat. And there is every reason to
believe that without American intervention, Ukraine would not have had a
problem with Russia anyway, beyond the typical disputes over Ukraine
stealing Russian gas piped through their country to Europe.[1435]
On the other hand, the U.S. was in violation of the Budapest
Memorandum itself, because with President Clinton’s signature they had
promised to “respect the independence and sovereignty” of Ukraine, as well
as reaffirmed their support for the Final Act on the OSCE, which contains
an outright ban on “direct or indirect assistance to . . . subversive or other
activities directed toward the violent overthrow of the regime of another
participating State.”[1436]

The Monroe Doctrine

Non-interventionists and realists sometimes bring up America’s Monroe

Doctrine to make the point that the Russians must feel the same way about
their near abroad as Americans do about their own. Better, the Doctrine
itself actually promises the United States will stay out of European affairs if
they will stay out of our hemisphere in return.
Two hundred years ago, President James Monroe promised in his
“Seventh Annual Message” of December 2, 1823, that “we should consider
any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this
hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety . . . [and] the
manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”
However, Monroe also declared, “Our policy in regard to Europe . . . is not
to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the
government de facto as the legitimate government for us [and] to cultivate
friendly relations with it.”[1437] That last part always goes unnoticed and
unmentioned.
But imagine if the shoe was on the other foot, in, say, Canada. What if
the Russians, after having won the Cold War, had begun incorporating all of
Latin America into their Warsaw Pact military alliance, used neo-Nazis in a
street putsch in Ottawa, proposed kicking the United States out of its naval
bases in Alaska, then helped the new regime launch a hot war against the
people of Vancouver for refusing to recognize the new junta—all while
threatening to overthrow the government in Washington next?
Right. The U.S. would invade Canada and probably nuke Moscow.
We have examples from history. After the Civil War, President Andrew
Johnson sent 50,000 troops to the border and threatened to invade Mexico
to kick out the French occupation.[1438] Fifty years later, when the British
intercepted the Zimmermann telegram in which the besieged Germans
promised to help Mexico retake the American Southwest if they would only
declare war on us,[1439] President Woodrow Wilson demanded a
declaration and brought the U.S. into World War I.[1440] After the
Communists took over Cuba in 1959, the CIA sponsored an ultimately
failed invasion of exiles to topple the new regime, known as the Bay of
Pigs, in 1961.[1441] When the USSR stationed nuclear missiles there the
next year, President John F. Kennedy brought the entire planet to the brink
of thermonuclear war with his demand that the Soviets remove the missiles.
[1442]
Those crazy Russians though—especially that Vladimir Putin, the
allegedly most dangerous, freedom-hating psychopath on the planet? Well,
they would just have to learn to get used to it. The Americans acted as if
there was nothing he could ever do about it.
A civilian adviser to the Pentagon brass and intelligence executives
told reporters he had posed these questions to his clients to gauge their
responses over the last few years. For example, what if Mexico invited
China to build military bases? They always answered: maximum pressure
on Mexico and war, if necessary, to force them to change their mind. When
he then asked how they thought Russia saw the United States in Ukraine,
“the military and intelligence officers have been taken aback, in many cases
admitting, . . . ‘Damn, I never thought out what we’re doing to Russia in
that light.’”[1443]
And forget the Monroe Doctrine’s limitations about the Americas.
Every nation must bow down to the empire in the Old World too. Those
countries will be allowed no alliances against the wishes of Washington.
For example, in 2015, Barack Obama put the world’s oldest constitutional
republic in service of His Royal Majesty Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of
the United Arab Emirates and His Royal Highness Prince Mohammed bin
Salman of Saudi Arabia, helping them launch a genocidal war against
Yemen. They killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people based on the
theory that the new Shi’ite regime was allied with Iran, when in fact their
ties had always been greatly exaggerated.[1444]
In 2023, when the Solomon Islands said they might join a military
alliance with China, the U.S. threatened them on Australia’s behalf. The
universal principle that all nations have the sacred right to choose any
military alliance they wish had somehow been forgotten.[1445]
 Putin gave a speech to the UN in 2015 claiming the United States was
the “rogue nation” and that Russia was seeking to uphold the post-World
War II, UN Charter-based international system. He said the U.S. and its
allies “continue their policy of expanding NATO. What for? The Warsaw
Bloc stopped its existence, the Soviet Union has collapsed and,
nevertheless, NATO continues expanding as well as its military
infrastructure.” He added that the false choice between the East and West
offered by the alliance to Eastern European countries “was bound to spark
off a grave geopolitical crisis.” Putin concluded, “This is exactly what
happened in Ukraine, where the discontent of population with the current
authorities was used and the military coup was orchestrated from outside—
that triggered a civil war as a result.”[1446]
The CIA later threw Bush and Obama under the bus for not listening to
their warnings. A former intelligence official relayed to journalist Zach
Dorfman that “[w]e used to glibly tell people, if you like what happened in
Georgia in 2008, or Ukraine in 2014, then by all means give either country
a NATO MAP [Membership Action Plan],” because “[i]f we took a serious
step toward admitting either country to NATO, we were 100 percent
convinced that the Russians would find some reason to declare war” before
they could join. He added, “There wasn’t even a 1 percent shadow of doubt
in any analyst’s mind about that assessment.” Another CIA official said they
thought Ukraine was the only country Putin might risk war over. Russia had
learned to accept the loss of Poland and even the Baltics, but the analysts
were certain that Georgia, and especially Ukraine, were “a different matter
entirely.”[1447]
 Life is not fair. These are the breaks for small, weak nations stuck next
to large, powerful ones. President Theodore Roosevelt said, “The Monroe
Doctrine is not a question of law at all. It is a question of policy. . . . To
argue that it cannot be recognized as a principle of international law is a
mere waste of breath.”[1448]

International Law

After the disasters of America’s Middle East wars of the early 21st century,
along with the U.S.-led financial catastrophe of 2008, it became clear that
the high-water mark of American power was in 2003, when George W.
Bush blew the empire’s advantage in the sands of Iraq in a war ultimately
fought in favor of its regional rival Iran.[1449] The “unipolar moment” was
already over before Obama had even had the chance to launch and lose five
more wars.[1450]
The empire insists it is no such thing at all. The U.S. only has an
interest in being a disinterested referee of the post-World War II, liberal,
rules-based international order of law and cooperation and governance. But
that international order has some terrible baked-in problems as well. The
world’s nations all signed the UN Charter where they promise not to engage
in aggressive war or attempt to otherwise change international borders by
force, at least without authorization from the UN Security Council. These
boundaries, as they existed after the Second World War, or at least since the
end of the first Cold War, are, legally speaking, inviolable, and war is
outlawed. Great. But so many borders in the world are drawn in the
“wrong” places, according to the people and governments involved. Often it
is especially questions of ethnicity and language which separate people and
lead them to wish to secede or join another state. But the international order
does not have a system where these questions can be considered and hashed
out in diplomatic negotiations instead of war. Obviously, more powerful
countries would have the advantage, but they already do, and this was
supposedly the point of the United Nations, so that states can negotiate in
good faith instead of sending their people into battle all the time. In a better
world, perhaps it could be America’s job to help negotiate peaceful
adjustments to these lines from time to time, instead of instigating wars
over them.

Sane Men

After the war broke out in the Donbas in 2014 and Russia was widely said
to have invaded, the CFR’s journal Foreign Affairs polled Western scholars
to ask whether the West had “provoked Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
aggression in Russia’s near abroad by expanding NATO and the EU after
the Cold War.” A solid third of them agreed that it did, with many who
disagreed still admitting it played at least some role.[1451]
John J. Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University
of Chicago, along with his sometimes-co-author Stephen M. Walt from
Harvard University, is considered the dean of the “realist” school of
American foreign policy studies. Realists are not non-interventionists, and
in fact may or may not favor “restraint” in any given foreign crisis. Their
analysis and prescriptions are centered around a grand theory of great
power politics, which emphasizes the balance of power between the
strongest nation states and the reality that those larger states, including the
U.S., have interests and will pursue them, all loud protestations about
international law notwithstanding.[1452] Walt, for example, has said he
believes America should go to war if necessary to keep any single power
from dominating Europe, East Asia or the Middle East.[1453] Compared to
the liberal internationalists, who claim to launch aggressive wars for
“humanitarian” reasons[1454] and in the name of the international law they
are constantly violating to do so, or the neoconservatives, who only care
about Israel and profits for arms manufacturers,[1455] the realists are
typically not so bad. Perhaps they just specialize in not being naïve, and as
academics instead of think-tankers, they have less of a conflict of interest
when they dispense their advice.[1456]
In August 2014, Mearsheimer wrote a piece for Foreign Affairs called
“Why the West is to Blame for the Ukraine Crisis.” After reciting much of
this history, he added an important perspective about Russia’s geographic
vulnerability, having no major hills, mountains or rivers serving as natural
barriers for its capital’s defense. “A huge expanse of flat land that
Napoleonic France, imperial Germany, and Nazi Germany all crossed to
strike at Russia itself, Ukraine serves as a buffer state of enormous strategic
importance to Russia.” Because of this, “No Russian leader would tolerate a
military alliance that was Moscow’s mortal enemy until recently moving
into Ukraine.” He also doubted “any Russian leader [would] stand idly by
while the West helped install a government there that was determined to
integrate Ukraine into the West.”
 Mearsheimer concluded the U.S. should immediately abandon its
project of bringing Ukraine into the Western alliance, cease all “social
engineering” projects in the country and recommended America work
instead to negotiate a position of neutrality for the country akin to that of
Austria during the last Cold War. He also said, “The sad truth is that might
often makes right when great-power politics are at play. Abstract rights such
as self-determination are largely meaningless when powerful states get into
brawls with weaker states.” He compared Ukraine to Cuba and said the
reality is that Ukraine may not, in fact, join any military alliance they want.
Not as long as Russia has anything to say about it, which they do and will
continue to.[1457]
Mearsheimer said in August 2014 that if the U.S. insisted on pursuing
the path to Ukrainian NATO membership, Russia would instead find a way
to “wreck Ukraine,” which is after all directly on their western border,
rather than let things go that far. He also warned that if many Russians are
killed in a civil war in their own near abroad, they would be sure to invade
to prevent it.[1458]
In February 2015, just before Minsk II was negotiated, and as Daalder
and the Brookings group were recommending sending in more weapons to
kill Russians and make the debate “go up” in Russia, Mearsheimer wrote in
the New York Times, “Don’t Arm Ukraine.” He warned that doing so would
risk escalation of the war, and that the economic and social consequences
could be terrible for the country’s entire population. He again insisted on
neutrality for Ukraine and said the U.S. and its allies should take NATO
membership off the table. He also recommended strong federalism and
autonomy for the Donbas and said it would be better to accept Russia’s
sovereignty over Crimea since a refusal to do so could only hurt American-
Russian relations with no real benefit.[1459]
After Ukraine’s loss of Crimea, Henry Kissinger gave an interview to
the German magazine Der Spiegel, not exactly accusing the U.S. of
supporting a coup that was already backfiring, but then what else could he
have meant? Referring to Russia’s seizure of Crimea, Kissinger said, “[I]f
the West is honest with itself, it has to admit that there were mistakes on its
side. The annexation of Crimea was not a move toward global conquest. It
was not Hitler moving into Czechoslovakia.” He pointed out that Putin had
just spent tens of billions of dollars on the Sochi Olympics, the theme of
which was that Russia is part of Europe and “tied to” the West. “So it
doesn’t make any sense that a week after the close of the Olympics, Putin
would take Crimea and start a war over Ukraine. So one has to ask one’s
self why did it happen?”
When the Der Spiegel reporter asked Kissinger, “What you’re saying is
that the West has at least a kind of responsibility for the escalation?” he
responded, “Yes, I am saying that. Europe and America did not understand
the impact of these events, starting with the negotiations about Ukraine’s
economic relations with the European Union and culminating in the
demonstrations in Kiev.” While criticizing Russia for Crimea and their role
in the war in the Donbas, he said, “Ukraine has always had a special
significance for Russia. It was a mistake not to realize that.” The former
secretary of state said, “I think a resumption of the Cold War would be a
historic tragedy. If a conflict is avoidable, on a basis reflecting morality and
security, one should try to avoid it.” He suggested that since Crimea was
long gone and the Donbas soon enough, the U.S. and Europe could simply
accept those “facts of life,” while remaining committed to the old truth as
far as international law was concerned, “just as we continued to treat the
Baltic states as independent throughout Soviet rule.”[1460]
Kissinger wrote a piece for the Washington Post after the successful
coup, but before Ukraine’s loss of Crimea back to Russia. “Far too often the
Ukrainian issue is posed as a showdown: whether Ukraine joins the East or
the West,” he said. “But if Ukraine is to survive and thrive, it must not be
either side’s outpost against the other—it should function as a bridge
between them.” He said Russia was making a mistake to try to subjugate
Ukraine as a satellite due to the reaction from the West. But he added that
the West “must understand that, to Russia, Ukraine can never be just a
foreign country. . . . Ukraine has been part of Russia for centuries, and their
histories were intertwined before then.” Kissinger also warned against
helping western Ukrainians dominate the east, as this would surely “lead
eventually to civil war or break up,” and that any attempt by the Obama
administration to “treat Ukraine as part of an East-West confrontation”
would ruin for decades the opportunity to bring Russia into the European
system.
Too late to make the difference, Kissinger told Putin not to intervene in
Ukraine as it would surely lead to a new Cold War, and told the Americans
to stop lecturing the Russians as though they were disobedient children. He
then proposed allowing Ukraine into the EU, but not NATO, and a Finland-
type independence: not exactly neutral, but “carefully avoid[ing]
institutional hostility toward Russia.”[1461]
Professor Walt asked at the time, “[F]ew experts think this bankrupt
and divided country is a vital strategic interest and no one is talking about
sending U.S. troops to fight on Kiev’s behalf. So the question is: does
sending Ukraine a bunch of advanced weaponry make sense?”[1462]
Walt insisted the American narrative was all wrong, arguing the “spiral
model,” not deterrence, was a more appropriate way to understand this
conflict. When a country is acting out of fear, threatening them only makes
it worse. He advised that “[w]hen the ‘spiral model’ applies, the proper
response is a diplomatic process of accommodation and appeasement (yes,
appeasement) to allay the insecure state’s concerns.” He was clear that did
not mean unconditional surrender or giving them everything they want, “but
it does require a serious effort to address the insecurities that are motivating
the other side’s objectionable behavior.”
Then the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of international relations
at the Harvard Kennedy School stated the absolute fact that no hawk can
dispute without resorting to lies and smears: “[T]he Ukraine crisis did not
begin with a bold Russian move or even a series of illegitimate Russian
demands; it began when the United States and European Union tried to
move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and into the West’s sphere of influence.”
Walt continued, “Moscow made it abundantly clear it would fight this
process tooth and nail. U.S. leaders blithely ignored these warnings—which
clearly stemmed from Russian insecurity rather than territorial greed—and
not surprisingly they have been blindsided by Moscow’s reaction.”
 It does not matter one bit if the Kremlin decides to translate his
statement and put it first on their list of dreaded “Russian talking points.”
Walt is a patriot and an academic foreign policy expert at the top of the Ivy
League. What he said was true. The U.S. government started the fight, not
Russia. He added for good measure, “The failure of U.S. diplomats to
anticipate Putin’s heavy-handed response was an act of remarkable
diplomatic incompetence, and one can only wonder why the individuals
who helped produce this train wreck still have their jobs.”[1463]

Primordial Fear

Brzezinski warned back in 1997 that a remote but serious threat to

American dominance in Europe would be a German-Russian or French-
Russian entente. This is why, he said, the U.S. had to focus on uniting
Europe under the EU, NATO and American leadership.[1464]
But what is this obsession with continuing to hit Russia all this time
after the end of the first Cold War? George Friedman explained it all quite
clearly in his “most blatant coup in history” interview with Kommersant.
[1465] Since World War I, he said, America’s priority has been preventing
any one power, such as Germany or Russia, from gaining dominance in
Europe. But, “What is more, the most dangerous potential alliance, from the
perspective of the United States, was considered to be an alliance between
Russia and Germany. This would be an alliance of German technology and
capital with Russian natural and human resources.” Part of their strategy for
preventing this was intervention in Ukraine, to stop Russia from
“consolidat[ing] its position in the post-Soviet space. The success of the
pro-Western forces in Ukraine would allow the U.S. to contain Russia.”
Halford Mackinder warned back in 1904, “The oversetting of the
balance of power in favour of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion over
the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use of vast continental
resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world might be in sight.
This might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia.”[1466]
That is what the Americans feared Merkel and Putin had in mind with their
so-called Common Eurasian Home project.
Friedman reiterated this in a speech at the Chicago Council on Global
Affairs, during the peak of the fighting in the Donbas in February 2015,
saying a German-Russian alliance would be the only power that could
threaten us and that the “primordial interest of the United States” was to
prevent it. So, when the U.S. sees the Russians creating an extra buffer zone
in eastern Ukraine, in response to their own intervention, they react as
though they have gone mad and are prepared to conquer all of Eastern
Europe. The Americans have already drawn a line “from the Baltic to the
Black Sea,” the question was what side of the line Ukraine and even
Belarus are considered to be on.[1467]
As British author and analyst Anatol Lieven explained, Putin’s policy
of trying to move closer to Western Europe at the expense of U.S. influence
required Russian restraint in the Donbas. Even though invading Ukraine,
destroying their military and seizing the far-eastern part of the country
would have been much easier back in 2014 and 2015, Putin knew that if he
did so, the Russian-German Eurasian Home concept would be dead. So
instead, he placed his bets on the Minsk deals to make his Ukraine
problems go away. “This Russian strategy was correctly seen as an attempt
to split the West, and cement a Russian sphere of influence in the states of
the former Soviet Union,” Lieven wrote, adding, “However, having a
European security order with Russia at the table would also have removed
the risk of a Russian attack on Nato, the EU, and most likely, Ukraine.”
This would have made it more likely that Russia would “exert a looser
influence over its neighbours . . . rather than gripping them tightly. It was an
approach that had roots in Mikhail Gorbachev’s idea—welcomed in the est
at the time—of a ‘common European home.’” The author went on to say
that Putin had decided to turn his back on Europe and embrace a new Asia-
centric future for Russia, in line with nationalist hardliners, who now seem
vindicated by the failure of his pro-European vision.[1468]
In 2009, Yossef Bodansky wrote of Merkel’s pressure on Azerbaijan,
Armenia and Georgia to conform with German and Russian plans to work
together on a new Southern Corridor of gas pipelines from the Caspian
Basin to Europe through Russia and Turkey, and the backfiring of then-
President Bush’s response. Merkel and then-French President Nicolas
Sarkozy were reaching out to the Russians to consolidate the strategic
partnership. “The ‘Eurasia Home,’” Bodansky wrote, “is considered the key
to the joint building of a global geo-strategic and geo-economic bloc
capable of withstanding both the U.S. and the PRC [People’s Republic of
China].” He said that central to Bush’s policy was to “undermine Russian
dominance over energy—mainly natural gas—supplies to the EU. This
effort peaked in 2008 when the Bush Administration goaded Georgia into
provoking Russia. The ensuing war consolidated Russia’s hegemony in the
GBSB [Greater Black Sea Basin].”[1469]
And so the problem, as Washington and London saw it, of the too-close
relationship between Germany and Russia remained.

Cold War II

Obama refused to integrate Ukraine into NATO because he understood the

major risks and low rewards of such an action. On the other hand, he
continued to slow-walk the policy and repeatedly declared that Ukraine
would indeed be brought into the alliance someday,[1470] thus continuing
to make matters worse and foregoing the benefit of any restraint he was
actually practicing.
Of course, the U.S. government had to ignore the facts of their own
provocation in Kiev and pretend the problem began with “Russian
aggression” in Crimea. So in 2015, Obama announced his new National
Security Strategy, which focused on great power conflict with Russia and
China. It said the United States would “continue to impose significant costs
on Russia through sanctions and other means while countering Moscow’s
deceptive propaganda with the unvarnished truth,” as well as “deter Russian
aggression, remain alert to its strategic capabilities, and help our allies and
partners resist Russian coercion over the long term.”[1471] By 2016, NATO
nations America, Britain, Canada and Germany had troops on a “persistence
rotational presence” in the Baltic states—a supposed loophole in their
promise not to permanently station troops in the new NATO nations.[1472]
They also held the biggest military exercises since the 1980s, and right on
Russia’s western border.[1473]
The second Cold War had begun.

OceanofPDF.com
Donald Trump

“The Americans promised that NATO wouldn’t move

beyond the boundaries of Germany after the Cold
War, but now half of Central and Eastern Europe are
members. So what happened to their promises? It
shows they cannot be trusted.”
—Mikhail Gorbachev

“It would be great if we could get along with Russia.”

—Donald Trump

“All roads lead to Putin.”

—Nancy Pelosi

“Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki

was nothing short of treasonous.”
—John Brennan
“I think you have overlearned the lessons of the pre-
Iraq war reporting failures.”
—Charlie Savage

“We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending

in that direction.”
—Harry Truman

“For the first time in history, the language of ‘arms

control’ was replaced by ‘arms reduction’—in this
case, the complete elimination of an entire class of
U.S. and Soviet nuclear missiles.”
—Ronald Reagan

“For the first time in 25 years, the United States is

facing a return to great power competition.”
—Adm. John Richardson

“War is a massive racket. We are at war constantly. At

the end of the day, it’s about making money.”
—Gen. Michael Flynn
OceanofPDF.com
 Russiagate

Framing Trump

In his great book on the origins of the new Cold War in the color-coded
revolutions of the Clinton and W. Bush years, Canadian journalist Mark
MacKinnon talks about the phony nature of Russia’s “managed
democracy.” The country is an autocracy even if not a dictatorship. While
retaining the trappings of a republican form of government, really the state
and its leader are in charge, all public politics notwithstanding. Parties and
elections play more of a ceremonial role to invoke the appearance of
popular sovereignty without any real participation by the people or turnover
of those in authority.[1]
That is evidently similar to what we have in the United States of
America—white marble statues, ancient parchments and regular elections,
again, notwithstanding, though in our system it is the bureaucracy itself,
rather than the leader, that holds the permanent power. For example, the
regime simply framed Donald J. Trump of all people for treason
—“collusion” they called it—and invented a Russian plot to steal the 2016
election and give it to him, their blackmailed, compromised agent.
It was the CIA and FBI, as well as the Clinton campaign and their
agents, that did this to Trump—the frontrunner for major party candidacy
for U.S. president, later the Republican nominee, president-elect and
eventually sitting chief executive. None of it was true. The false claims
implicated low-level staffers like George Papadopoulos and Carter Page,
along with well-known Washington players such as Senator Jeff Sessions,
General Michael Flynn and political consultant Paul Manafort, who were
simply collateral damage. It was absolutely unbelievable. But millions did
believe it. After failing to prevent Trump’s election, the same Russiagate
hoax was used to “rein in” his independence from the permanent policy, and
to sway the outcome of the 2018 election and the 2020 race as well.[2]
Trump ran on a promise to “get along with Russia” in 2016. Not that
he had any idea of what issues divided our nations, nor what should be done
about them. He simply possessed the pedestrian insight that the Evil Empire
ceased to exist more than a generation ago, and that his predecessors’
failures to forge a peaceful coexistence with Russia should be placed at
their own feet. He also repeated former Secretary of State Henry
Kissinger’s advice that the U.S. should seek partnership with Russia to use
them against China, apparently on the theory that it makes more sense to
make peace with Eurasia before fighting East Asia, rather than both of them
at the same time.[3]
Perhaps the foreign policy establishment could have handled that, even
after the loss of Crimea. After all, “reset” had been the official policy of the
early Obama years. But Trump was just too uncouth. It is not that he ever
meant to abandon, or even scale back, America’s commitment to NATO, but
he disgraced and insulted the alliance, calling it “obsolete.”[4] For those
who did not understand his business style, this seemed like an attack on
American dominance in Europe and the rest of the world. To the foreign
policy establishment, this was spitting in church. He was making them
uncomfortable.[5] As demonstrated by his presidency,[6] Trump was just
playing hardball to get NATO countries to spend more on their militaries.[7]
But it is easy to see why many elites panicked over his praise for Putin’s
Russia[8] while “deriding” the Atlantic alliance, as the New York Times put
it.[9]
He also severely upset the establishment with his criticism of Obama’s
Syria policy, taking the advice of his designated national security adviser,
Gen. Mike Flynn, that though they opposed Iran, it was wrong to back al
Qaeda against them in Syria,[10] especially after the rise of the ISIS
Caliphate in 2014.[11] In Trump’s hyperbolic language, “Obama co-
founded ISIS,”[12] and, he mused, maybe we should just let Iran, Syria and
Russia kill them for us.[13] When he finally ordered a halt to CIA support
for al Qaeda in 2017, the Washington Post made it sound like treason:
“Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move
sought by Moscow.”[14] America’s Syria policy under Obama was so
twisted[15] that setting it anywhere close to straight was a massive
repudiation of the entire War Party and had much to do with their hatred for
and fear of Trump.[16]
Just before his first debate with Secretary Clinton, James Clapper, the
director of national intelligence (DNI), released a report along with DHS
saying the Russians were intervening in the election against her.[17] She
then cited the claims in the debate. Retired U.S. Army Colonel Derek
Harvey, who investigated the origins of the scandal for the House
Intelligence Committee, later confirmed, “There was no evidence to support
it. It was a political diversion to help Clinton.”[18]
 Chris Swecker, a former FBI assistant director, told journalist Paul
Sperry that Clapper’s October 7 assessment was a covert intelligence
operation against Trump to keep him from winning, or failing that, to limit
his power. Clapper’s “pre-cooked” conclusion about Russia targeting
Clinton, Swecker said, was an abuse of the powers of the intelligence
community to intervene in the election. He also claimed CIA Director John
Brennan had manipulated the elderly Clapper into doing it.[19]

Media Storm

The whole thing started with a frame-up, but ultimately captured the most
fevered imagination of the American establishment for the better part of
three years, including the leadership of the Republican Party, and especially
liberal Democratic functionaries, voters and news consumers. It was very
similar to the Second Red Scare, led by Sen. Joe McCarthy back in the
1950s, and mirrored the paranoia about an all-powerful Soviet Union taking
over America[20]—only this time it was all true! Except it was not true. But
it became a cult obsession. People made religious-inspired candles in
devotion to leading Russiagate crusaders, they sang songs and prayed to
God to deliver us from this evil. Every middle-aged lady on TV news and
opinion shows, led by CNN, MSNBC and The View, believed. Dozens of
new fraudulent Russia and “disinformation” experts made tons of money
analyzing all the latest rumors day in and day out. It was a big social
psychology experiment in consensus-building. In place of facts was a
shared belief about a great danger. It was a very exciting time for those who
jumped on the bandwagon.
 And worse, people were really scared. They were told Vladimir Putin’s
Russia was an enemy the likes of which America had never seen or dealt
with before, that it was a terrible emergency. His supposed “attack on our
democracy” in the 2016 election was repeatedly called an “act of war,” and
was directly compared to September 11,[21] Pearl Harbor[22] and even
Kristallnacht—or the “Night of Broken Glass,” the first significant anti-
Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria in November 1938, widely
regarded as the beginning of the Holocaust.[23] It was accepted in all the
major media that Russia was waging an all-out “influence” and
“information war” to “sow discord,” “disrupt and destabilize” American
society and destroy our democracy. The U.S.A. was losing the fifth-
generation hybrid cyberwar gap!
After BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith published the so-called “Steele dossier”
compiled by former MI6 officer Christopher Steele, alleging a long-term
Kremlin plot to plant the real estate tycoon in the White House,[24] the
Washington establishment went out of its mind. Paul Krugman of the New
York Times called Trump the “Siberian Candidate,”[25] while
neoconservative war hawk Max Boot[26] speculated “18 reasons Trump
could be a Russian asset” in a piece for the Washington Post.[27]
Polls showed that large numbers of Americans, especially Democrats,
bought the story about Putin’s government rigging the 2016 election[28]—
right down to the vote totals[29]—and that Trump and his campaign were in
on it all. In fact, Russiagate was nothing more than a big, fake hoax. As
former foreign service officer and whistleblower Peter Van Buren put it,
“The short version of Russiagate? There was no Russiagate.”[30]
 The author is not and has never been a Trump supporter.[31] The
careful reader will note that what follows contains very few defenses of the
man or his antics. Instead, there are accurate charges against his enemies. If
in some parallel universe, Republican hawks had done the same to
President Obama and Secretary Clinton over their attempted “reset,” the
truth would have deserved defending all the same. Whether one is for
Trump or against him, it is simply a fact: Russiagate was a lie.
It really was one of history’s all-time greatest political dirty tricks, just
a degree or two away from actual assassination. The government made
itself clear: no election would stand in the way of their consensus for how
their empire was to be run. It was effective, too. Despite the fact that
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, W. Bush’s former FBI director, could
ultimately prove no Russian interference, and did not even allege a plot by
Trump associates to “collude” with Moscow,[32] it did not matter. A
Reuters poll showed that nearly half the country still believed the lies.[33]
DNI Clapper, CIA Director Brennan, Special Counsel Mueller, FBI
Director James Comey and the leaders of the Department of Justice knew
the entire story was nonsense. The FBI investigation, dubbed “Crossfire
Hurricane,” and later the special counsel’s two-year inquiry—which
eventually ended with no prosecutions of any American for conspiring with
Russia—were the means and the end. After two years of pretending to look
into it and a few trivial convictions that had no connection to the main case,
Mueller conceded, “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that
the Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated
with Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election.”
Even that was an embellishment. There had actually been nothing to the
story at all.
John McLaughlin, a former acting director of the CIA, was asked at an
event whether the “deep state” was trying to remove Trump. “Thank God
for the deep state,” he answered, to applause. This was all fine, he declared,
because “the problem is . . . at 1600 Pennsylvania, it’s not at the Hoover
Building, it’s not at Langley, it’s not at Fort Meade.”[34]
Perhaps this would have been an exemplary case of honor-bound
fidelity to the constitutional law if any of their accusations were true. Trump
was the elected president. They were appointees and bureaucrats from post-
constitutional national security departments. He had better have been guilty
as hell for them to come at him this way. He was not. They were the ones
who were out of line.
Years later, Special Counsel John Durham, assigned to investigate
Russiagate’s origins, later put it in terms so polite as to amount to a cover-
up. “It is the Office’s assessment that the FBI discounted or willfully
ignored material information that did not support the narrative of a collusive
relationship between Trump and Russia.” The Department of Justice
inspector general (IG) concluded the same, saying the FBI “repeatedly
ignore[d] or explain[ed] away evidence contrary to the theory the Trump
campaign . . . had conspired with Russia. . . . It appeared that . . . there was
a pattern of assuming nefarious intent.”[35] Durham concluded, “An
objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have
caused the FBI to question not only the predication for [the investigation],
but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or
other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.”[36]

DNC Podesta Leaks

The story first came to public consciousness in the summer of 2016. When
someone handed WikiLeaks a trove of emails from a Democratic National
Committee (DNC) server and accounts of the Democratic Congressional
Campaign Committee (DCCC) and Hillary Clinton campaign manager John
Podesta, showing they had outright cheated Bernie Sanders in the primaries,
[37] the former secretary of state approved a plan to help frame Trump for
treason. It was the Russians who hacked the emails and delivered them to
Julian Assange, to benefit Trump at her expense, her campaign manager
Robby Mook claimed on July 24,[38] citing the DNC’s computer security
contractor, CrowdStrike.[39] Ironically, Trump’s former National Security
Advisor John Bolton, the notorious hawk[40] and self-confessed
professional liar,[41] was closest to the truth when he suggested the entire
thing was a “false flag” perpetrated by the Obama administration and
Clinton campaign.[42] It is unlikely that the Democrats were behind the
leaks themselves, but their cynical exploitation of the event and knowingly
false accusations against Trump and Russia amounted to virtually the same
level of deceit.
When Trump heard about Russia’s alleged hack on the DNC, he
mentioned emails that had been scrubbed from Hillary Clinton’s private
server: “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you are able to find the 30,000
emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by
our press. Let’s see if that happens.”[43] For those predisposed to believe,
this was taken as proof that Trump did not simply want to get along with
Russia, but secretly worked for the Kremlin and would hand over the keys
to the entire castle.
On June 19, 2016, just four days after CrowdStrike claimed Russia was
the culprit behind the DNC hack,[44] Jeffrey Carr, a top-level computer
security expert, explained that it was impossible to say with certainty who
might be behind the hacks because—as was later revealed by the CIA Vault
7 leak[45]—it is too easy to leave false fingerprints, such as the supposed
“tell-tale” Cyrillic script allegedly left behind in the DNC server.[46] There
is only one agency in the world, Carr said, who could say for certain who
was behind the hack and leak: the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
They can essentially rewind the entire internet if they wish, and trace any
electronic packet anywhere in the world.[47] This is why the document
leaked by NSA analyst Reality Winner to the Intercept was so revealing,
and not in the way she apparently intended.[48] The NSA was shown to
have concluded, based only on an analyst’s judgment, not hard facts, that a
hacker working for Russian military intelligence was behind an operation
targeting local governments, hacks which evidently were of no consequence
anyway.[49] The Intercept’s Matthew Cole recklessly sent a copy of the file
directly to the NSA’s media office and published it online, compromising
his source who was then convicted and imprisoned[50]
Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and someone
very close to WikiLeaks’s Assange, told the author in December 2016 that
he met with the DNC leaker in Washington, D.C., and that it was an
American with no conceivable tie to the Russians. He said he also knew
who phished and leaked the Podesta emails, strongly implying it was an
NSA employee resentful of Clinton’s reckless use of a private email server.
[51] This may not be definitive proof, or even sworn testimony; however it
remains the most credible explanation for the leaks. All other accounts were
obvious, and later admitted, lies.
Only years later and too late, Congress finally released the transcripts
of a classified congressional hearing from December 2017, when Rep.
Adam Schiff of California, chief promoter of the Russiagate hoax in the
House, asked the head of CrowdStrike, Shawn Henry, on what date the
Russians “exfiltrated the data” from the DNC’s servers. Henry started to
say, “It is in our report,” but then after a short off-microphone discussion
with his lawyer admitted he had no evidence Russia had “exfiltrated” the
DNC emails after all. “Counsel just reminded me that, as it relates to the
DNC, we have indicators that data was exfiltrated. We did not have
concrete evidence that data was exfiltrated from the DNC.”
Apparently attempting to walk back that damning statement, he instead
advanced it. “We didn’t have a network sensor in place that saw data leave.
We said that the data left based on the circumstantial evidence.” He added,
“When I answered that question, I was trying to be as factually accurate—I
want to provide the facts. So I said that we didn’t have direct evidence. But
we made a conclusion that the data left the network.”[52]
Henry told Congress under oath that his company thought it must be
the hacking group “Fancy Bear” that did it, and that Fancy Bear must be the
Russians, but admitted they were really just speculating. “Fancy Bear is an
actor that we associated with Russian intelligence. It’s likely a group of
people that are operating on behalf of a Russian intelligence service, and
aggregately we have named them Fancy Bear as a way for us to kind of
identify different tactics and associate it with a particular group.” He
admitted, “There wasn’t a videotape of the Russians with their fingers on a
keyboard, but the activities were consistent with what we’d seen previously,
targeting other [agencies]—the State Department, for example, the Joint
Chiefs, other governments.” They had suspicions, but no proof. He added,
“I think that when you’re looking at attribution, it’s—you look at an
aggregate across many different attacks over a long period of time, years in
many cases, and the intelligence that you collect leads you to a certain
conclusion. I think that’s the case here.”
That was in December 2017. The completely unproven nature of the
Russians’ alleged DNC hack, the core of the entire hoax, was exposed—in
secret—by the end of Trump’s first year in office. The American people
were not told until May 2020.[53]
CrowdStrike had already long since proven how biased and sloppy
they were after falsely claiming Russia had hacked artillery apps on
Ukrainian soldiers’ smartphones,[54] which they were forced to retract after
resounding criticism from various computer security experts.[55] One of
the company’s co-founders, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a Russian expatriate,
opponent of Putin and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.[56] They
were not just a computer security firm, but had an enormous conflict of
interest. CrowdStrike’s original claim about the Russian hack and email
leak remains one of the most deeply believed lies about the whole affair.
Court documents later revealed that the FBI never even examined the server
themselves, relying on three redacted draft reports from CrowdStrike which
themselves provided no evidence.[57]
Journalist Aaron Maté showed that attorney Michael Sussmann and
Henry both lied to Congress when they denied the FBI had requested access
to the servers. CrowdStrike had stonewalled the FBI both on an inspection
and on “Priority Requests” for unredacted copies of their reports. He also
showed that the bureau let Sussmann edit a press release to make it seem
like the FBI was confirming, rather than referring to, others’ allegations.
When Obama ordered the DHS to announce they were certain the Russians
had hacked the Democratic emails, this was before CrowdStrike had even
denied the FBI access to the servers or given them the image files.[58]
It was not revealed until September 2023 that some of the Russian
hacking claims came from the “Georgia Tech team,”[59] the same people
who originated the completely ridiculous and widely debunked Alpha Bank
hoax,[60] which claimed the Trump campaign was receiving secret
instructions by way of a server communicating with a Russian bank,
another devastating blow to the credibility of the hacking story.[61]
Erik Wemple from the Washington Post did a deep post-mortem on the
whole Russiagate affair after Special Counsel Mueller’s massive flop of a
report was finally published in the spring of 2019.[62] But he still refused
to revisit the central question of the 2016 DNC and Podesta email leaks and
the unproven claims that the Russian government had anything to do with
them.[63] A later indictment of several GU officers made assertions about
what role they had played in the hacks and leaks, but there was no proof.
[64]
CNN claimed to have email evidence showing that Donald Trump Jr.
had advanced knowledge of WikiLeaks’s plans to publish the DNC
documents.[65] It turned out they got the date wrong.[66] Even if their
story were true, WikiLeaks informing the Trump campaign about damaging
material on Clinton would only matter if one assumed WikiLeaks was
acting as a cutout for Russia—an accusation for which there remains no
evidence or credible indication. In the Mueller report, the special
prosecutor’s office pushed the innuendo that WikiLeaks coordinated with
the campaign to protect Trump’s interests, claiming it was not a coincidence
that the website started publishing the Podesta emails soon after a leaked
tape surfaced in which Trump made crude comments about women. But
that was a wild centrist conspiracy theory that had no basis in fact, which
was debunked by Italian journalist Stefania Maurizi, author of Secret
Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies,[67] who worked with the group to
prepare the materials for publication. The documents were simply ready to
be posted at that time.[68]

DCLeaks and Guccifer 2.0

The Mueller report also insisted without evidence that Guccifer 2.0 and
DCLeaks—which also published leaked documents—were both controlled
by the Russian military intelligence agency GU (“Main Directorate,” often
referred to by its former name GRU). The report claimed, “That the
Guccifer 2.0 persona provided reporters access to a restricted portion of the
DCLeaks website tends to indicate that both personas were operated by the
same or a closely-related group of people.”[69] But it also said DCLeaks
was easy and had approached Assange offering to coordinate releases, while
Guccifer 2.0 played hard to get. Assange had to pester them about allowing
WikiLeaks to publish the material, since his site had so much more
prominence, saying it would “have a much higher impact than what you are
doing.” Mueller also said both alleged GRU fronts “transferred some of the
stolen documents to WikiLeaks through online archives set up by the
GRU,” but instead of proof, we were given a black bar redaction under the
typical excuse that demonstrating a claim would reveal an “investigative
technique.”
The timelines in the special counsel report and GU indictment[70]
make little sense. Mueller conceded that Assange had discussed “emails
related to Hillary Clinton . . . pending publication” on Britain’s ITV on June
12, 2016, two days before the Washington Post reported that the DNC had
been hacked.[71] DCLeaks contacted Assange that day. The Guccifer 2.0
persona was not even created until one day after.[72]
As soon as Guccifer 2.0 went online, it immediately claimed it had
thousands of files, but had given “the main part” of them to WikiLeaks.[73]
Mueller acknowledged that WikiLeaks released approximately 28,000
emails just four days after receiving some from Guccifer 2.0, which would
have given Assange and his team very little opportunity to review the
emails before posting them. WikiLeaks has a strong reputation for having
never published a fake or altered document because of their legendary
diligence.[74] In this case we are told to believe they exercised none of
their usual caution—and when Assange had already announced an
upcoming post of “emails related to Hillary Clinton” before this identity
ever went online.
But even the truthers over at The New Yorker magazine noticed that
what Guccifer 2.0 had leaked separately was a bunch of nothing, including
fake documents and a pretended Democratic Party “dossier” on Hillary
Clinton. Assange told their reporter, “We received quite a lot of submissions
of material that was already published in the rest of the press, and people
seemingly submitted the Guccifer archives. We didn’t publish them. They
were already published.” When asked, “Why not add them to the
WikiLeaks library?” Assange answered, “We might have done that. But the
material from Guccifer 2.0—or on WordPress—we didn’t have the
resources to independently verify.”[75] While Assange did ask Guccifer 2.0
to hand over whatever they had, that does not imply that any material
posted by WikiLeaks came from that source. The timeline makes it unlikely
that he relied on whoever it was behind the project. Also, Mueller refused to
plainly assert in his report that the Russians had poached the Podesta
emails, claiming only that GU “officers appear to have” done so. Always
read the fine print.[76]
Then-CIA Director Brennan later conceded to PBS Frontline that they
were only guessing based on circumstantial evidence, calling the accused
Russian military intelligence agency “the more likely culprits in this.” One
might argue that sometimes a guess is the best the CIA can do, but that was
conceding a hell of a lot in this case, in which they were falsely accusing a
sitting elected president of the highest crimes. “[W]e were able to put
together some bits and pieces of information and intelligence, as well as
look at it against the backdrop of things that had happened previously,”
Brennan said.[77]

Mueller on WikiLeaks’s Source

Eventually, Special Counsel Mueller admitted there was nothing to the story
at all. “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump
Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its
election interference activities,” he said in his final report.[78] Further, he
acknowledged there was no chain of evidence to WikiLeaks, but still wrote
that “[t]he office cannot rule out that stolen documents were transferred to
WikiLeaks through intermediaries who visited during the summer of 2016,”
begging the question and conceding his ignorance simultaneously. DNI
Clapper[79] admitted as much back in 2016, telling Congress, “As far as
the WikiLeaks connection, evidence there is not as strong and we don’t
have good insight into the sequencing of the releases or when the data may
have been provided.”[80] No one on the Trump campaign had anything to
do with the leaks, the transfers to WikiLeaks, or in any way “colluded” with
the Russians on any of the above. It remains unproven that the Russians had
any part in the hack or leak.
The core of the scandal was a hoax—the rest of the details too.[81]

Manafort-WikiLeaks
Luke Harding of the Guardian falsely claimed that Trump’s then-campaign
manager Paul Manafort met with Assange at the Ecuadorian Embassy in
London, presumably to plan the leaking of Democratic Party documents in
ways to best help the campaign. The people who lied to Harding about this
supposed meeting wanted us to believe it went entirely unnoticed at the
most surveilled house in all of Britain,[82] which was obviously as
impossible as it was false.[83] Like the fabled meeting between Iraqi
diplomat Ahmad Ani and lead September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in
Prague,[84] or George W. Bush and Colin Powell’s false claims about
Saddam Hussein’s support for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi,[85] this lie was
meant to establish another connection between the Trump campaign,
WikiLeaks and the Russians. But it never happened, and Manafort was not
serving Russian interests anyway.[86]

Roger Stone

One major pretended piece of the puzzle was the longtime Republican Party
dirty trickster and Trump associate Roger Stone. For years, the rumor was
that he had early knowledge of WikiLeaks’s access to the emails.[87] But
investigative reporter James Bamford showed, citing FBI documents, that
Stone’s advanced knowledge of WikiLeaks activities was much more likely
given to him by the Israeli government, rather than Russians. In fact,
according to an FBI search warrant, on May 17, the same day that Stone
began communicating with a lawyer named Isaac Molho, who Haaretz
described as one of Prime Minister Benajamin Netanyahu’s most trusted
agents,[88] Stone began Googling “dcleaks” and “guccifer.” This was
almost a month before Assange let it be known he had information on
Clinton and those websites went live. He and his friend Jerome Corsi both
also showed foreknowledge of the Podesta emails’ upcoming release.[89]
There was no indication they got this information from those identities or
WikiLeaks. Bamford appeared to take it for granted that the hack was done
by the GU, and that the Israelis must have simply figured that out through
their own surveillance, and then told them. But the revelations would seem
to raise more reason to doubt the Russians were behind the leaks if the
Israelis knew so much about it, though as shown, it does not appear either
dcleaks or Guccifer 2.0 were the source of the DNC leaks anyway. The
timeline at least allows for the possibility they provided the Podesta emails.
Mueller’s office certainly failed to charge Stone with any crimes regarding
Russia or to demonstrate that this knowledge must have come from the
Russians.[90]

Electoral College

After the leaks about Russia’s supposed DNC hack failed to stop Trump’s
2016 election, a group calling themselves the “Hamilton Electors” and the
Clinton campaign demanded that Acting CIA Director Mike Morell brief
the Electoral College that Trump cheated with the Russians to win and so
they should throw the election to Clinton, or at least to the House, which
could then name Congressman John Kasich of Ohio, former Massachusetts
Governor Mitt Romney, former House Speaker Paul Ryan or former
Secretary of State Colin Powell to take his place.[91] Morell had
nonsensically accused Trump of being an “unwitting agent” of Russia.[92]
 That plan went nowhere. Those electors come from the state parties,
not the D.C. suburbs, and there was no way in the world they were going to
give Trump’s win to anyone else.

Brennan’s ICA

Then, on January 17, three days before Trump’s inauguration, DNI Clapper
released an “Intelligence Community Assessment” (ICA) written by five
people admittedly “hand-picked” by John Brennan[93] in place of a real
National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). President Obama had ordered them to
prepare the document,[94] titled “Russian Activities and Intentions in
Recent Elections.” While conceding that they “did not make an assessment
of the impact” of Russia’s alleged meddling, its authors claimed, “Vladimir
Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential
election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S.
democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability
and potential presidency.” They added, “We further assess Putin and the
Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect
Trump,” but admitted that the National Security Agency had only
“moderate confidence” in that assessment when they were the ones who
should be able to testify for a fact whether or not it was true. This seemed to
indicate they were following the CIA and FBI’s lead and simply being
agreeable rather than making the positive claim themselves at all. The ICA
claimed Russia was the source for WikiLeaks as well as Guccifer 2.0 and
DCLeaks, but again, did not demonstrate this.
 The report contained exactly zero substance, and even disclaimed that
its judgments were “not intended to imply . . . proof that shows something
to be a fact.”[95] The public version included a nine-page “annex” about
the supposed influence of the Russian-backed TV channel Russia Today
(RT), much of it leftover from the 2012 U.S. presidential race, seemingly to
pad the paper’s length, as a high school student might do.[96] Brennan
included information from the Steele Dossier in the classified version of the
report.[97]
Clinton and the major media pretended this so-called “ICA” somehow
proved the devastating truth that Trump had only won the election because
Russia had rigged it for him, leaving him the usurper of his rival’s rightful
throne. He was, as Clinton claimed on several occasions, an “illegitimate
president.”[98] She and much of the media[99]—including all the self-
appointed, supposed “fact-checkers”[100]—also repeatedly lied that “all 17
intelligence agencies,” referring to the NIC, agreed that Russia had rigged
the election against her, with the Times only much later admitting that was a
lie.[101]
We learned three years later from journalist Paul Sperry that in fact,
“career analysts disputed Brennan’s take that Russian leader Vladimir Putin
intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump clinch the White
House,” leading him to sideline them and bring in a “political ally,” Andrea
Kendall-Taylor, who had donated to the Clinton campaign, to write the
report in their place. “It was not an intelligence assessment. It was not
coordinated in the [intelligence] community or even with experts in Russia
House [a department within Langley officially called the Center for Europe
and Eurasia],” the official told Sperry. “It was just a small group of people
selected and driven by Brennan himself . . . and Brennan did the
editing.”[102] A former White House staffer later said that he was allowed
to read a classified version of the House investigation report, including their
conclusion, based on CIA records and interviews with agency officials, that
the Russians preferred that the more predictable Clinton win the election.
That was a judgment call about what they assumed Putin wanted, but the
point is that Brennan lied and pretended to believe that not only did they
prefer Trump, but intervened in the election to steal it for him. He also
excluded the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR)
and DIA, which had primary responsibility for tracking the GU, from the
assessment.[103]
As Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer told MSNBC’s Rachel
Maddow, Trump was “very dumb” to take on the CIA. “Let me tell you,
you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at
getting back at you,” he said, adding that CIA officials were “very upset
with how he has treated them and talked about them.”[104] The president-
elect had very rudely disputed their outrageous lies about him.[105]
Trump seemed to get the message. The day after his inauguration, he
traveled to CIA headquarters to try to make nice with his supposed partners
in power. Instead, he stood in front of what the Agency calls their “sacred
wall,” dedicated to officers killed in the line of duty, and ranted about how
the media had unfairly portrayed his inauguration crowd as smaller than he
thought it was.[106] This may have been typical self-centered Trump, but as
Brennan later recounted to PBS Frontline, it was clear the new president
had truly insulted them, making their vendetta against him that much worse.
[107]

Big Fake Times Story

Just a few weeks after Trump was sworn in, on February 14, 2017, Mark
Mazzetti of the New York Times claimed that “Trump campaign aides had
repeated contacts with Russian intelligence.”[108] Years later, the paper
admitted the piece was privately trashed even by the FBI agents targeting
Trump.[109] FBI counterintelligence section chief and later the Deputy
Assistant Director for Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, who had opened the
investigation and was later fired for his own proven animus toward its
subject,[110] commented that the Times story was “misleading and
inaccurate as written. We have not seen evidence of any individuals
affiliated with the Trump team in contact with IOs [Russian intelligence
officials].” He continued, “Again, we are unaware of ANY Trump advisers
engaging in conversations with Russian intelligence officials,” adding,
“There is no known affiliation, and little if any GOR [government of
Russia] affiliation. FBI investigation has shown past contact between Carter
Page and the SVR [Foreign Intelligence Service], but not during the Trump
campaign”[111] [emphasis in original].
Strzok went on to detail how the FBI had queried the NSA and CIA for
any incriminating information on Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort,
Carter Page or the also-accused incoming national security adviser, retired
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, and had gotten nothing back.[112] Former
FBI Director Comey also admitted about the Times story, under oath before
Congress, that “in the main, it was not true.”[113] It was later revealed that
after Mueller was made special counsel in April 2017, two years before the
investigation finally ended, Strzok had written that he was hesitant to join
the team since he had already concluded “there’s no big there, there.”[114]
When he went to London in early August 2016, just after launching the
investigation, he told a British intelligence official, “there’s nothing to this,
but we have to run it to ground.”[115]
Durham, the special counsel appointed to investigate the origins of the
hoax, wrote much later, definitively, “As the record now reflects, at the time
of the opening of Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI did not possess any
intelligence showing that anyone associated with the Trump campaign was
in contact with Russian intelligence officers at any point during the
campaign.”[116]

The Steele Dossier

The Times hit piece claiming extensive connections between the Trump
campaign and Russian intelligence was followed by the leak of the
Christopher Steele dossier, which alleged Trump’s full subordination to
Russia going back five years. A former MI6 agent hired by the Clinton
campaign to gather opposition research on Trump, Steele wrote that the
nefarious plan, “endorsed by PUTIN,” was to “encourage splits and
divisions in the western alliance.” He claimed a “former top Russian
intelligence officer” told him Trump was being blackmailed over “perverted
sexual acts which have been arranged/monitored by the FSB.” He also
claimed to have a source close to Trump who had admitted to this “well-
developed conspiracy,” which was allegedly handled by Trump’s campaign
manager Manafort, foreign policy adviser Page “and others.” The Russians
were doing all this because of how much Putin “hated and feared” Clinton.
[117]
This tale included a story of Trump being blackmailed by Russia’s FSB
domestic intelligence agency after they filmed him watching Russian
prostitutes urinate on a hotel bed where the Obamas had supposedly
previously slept.[118] No matter how badly Democratic partisans wanted to
believe the story,[119] it turns out it was completely made up “in jest . . .
over beers,” by Clinton campaign operative John Dolan,[120] according to
Steele’s source, Igor Danchenko.[121] FBI Director Comey, CIA Director
Brennan, NSA Director Rogers, and Director of National Intelligence
Clapper briefed Trump on the dossier on January 6, two weeks before the
inauguration. Comey later claimed he was trying to warn the president-
elect. “I wasn’t saying it was true, only that I wanted him to know both that
it had been reported and that the reports were in many hands.” He was just
trying to help Trump, he swore. “I said media like CNN had them and were
looking for a news hook. I said it was important that we not give them the
excuse to write that the FBI has the material.”[122]
Of course, the “hook” for CNN[123] was that Comey had warned
Trump about the fake accusations.[124] He later admitted to Congress that
he leaked his notes about the meeting in the hope it would lead to the
appointment of a special counsel.[125]
Outgoing DNI Clapper first lied to Congress, then acknowledged that
he had orchestrated the leak to CNN’s Jake Tapper for their pathbreaking
piece on the dossier on January 12, 2017, eight days before Trump’s
inauguration.[126] Perjury is a felony.[127] So this was just another one.
[128] Clapper is currently a paid expert for CNN.[129]
“Major parts of the dossier have been confirmed!” all the media myna
birds repeated.[130] “British ex-spy behind Trump dossier seen as a cool
operator.”[131] The Russians have “kompromat” on the new president!
[132] But before Trump was even sworn in, we now know, FBI agents were
refusing to stand by any of the claims in the dossier to their colleagues,
even among the small, “hand-picked” team that Brennan had put together,
leading to their decision to include it only in a separate, highly classified
annex for President Obama, but excluding it from the publicly released
“Intelligence Community Assessment.”[133]
As the FBI already knew, the only true facts in the dossier had already
been in the public domain before Steele wrote it. From the very first day
Steele brought his initial reports to the FBI, July 5, 2016, he admitted it was
opposition research funded by a law firm, Perkins Coie, working for the
Clinton campaign, and that Secretary Clinton herself was aware of his
reporting. That agent had accepted the document with “disbelief,” knowing
that it was “politically motivated,” he later told Durham’s investigators,
though the Crossfire team claimed it did not get these materials until the
middle of September.[134]
FBI investigators had created a spreadsheet to methodically check the
claims in the dossier. None held up. There was not one thing true in it that
was scandalous or criminal, and not one thing scandalous or criminal that
was true—at least that had anything to do with Russian spying or election
interference.[135] As was revealed years after the fact, this dossier had been
dismissed from the very beginning by at least part of the CIA as nothing but
“internet rumor.”[136] The Wall Street Journal explained, “The dossier took
real events, such as the visit of a Trump adviser to Moscow, and expounded
on them by describing meetings with high-level Kremlin officials for which
no corroborating evidence surfaced.”[137] Steele also claimed Trump’s
team was “transmitting this intelligence to the Russians” by way of their
“Miami consulate,” which does not and has never existed.[138]
On July 30, 2016, the former associate deputy attorney general, Bruce
Ohr—whose wife Nellie worked for Glenn Simpson’s Fusion GPS, the firm
that hired Steele—had also admitted to FBI Deputy Director McCabe and
agents Strzok and Lisa Page (Strzok’s mistress, no relation to Carter) that
Steele told him he was “desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and
was passionate about him not being president.”[139]
The false accusations that Steele and his sources did not invent, such as
the lies about Trump campaign staffer George Papadopoulos, were not in
his dossier, since those separate stories had not yet appeared in the news at
the time he was putting his claims together.[140]
Durham later wrote that “the Crossfire Hurricane investigators did not
and could not corroborate any of the substantive allegations contained in the
Steele reporting.” He added, “Nor was Steele able to produce corroboration
for any of the reported allegations, even after being offered $1 million or
more by the FBI for such corroboration.” He also wrote that when they
interviewed Steele’s source Danchenko in January 2017, just before Trump
was sworn in, he “also was unable to corroborate any of the substantive
allegations in the Reports. Rather, Danchenko characterized the information
he provided to Steele as ‘rumor and speculation’ and the product of casual
conversation.”[141] They lied about the origin of the dossier too, claiming
other Republicans were behind it,[142] and bolstering the Clinton
campaign’s false denials that they had sponsored the dirty trick in the first
place.[143] Her campaign was later forced to pay a $113,000 fine to the
Federal Election Commission for the crime.[144]
There was a kernel of truth to that particular lie: Simpson’s political
consulting firm, Fusion GPS, which the Clinton campaign had hired to
write the dossier, had already been at work on opposition research against
Trump on behalf of the neoconservative-controlled[145] Washington Free
Beacon, financed by the powerful Republican billionaire kingmaker Paul
Singer, before the Clinton campaign had hired them. And though he
claimed they stopped looking at Trump right around the time the Clinton
team began their opposition research,[146] the Beacon’s chairman Michael
Goldfarb did admit under oath before Congress that their research had
covered what he called “Russian nationals in Mr. Trump’s orbit, in his
business dealings,” though not his alleged “ties” to Russia. Goldfarb also
stated that Singer was in on the decision to hire Fusion GPS, and that they
still had a contract to continue to investigate one-time Trump campaign
chairman Manafort and his alleged “relationship with Russia.” They
continued to use Simpson’s firm, Goldfarb told the House Intelligence
Committee, until the Steele dossier was published in February 2017.
Goldfarb did seem to credibly deny that the work his newspaper paid for
ended up in the Steele dossier, which he dismissed as “bullshit” and “not
credible,” adding that it was the reason he ended their companies’
relationship.[147]
When it was finally revealed the Clinton campaign was behind the
dossier,[148] even Maggie Haberman of the Times complained: “Folks
involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”[149]
This pretend intelligence report by a supposedly “highly credible” and
trusted MI6 operative was really just bogus “opposition research” by
someone trying to make the FBI and the American press believe Trump had
a secret deal with the Russians. But the British Steele and his researcher
Igor Danchenko, a Russian citizen, were the foreigners interfering in the
American election.[150]
Nevertheless, according to the Durham investigation, the FBI
counterintelligence division, “without any further verification or
corroboration of the allegations contained therein,” used this shoddy piece
of unverified opposition research as the “essential” basis to seek a FISA
warrant against an American citizen, Trump adviser Carter Page, claiming
he was acting as an unregistered agent of a foreign power. They lied for
years that this was not the case,[151] even after Republican Rep. Devin
Nunes released a memo[152] explaining it was so after reviewing the FISA
warrant applications in a classified setting.[153] Nunes also noted much of
the information the feds had withheld from the court, including about the
origins of the document in the Clinton campaign, the money paid to Steele
to produce it and the fact that the application cited a September 23, 2016,
article by Michael Isikoff in Yahoo News[154] as confirming the Steele
dossier when it was instead a classic “information loop”: they knew Steele
was the source for the story too.[155] Early drafts of the FISA application
included that fact, but it was eventually deleted before the request was
submitted to the court. They pretended instead to believe the source must
have been from the Justice Department or Fusion GPS just so they could
delete it. As Durham concluded, “It seems reasonable to surmise that the
FBI’s assessment of the Yahoo News article radically changed in order to
protect the FISA application.”[156] Then there was the small detail the FBI
left out about how the bureau itself had fired Steele for leaking and lying
about it back in October 2016. Instead, former officials, Democrats and the
major media all called Nunes a liar.[157] In the end, he was completely
vindicated by the inspector general,[158] as even the Post finally,
reluctantly admitted.[159] Former Deputy Director McCabe also conceded
to the House Intelligence Committee that without the Steele dossier, he
thought their other supposed evidence “would not have been enough” to get
the court to agree to the warrant.[160]
Special Counsel Durham later added Steele and Danchenko’s
important admissions in their debriefings of October 2016 and January
2017 that the dossier was simply made up of “rumors and speculations,”
and that “significant parts” of their statements were contradictory. “At no
time . . . was the FISC informed of these inconsistencies.” Nor apparently
were they informed that Fusion GPS had tried to launder the same lies into
the intelligence stream by way of an FBI station in New England, which
remains unspecified in the Durham report. It was seemingly an attempt to
create an echo chamber and enhance the perception that the claims were
coming from multiple independent sources.[161] The FBI continued to keep
Danchenko on their payroll as an informant for almost four more years,
paying him at least $200,000.[162]
Once the FBI had the FISA warrant for Page, however, that allowed
them to surveil his communications and to expand the investigation
immediately to include everyone implicated in the dossier.[163]

Kooks

Though the government and establishment media constantly abuse the term
“conspiracy theorist” to mean anyone who does not believe their own
conspiracy theories on any given subject, there truly is such a thing as
classic, circular logic-driven, conclusion-jumping narratives that people
accept despite all evidence to the contrary—and the type of nut who
believes in them. Recent examples from pop culture include the belief
among some groups that nuclear weapons do not really exist,[164] that JFK
Jr. is still alive[165] and that the Earth is actually flat.[166]
Russiagate was the same way. “It all fits together!” liberals, Democrats
and the population of U.S. government employees, concluded.[167] At the
core of their collusion theory was Christopher Steele’s dossier and its claim
that Trump had been under the control of the Russians for years. Their
purpose was supposedly to “sow disunity both within the U.S. itself, but
more especially within the Transatlantic alliance which was viewed as
inimical to Russian interests.”[168] Steele claimed that “a senior Russian
official said the TRUMP operation should be seen in terms of PUTIN’s
desire to return to Nineteenth Century ‘Great Power’ politics anchored upon
countries’ interests rather than the ideals-based international order
established after World War Two.”[169] No wonder Putin had launched
such a massive effort to install him in power, they thought.
The dossier even seemed to confirm that Russia had been responsible
for the DNC hack and leak to WikiLeaks, a claim they had heard elsewhere
before.[170]
Even better, Russiagate hoax victims figured that anyone who did not
believe it must be the conspiracy theorist, since to deny Trump’s collusion
with Russia would be equivalent to concluding that the FBI, CIA,
Department of Justice, Washington Post, New York Times, the leadership of
both major parties and all the major TV news channels were some sort of
Deep State working together to push a lie that the president was a traitor
being blackmailed and controlled by the Kremlin—and that would be crazy.
[171]
As journalist Daniel Lazare put it, Russiagate was more than a lie; it
was imperial psychosis: “This country is so conformist. Its political system,
its political classes have just collapsed. We are seeing a case of mass
hysteria seizing the nation’s capital.”[172]
The Steele dossier, “the Magna Carta of #Russiagate,” in the words of
the great journalist and debunker Matt Taibbi,[173] became the basis for
more than two years of wild conjecture by media figures, stoked on by an
endless parade of former federal police and intelligence officials telling
them it was all true. “It provided the implied context for thousands of news
stories to come,” Taibbi wrote, “yet no journalist was ever able to confirm
its most salacious allegations: the five year cultivation plan, the blackmail,
the bribe from Sechin, the Prague trip, the pee romp, etc.”
 That did not matter. The narrative had already been established in the
attempted frame-up. When that failed to prevent Trump’s 2016 win, they
immediately decided they would not be gracious losers, but instead accuse
Trump and Russia of stealing the election from Clinton and insist he was an
“illegitimate president” and usurper of her throne. Jonathan Allen and Amie
Parnes elaborated in Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,
as close as you can get to an official account of the Clinton campaign of
2016. “She’s not being particularly self-reflective,” one source close to
Clinton told them. Instead, she was determined to blame her loss on FBI
Director Comey, who had reopened the investigation into her classified
emails,[174] and of course, Russia. “She wants to make sure all these
narratives get spun the right way,” the source explained. “That strategy had
been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech.” Campaign
manager Robby Mook and chairman John Podesta “assembled her
communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case
that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up.” Memorably, they wrote,
“For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they
went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already,
Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.” They added, “In
Brooklyn, her team coalesced around the idea that Russian hacking was the
major unreported story of the campaign, overshadowed by the contents of
stolen e-mails and Hillary’s own private-server imbroglio.”[175]
Building on the bogus dossier, Jonathan Chait, a major and unrepentant
liberal-interventionist supporter of Iraq War II,[176] even wrote a cover
story for New York magazine speculating that Trump had been
compromised and owned by Russia since 1987—approximately 30 years.
His evidence? Trump visited Russia in 1987.[177] Chris Hayes promptly
and credulously interviewed Chait about it on MSNBC.[178] His colleague
Rachel Maddow made a second career out of pushing the Steele dossier
hoax and reduced herself to a discredited, raving loon in the process.[179]
Once-distinguished[180] intelligence beat reporter Jane Mayer of The New
Yorker was disgraced by her credulous hagiography on Steele.[181] As the
Washington Post’s Erik Wemple said, Politico-turned-CNN reporter
Natasha Bertrand “bootstrapped her entire career” off pushing the bogus
claims in the Steele dossier.[182]
Partisan Democrats in Congress were at least as guilty. For example,
Rep. Adam Schiff knowingly lied to the American people that he had access
to secret intelligence that was “more than circumstantial”[183] proof that
Trump was compromised and controlled by Russia. This proof was never
revealed. Schiff even read portions of the Steele dossier into the
congressional record.[184]
At its core, Russiagate was a collection of false claims which, when
imagined together, gave the kooks something to believe in. Just like the
case against Saddam Hussein in 2002–2003, it was pure trutherism, with
scores or even hundreds of claims put out in support of the establishment
consensus, none of them true.[185] From there developed an only-half
joking pseudo-religion around the Prophet Robert Mueller,[186] the same
guy who had run hundreds of frame-up jobs against innocent Muslims in
the W. Bush years[187] and told Congress that he knew Iraq had illegal
weapons of mass destruction.[188] They made candles with Mueller
depicted as a saint and action figures showing him as a hero, wrote at least
half a dozen Christmas songs about him[189] and all the worst sort of
upper-middle-class, liberal, middle-aged white-lady cringe you could
imagine. It was just terrible.

Ohr Smears Millian

And speaking of the Justice Department’s Bruce Ohr and his wife Nellie,
who was working for Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS to collect opposition
research for the Steele dossier: Apparently she was the first to name the
innocent Belarusian-American businessman Sergei Millian, president of the
Russian-American Chamber of Commerce, in an effort to connect Trump
and the Kremlin. The FBI hid that fact from the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court while seeking warrants to spy on the Trump team.[190]
The actual source, Igor Danchenko, then told the bureau that some of the
information in the dossier, including the lie about the pee tape, came from
him.[191] As journalist Paul Sperry noted, “Millian was called to [Steele
and Danchenko’s] attention by Nellie Ohr, who the prosecutor said
‘implicated’ Millian through her own reports.” At the same time, her
husband Bruce gave 12 different reports that cited Millian to the Crossfire
Hurricane investigators. “Agents used her reports as a source of
corroboration for the Steele reports they received in the summer and fall of
2016, even though it was circular reporting.”[192] Millian was never
accused by Mueller and was completely exonerated by Durham.[193]

Papadopoulos
Trump campaign volunteer George Papadopoulos had supposedly admitted
to then-Australian Ambassador to the UK Alexander Downer that a Russian
spy had boasted to him that they had stolen “thousands of emails” from
Clinton and were going to release them to damage her, months before the
DNC email leak was revealed, Scott Shane claimed in the Times.[194] This
lie massively reinforced the idea that Russia had, in fact, hacked and leaked
the emails, a claim that remains unproven and which even its originators
eventually admitted they could not demonstrate.[195]
It is strange, though. As another Times report revealed, this story was
used as the basis for the entire investigation[196] before the FBI switched
to the lies in the Steele dossier about another Trump aide, Carter Page, as
the predicate.[197] They evidently doubted they could get a Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to surveil the campaign based
solely on the story of Papadopoulos and his connection to a mysterious
Maltese diplomat and academic named Joseph Mifsud, who the FBI
claimed was a “Russian agent.”[198]
The Department of Justice referral document by lead FBI Agent Peter
Strzok makes no mention of Mifsud, pilfered emails or any specific claim
about what the Russians might have. Strzok even wrote that “[i]t was
unclear whether he or the Russians were referring to material acquired
publicly [or] through other means.”[199]
Supposedly adding credibility to the story was the fact that in late July
2016, just as WikiLeaks was posting the emails, it was the Australian
diplomat Downer who brought Papadopoulos to the FBI’s attention. Though
federal agents claimed through the Times that Papadopoulos told this
diplomat the Russians had “dirt” in the form of “thousands” of Secretary
Clinton’s emails, they both denied it.[200] For his part, the Aussie publicly
denied that emails or Mifsud were brought up at all,[201] as the Times had
claimed, supposedly citing “court documents” they had seen. It was shown
years later that Downer had only told the FBI, as Durham reported, that
“Papadopoulos made no mention [to Downer] of Clinton emails, dirt or any
specific approach by the Russian government to the Trump campaign team
with an offer or suggestion of providing assistance.” He said that
“Downer’s recollection was that Papadopoulos simply stated ‘the Russians
have information’ and that was all. . . . Downer also said that he ‘did not get
the sense Papadopoulos was the middle-man to coordinate with the
Russians.’”[202] Of course, as Durham also said, “Notably, the information
[from Downer] does not include any mention of the hacking of the DNC,
the Russians being in possession of emails, or the public release of any
emails.”
On January 10, 2017, 10 days before Trump was even sworn in,
Mifsud, the supposed Russian spy, met with the FBI in Washington and
denied saying any such thing to Papadopoulos. The Justice Department
never charged him with lying to them about it.[203] Nor did the Mueller
report demonstrate that Mifsud was a Russian agent or asset.[204] The
supposed crux of the Times story was: “Although Russian hackers had been
mining data from the Democratic National Committee’s computers for
months, that information was not yet public. Even the committee itself did
not know.” Readers were led to believe, then, that Mifsud was a Russian
spy who leaked to Trump’s agent Papadopoulos that the Russians were
going to release hacked DNC and Podesta emails on their behalf—how else
could he have known?![205]
But Papadopoulos insists the only time he discussed emails with
Mifsud was to speculate about Clinton’s private server being hacked—
nothing about the DNC or WikiLeaks. The server was widely discussed in
the media at the time due to a criminal investigation into why Clinton had
kept it at home, whether it contained classified information from her time as
secretary of state and the fact she had erased tens of thousands of emails
before turning the drives over to investigators.[206] Papadopoulos also
swears he never brought it up to Downer at all, though he told Congress and
the special counsel’s office that he did blurt it out as a bit of gossip to the
Greek foreign minister, for what it is worth.[207]
After WikiLeaks began posting the DNC emails, Downer and FBI
officials pretended to believe what Papadopoulos had said back in April
must have been in reference to the hacked emails released in July,
indicating that he—a member of the Trump team—had special advanced
knowledge of a Russian plot. Downer, rather than the Australian
intelligence services, brought the information to Elizabeth Dibble, then-
chargé d’affaires at the U.S. Embassy in London and former principal
deputy assistant secretary under Clinton in the first Obama term.[208] She
then sent it to the FBI. Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence
Peter Strzok then immediately opened the “Crossfire Hurricane”
investigation at the command of his boss, Deputy Director Andrew
McCabe.
 That this bit of non-specific gossip became the basis for a
counterintelligence investigation of the then-presumed candidate would
certainly seem to indicate they were simply going through the motions of a
legal process. Papadopoulos was a lowest-level staffer on the Trump
campaign, who had no previous relationship with Trump. The FBI must
have known up front that there was no way Russian intelligence services
would have thought for a minute that leaking these claims to him would be
useful in any way. Even though there were no dots to connect, the FBI had a
fake story they could run with.
Special Counsel Durham later complained that they opened their
investigation without having even interviewed the source of the rumor. He
said they did so without reviewing their own databases, asking other
agencies for relevant information or using “any of the standard analytical
tools typically employed by the FBI in evaluating raw intelligence.” Had
they done any of these things, they would have found that none of their
own, or any other Russia experts in the government, had ever heard of any
such relationship between Trump and Russian intelligence, nor did their
surveillance databases show any relevant links between the candidate or his
campaign staff with the Russians.[209]
Durham’s report also related how Strzok traveled to London for a
meeting with Downer to clarify the details of his story. On August 16,
Strzok had a text conversation with someone from the FBI legal attaché
office in London, in which the latter noted their evidence on Papadopoulos
was “thin.” Strzok replied: “I know. It sucks.”[210]
 Trump and his aides “have also insisted that Mr. Papadopoulos was a
low-level figure. But spies frequently target peripheral players as a way to
gain insight and leverage,” the Times reporters speculated.[211] If these
alleged journalists had looked more deeply, they might have seen that it was
more likely the FBI and MI6 who had set up the low-level Papadopoulos in
the first place. As his own lawyer said, Mifsud worked for Western
intelligence agencies,[212] not the Russians.[213] A German lawyer named
Stephan Roh, who had employed Mifsud as a consultant, wrote that he has
“only one master: the Western Political, Diplomatic, and Intelligence World,
his only home, of which he is still deeply dependent.”[214] Mifsud has
been photographed with then-British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson[215]
and veteran diplomat Claire Smith, a top UK intelligence official. Indeed,
Mifsud taught a course with Smith for Italian military and law-enforcement
personnel[216] at the same Link Campus where he met Papadopoulos.[217]
Mifsud was also on a panel with former CIA officer Michael Hurley,
former U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter and former commander of the
International Counterterrorism Operations Group for MI6, Richard Barrett,
in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in May 2017—months after he had been identified
by Papadopoulos to the FBI and long after they had publicly accused him of
being a Russian agent. A reporter for the Washington Times “examined Mr.
Mifsud’s extensive resume and frequent travels, revealing a skilled
networker far more wedded to the West than the East.” He found pictures
and news clips showing Mifsud palling around not with Russian
intelligence, but “NATO military personnel, retired American and British
intelligence officers, French officials at the Elysee Palace and State
Department diplomats on Capitol Hill.” The reporter noted that Rep. Devin
Nunes had said Mifsud “is a former diplomat with the Malta government.
He lived in Italy. He worked and taught FBI, trained FBI officials and
worked with FBI officials.”[218]
Mifsud was working with a man named Nawaf Obaid from the
Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, who also got Mifsud a contract to
work with CNN’s Freedom Project at Link Campus in Rome in the first
place.[219]
Either Mifsud was a Russian spy who infiltrated all of these
organizations and gained immediate access to the former secretary of
defense and then-British foreign minister, but nobody noticed or cared in
the midst of a massive anti-Russia panic, or he never worked for the
Russians at all and was instead helping U.S. and British agents to frame an
American citizen. The former explanation is ridiculous. The latter makes
more sense.
The Mueller report did not demonstrate that Mifsud was a Russian
agent or that he had any ability to know what the Russians knew about
anything.[220] Mifsud also set up a meeting between Papadopoulos and a
Russian woman named Olga Polonskaya, whom Mifsud falsely represented
as Vladimir Putin’s niece, and who he said could help arrange a meeting
between Trump and the Russian president. Mifsud also connected
Papadopoulos with Ivan Timofeev, who worked for the Russian Valdai
Discussion Club, to try to set up a meeting between the campaign and the
Russian government. After Timofeev offered to do so, the young
entrapment mark insisted only on an above-board, official meeting between
the campaign and equivalent-level figures on the Russian side. Of course, it
never happened; it was seemingly just bait, and Papadopoulos, at least in
this instance, was too smart to take it.[221]
This would seem to discredit claims that there were any lines of
“collusion” or “cooperation” between the campaign and the Russians if they
would need to arrange a meeting through a lower-level staffer like
Papadopoulos. Further, there is no indication the Mueller team ever
believed obtaining the Clinton emails was Papadopoulos’s objective in
trying to make these connections, or that he had any other illegitimate
purpose besides maybe building his own resume. This was his job. He had
succeeded in arranging a meeting between Trump and Egyptian dictator
Fattah al-Sisi and was also attempting to set up meetings with Greek,
British and Japanese officials.[222] The email issue only came up later.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy concluded, “Downer’s
report enabled the Obama administration to cover an investigative theory it
was already pursuing with a report from a friendly foreign government, as if
that report had triggered the Trump-Russia investigation.” Of course, “In
order to pull that off, however, it was necessary to distort what
Papadopoulos had told Downer.”[223]
Setting up a separate reason for the investigation makes sense,
especially if the original surveillance that triggered it was illegal. American
cops do it all the time, a practice called “parallel construction.”[224] As
Special Counsel Durham reported, the FBI seemed to be unreasonably
quick to launch a full-scale investigation into whether people associated
with the campaign were “witting of and/or coordinating activities with the
Government of Russia” based on the Papadopoulos information without any
further vetting or analysis.
Durham wrote in his report that the rules mandate a much more careful
and measured approach to such investigations, and that the FBI agents
clearly broke them by launching such a major investigation on such a thin,
“unevaluated” pretext, when, if they had gone by the book, it would have
never gotten past the preliminary stage.
And if they had been seeking the truth instead of a narrative, might
they not have consulted Russia specialists in their own bureau? Durham
finally asked this question as well. He found that if they had, they would
have learned that Jonathan Moffa, then-Counterintelligence Analysis
Section chief and a former head of the Russian Analysis Unit, had “advised
investigators that he had heard nothing about Trump and Russia” before.
Another unnamed analyst “who had perhaps the most in-depth knowledge
of particularly sensitive Russian intelligence” also “disclosed that she never
saw anything regarding any Trump election campaign conspiracy with the
Russians,” including by anyone on his staff.
Further, Durham reported that former DNI Clapper, former CIA
Director Brennan, former NSA Director Mike Rogers, former
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland and CIA
Deputy Director David S. Cohen all told the FBI they had seen no evidence
of collusion between Trump or his associates, other than Nuland’s receipt of
a summary of the Steele dossier in July 2016. Cohen told him if the CIA
had seen any such evidence, they would have sent it to the FBI in the form
of a criminal referral, and said that had not happened.[225] Of course, they
either remained silent or lied that it was all true during the three-year hoax.
According to Papadopoulos,[226] after his colleagues at the London
Centre of International Law Practice (LCLIP) introduced him to the
mysterious professor Mifsud in Rome—at an event at a Western spy
training school—Mifsud offered to help him arrange a meeting between
Trump and Putin. The next week Papadopoulos’s boss at LCLIP, Nagi Idris,
insisted he meet Mifsud and Putin’s supposed niece Olga Polonskaya for
drinks.[227] She, or someone posing as the same character, then started
writing emails stringing him along on promises to arrange contacts with
Russian officials as a step toward a meeting between Trump and Putin,
which never took place. Mifsud then proposed one more meeting on April
26, 2016, where Papadopoulos says Mifsud almost immediately told him
Russia had “Hillary Clinton’s emails.” Papadopoulos insists the implication
was about the 30,000 missing emails deleted from the former secretary of
state’s private server. The emails, which have still never seen the light of
day, were under investigation by the FBI, and were a huge media
controversy at the time, making his inference perfectly reasonable.[228]
Mifsud then disappeared for years, evidently so he could not be put in the
awkward position of having to proclaim his innocence, which would ruin
the lie he had helped to tell in the first place.
It is possible that Papadopoulos made up what Mifsud supposedly said
about emails. He admitted he lied to the Trump campaign about meeting the
Russian ambassador to the UK after Mifsud claimed he could help arrange
a meeting. His stories about his London colleagues setting him up to meet
Mifsud for this nefarious purpose, and another about an American
businessman handing him $10,000 cash, do not seem to hold up either. The
woman he accused of sending him to Rome in his book—as well as during
his interview with journalist Michael Tracey—credibly denied it, and he did
not name her at all in his congressional testimony, only his boss Idris.[229]
The U.S. businessman showed the Post there was a simpler, more credible
explanation for the money transfer.[230] Before disappearing for two years,
Mifsud adamantly denied being a Russian agent or telling Papadopoulos
anything about Russian “dirt” on Clinton, insisting: “This is nonsense.
Friendship is friendship but Papadopoulos doesn’t tell the truth. The only
thing I did was to facilitate contacts between official and unofficial sources
to resolve a crisis.” This was his job, he said. “It is usual business
everywhere. I put think tanks in contact, groups of experts with other
groups of experts.” He noted that he was a member of the European
Council on Foreign Relations, and added, “And you know which is the only
foundation I am member of? The Clinton Foundation. Between you and me,
my thinking is left-leaning.”
Regarding the emails, he said, “I don’t know. I strongly deny any
discussion of mine about secrets concerning Hillary Clinton. I swear it on
my daughter.” Further, he credibly denied being any kind of Kremlin agent.
“I don’t know anyone belonging to the Russian government: the only
Russian I know is Ivan Timofeev, director of the think tank Russian
International Affairs Council. But this is meaningless.”
As for the pretty, young Ms. Polonskaya, Mifsud said that she was just
a student, her identity as Putin’s niece was “totally an invention,” though he
did not say who invented that story about her. “[S]he had nothing to do with
the Kremlin or with the secret service.”[231]
Whether it was Mifsud, Papadopoulos or Downer embellishing the
story, the FBI knew there were no Russians, there were no emails and that
neither of these two had anything to do with collusion between the Trump
campaign and Russia to rig the 2016 election.
Papadopoulos theorizes that the Australian’s interest in him was also
artificial. He says that when he arrived at the meeting, Amb. Downer was
immediately aggressive, essentially interrogating him on his role in the
Eastern Mediterranean energy business. They had one drink and that was it.
He swore to Congress and insisted to Tracey that no discussion of Russia or
any Clinton-related emails ever came up.[232]
Essentially, Papadopoulos’s story is that Mifsud tried to plant this
information on him, but when Downer tried to get it out of him on the other
side, he never said a word about it since Downer was such a jerk and the
meeting was so short. This would make sense if one were to speculate that
the feds set up Papadopoulos, and that Downer was told to try to get him to
say something incriminating. Downer then apparently pretended he got a
damning statement out of the Trump aide after the email hack-and-leak
story broke, retconning events to fit the new facts.
Papadopoulos was then prosecuted for lying to the FBI when all he did
was give the wrong date for the first time he met Mifsud, which made no
difference in the story either way. He said that during his interrogation, FBI
agents desperately tried to get him to say he had told anyone on the Trump
campaign about Mifsud’s story, which he denied and still denies he ever
did.
That is why Papadopoulos said he lied about the date. In a panic, he
pretended the meetings must have occurred before he joined the campaign
to avoid incriminating Trump or other members of the campaign, who were
not involved in the Mifsud meeting and were never told about the supposed
Clinton “dirt” in any case.[233] Special Counsel Mueller’s investigation
found that “[n]o documentary evidence, and nothing in the email accounts
or other communications facilities reviewed by the Office, shows that
Papadopoulos shared this information with the Campaign.”[234]
This whole sordid episode was almost certainly about framing up a
pretext to investigate the Trump campaign for conspiracy with the Kremlin.
When they threatened him with 20 years in the penitentiary for deleting his
Facebook account—what federal prosecutors called “obstruction of
justice”—Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to the lesser charge and did his 12
days in prison instead.[235]
In early September 2016, an FBI informant named Stefan Halper
invited Papadopoulos to London on a pretext—a well-paid gig to write a
paper on Mediterranean natural gas that was never used. While there,
Halper and his suspicious assistant, Azra Turk, who the Times and Durham
report eventually confirmed was also an FBI informant,[236] tried to
persuade Papadopoulos to talk about Russian hacking of Democratic Party
emails. Papadopoulos told him it was not true.[237] The Times later found
that Halper was acting as an FBI informant in doing so.[238] Though the
Durham report does not name him, calling him “CHS-1” (confidential
human source), it does quote their secretly recorded conversations at length,
including an exchange in which Papadopoulos insists three different times
that the campaign would never even consider working with Russia because
that would be “treason,” “compromise national security” and “set a very
bad precedent.” Papadopoulos told Halper, “No one’s looking to obviously
get into trouble like that and, you know, as far as I understand . . . no one’s
collaborating, there’s been no collusion and it’s going to remain that
way.”[239]
Special Counsel Durham later added that after Halper played his
undercover audio and video of Papadopoulos for his friends in British
intelligence, they mocked him and soon began to refuse to cooperate with
the scam. One of the Brits told the FBI assistant legal attaché, “For
[expletive] sake, man. You went through a lot of trouble to get him to say
nothing.” According to the attaché, “the Brits finally had enough,” and after
another request for assistance a UK intelligence officer “basically said there
was no [expletive] way in hell they were going to do it.”[240]
But in Washington, according to Durham, “the FBI chose to discount
the information and assessed it to mean the opposite of what was explicitly
said.”[241] Government agents wrote that Papadopoulos must have
“rehearsed” his “weird,” “rote,” “canned” responses, “notwithstanding,”
Durham said, “the lack of any actual evidence to support such a
conclusion.” Durham’s investigators found no such indication of deceit
when they later listened to the same recordings. The FBI could have
interviewed Papadopoulos to resolve the question but chose not to until
January 27, 2017, six months after opening the investigation based on
rumors about him, and seven days after Trump was sworn in.
Again, as Durham emphasized, these candid statements by
Papadopoulos exonerating the Trump campaign were secretly recorded
more than a month before the FBI had submitted their first FISA warrant
application and all of the bosses, including Director Comey, were in the
loop.[242]
It is even worse. The Durham investigation revealed that the FBI
recruited a second informant, a “longtime acquaintance” of Papadopoulos,
who recorded 23 separate conversations with him. Durham wrote that
between October 23, 2016, and May 6, 2017, that informant “challenged
Papadopoulos with approximately 200 prompts or baited statements which
elicited approximately 174 clearly exculpatory statements from
Papadopoulos.” Papadopoulos told this second informant repeatedly that no
one on the Trump campaign was involved in any scheme with Russia to
pilfer the Democrats’ emails because to do so would be completely
“illegal,” even “psychotic,” risking the virtual “suicide” of “50 years” in
federal prison, and told Halper such activity would be “espionage” and
“treason.” None of this information was included in the FBI’s FISA warrant
applications against the Trump campaign, even though they had presumably
sworn to tell “the whole truth” to the court. If a civilian lies to an FBI agent,
he is charged with felonies as though it were sworn perjury. But they can lie
right to the judges’ faces, and it is all in a day’s work.
There was never any indication that Papadopoulos intended the
meetings between the campaign and the Russians to be clandestine or ill-
motivated. Even the Times did not lean too heavily on that part of the story.
[243]
Halper also met with Trump campaign co-chair Sam Clovis, “offering
to provide foreign-policy expertise to the Trump effort,” according to the
Post. Interestingly, sources told the Post that Russia did not come up in
those conversations.[244] Perhaps the problem was that Clovis was a bit too
difficult to entrap. It was revealed by the Durham investigation that, in fact,
Halper did bring up Russia, but got nowhere with Clovis, who immediately
dismissed the topic with an assurance that there was no Russian interference
in the election, much less some conspiracy between them. They lied by
omission to the FISA court about this as well, never mentioning this
exculpatory interaction with Clovis in their warrant applications.[245]
There was another prominent lie: that Halper, while on one hand was
merely an informant, not a “spy” as the hyperbolic Trump insisted, was also
a super deep-cover intelligence officer and naming him could compromise
national security.[246] The truth is that Halper was just a washed-up
government contractor who had been publicly identified doing dirty tricks
for major players and writing overpriced “studies” for the Pentagon for
decades.[247] In 1980, he worked for the CIA and Ronald Reagan to steal
materials from President Jimmy Carter’s reelection campaign in an
operation run by then-vice presidential candidate and former CIA Director
George H.W. Bush.[248] Around Washington and London he was well-
known as “the Walrus” due to his incredibly large frame. Outing Halper did
not compromise national security; it just showed U.S. police and spy
agencies were playing dirty.
 It is revealing that throughout this entire time, though the official
investigation began at the end of July, the FBI never came to major-party
nominee, President-elect or President Trump to give him a protective
counterintelligence “defensive briefing” to warn him that Papadopoulos,
Page or anyone else on his team had been compromised by the Russians.
Would that not be their duty? Instead, it was a contest to see if they could
frame Trump along with his staff.[249] Durham later explained that as soon
as they launched the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, they immediately
opened sub-investigations into Papadopoulos, Page, Manafort and Flynn.
He said that “[n]o defensive briefing was provided to Trump or anyone in
the campaign concerning the information” provided by Alexander Downer,
“either prior to or after these investigations were opened. Instead, the FBI
began working on requests for the use of FISA authorities against Page and
Papadopoulos.”[250]
Despite this entire framed-up narrative, the FBI quickly dropped
Papadopoulos in favor of Carter Page as the predicate for their
counterintelligence investigation, relying on claims in the Steele dossier to
get a FISA warrant to continue to surveil Page and others on the Trump
campaign in October 2016. Evidently the FBI still thought the dossier’s
unconfirmed thirdhand claims were more credible for the FISA judges than
the story they had concocted around poor Papadopoulos. When asked later
why they investigated Page instead, then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew
McCabe told Congress, “We thought Papadopoulos’ comment didn’t
particularly indicate that he was the person that had—that was interacting
with the Russians.”[251]
 As journalist Aaron Maté noted, the feds only publicly debuted this
version of the story at the end of 2017,[252] after it was revealed that the
Clinton campaign’s law firm Perkins Coie had hired opposition research
company Fusion GPS to write the Steele dossier.[253] This was fully a year
and a half after the FBI had decided there was not one thing in the
Papadopoulos story worth putting in their FISA warrant application. The
FBI and the Times did not write that ironically; this whole investigation
started from a funny story that the feds themselves say amounted to nothing
on top of a phony dossier cooked up by the Clinton campaign. Instead, they
tried to make it sound like Mifsud really was a Russian agent and
Papadopoulos was colluding with him, claiming the latter was a “tantalizing
target for a Russian influence operation.”[254] The entire mainstream
media naturally bought it as another major data point in their conspiracy
theory. The fact that a law firm hired by the Clinton campaign was behind
the dossier was washed from the news cycle by the exciting new story about
the origin of the investigation.

Framing Carter Page

Based on the made-up nonsense in the Steele dossier, campaign adviser

Carter Page was alleged to be a go-between handling Trump for Putin. In
his dossier, Steele pushed the preposterous lie that Page had made a deal
with Rosneft CEO Igor Sechin and Russian National Security Council
official Igor Divyekin to collect brokerage fees worth approximately $750
million[255] on the transfer of a 19 percent ownership stake in the giant
Russian government-owned oil firm worth tens of billions of dollars, if only
he would seize control of American foreign policy and lift all Russian
sanctions for them. That such nonsense was included in the dossier should
have been all anyone needed to know to understand that the report had no
credibility. As journalist Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, said, to the
annoyance of his colleagues at the Washington Post, it was a “garbage
document.”[256] We later found out from the Durham investigation that the
Post’s sources in Moscow immediately and categorically shot down the
idea of Page’s access to, or proposed deal with Sechin as “[expletive]” and
“impossible” on July 29, 2016, two days before Crossfire was officially
launched.[257]
Similarly, undercover FBI informant Stefan Halper made repeated
contacts with Page, who also adamantly denied any knowledge of nefarious
Russian activities. At a meeting on August 20, 2016, notably one month
before the Crossfire investigation supposedly received the Steele dossier
reports from the New York office on September 19, Page also told Halper
that he had never spoken to Manafort, and that he was “never from the
beginning a Manafort fan,” severely undermining accusations in the Steele
dossier that the two were working together to control Trump for Moscow.
The FBI conveniently omitted these facts from their FISA warrant
applications.[258]
Durham’s investigation also found that they did not even try to follow
up with email or phone records to verify what Page had told their man
Halper. Perhaps for some reason they did not want to be able to prove what
they must have already known to be true. “Had they done so, investigators
would have found that Page had previously sent Manafort one direct email
message and copied him on two other messages, none of which Manafort
appears to have answered.” And they did not try to find out whether Steele,
whom they had already fired for lying to them, was right about the guy he
was falsely accusing: “[T]he FBI [did not] resolve the glaring conflict
between Page’s unequivocal statement regarding Manafort and the critical
assertion in the Steele reports that Page served as one of Manafort’s liaisons
to the Russians.” Durham reported that “during all of his meetings with
CHS-1 [Halper], Page never provided any information, evidence, or
documentation indicating knowledge of any relationship between the
Trump campaign and the Russian government.” This included when Halper
repeatedly brought up questions regarding Papadopoulos in an attempt to
get Page to confirm the rumors the former had supposedly heard from
Mifsud. Page again clearly had nothing to add that indicated cooperation
between the Trump campaign and Russia.[259]
Steven Schrage—a former White House official and deputy assistant
secretary of state in the W. Bush years, former foreign policy adviser to Mitt
Romney and chief of staff for Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts—who
was completing his PhD under Halper at Cambridge, explained the critical
role in the story of a group of “washed-up spies” he calls the “Cambridge
Four.”[260] Halper, former MI6 Director Richard Dearlove,[261]
Dearlove’s former agent Christopher Steele and associated academic and
former MI5 agent Christopher Andrews, seemed to work together to set
major parts of the plot in motion, one in which their targeting of Page was
simply a matter of happenstance. Schrage had invited Page to represent the
Trump campaign at a conference in Cambridge, where Halper at first paid
him no mind and even made rude remarks about him behind his back. But
then, after Dearlove arrived and spoke with Halper—his “longtime
collaborator,” according to Schrage—the American turned around and
began to try to befriend Page instead. “Suddenly, [Halper] seemed
desperately interested in isolating, cornering, and ingratiating himself to
Page and promoting himself to the Trump campaign,” Schrage wrote.
“Almost immediately after that, the sparks of international intelligence
interest surrounding Trump-Russia connections caught fire. Seven days
after the conference, Steele provided a new report for the Clinton
Campaign. In it, for the first time, Steele made Page central to his Trump-
Russia conspiracies.”[262] Steele’s main source, Danchenko, later told the
FBI he got Page’s name from Halper.[263]
It turned out in the end, according to Justice Department Inspector
General Michael Horowitz, Page was actually a “candid” and loyal CIA
asset—an “operational contact”—who always debriefed the agency after
meeting with any Russian government officials or powerful businessmen,
and the CIA had told the FBI in writing that his agency contact had given a
“positive assessment” of his “candor.” In short, Page was a patriot and no
traitor at all. And the FBI knew it all along. On Page’s loyalty, Horowitz
reported that the Crossfire Hurricane investigators had received a memo
from the CIA detailing its relationship with Page on August 17, 2016. This
included the fact that “Page had been approved as an operational contact for
the other agency from 2008 to 2013,” and highlighted “information that
Page had provided to the other agency concerning Page’s prior contacts
with certain Russian intelligence officers.” The American people were led
to believe the opposite for years, that Page was guilty of treason on behalf
of the Kremlin and a major proof of the president’s conspiracy with
America’s deadliest enemy.[264] The IG also found that after the CIA
informed the bureau, “We found no evidence that . . . the Crossfire
Hurricane team requested additional information from the other agency
prior to submission of the first FISA application in order to deconflict on
issues that we believe were relevant to the FISA application.” In other
words, instead of double-checking with the CIA to make certain this
obvious turncoat was not one, the FBI preferred to drop the issue altogether,
which would be odd if the investigators believed Steele’s lies were true.
Even worse, the FBI censored the CIA’s vouching for Page from their
FISA court search warrant application against him, alleging that he was an
agent of the Kremlin in order to keep the investigation going.[265] An FBI
lawyer named Kevin Clinesmith was eventually convicted for this crime,
[266] but sentenced to only probation. FISA court presiding Judge
Rosemary Collier wrote in an opinion that “[t]he FBI’s handling of the
Carter Page applications, as portrayed in the OIG report, was antithetical to
[their] heightened duty of candor.” She continued, “The frequency with
which representations made by FBI personnel turned out to be unsupported
or contradicted by information in their possession, and with which they
withheld information detrimental to their case, calls into question whether
information contained in other FBI applications is reliable.”[267]
Comey confessed on television in front of thousands that he should not
have used FISA against this American citizen based on a bunch of lies.
Referring to IG Horowitz, Comey said, “He’s right, I was wrong,” blaming
his misplaced faith in the process, even though his subordinates’ lies by
omission about Page were at least indirectly ordered by him. This was what
the boss wanted. Instead, his excuse was “real sloppiness” on the part of
everyone but himself.[268]
Horowitz later revealed another criminal omission, finding that
Steele’s primary source, Igor Danchenko, in his interviews with the FBI,
had disputed Steele’s claims that he had said anything about WikiLeaks or
the Trump campaign’s contacts with the Kremlin. The FBI omitted that fact
from their future FISA warrant applications since it showed their source
was a liar. They also withheld from the court that they knew Steele was
sharing his information with the Clinton campaign.[269]
Special Counsel Durham later showed that the FBI’s “Page case agent”
had reasons to doubt the probe before they ever took it to court. For one
example, he cited a text message exchange between that agent and another
FBI employee from September 27, 2016, in which they complained about a
lack of dates, times and other details in Steele’s reporting, and that it
contained nothing confirmed which could not have come from open
sources. The agent added, “What was strange was that [British Intelligence
Services] don’t seem to want to deal with the guy,” to which his colleague
replied, “If he has the sub-source network that he claims to have (and the
reporting suggests), you would think they’d be interested in him.”
Durham’s investigators concluded that “not a single substantive
allegation pulled from the Steele Reports and used in the initial Page FISA
application had been corroborated at the time of the FISA submission—or
indeed, to our knowledge, has ever been corroborated by the FBI.”[270]
 Of course, they had completely knocked it down shortly after. As
Durham showed, once the agents started filing negative reports about the
Steele dossier, the bosses demanded they stop investigating its claims.[271]
And they continued to lie by omission to the FISC. According to Durham,
the FBI and Justice Department include claims from the Steele dossier “in
all four Page FISA applications, including in two applications after Steele’s
primary sub-source (Igor Danchenko) had been identified, interviewed by
the FBI, and was not able to provide corroboration for any of the allegations
he provided to Steele.”[272]
As soon as his name was made public, Page wrote to FBI Director
Comey, volunteering to be interviewed “in the interest of helping them put
these outrageous allegations to rest,” and to address recent “completely
false media reports.” He added, “[F]or the record, I have not met this year
with any sanctioned official in Russia.” Page said he had “interacted with
members of the U.S. intelligence community including the FBI and CIA for
many decades.”
But the FBI did not interview Page for more than six months.[273] In
his report, Durham quoted agents frustrated that “the top-echelon of the
FBI, including Comey and McCabe,” was preventing them from doing their
job. One week before submitting their first FISA application, two FBI
investigators on the Crossfire Hurricane team wrote in text messages that
“[i]t looks like Mgmt doesn’t want us to do an interview, right now.” The
other responded, “[O]f course not, that would make too much sense.” In a
separate conversation, the second agent relayed to a supervisor that the first
had said the bosses had “no appetite to interview Page,” adding, “thats [sic]
stupid.” The supervisor agreed, “yeah- dude i don’t [sic] know why we are
even here.”
On October 17, four days before the FBI submitted their warrant
application to the FISC, Page again met with the undercover FBI informant
Halper and denied meeting with Gazprom’s Sechin, much less making a
$100 million deal with him,[274] and denied having ever even heard of
Russian National Security Council official Igor Divyekin, facts which
agents omitted from their FISA warrant applications.
Durham also thought it was suspicious that the FBI did not take the
obvious step of using non-obtrusive electronic methods to spy on Page. He
even cited “FBI [Office of General Counsel] Unit Chief-1,” who Durham
said “could not understand why investigators working on Crossfire
Hurricane were not seeking authority to use pen registers and trap and trace
devices” to track who he spoke to on the phone.[275]
Nor did they ever talk to the New York case agent on the older Page
investigation, who later told the special counsel looking into Russiagate’s
origins, as the Durham report puts it, “she and others were never overly
concerned about Page being an intelligence officer for the Russians. At no
time during the course of her investigation did NYFO Case Agent-1
consider pursuing a FISA [warrant] on Page.”[276] There is only one
obvious explanation for this. They did not want the voice of reason spoken
because otherwise it might have interfered with their ability to pretend not
to know that Page was innocent, and they needed this pretext. By
monitoring his communications, they would eventually debunk their
friends’ fabrications in a way that would have ruined the lie they were
determined to pursue. As Durham pointed out, they could have even used
Page as a willing informant inside the Trump campaign to help the feds
reveal any traitors, and to better vet the accusations against them.
Before Trump was ever inaugurated, the FBI already knew for a fact
that the entire basis of their pretended investigation was bogus: they had
nothing on Papadopoulos, nothing on Page, and had verified that the Steele
dossier was false.
Once Comey finally allowed agents to interview Page in March 2017
—five months after they got their FISA warrant against him, with its sub-
constitutional burden of proof below probable cause, and two months after
Brennan’s fake “assessment” had been published and Trump inaugurated
under this cloud of treason allegations—he showed up for five voluntary
interviews and “fully cooperated with the FBI, even going so far as to bring
his own Power Point presentation to one of the interviews.” He truthfully
denied ever meeting with Sechin or Divyekin or speaking with Manafort,
[277] just as he had told their informant Halper, information which they
withheld from the FISC judges in their applications.
The FBI even lied to the court that Page would continue to have major
influence in the Trump campaign, despite the fact that he had told Halper he
was quitting and the campaign itself had already disavowed him. “This
assertion was unsupported by actual evidence that such continued
involvement in the campaign was occurring,” Durham noted.[278] And the
FBI agents outright perjured themselves before the FISC, falsely claiming
in their warrant application that in his recorded discussions with Halper,
“Page did not provide any specific details to refute, dispel, or clarify the
media reporting [and] he made vague statements that minimized his
activities.”
The leaders of the Crossfire investigation lied to their own men too.
According to Durham, two agents brought in to write up the second FISA
warrant application for Page complained that neither of them had ever been
told he was a CIA asset. “When Special Agent-1 eventually learned this
information, he stated that he ‘felt like a fool.’”
Regardless of their ignorance of Page’s status as a CIA informant,
Durham goes on to say that both men thought Page was innocent, “a dry
hole.” Comically and tragically, Durham wrote, “Nonetheless, Special
Agent-1 ‘assumed’ that ‘somebody above them’ possessed important
information—unknown to the investigators—that guided the Crossfire
Hurricane decision-making.” That’s what Comey, McCabe, Strzok and the
rest were leading the American people to believe as well. When one of these
agents complained to his supervisor, Deputy Assistant Director Jennifer C.
Boone, about the lack of evidence upon which to proceed, “he was largely
ignored and directed to continue the FISA renewal process.” Another agent
who signed all three FISA warrant renewal applications said that he and
other investigators had “low confidence” that Page was a Russian agent
—“very low” by the third time. But the agent insisted he was only going
along since continuing to surveil Page would eventually prove the man’s
innocence, forget probable cause, a “reasonable belief” or anything about
playing into the larger narrative of the ongoing investigation into the
president’s alleged “collusion” with Russia.[279]
 The 2019 Mueller report eventually conceded that “the investigation
did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its
efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.” Instead, they wrote
that Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich met Page at a
December 9, 2015, dinner and said something about trying to help start a
“dialogue” between “the United States and Russia,” and possibly future
“cooperation” between the two countries. Of course, Page debriefed the
CIA on his contacts with that Russian official as per his usual arrangement.
This is from the Mueller report. If there was anything beyond the face-value
talk of the two nations getting along a bit better, it would be in there. But
that is it. The implications are not vast. They do not exist at all.[280]
Then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein later admitted under
oath that he should never have sought the FISA warrant on Page, claiming
ignorance. He also conceded that by at least the time he wrote a memo
describing the scope of Mueller’s special counsel investigation in August
2017, he already knew there was nothing to the collusion allegation. “We
investigate people who are not necessarily guilty, and so I didn’t have any
presumption that these folks were guilty of anything,” he explained,
pretending that he did not understand at the time that due to all the
intelligence agencies’ and FBI’s leaks, the major media had it that the new
U.S. president was presumed guilty. The fact that his own Justice
Department—led by Republican George W. Bush’s FBI director, Mueller—
was continuing to investigate him heavily implied that they knew
something big already and were building a case against him.[281] As cable
TV news anchors, and high-profile leaders of the liberal Twitter swarm
repeatedly put it over the course of the two-year special counsel
investigation, every leak was a “bombshell.” It is “the beginning of the end
of the Trump presidency,” he will surely be impeached and removed or
forced to resign since “the walls are closing in” on his traitorous plot.[282]
This was just over six months into Trump’s presidency. They went on
pretending to investigate, looking for his criminal conspiracy with the
Kremlin, for 20 more months. They had no predicate for the investigation,
so they just bore false witness against innocent people. Durham complained
that even though “several” investigators believed Page was innocent,
“Nevertheless, despite the surveillance’s lack of productivity, FBI
management directed the Crossfire Hurricane investigators to renew the
Page surveillance three times.”
IG Horowitz dismissed the idea that agents had any “political bias” in
the investigation, but seemed to narrowly define that as a partisan bias
toward one or the other major political party. With Trump, though, the
question was not one of red-blue horseracing but of national security. FBI
agent Strzok and Special Assistant Lisa Page referred to Trump as
“loathsome,” “an idiot” and someone who should lose to Clinton
“100,000,000–0.” Lisa Page had texted Strzok, “[Trump’s] not going to
become president, right? Right?!” He replied, “No. No, he’s not. We’ll stop
it.” Indeed, the day before the Australian information was received at FBI
headquarters, Page sent a text message to Strzok stating, “Have we opened
on him yet? [angry faced emoji].”[283]
The FBI was not mistaken. They were deliberately lying the whole
time. Special Counsel Durham later concluded that before they ever
submitted their first FISA application against Carter Page, Steele had
already admitted to them that he was working for Fusion GPS, which had
also been hired by a law firm working for the Clinton campaign, and that
the candidate herself was aware of his work. “[T]he fact that Steele’s
information was being financed by the DNC and/or the Clinton campaign
was not included in the affidavit’s source description of Steele [to the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC)],” Durham deadpanned. He
added that Page was not only an Agency “operational contact,” but had also
been interviewed by the FBI four times between 2009 and 2015, including
about a failed attempt by Russian intelligence officers to recruit him.[284]
That is how the U.S. government treats a loyal CIA asset. They
deliberately smeared him as an anti-American traitor as an excuse to violate
his constitutional rights, all as part of a plot to frame a major party
presidential candidate for the highest crime of all, treason.

Mike Flynn

In another major Pulitzer Prize-winning story smearing a so-called public

servant,[285] then-National Security Advisor-designate Gen. Michael Flynn
was accused of collusion over a phone call with the Russian ambassador to
Washington, Sergey Kislyak. The conversation was spun as treason for
Russia, but in reality, Flynn made no deals or promises. The FBI told the
Post that Flynn had promised to lift sanctions on Russia upon taking office.
[286] They made the same claims to the White House, and this was used to
force him out of his job for supposedly lying about the interaction to Vice
President Mike Pence.[287]
 Steven Schrage later said that “48 hours before the leak was published,
my former supervisor Halper eerily laid out what was about to happen to
Flynn, something he had no independent reason to know.” He has the audio
of Halper explaining: “I don’t think Flynn’s going to be around long. The
way these things work,” he said, was that “opponents” of the general would
be “looking for ways of exerting pressure. . . . That’s how it builds.” Once
they went after him, Halper predicted Flynn would “blow up and get angry.
He’s really fucked. I don’t [know] where he goes from there. But that is his
reaction. That’s why he’s so unsuitable.”[288]
Just two days later, a week before the inauguration, David Ignatius,
who Schrage says was close to Halper,[289] kicked off the scandal with his
piece “Why did Obama dawdle on Russia’s hacking?” In it, Ignatius wrote
that Flynn had talked to Kislyak on the phone several times on December
29, the same day President Obama expelled Russian diplomats from the
U.S. over their supposed election interference. “What did Flynn say, and did
it undercut the U.S. sanctions?” Ignatius suggestively wondered. Did it
violate the Logan Act, which bans private people from interfering in U.S.
foreign policy? The longtime national security state asset, carrying out this
hit for the FBI and/or CIA still conceded, “If the Trump team’s contacts
helped discourage the Russians from a counter-retaliation, maybe that’s a
good thing. But we ought to know the facts.”[290]
Reporter Greg Miller followed up, claiming Flynn had been caught
red-handed discussing sanctions policy with the Russian ambassador.
Obama administration officials told Miller this was an “inappropriate and
potentially illegal signal to the Kremlin that it could expect a reprieve from
sanctions” after Trump took office.[291]
When the call transcripts were finally released years later, it was shown
that the two had not discussed lifting the sanctions at all.[292] Journalist
Aaron Maté showed how Flynn’s words had been misconstrued, likely
deliberately. Flynn had simply suggested that the Russians should not
respond in a tit-for-tat manner after the Obama administration had expelled
their diplomats, which would unnecessarily escalate matters shortly before
the new administration was inaugurated. This was the designated national
security adviser of the president-elect during his transition, and a former
three-star general and director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He had
every right to speak to the Russian ambassador and crossed no lines in the
conversation.[293]
But the FBI used this call to continue their probe into Flynn. Vice
President Joe Biden suggested the general could be investigated for
violating the Logan Act—a law that is nearly as old as the republic and has
never been successfully prosecuted,[294] as Biden must have known. It was
just another pretext to use the national security state against their political
opponents.
When Maté pushed the Post’s editors on this point, instead of
admitting their sources lied to them and that they had then pushed those lies
on the American public, they laughably claimed diplomatic expulsions
counted as “sanctions” in an entirely separate meaning of that term. When
he showed how they had previously distinguished between the two actions,
they did not answer.[295]
 On January 4, 2017, still weeks before the inauguration, a Department
of Justice memo recommended the “Crossfire Razor” probe into Flynn be
closed since he was considered a “non-viable candidate” for continued
investigation due to a lack of “derogatory information” against him. In
other words, they knew perfectly well that there was nothing incriminating
in the intercepts of Flynn’s calls with the Russian. But executives on “the
7th floor” and FBI agent Peter Strzok intervened to keep the investigation
going,[296] sending texts to another agent insisting it remain open so they
could set up an interview.[297] Strzok then texted his mistress Lisa Page to
celebrate: “That’s amazing” the case was still open, she wrote. “Yeah, our
utter incompetence actually helps us. 20% of the time, I’m guessing,”
Strzok responded.[298] Three years later, the Department of Justice finally
released emails showing that the purpose of the interview was to catch
Flynn in a perjury trap.[299]
Agent Bill Priestap wrote on the 24th, just before the interview, “What
is our goal? Truth/admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or
get him fired?” They hid these documents from his lawyers for years, in
violation of the law.[300] They very carefully gamed out how to fool Flynn
into thinking he was having a normal conversation, as well as their decision
to not show him the transcript as they would normally do in a similar
situation.
As the Post admitted years later, Flynn had no reason to lie, since he
had done nothing wrong, and told the agents that he assumed they had the
audio of the call and could listen to it all for themselves.[301]
 The discussion about the expulsions also completely negated the idea
that the Russians were controlling, blackmailing, extorting or even
influencing the Trump team. Otherwise, the call would have been from
Kislyak to Flynn telling him what to do, rather than Flynn asking for
Russian restraint. But it was not.
Then there was the story about Flynn asking Kislyak to have Russia
veto or delay the Egyptian UN Security Council resolution condemning the
expansion of Israeli Jewish-only colonies on the Palestinians’ West Bank.
But it was Trump’s call to Egyptian dictator Fattah al-Sisi that got the vote
postponed. Soon though, other nations reintroduced the resolution. Flynn
apparently again asked Kislyak to try to delay the vote. The second time,
the ambassador told him no. Russia voted for the resolution.[302]
ABC’s Brian Ross, who was never held accountable for his false story
claiming Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks of 2001,[303] was suspended
for four weeks[304] after falsely reporting that Flynn was prepared to
testify for the Mueller investigation that as a candidate, Trump had
instructed Flynn to contact the Russians.[305] Presumably someone told
him that.
Flynn is a retired general and former DIA director, and though he was
good on Syria,[306] he co-authored a crazy book[307] with neocon
nutball[308] Michael Ledeen[309] and is a war criminal for his role in the
Afghan “surge” of 2009–2012.[310] But he was never part of anything
resembling treason with Russia. Nor did he even lie. As former FBI Deputy
Director Andrew McCabe admitted to Congress in secret, “the two [agents]
who interviewed him didn’t think he was lying.”[311] Strzok had told the
bosses that Flynn “had a sure demeanor, and he was telling the truth or
believed he was—even though he did not remember it all.”[312]
But after the interview, Strzok celebrated in text messages with Lisa
Page, saying he succeeded in his mission since Flynn had misstated some
minor detail of his conversation with Kislyak. Strzok described “the feeling,
nervousness, excitement knowing we had just heard him denying it all.”
Even then, the feds had to lie about Flynn’s alleged mistake. He said he did
not remember whether he ever discussed the UN vote with the Russian
ambassador. After the Post story, they fraudulently changed the FBI 302
form to say that he “stated he did not.”[313] Lisa Page told Strzok that she
was making massive edits to the 302s, while trying to “save [agent Joe
Pientka’s] voice” in them. The originals have never seen the light of day.
Mueller did not even attempt to charge a single person for acting as an
agent of a foreign power without registering under the Foreign Agents
Registration Act (FARA).[314] The closest Mueller’s team got to charging
someone with a FARA violation was apparently Papadopoulos for an
improper relationship with Israel for his work with neoconservative
ideologue Douglas Feith[315] at the Hudson Institute.[316]
In December 2017, Flynn was coerced into pleading guilty to lying to
the FBI[317] after they threatened to prosecute his son for alleged FARA
violations, but promised not to if the father took a guilty plea.[318] They
illegally kept the deal about the son secret so other defendants would not
know about it in case they could get him to turn state’s witness.[319]
Federal judge Emmet G. Sullivan denounced Flynn as a traitor who “sold
[his] country out” at a plea deal hearing. Sullivan did not even have the first
clue about the case, claiming Flynn’s alleged work on behalf of
Turkey[320] took place during the Trump administration. He was later
forced to apologize for it in court.[321] The media stars all whooped and
hollered that now the “walls are closing in” on Trump. Soon Flynn would
turn state’s witness and reveal all he knew about their nefarious plot with
the Kremlin.[322] Instead, after it was revealed that lead agent Strzok had
wanted the investigation shut down before he was overruled by superiors,
Flynn withdrew his guilty plea and the Justice Department moved to
dismiss the charges. The U.S. attorney on the case even denounced the
FBI’s “frail and shifting justifications” for attempting to prosecute the
general, but a full three and a half years after they had begun to frame him.
[323] Despite the fact that the attorney general ordered the case dropped,
the judge, Emmet Sullivan, refused to dismiss the charges for months.[324]
After the 2020 election, Trump finally intervened and pardoned Flynn.[325]
In the meantime, the feds nearly drove the general’s son, Michael Flynn Jr.,
to suicide.[326]

Smearing Svetlana

The hoaxers also launched a terrible smear of an innocent Russian-born

scholar, Svetlana Lokhova, accusing her of acting as a honeypot spy who
slept with Gen. Flynn,[327] which was entirely false.[328] Far from being a
Russian spy, Lokhova was working on a book about a previously unknown
group of Soviet agents in the United States in the 1930s.[329] But the
Democrats and federal police think nothing of defaming an innocent
woman and new mother as a whore and a spy if it will help them on the
margin in the news cycle for a day.[330]
The London Sunday Times got the ball rolling with their story by
former MI5 officer Christopher Andrews—one of the “Cambridge Four,”
along with Stefan Halper, Richard Dearlove, the former director of MI6,
and Christopher Steele, identified by Halper’s PhD student, Steven Schrage.
Andrews claimed Flynn was “especially struck” by an unnamed graduate
student—Andrews’s own, it turns out—who, at a 2014 conference at
Cambridge University hosted by Dearlove, had shown Flynn an “erotic
postcard” Stalin had supposedly sent to a young lover. He also claimed that
“Flynn invited the student to accompany him on his next official visit to
Moscow to help with simultaneous translation,” and “continued an—
unclassified—email correspondence with her on Russian history.”[331]
The Wall Street Journal then made a big deal out of the fact that Flynn
did not report meeting her, even though they admitted that another DIA
official said the contact was insignificant enough that he would not have
reported it either.[332] The Guardian’s Luke Harding implied that she must
be a Russian intelligence agent to have access to the files she was using for
her research. They later appended a correction admitting there was nothing
to it.[333] Sen. McCain’s aide David Kramer, a neoconservative from Bill
Kristol’s old Project for a New American Century (PNAC) and George
Soros’s Freedom House, told Congress that he had heard the rumor about
Flynn’s affair with Lokhova from Steele.[334]
Lokhova disputed the story entirely.[335] “I’m not just accused of
being a spy, but I’m also accused of sleeping with all these powerful men,”
she told the Times. “I’m trying to laugh it off, but it’s hugely upsetting.” She
insisted, “I’m an author, not a practitioner of intelligence.” She accused
none other than FBI informant Halper, a close associate of Dearlove and
Andrews, of telling reporters that Flynn had left with her that night, and
sued him for defamation.[336] He certainly told the FBI that. According to
notes by agent Stephen Somma, Halper claimed Lokhova had “latched on”
to the general and had “surprised everyone” when she got in Flynn’s cab
and joined him on the train to London.[337] These were all lies.
Lokhova said that while she had exchanged a few emails with Flynn
and his assistant about her research, Flynn had never referred to himself as
“General Misha,” as Andrews had claimed. She also invited a reporter to
look at pictures which showed she did not sit next to Flynn at the event as
alleged by Andrews, nor was she invited to join him as a translator in
Russia. Most especially, Lokhova insisted, she was not having an affair with
him.[338] The fact that she kept suing until the courts enjoined her from
any further attempts would tend to add credibility to her story.[339] Her
cases were dismissed over statute of limitations problems and other
technicalities, not any lack of truth or damages on Lokhova’s part.[340]
Flynn likewise told the FBI the whole thing was “ridiculous,” and that
he had simply gone back to his hotel.[341]

It Was Brennan All Along

Reportedly, the rumors of Trump’s “illicit” relationship with Russia began

when British GCHQ passed information to the CIA at the end of 2015.[342]
No one has ever gotten to the bottom of what alleged facts the original
investigation was based on.[343] But that was just a cover story for British
involvement. They gave the same story to CNN.[344]
Former CIA Director Brennan also told PBS Frontline that they began
looking at Russian interference, if not Trump’s supposed subordination to
Russia, in late 2015.[345]
Only in February 2024 was it finally revealed by reporters Matt Taibbi,
Michael Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag that it was, in fact, Brennan who
concocted the Russiagate hoax in the first place. He had asked the so-called
“Five Eyes” intelligence agencies of the Anglophone countries to help him
“bump” and “reverse target” 26 Trump advisers to entrap them in his
invented crime long before the official Crossfire Hurricane FBI
investigation was ever launched. This was the explanation for why Halper
had set up Page and lied about Flynn, the MI6 agent Mifsud’s
rumormongering to Papadopoulos and the Australian Ambassador
Downer’s lies about the same—all to get the fake federal investigations
started.[346] The reporters based their story on the same set of documents
Rep. Nunes cited in his famous, vindicated memo.[347]
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is a felony statute.[348] If
the law applied to government employees, these men and women would all
go to prison, where they belong.

Brennan’s Source

Brennan spent years as a paid expert guest on MSNBC telling the audience
that he knew for a fact, based on secret evidence he had seen, that the entire
Russiagate story was true. If he was not simply lying, perhaps Brennan was
referring to statements made by mid-ranking Russian Foreign Ministry
official Oleg Smolenkov,[349] who CIA sources later said was their top spy
high up in the Kremlin.[350] He had previously “confirmed” Putin’s role in
ordering the election interference and his life was now supposedly in
danger.[351]
But if Smolenkov really did tell his handlers that, he was selling them a
bill of goods to order. As we have seen, the whole thing was dreamed up by
the opposition in America; not one bit of the story held up on its own. This
allegedly top-secret asset, who had access to Putin himself and “could even
provide images of documents on the Russian leader’s desk,” as sources told
CNN, had supposedly been “exfiltrated” out of the country with the greatest
secrecy,[352] but was living under his own name in the suburbs of
Washington, D.C.[353]

Perkins Coie and the Clinton Plan

Fittingly, as we later learned from the Justice Department inspector general

—as well as related prosecutions and finally the Durham report—on April
1, 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign hired the Perkins Coie law firm, which,
in turn, brought on the computer security outfit CrowdStrike, the same
company that pushed the DNC hacking hoax. They also used a group of
contractors known as the “Georgia Tech Team” to push the Alfa Bank secret
server story,[354] and to harvest Wi-Fi data near Trump Tower in New York
in an attempt to link it to Russia.[355] We later learned the Georgia Tech
experts were in on the phony DNC server hack attribution to the Russian
GU as well.[356] As mentioned, Perkins Coie also hired Glenn Simpson’s
firm Fusion GPS, which paid $160,000[357] to retired British intelligence
officer Christopher Steele, through his company Orbis Business
Intelligence, to create the dossier used by the FBI to continue the
investigation.[358]
A briefing CIA Director Brennan gave Obama in July 2016 is the
clincher. He told the president that Russian intelligence was aware of a plan
by the Clinton campaign to distract from the embarrassing email leaks by
claiming Russia was behind it and that Trump and his campaign were in on
the plot. Brennan told Obama on July 28, days before the official Crossfire
Hurricane investigation was launched, that they had information about what
the Russians had learned from spying on the Clinton campaign. “Cite
alleged approved by Hillary Clinton on July 26 a proposal from one of her
foreign policy advisers to vilify Donald Trump by stirring up a scandal
claiming interference by the Russian security service.”[359] That means
that Obama knew the whole thing was a put-on by the Clinton campaign all
summer long. And whether it was coordinated or not, it means that Brennan
was aware Hillary had followed his lead in pushing the same narrative he
had been building since the end of the previous year. Charlie Savage of the
Times later printed anonymous claims that this must have been Russian
disinformation,[360] but the CIA did not assess so at the time.[361] In fact,
in September 2016, the CIA assistant director for counterintelligence even
forwarded a criminal referral on Clinton to the Justice Department for an
“exchange . . . discussing U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s
approval of a plan concerning U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump
and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections as a means of distracting the
public from her use of a private email server.”[362]
Nothing was done with this referral. The director of America’s national
police force, James Comey, later blatantly committed a serious felony on
TV, perjuring himself by claiming under oath to Congress that the letter
from the CIA’s counterintelligence division to him and his deputy about
Clinton framing her opponent for treason “doesn’t ring any bells with me,”
and in fact did not even “sound familiar.”[363]
The Durham report later confirmed that the allegation about what he
called the “Clinton Plan intelligence” was briefed to Obama, Biden and
Comey by Brennan at an Oval Office meeting on August 3. Durham said he
confirmed that the most senior analysts on the Crossfire Hurricane team
were notified about it on August 22.
Durham also wrote that the Clinton Plan intelligence continued to be
included in reports for the highest levels of the intelligence community. In
late September, a briefing prepared for Comey and Clapper included the
information. He noted, “The Office did not identify any further actions that
the CIA or FBI took in response to this intelligence product as it related to
the Clinton Plan intelligence.” Especially, say, leak it to the Washington
Post.
Durham said that it was crucial to understand the role the Clinton Plan
intelligence played in the FBI agents’ decision-making during the Crossfire
investigation since it was criminal for the campaign to funnel false
information to the FBI, and, secondly, because it obviously raised questions
about the origin and veracity of all of the information flooding into the FBI
supposedly showing a treasonous relationship between Trump and Russia in
the summer of 2016. Durham said this ignored evidence was “arguably
highly relevant and exculpatory,” because taken in context the rest of the
Russiagate allegations, it might have become clear it was “part of a political
effort to smear a political opponent and to use the resources of the federal
government’s law enforcement and intelligence agencies in support of a
political objective.”
Thirdly, Durham said, due to the fact the intelligence came secondhand
from their spying on the Russians, they needed to know whether it was true.
However, he found they had taken no action at all to verify the claims—
even though they had evidently been deemed crucial for Brennan to pass on
the information to President Obama, DNI Clapper and FBI Director Comey
himself, and for the CIA’s legal department to have sent over a criminal
referral on the matter to Comey and Strzok. Nor had investigators
considered the implications of the Clinton Plan intelligence for the
investigation into Trump and his team.
Durham also said this information was kept from the judges on the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
Durham’s final report went pretty hard against the FBI’s double
standard in this case. They would skip any step, include any trumped-up
accusation, exclude any contradictory evidence, and in the end, even lie to
the FISC judges’ faces to justify their investigation into Trump, while, in
their own words, “tippy-toeing” and being “super more careful” with
Clinton since they presumed she would be the next president.[364] As
examples, Durham cited the way the FBI went easy on Clinton when they
questioned her about her private email server, gave defensive briefings to
the Clinton campaign when foreign nationals attempted to donate to it, and
the way they were ordered to “cease and desist” from an investigation once
a source succeeded in making an illegal donation to the Clinton Foundation.
The agent told the informant thereafter “to stay away from all events
relating to Clinton’s campaign.” These decisions essentially closed any
investigation into the foundation.[365]
Clinton told Durham’s team that the story about the Clinton Plan to
frame Trump was also “Russian disinformation.”[366] That seems unlikely,
since that very week her campaign manager accused Russia of hacking the
DNC for the purposes of helping Trump win the election.[367] Text
messages between Clinton advisers show they were expecting the news
about the FBI’s investigation of the DNC server hack, “which would be
consistent with, and a means of furthering, the purported plan,” as Durham
noted. Same for the full-court press by Fusion GPS at that time to push
Steele dossier claims and other related lies.
Humorously, the Durham report describes either one hell of an act or
some genuine shock on the part of the original supervisory special agent on
the Crossfire case, Josh Campbell, when he was finally shown the CIA’s
criminal referral to the FBI based on the Clinton Plan intelligence.
Campbell “became visibly upset and emotional, left the interview room
with his counsel, and subsequently returned to state emphatically that he
had never been apprised of the Clinton Plan intelligence and had never seen
the aforementioned Referral Memo.” When they told him it needed further
confirmation, he “responded firmly that regardless of whether its contents
were true, he should have been informed of it.”[368]
FBI General Counsel James A. Baker (no relation to the former
secretary of state) also told Durham that he was never informed of the
Clinton Plan intelligence. He acknowledged the significance of the
reporting and “explained that had he known of it during the Crossfire
Hurricane investigation, he would have viewed [the accusations] in a
different and much more skeptical light,” including the Steele information.
[369]

Danchenko and Dolan (and Hill)

It turns out the British-American Russia hand Fiona Hill, then working at
the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., was the one who introduced
Christopher Steele and Democratic Party-connected[370] public relations
executive Charles Dolan Jr.—a former Clinton-era State Department
official[371] who had “long-standing ties to Hillary Clinton,” as the
Washington Post finally admitted at the end of 2021[372]—to Brookings
analyst Igor Danchenko, the primary source of the made-up claims Steele
published in his dossier. That included allegations Dolan had passed on to
Danchenko, which he and the media falsely blamed on New York
businessman Sergei Millian.[373] Danchenko admitted to the FBI that what
he told Steele was just “word of mouth and hearsay” and “conversation[s]
that he had with friends over beers.” The pee-tape blackmail story? He had
heard a friend say that “in jest.”[374] In fact, Durham later wrote that Dolan
was likely the origin of that particular rumor, as well as other false
information relating to Paul Manafort in the Steele dossier. The FBI never
questioned him for the Crossfire Hurricane investigation due to a “higher
level decision” by FBI executives—even though agents were never
“provided a specific rationale for the denial of the case opening.”[375]
Durham later charged but failed to convict Danchenko for denying his
relationship with Dolan and falsely naming Millian as a source.[376] It
turns out that Dolan was a former paid consultant for the Russian
Federation when he worked for the firm Ketchum Inc., and worked closely
with Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s confidant and spokesman, as well as Sergey
Kislyak, the Russian ambassador to the United States, who, as mentioned,
was falsely accused of being Gen. Mike Flynn’s illicit connection to Russia.
Dolan even claimed to have met former Russian President Dimitry
Medvedev several times. Danchenko had lived in the U.S. for years. Dolan
himself—again, a Democratic Party-connected PR man—was the closest
thing to a “Kremlin insider” source who provided information to Steele. Of
course, the public was not told this until four full years later.[377]
Department of Justice IG Horowitz later complained that the Carter Page
FISA warrant was also based on Danchenko’s lie that Millian was the
source for many of the most important claims in the dossier.[378] The
Durham investigation found that “despite the obvious infirmities in
Danchenko’s narrative, the information allegedly provided by Millian
remained in the Page FISA applications through the final renewal in June
2017.”[379]
In fact, if there was any collusion with Russia, it may have been from
the other direction. Both Horowitz and Durham raised the possibility in
their reports that it was Danchenko who was acting as an agent of the
Russian Federation and spreading disinformation during the 2016 election.
He had been investigated as a potential spy in 2009–2011. According to
Durham, the only reason the FBI closed that inquiry was that they
mistakenly believed he had moved back to Russia. It also turns out that at
the very beginning of the investigation, agents surmised the Russians
already knew about Steele’s operation and had compromised it, feeding him
misinformation, and that when those agents brought this to their superiors,
they were ordered to stop writing reports about it.[380]
Worst-case scenario, this would mean the Clinton campaign was
colluding with Russia to create disinformation about Trump colluding with
Russia in order to influence the election. Without engaging in that
speculation, it is worth pointing out that if the FBI had been honest about
what they knew about Danchenko, they could never have justified taking
information from the Steele dossier to the FISC or the American people. As
Durham wrote, the FBI did not even close their previous counterintelligence
investigation of Danchenko before hiring him as an informant, and did not
tell the Justice Department lawyers drafting the Page FISA warrant requests
about it. “As a result, the FISC was never advised of information that very
well may have affected the FISC’s view of Steele’s primary sub-source’s
(and Steele’s) reliability and trustworthiness.”
They were defrauding their own Justice Department lawyers, the FISC
and the American people, all to frame the then-Republican Party nominee
for president.[381]

Alfa Bank
Another major false accusation of the Russiagate scam was the story about
a server belonging to Trump secretly communicating with Russian
intelligence by way of the Alfa Bank’s computers in Moscow—perhaps, we
were meant to believe, the backchannel by which the Russians controlled
their minions. But it was another hoax perpetrated by Perkins Coie. Their
partner Michael Sussmann brought these lies straight to FBI General
Counsel James Baker, and also to “another government agency” (CIA),
[382] and falsely claimed he was not representing any other interest when
he did so. That a jury later acquitted him for lying does not change the fact
of his guilt.[383] FBI agents testified at Sussmann’s trial that they debunked
the claims within one day.[384] Campaign manager Robby Mook later
admitted under oath that Clinton personally approved the plan to leak the
story to the press.[385] The way that Hillary’s Twitter account would
immediately promote these stories was an obvious clue for doubters at the
time that these stories were coming from the campaign itself.[386]
Though the FBI did not take the bait on that one, Slate’s Franklin Foer
did, and passed it on to his readers as a real story about the Republican
nominee’s treason.[387] Dexter Filkins of The New Yorker disgraced
himself the same way.[388]
In the end, the observed web traffic supposedly connecting the
campaign to Russian intelligence was really a Trump Hotels spam bot
operated by a third-party vendor.[389] The FBI threw cold water on the
story in the Times on October 31.[390] Someone at the bureau had made the
strange decision to let actual computer specialists examine the claims
instead of assigning the more biased agents from the Crossfire
investigation. Ironically, Mueller later reported that here in the real world,
not only was there no connection, but Putin had complained to the head of
Alfa Bank that he had no good contacts with President-elect Trump during
the transition period in the winter of 2016.[391]
As former Times reporter Jeff Gerth wrote, “Hundreds of emails were
exchanged between Fusion employees and reporters for such outlets as
ABC, the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo, the Washington Post, Slate, Reuters,
and the Times during the last months of the campaign” in an effort to push
the Steele dossier and Alfa Bank story.[392] Sussmann was billing the
Clinton campaign for it all too.[393] It was the “big lie” effect—and it
worked. Emails subpoenaed by the Durham investigation also showed they
knew they were lying. The job was to try to establish any hint of contact
between these servers, close enough that it might fool some IT
professionals. The Georgia Tech team, a group of supposed experts from
Georgia Tech University led by government cyber contractor and Sussman
associate Rodney Joffe was hired to find a technical reason for the FBI to
begin an investigation. Later, Durham revealed that one of the Georgia Tech
researchers wrote to another: “I[f] . . . [Joffe] can take the *inference* we
gain through this team exercise then work to develop [it,] even an inference
may be worthwhile” [asterisks in original]. The researcher added, “It’s just
not the case that you can rest assured that Hillary’s opposition research and
whatever professional gov[ernments] and investigative journalists are also
digging will come up with the same things.” According to the Sussmann
indictment, “on or about that same day,” Joffe clarified to the researchers
that an inference would be just fine. “Being able to provide evidence of
*anything* that shows an attempt to behave badly in relation to this, the
VIPs would be happy. They’re looking for a true story that could be used as
the basis for closer examination” [asterisks in original].[394] Later, one of
the researchers wrote in a group email to the team that he was starting to
have doubts about the job they had taken: “Let’s for a moment think of the
best case scenario, where we are able to show (somehow) that DNS
communication exists between Trump and R[ussia]. How do we plan to
defend against the criticism that this is not spoofed traffic we are
observing?” He worried that “unless we get combine netflow and DNS
traffic collected at critical points between suspect organizations, we cannot
technically make any claims that would fly public scrutiny.” The researcher
concluded, “The only thing that drives us at this point is that we just do not
like [Trump]. This will not fly in eyes of public scrutiny. Folks, I am afraid
we have tunnel vision. Time to regroup?”[395]
Joffe also noted in an email that he knew the Alfa Bank connection was
a “red herring” from a “legitimate valid company.”[396] Still, they wrote up
a propagandistic “white paper” supposedly proving the connection for
Sussmann to give to the feds, and for Glenn Simpson and Fusion GPS to
send out to the media.
Before sending his lawyer off to go lie to the FBI, Joffe asked his
researchers if they were sure their lies would pass a cursory inspection—
were they at least “plausible”? Researcher Manos Antonakakis responded
that “[a] DNS expert would poke several holes to this hypothesis (primarily
around visibility, about which very smartly you do not talk about). That
being said, do not think even the top security (non-DNS) researchers can
refute your statements. Nice!”[397]
Sussmann’s hired researchers did not fool the FBI tech crews.
However, the bosses of the counterintelligence division still insisted on
opening up a full-scale investigation into these claims based out of Chicago.
Though FBI leaders refused to tell investigators where they obtained the
accusations, their second round of expert opinion, based on records from
the American server companies and an internal investigation at Alfa Bank,
finally killed the story inside the FBI.[398] But even their disavowal in the
Times did little to dampen the enthusiasm of the rest of the major media,
which repeated different takes on the story hundreds of times for the next
two and a half years anyway.[399]
Durham later wrote that Joffe had been promised an important job in
the new administration.[400]

Yota Phones

The Yota phones story was an original part of the hoax, but the FBI had
dismissed it so quickly it never became part of the public narrative. The
story claimed a Russian brand smartphone, the Yota phone, had been shown
to have been near Trump Tower, Trump’s Manhattan apartment and the
White House, supposedly revealing covert contacts between the campaign
and Russian intelligence services.
Like the Alfa Bank data, Sussmann took the Yota phone story to the
CIA as well as the FBI, who both quickly debunked it, the CIA concluding
that the data was not “technically plausible,” could not “withstand
scrutiny,” “contained gaps,” “conflicted with [itself]” and was “user created
and not machine/tool generated.”[401] Sussmann also lied to the FBI that
he was not working on behalf of any client when he did so, even though he
again billed the Clinton campaign for every minute spent on the project.
[402] Again, the FBI knew this was not true, and another hoax perpetrated
by the Clinton campaign’s law firm, all along.
The same group pushed a false Russian metadata story as well. The
Durham report says that the researchers hired by Perkins Coie continued to
mine internet metadata searching for links between the new Trump
administration and Russia until at least mid-2018.[403]

25th Amendment

Trump fired Comey in May 2017. In retaliation, the leaders of the

Department of Justice launched a counterintelligence investigation against
Trump to find out if the Russians made him do it to obstruct the
Department’s very above-board investigation into whether the campaign
and the Kremlin fixed the election together, considered sending Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein into the White House wearing a wire to
try to implicate the new president and a plan to invoke Section 4 of the 25th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and get the cabinet to remove him
from power under the theory that he was “unable to discharge” the duties of
his office, due to being compromised by Russia.[404] Talk about
commitment to a premise.[405] Once they were sure they would fall short if
they tried it, they settled on a plan to have Mueller pretend to criminally
investigate the fake treason plot for another two years. They then merged
their counterintelligence investigation into the president with that of the
special counsel.[406] If they could not remove Donald Trump from power,
FBI officials told CNN that he still needed to be “reined in.”[407]

OceanofPDF.com
Dowd

Once the special counsel investigation was launched, Bob Woodward

reported in his book Fear, Trump’s lawyer John M. Dowd convinced the
new president to turn over every scrap of paper from his campaign to the
Mueller team to show good faith and ask for some in return. “I want to
build a relationship where we engage [Mueller] and then there are no
secrets. And that can be done.” Then he and another D.C. lawyer, Ty Cobb,
went to see Mueller. Dowd told Mueller, “The president has authorized me
to tell you he will cooperate. His words to me were, ‘Tell Bob I respect him.
I’ll cooperate.’” He went on, “What do you need? We’ll get it to you. But
let’s get this investigation done.” He said the president had nothing to hide
and wanted to avoid a “protracted battle.” Dowd added, “But we’d like you
to reciprocate. And that is, engage.” He explained, “The reason we’re
cooperating is to get this damn thing over with. We’re not going to assert
any privileges. This is over the objection of [White House legal counsel]
Don McGahn, but the president wants to do it. He wants you to see
everything, talk to everyone.”
Mueller claimed to agree, saying, as Dowd paraphrased him, that “the
length of these investigations often became the abuse.” Dowd thought they
had a deal. “You guys need something, call me. And we’ll get it for you or
we’ll answer whatever question or help get witnesses.”[408]
That was a fool’s errand for sure. Mueller, Andrew Weissman and the
other prosecutors were not trying to get to the bottom of anything, but to
rein in the elected president using this pretended investigation against him.
[409] Proving his innocence was never going to slow them down in the
slightest. And so it did not.
The leaks and lies kept coming. Amazingly, they kept it going for
another two years, and told dozens of them, starting with the DNC and
Podesta email hacks. As noted by former Times reporter Jeff Gerth, who
wrote a devastating report on the media’s role in the Russiagate hoax for the
Columbia Journalism Review, “When those storylines were authoritatively
undercut, the follow-ups were downplayed or ignored.”[410]

Jeff Sessions

Another fake Russiagate scandal revolved around Sen. Jeff Sessions, a

policy adviser to the Trump campaign and the administration’s first attorney
general. Like Gen. Flynn, he was accused of supposedly scandalous
contacts with the Russian ambassador, Sergey Kislyak.[411] In fact, they
were purely perfunctory meetings, one of which took place in his office in
front of his staff, at least two of whom were retired army colonels.[412] The
other was nothing more than a handshake at a public speech at the National
Interest Foundation. As unbelievable as it may seem, the Post won a
Pulitzer Prize for pretending there was anything criminal or even interesting
there.[413] Russian expat and interventionist hawk Julia Ioffe indulged in
wild speculation in The Atlantic, going on for thousands of words “raising
questions” about whether Sessions was secretly communicating with Russia
and covering it up, possibly, she imagined, through the scholars at the
Center for the National Interest.[414]
 CNN breathlessly claimed the senator had omitted these not-important
meetings in the background check he had completed to become Trump’s
short-lived attorney general.[415] The meetings were also invoked as
reasons why the new chief of the Justice Department needed to recuse
himself and appoint an independent counsel to investigate the case, which
he did.[416] Seven months later, the Times finally admitted he was not
required to disclose the meetings, since they were part of his duties as a
senator on the Armed Services Committee rather than the Trump campaign,
as he had been instructed by the FBI during his background check.[417]
The Mueller report eventually dismissed the contacts as entirely innocent
and inconsequential. In fact, at the meeting in his senate office, Sessions
had taken the opportunity to lecture Kislyak on Russian intervention in
Ukraine and Moldova. Kislyak invited Sessions to dinner. The senator
declined.[418]
California Senator Kamala Harris grilled Sessions about his supposed
Russia connections before the Senate.[419] According to NPR News, this
helped to get her noticed by Democratic Party leadership as a “rising
star”—a tough prosecutor-type personality who could take on Trump.[420]

Facebook and Twitter Ads

Yevgeny Prigozhin was a friend and patron of Vladimir Putin who started
out as a restaurateur, later ran the Wagner Group mercenary firm, dabbled in
petty internet clickbait operations and ended up crossing Putin and meeting
an untimely death in an airplane explosion in 2023.[421] Mueller charged
13 employees of Prigozhin’s troll farms for interfering in the 2016 election
in the case of USA v. Netyksho.[422] The indictment claims the trolls
bought Facebook ads that allegedly favored Trump, but nothing at all about
hacking or releasing anyone’s emails, and contained no proof of its
allegations regardless. “The indictment alleges that the Russian conspirators
want to promote discord in the United States and undermine public
confidence in democracy,” claimed Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney
general. In fact, there was no demonstrated reason to believe the Russians
had any such goal. Somehow, the Times editors dutifully printed that “Mr.
Mueller identified 13 digital advertisements paid for by the Russian
operation. All of them attacked Mrs. Clinton or promoted Mr. Trump.”
Thirteen. Not 130, or 130,000,000. Thirteen.
As the newspaper of record conceded, “The indictment does not say
that Russia changed the outcome of the election, a fact that Mr. Rosenstein
noted repeatedly.” Nor does the indictment “explicitly say the Russian
government sponsored the effort,” but they insisted, “American intelligence
officials have publicly said that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia
directed and oversaw it,” and that “the indictment notes that two of the
Russian firms involved hold Russian government contracts.” The Justice
Department and their media accomplices were simply grandstanding.
Indicting foreign actors is a way for prosecutors to “name and shame
operatives” and make it “harder for them to work undetected in the future,”
as the Times put it.[423] No one thought they would have to bring a case.
But in May 2018, lawyers for Concord Management and Consulting LLC,
one of the companies accused in the indictment, showed up in court
demanding to see the evidence against them.[424] After failing in their
attempt to limit the defendant’s access to material which supposedly proved
their guilt, the government, claiming Russia was trying to “weaponize the
case” by defending themselves, dropped the charges instead.[425]
In January 2023, journalist Matt Taibbi revealed the extent of the
government’s pressure on Twitter to “come up with” evidence of
widespread Russian interference in the 2016 election by way of their
platform, which numerous internal reviews had already shown to simply be
false.[426] The feds told the papers that the Internet Research Agency, a
Russian troll farm owned by the previously mentioned St. Petersburg
restauranteur and Wagner Group owner Yevgeny Prigozhin,[427] had
succeeded in swaying the election by buying ads on Facebook and Twitter
to “weaponize” the social media platforms against the American people and
brainwash them into voting for Trump, representing “unprecedented foreign
interference in American democracy.”[428] The fact they created clickbait
for other groups, such as “United Muslims of America” and the Black Lives
Matter-themed “Don’t Shoot Us” and “Black Matters U.S.,” did not seem to
interfere with the Russiagate theorists’ beliefs. If it is not pro-Trump, then
the media insisted it must be meant to “engender mistrust”[429] or “sow
discord,” as opposed to a way to make easy money.[430] The Mueller
report conceded that in total, the IRA could be tied to fewer than 200,000
tweets in the 10 weeks leading up to the 2016 election, a relative hydrogen
atom in an ocean of political hype.[431]
Democratic partisans were thrilled when Prigozhin boasted that it was
true in 2022.[432] It still was not. As journalist Gareth Porter had already
shown, Times reporters Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti had either been
naïvely taken advantage of by liars and failed their readers by passing along
these deceptions, or knowingly lied themselves when they claimed “126
million Americans [viewed these ads] on Facebook alone.” Alarmingly, this
number was “not far short of the 137 million people who would vote in the
2016 presidential election.”
Porter refuted them. “[A] relatively paltry 80,000 posts from the
private Russian company Internet Research Agency (IRA) were engulfed in
literally trillions of posts on Facebook over a two-year period before and
after the 2016 vote.” The Times “failed to tell their readers that Facebook
account holders in the United States had been ‘served’ 33 trillion Facebook
posts during that same period—413 million times more than the 80,000
posts from the Russian company.” Colin Stretch, Facebook’s general
counsel, told the Senate that 126 million American may have seen an IRA
post not during the election period, but in the two years from 2015 to 2017
—including a year after the election. As Porter wrote, “To put the 33 trillion
figure over two years in perspective, the 80,000 Russian-origin Facebook
posts represented just .0000000024 of total Facebook content in that time.”
He added, “The Times’ touting of the bogus 126 million out 137 million
voters, while not reporting the 33 trillion figure, should vie in the annals of
journalism as one of the most spectacularly misleading uses of statistics of
all time.”[433]
Journalist Paul Sperry showed the IRA had only spent $2,930 on
Facebook ads before and after the election.[434]
Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren of Clemson University had
published a report on 2.9 million tweets from those same 3,814 IRA
accounts over a two-year period.[435] As Porter put it, they “revealed that
nearly a third of its Tweets had normal commercial content or were not in
English.” A third of them were just reposts of local news feeds and “hashtag
games” that had no relation to politics, with only one last third being
focused on right- and also left-wing “populist themes.” They also showed
there were more political tweets by these accounts in the year after the
election than before, peaking in the summer of 2017.[436]
In January 2023, New York University released a study showing that
Porter was correct. “[W]e find no evidence of a meaningful relationship
between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes
in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”[437]
Numerous outlets confirmed that many of the fake news sites created
in 2016 were the work of clever young Macedonian kids who realized
Trump voters would click on just about anything—Pope Endorses Trump!
[438] ISIS Endorses Clinton![439]—and made a ton of ad revenue doing
so.[440] Again, even Philip Bump, an infamous Russiagate conspiracist
from the Post, conceded the entire Facebook and Twitter campaign by the
IRA had nothing to do with targeting voters. It was just clickbait, blown
way out of proportion by his colleagues.[441]
There was an influence operation. It was carried out by America’s
treacherous so-called intelligence agencies acting as secret police to frame
the elected president for treason, using Shane and Mazzetti as sock puppets
to accomplish their mission. Those supposedly top-tier reporters and
devoted Times fans are the credulous marks, not America’s Facebook-
reading aunties.
Paul Manafort and Oleg Deripaska

In March 2016, when Trump hired Paul Manafort, a lobbyist for foreign
states who had worked for the previous, Russian-leaning president of
Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, to run his campaign, the Democrats saw an
opportunity. In fact, back in 2013, Manafort was serving American interests
in attempting to persuade Yanukovych and his Party of Regions to lean
toward the U.S., EU and NATO, and away from Russia.[442] The important
Democratic lawyer and power broker Greg Craig was even prosecuted after
taking money from pro-Western Ukrainian oligarch and Clinton Foundation
donor[443] Victor Pinchuk to have a friendly law firm write a report on
Ukraine’s economy that, the Times said, “Yanukovych hoped would
convince Western governments that Ukraine should be allowed to join the
European Union and partake of its financial benefits.”[444] But the feds,
their co-conspirators and media puppets had a narrative to run with:
Manafort was secretly handling Trump for Putin, by way of one Konstantin
Kilimnik.
This was never prosecuted because they had nothing but a story.
Kilimnik was an informant for the U.S. State Department and worked for
John McCain and the color-coded revolutionaries at the International
Republican Institute (IRI), not for Vladimir Putin at the FSB.[445]
Manafort asked Kilimnik to pass on Trump campaign polling data to
Ukrainian oligarchs Serhiy Lyovochikin and Rinat Akhmetov, not Russian
aluminum oligarch Oleg Deripaska,[446] as alleged by the hoaxers and
their useful dupes.[447] This polling data was claimed to have been crucial
to Russia’s efforts to buy targeted Facebook ads to sway the election.[448]
Even though the public was told Manafort and Deripaska were Trump’s
links to Putin, secretly, behind the scenes, the feds had trusted Deripaska so
much they had actually helped get him into the United States,[449] and
tried to recruit him as an informant to find out if Manafort was controlling
Trump for Putin.[450] Deripaska had worked with the U.S. government on
a failed attempt to free Robert Levinson, a former FBI agent being held in
Iran. While supposedly “close” to the Kremlin, he was not an agent of
Russian security services. Even British spy Christopher Steele had said in
an email to Justice Department official Bruce Ohr that he did not believe
Deripaska was a “tool” of Putin. Deripaska told the FBI their theories about
Manafort, Putin and Trump were “preposterous.” When he offered to testify
about it before Congress, they stopped talking to him.[451] Manafort had
allegedly considered offering to brief Deripaska on the polling data as a
way to burnish his credentials as someone close to the next U.S. president.
But it never went any further than that.[452]
Deripaska sued the Treasury Department to lift the sanctions against
him, declaring the accusations as “very absurd.” He had loaned Manafort
money but swore he had not dealt with him since 2011. His lawyers had
sued to try to recover the money, but he strongly and credibly denied having
any deal with the man over polling results or anything else. He just had a
well-known Russian name they could drag through the mud.[453] Time
reported that one of Deripaska’s associates, Victor Boyarkin, had been
pressuring Manafort for the money, but even if true, there is no reason to
believe they made any deals regarding Trump or the campaign.[454]
 Even Philip Bump, the Washington Post resident Russiagate paranoiac,
was dismissive of the story, admitting in December 2017 that there was
“still little evidence that Russia’s 2016 social media efforts did much of
anything.” He later added, “That sophisticated, specific Russian 2016 voter
targeting effort doesn’t seem to exist,” and that the information Manafort
was alleged to have passed on was from before Trump was even nominated,
making it “by election day . . . several months out of date.”[455]
One more for the nothing pile.

Ukraine’s Role (Framing Manafort)

In January 2017, Politico ran an important piece describing the corrupt role
that Ukraine’s Petro Poroshenko administration played in helping to push
the Russiagate hoax.[456] Their reporters wrote that “Ukrainian
government officials . . . disseminated documents implicating a top Trump
aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to
back away after the election.” They added, “And they helped Clinton’s
allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.” Politico
insisted the nonexistent Russian assistance for Trump must have surely
been worse. Still, they described the efforts of Ukrainian-American
Alexandra Chalupa, whom they called an “operative” for the Democratic
National Committee, saying she “met with top officials in the Ukrainian
Embassy in Washington” in an attempt to tie Trump and Manafort to
Russia.
Andri Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian
Embassy, said he had been ordered by his superiors to give anything they
had on Manafort to Chalupa. They confirmed that his boss “specifically
called Telizhenko into a meeting with Chalupa to provide an update on an
American media outlet’s ongoing investigation into Manafort.” They also
found the Ukrainian government was behind the leak of Manafort’s
doctored “little black book” ledger, which appeared to show that he
received $12.7 million in cash payments from Yanukovych’s Party of
Regions.[457]
Ukrainian MP Serhiy Leshchenko, who published the ledger, said, “For
me, it was important to show not only the corruption aspect, but that
[Trump] is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical
balance in the world” and “change the pro-Ukrainian agenda in American
foreign policy.” The Financial Times quoted Leshchenko saying the
majority of Ukraine’s politicians were “on Hillary Clinton’s side.” They
added that the prospect of Trump’s election “has spurred not just Mr
Leshchenko but Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they
would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S.
election.”
It worked. As the Politico reporters wrote, “The Ukrainian efforts had
an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and
advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to
Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.” Leshchenko was not appeased. He and
others in Kiev told the Financial Times that “they will continue their efforts
to prevent a candidate—who recently suggested Russia might keep Crimea,
which it annexed two years ago—from reaching the summit of American
political power.” They were happy to boast then that “[i]f the Republican
candidate loses in November, some observers suggest Kiev’s actions may
have played at least a small role.”[458]
But the document had been tampered with. After the election, Politico
said, “questions began mounting about the investigations into the ledgers—
and the ledgers themselves. An official with the anti-corruption bureau told
a Ukrainian newspaper, ‘Mr. Manafort does not have a role in this case.’” In
fact, the Ukrainian government had warned the FBI it was unconfirmed and
likely fake in the summer of 2016, months before the election. Konstantin
Kilimnik also told the FBI it was almost certainly fake in August 2016.
Manafort, he said, “could not have possibly taken large amounts of cash
across three borders. It was always a different arrangement—payments
were in wire transfers to his companies, which is not a violation.” He also
told them, “I have some questions about this black cash stuff, because those
published records do not make sense. The timeframe doesn’t match
anything related to payments made to Manafort. . . . It does not match my
records. All fees Manafort got were wires, not cash.”[459] Copies of his
statement were given to the FBI and Special Counsel Mueller’s
investigation.[460]
Manafort credibly denied any wrongdoing, noting that his work with
Yanukovych was not at all on behalf of Russia, but the West, and he
complained to Politico about being smeared in that way, “specifically
cit[ing] his work on denuclearizing the country and on the European Union
trade and political pact that Yanukovych spurned before fleeing to Russia.”
He was more likely to have been working for American intelligence
agencies than Russian ones. “In no case was I ever involved in anything
that would be contrary to U.S. interests,” Manafort said.[461]
In a 2022 interview Manafort made clear that he had been a Western
partisan throughout his entire time in Ukraine going back to the W. Bush
years and was a great admirer of Zelensky and the Ukrainian military and
militiamen fighting Russian forces. He explained that he had always been
opposed to Russia’s agenda to keep Ukraine out of Europe, and that under
Yanukovych they were attempting to make the reforms necessary to take the
next step toward joining the EU, including describing his specific role in
working directly with them to do so. Manafort noted that Yanukovych went
to Brussels first, instead of to Moscow, upon taking office, in what was
rightly perceived as a major political statement of his intentions.[462]
He said Yanukovych’s support for turning West was a condition for
coming to work for him and emphasized how important it was that a leader
from the country’s east led Ukraine “into Europe.” He also said this was not
a problem because the eastern Ukrainian oligarchs wanted to join Europe
too. They were always the “bastard child” to the Russian elite, and since
they held the gas, mining and industrial resources, they wanted to try their
hand at trading with Europe instead. These were Yanukovych and the Party
of Regions’ supporters.
Manafort added that in the aftermath of the 2004 Orange Revolution,
President Viktor Yushchenko started playing the old game of nationalizing
eastern industries and handing them over to his cronies. In doing so, he
convinced the eastern oligarchs they would be better off in Europe, where
the rules would prevent such blatant theft. This, Manafort said, was why he
had been hired by the Russian oligarch Deripaska, who had significant
interests in eastern Ukraine, along with eastern Ukrainian oligarch Rinat
Akhmetov, which led to his contract with Yanukovych and his party.
Slick Washington lobbyist though he may be, Manafort was unfairly
smeared. He said Deripaska is closer to Putin now, but that he had been
tarred for dealing with a guy who was close to Putin back when the Russian
president was getting along with George W. Bush, and later when Obama
was pursuing the “reset” after the disaster at Bucharest. It was only in 2013,
when Russia “went to war with Ukraine,” as Manafort saw it, that Putin
became the villain, and therefore retroactively so did he through
association. This is consistent with the rest of Manafort’s opinions and
claims throughout the interview. He sounded like Michael McFaul or Anne
Applebaum, and was obviously sincere.[463]
This lie was a key to Russiagate. Democrats and other government
employees by the tens of millions were of the belief that Manafort, Trump’s
campaign manager, was his secret Russian spy handler who helped him
steal an election. Classical conspiracy kooks that they were, they let this
false claim become the basis to believe the rest too.
Fiona Hill said any claim that Ukraine, as she put it, “conducted a
campaign against our country” in the 2016 election was simply a “fictional
narrative that has been perpetrated and propagated by the Russian security
services themselves.” But it was interesting that Hill did not accuse Politico
reporters Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern—now at the New York
Times[464] and Washington Post,[465] respectively—of being Russian
spies. Nor did she claim their sources were Russian disinformation artists,
like, say for example, her associates Danchenko and Dolan.[466] Nor did
she deny any claim Vogel and Stern made about Alexandra Chalupa
successfully working with the Ukrainian Embassy to get Manafort fired.
“These fictions are harmful even if they are deployed for purely domestic
political purposes,” Hill said. But for some reason she did not want to get to
the bottom of them.[467]
The AP claimed to prove the Manafort ledger was, as they say, partially
confirmed. But all they found were transactions he never denied. The claim
was that he had accepted secret cash payments, but the outlet found wire
transfers that were not secret at all. It did not mean anything.[468] It was
just another lie. It turns out federal prosecutor Andrew Weissman had
leaked the story to the AP, then cited their pretended reporting in court,
instead of the actual ledger itself, in which case they would have been
forced to explain why they were taking it seriously. They never attempted to
use it against Manafort at his trial on fraud charges[469] because they knew
it could not withstand real scrutiny.[470]

Cohen Prague

Then there was the trip that Steele claimed Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen,
took to Prague to pay for Romanian hacking attacks against the
Democrats[471] and plot ways to divert attention from Page and Manafort’s
also-completely imaginary treason. McClatchy’s Peter Stone and Greg
Gordon claimed in repeated stories that it was true,[472] and still tried to
insist they were not wrong even after Mueller debunked their stenography-
for-liars, writing, “Mr. Cohen had never traveled to Prague and wasn’t
concerned about those allegations, which he believed were provably
false.”[473] Cohen never took the trip. It was not true.[474] As the Daily
Beast noted, “The Prague story is . . . critical for the reputations of reporters
Peter Stone and Greg Gordon.” The claim was a complete hoax, as
confirmed by Mueller himself.[475] Cohen’s passport showed he had never
been to Prague in his life. There was no other evidence or testimony of any
kind putting him there. Gordon and Stone were humiliated.[476]

Trump Tower Moscow

Tom Hamburger of the Post, a close friend of Fusion GPS’s Glenn

Simpson,[477] ran a lengthy piece about Trump’s supposedly suspicious
wish to get along with Russia and possibly close a real estate deal there.
[478] This tale evolved into a claim that Putin held approval for the
construction of a Trump Tower in Moscow over the candidate’s head.[479]
The Post ran a schizophrenic Pepe Silvia-style conspiracy diagram[480]
with faded yellow lines for string making “connections” and “links” where
they had no substance. They claimed this nonsense about a Trump Tower in
Moscow was “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a
senior member of Putin’s government.”[481] In a way it was true, since
there was no other significant interaction to speak of. But in another way it
was false because, in fact, Trump’s lawyer Cohen and his associate Felix
Sater, a known FBI informant,[482] never got past the Kremlin website’s
standard message form. Sater never even received a reply. At one point,
Cohen finally reached a woman at a public relations office. The call went
nowhere. There was no follow-up and nothing else to it. Nothing.[483]
Neither of them had any connections in Russia. They were simply stuck,
which is kind of disappointing. One might think at least one of these
accusations had some meat on it, but no.

Trump Tower New York

Then there was the big New York Trump Tower meeting with people who
were not intelligence agents, that the public was told for years would be the
key to locking up Manafort, the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. and his
son-in-law Jared Kushner for conspiracy and treason. It turned out the
meeting was with a lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya, who had nothing
on Clinton and was just trying to lobby against the Magnitsky Act, the anti-
Russian sanctions law passed years before that had no connection to the
Russiagate story.[484] The meeting was also attended by a lobbyist named
Rinat Akhmetshin, who had been a counterintelligence officer in the Soviet
army that had not existed since 1991. This was of course ultimately
meaningless, but in the meantime, “U.S. officials” told the credulous media
and its audience they thought he could have “ongoing ties to Russian
intelligence.”[485] They could imagine the rest.
Kushner texted two different aides to call him so he could leave early
since it was nothing.[486] At the meeting, Veselnitskaya made claims not
about hacked emails, but about Hillary Clinton and other Democrats
making money in an undefined illegal scheme. She provided no evidence,
then immediately turned to the Magnitsky Act. It was obviously unwise for
anyone on Trump’s team to be meeting with Russian nationals in this way.
Trump’s then-campaign manager Steven Bannon wanted no part in it at the
time.[487] However, even if one takes the least charitable interpretation of
that story, it still would not amount to more than attempted opposition data
collection, not collusion, cooperation or conspiracy, certainly not with
Russian military intelligence. It was later shown that Veselnitskaya just
happened to meet with Clinton agent and Fusion GPS head Glenn Simpson
before and after the meeting with Manafort, Trump Jr. and Kushner, raising
obvious questions about whether Simpson was using a client in one case to
entrap a target in another.[488]
CNN also claimed Trump knew all about the meeting before it
happened.[489] That was also a lie from an old Clinton associate named
Lanny Davis, as he later admitted.[490]

GOP Platform

Josh Rogin of the Post falsely claimed that Trump’s people had “gutted” the
Ukraine provision of the Republican Party platform. In fact, they
strengthened the language about sanctions, only pulling the part about direct
arms transfers, which Obama had also declined to do. This was done by
J.D. Gordon, a campaign adviser, of his own accord based on an assumption
about what Trump would want, and responding to objections to the harsh
language from Maine State Senator and GOP convention delegate Eric
Brakey,[491] rather than anyone acting as an agent of the Russian
Federation, as Mueller later admitted.[492] The new language was actually
tougher than the previous version, stating, “We will meet the return of
Russian belligerence with the same resolve that led to the collapse of the
Soviet Union,” and that “[w]e will not accept any territorial change in
Eastern Europe imposed by force, in Ukraine or elsewhere, and will use all
appropriate measures to bring to justice the practitioners of aggression and
assassination.” It said they supported sanctions until full Ukrainian
sovereignty was restored, and on the crucial point, “We also support
providing appropriate assistance to the armed forces of Ukraine and greater
coordination with NATO defense planning.” They did not take anything out
of it, but merely softened the language of a proposed amendment from
“lethal defensive weapons” to “appropriate assistance.”[493]
Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic[494] quickly ran with Rogin’s
fumble, in the wrong direction of course, assuring readers that Trump’s
collusion with the Russians was certain.[495]
However, Mueller concluded that Rogin and Goldberg were wrong.
“The investigation did not establish that one Campaign official’s efforts to
dilute a portion of the Republican Party platform on providing assistance to
Ukraine were undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia.”[496]

PropOrNot

Then there was the bogus blacklist of journalists who criticized the
consensus on these issues, falsely accusing them of being “witting or
unwitting” agents of the Kremlin. Those claims were advanced by an
anonymous website called “PropOrNot,”[497] as well as a Post hack named
Craig Timberg. His article now begins with a massive editor’s note about
how bad the reporting is and how they do not stand behind it.[498]
Times reporter Sheera Frenkel mocked Timberg for his lazy, false
reporting, writing to him on Twitter that “fwiw [for what it’s worth], a lot of
reporters passed on this story.”[499] If Timberg had any dignity, he might
have cared, but then he would not have written the false article smearing his
betters in the first place. Journalist Alan MacLeod noted that the PropOrNot
blacklist included virtually every antiwar alternative media source out there,
“from MintPress to Truthout, Truthdig and The Black Agenda Report. Also
included were pro-Trump websites like The Drudge Report, and libertarian
ventures like Antiwar.com and The Ron Paul Institute.”
MacLeod also observed that the list “was immediately heralded in the
corporate press, and was the basis for a wholescale algorithm shift at
Google and other big tech platforms, a shift that saw traffic to alternative
media sites crash overnight, never to recover.” Noting that the Atlantic
Council runs on taxpayer funds—State and Defense each give them more
than $1 million per year[500]—he concluded, “Thus, the allegation of a
huge (Russian) state-sponsored attempt to influence the media was itself an
intelligence op by the U.S. national security state.”
Journalist Yves Smith used sophisticated tools to scan the PropOrNot
website, discovering numerous links to the Atlantic Council and Michael
Weiss’s InterpreterMag.[501] Weiss had made himself infamous spinning
for al Qaeda terrorists during President Obama’s dirty war in Syria from
2011 to 2017.[502]
A small Trotskyite sect, the World Socialist Website, did an in-depth
study of the algorithm change on Google’s near-monopoly search engine
under what they called “Project Owl,”[503] which almost completely
ruined the traffic of these alternative media websites. Having analyzed data
from a company called SEMrush, they found that traffic to sites including
WSWS, AlterNet, Global Research, Media Matters, Consortium News,
Common Dreams, WikiLeaks, Truth-Out, Counterpunch, the Intercept and
Democracy Now! fell all at once between 19 and 67 percent.[504]
None of these sites are pro-Russian in their point of view. Media
Matters,[505] Democracy Now!,[506] AlterNet[507] and the Intercept each
toed the FBI-CIA line on Russiagate the whole time.[508] The rest are
mostly run by leftists who oppose American foreign policy, but are the
furthest thing from disseminators of Russian propaganda. Antiwar.com and
the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity are both well-known outlets
run by libertarians in the mold of free-market economist and author Murray
N. Rothbard[509] and former Republican Congressman Paul of Texas.[510]
The feds and their corporate and think tank allies were simply taking
advantage of the Russiagate hoax to not only censor Americans from the
internet, but to set the precedent that it is necessary and allowable in the
name of national security.
As the great journalist Gareth Porter explained, the “witting or
unwitting” foreign asset plot was pushed hard by former CIA Director
Brennan for the deliberate purpose of smearing not just Trump, but anyone
who went outside the government’s approved narrative, especially
independent journalists. It was the same thing the House Un-American
Activities Committee did in 1956.[511]

Hamilton 68 and the #TwitterFiles

Former FBI agent Clint Watts, terrorism researcher J.M. Berger and New
Knowledge founder Jonathon Morgan ran the “Hamilton 68 Dashboard”
under the auspices of neoconservative Iraq War II ringleader Bill Kristol’s
Alliance for Securing Democracy. They fraudulently claimed Russian bots
were behind the popularity of just about everything and everyone they did
not like on the internet,[512] including the Twitter hashtag
#ReleaseTheMemo, referring to the Devin Nunes memo showing the FBI
had relied on the Steele dossier to get FISA surveillance powers over the
innocent Carter Page.[513] They were lying. The accounts monitored by the
frauds Watts and Berger were not Russian bots. They were just American
Trump supporters or others with seemingly disapproved opinions, including
one man identified as a Russian agent solely because he tweeted in the
middle of the night, when he was just a nurse working the late shift.[514]
Of the accounts on the list who were actually Russian, most were just the
staff of RT, nothing covert about it. Like with the January 2017 intelligence
report, they were there to pad the numbers. And despite all the Democrats’
and media’s claims that Nunes was a liar and an agent of the Trump White
House, if not the Russians, the Justice Department inspector general’s
report later proved his memo 100 percent right.[515]
The “Twitter Files,” released by the site’s new owner, billionaire Elon
Musk, to a select group of reporters in 2022, revealed that their former
executives knew the Hamilton 68 project was a fraud all along but refused
to tell the American public. Yoel Roth, then the head of trust and safety at
Twitter, wrote in internal communications that “[t]hese accounts are neither
strongly Russian nor strongly bots,” and that all the information they had
was “[h]ardly evidence of a massive influence campaign.” On the contrary,
“real people” were being “unilaterally labeled Russian stooges without
evidence or recourse.” Roth said, “I think we need to just call this out on the
bullshit it is.” They did not do that. Instead, they acted as a sort of American
Stasi, censoring citizens who they knew were not representing any foreign
power, and who were in fact exercising their free speech on civic matters as
they had every right to do.[516] MSNBC cited this complete fraud at least
279 times.[517] The rest of the media relied on them heavily as well.[518]
For believers, it lent major support to their faith that this Russian conspiracy
was under every bed.
The people behind Hamilton 68 also claimed Russian bots pushed
divisive hashtags about gun control after the massacre at Parkland High
School in 2018.[519] There was no truth to that. After the Times published
an article about alleged Russian exploitation of that tragedy, which claimed
Russian bots were trying to “widen the divide and make compromise even
more difficult,”[520] the very anti-Trump website BuzzFeed remarked that
this was, “not to mince words, total bullshit.”[521]
Even though Hamilton 68 co-founder Watts confessed to journalist
Miriam Elder, “I’m not convinced on this bot thing,”[522] which he himself
had taken the lead in pushing for years,[523] Twitter’s Roth never told the
American people the truth.[524] Journalist Jacob Siegel showed that it was
a former counterterrorism public relations specialist and National Security
Council staffer named Emily Horne, then an executive at Twitter,[525] who
convinced them to allow the hoax to proceed.[526] She later went back to
work for the NSC in the Biden administration.[527]
Echoing Porter, Siegel compared the online witch hunt to the hysteria
of the second Red Scare of the 1950s, led by Wisconsin Senator Joe
McCarthy, and noted that the main difference was the entire liberal media
was leading the mob this time. Just as important: “When proof emerged
earlier this year that Hamilton 68 was a high-level hoax perpetrated against
the American people, it was met with a great wall of silence in the national
press.” Siegel thought this signaled a major turn by American liberals
against basic principles of truth and freedom, sacrificed for their fear of
Trump and willingness to go to any length to preserve their own power.
[528]

The Ministry of Truth

But it was much worse than just Hamilton 68. As digital rights expert
Andrew Lowenthal wrote, the Twitter Files revealed not just a regime of
unfair shadowbanning, but “an uncanny alliance of academics, journalists,
intelligence operatives, military personnel, government bureaucrats, NGO
workers and more,” a “censorship-industrial complex.” Instead of
government, it was civil society organizations, major media and Silicon
Valley checking and balancing each other while “we find them all working
together, cartel-style.” The major “tech companies not only collaborate on
content, they gather regularly for ‘private sector engagement’ with the FBI,
DOD, DHS, House and Senate Intel Committees, and others.”[529]
Possibly in reaction to Twitter’s initial reluctance to implement all their
censorship schemes, or to make sure they were there to implement their
next one, the FBI infiltrated dozens of agents into the company, as
investigative reporter Michael Shellenberger explained. “As of 2020, there
were so many former FBI employees—Bu alumni—working at Twitter that
they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard
new FBI arrivals.”[530]
This massive new American censorship industry[531] was financed by
the National Science Foundation and the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and led by nonprofits like the Poynter
Institute and supposed experts and “researchers” at universities like
Stanford in northern California, the University of Michigan, the University
of Washington,[532] Ohio State University and Clemson University.[533]
At Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, it was Obama’s former ambassador to
Russia, Michael McFaul, who ran the operation.[534]
As journalist Aaron Maté showed, the Twitter Files revealed that when
the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) sent the FBI a list of people they
wanted kicked off social media, including journalists they did not like
—“suspected by the SBU of spreading fear and disinformation,” including
Maté himself—the FBI was happy to forward those demands on to Twitter
headquarters. This time, at least, they did the right thing and denied the
national police force’s request to censor this great Canadian-American
journalist.[535]
Taibbi then developed the story further based on files released in a
lawsuit by the state of Missouri[536] and a new report by the House
Weaponization of Government Committee,[537] showing how the
government of Ukraine was constantly sending requests to Silicon Valley
companies, such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, demanding the
censorship of American citizens pushing so-called “anti-Ukraine
narratives.” These included everyone from “a New York photographer, to
the manager of a moving company in South Carolina, to a musician in
Minnesota, to a professor and an author of children’s books, even an
Instagram account belonging to the U.S. State Department.”[538]
He also pointed to an interview by journalist Lee Fang of Ilua Vitiuk,
the head of the department of Cyber Information Security for the Ukrainian
SBU. Vitiuk told Fang, “Once we have a trace or evidence of
disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the
U.S., we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to
Facebook.” They boasted about their role in getting Americans censored.
“We asked FBI for support to help us with Meta, to help us with others, and
sometimes we get good results with that. We say, ‘Okay, this was the person
who was probably Russia’s influence.’” He said he knew he was bearing
false witness against innocent people, but did not care. When his people
asked him how to determine what is real and what is disinformation, he said
he tells them, “Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake,
even if it’s not.”[539]
That foreign intelligence agency’s wish is the FBI and Silicon Valley’s
command. “It’s bad enough that the U.S. government is partnering with
oligopolistic tech companies to engage in censorship of many thousands of
accounts,” Taibbi wrote. “It’s absolute madness, however, for the FBI to
hand this Promethean fire to foreign governments, and give officials from a
government like Ukraine’s de facto authority to remove American
voices.”[540]
While Taibbi testified to Congress about what he had learned, and his
wife was home alone with their children, IRS agents came to his house,
leaving a note asking him to call them so they could help straighten out a
misunderstanding, they said. Though regime loyalists on social media raced
to insist this must have been an accident—the IRS was only trying to help
him clear up an issue of identity theft![541]—it was revealed that the order
to move against him was given on a Saturday, Christmas Eve, an unlikely
time to start a new investigation to help a journalist publishing blockbusters
about crimes committed by government employees, but in fact the same day
Taibbi had released a new story detailing Twitter’s relationship with the FBI
and CIA.[542]
Twitter honored “requests” to remove more than 20 million tweets
labeled “misinformation” from their site.[543]
It was later shown that the government and associated groups had built
much the same relationship with social media giant Facebook and its
subsidiary Instagram as well. After he was threatened with jail for contempt
of Congress, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally turned over a cache of
emails showing that the Biden White House itself was intervening to get
American citizens’ posts removed, even including memes warning against
vaccine dangers. His surgeon general demanded the censorship of the
“disinformation dozen,” including the then-most-watched cable TV news
host, Tucker Carlson.[544]
In July 2023, federal judge Terry Doughty accused the administration
of conducting “the most massive attack against free speech in United States
history,” and finally slapped them with an injunction forbidding any more
interference against Americans posting on social media. Biden appealed.
After an appeals court upheld much of the lower court’s ruling, the
administration appealed it again, making it very likely the Supreme Court
heard the case in March 2024, and it did not look good. The newest
Supreme Court associate justice, Ketanji Brown Jackson, revealed that she
had no understanding whatsoever of the American Bill of Rights or how it
is supposed to work. She actually complained that “[m]y biggest concern is
that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in
significant ways. Some might say that the government actually has a duty to
take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be
suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in encouraging or even
pressuring platforms to take down harmful information.” She added, “I’m
really worried about that because you’ve got the First Amendment
operating in an environment of threatening circumstances, from the
government’s perspective.”
But that was the whole reason that “declaratory and restrictive clause”
was added to the Constitution in the first place: to limit their power to
protect the rights of the people.[545] The $6 trillion U.S. domestic empire
does not make “suggestions,” and they were not using their “bully pulpit”
here. They sent legions of government agents to go work for these
companies to receive and comply with countless “requests” to ruthlessly
enforce the “censorship” of the American people, in the words of Meta
CEO Zuckerberg, who only in the summer of 2024 admitted how the
government fraudulently manipulated him into suppressing the Biden
laptop story four years prior.[546] Jackson had to invent an insane
hypothetical about government needing to pressure companies to downrank
posts in case a new social media fad were to persuade teens to throw
themselves out of windows to their deaths.[547] Even in that case, they
could buy ad space like anyone else. What was actually happening was that
government agents were lying, and were censoring Americans who were
telling the truth.
Journalist Alan MacLeod showed that before it was bought by Tesla
and SpaceX CEO Musk, Twitter was overrun by federal cops and spies,
particularly from the FBI, including agent Dawn Burton, a former
Lockheed Martin executive, who was given the job of “senior director of
strategy and operations for legal, public policy, trust and safety” at Twitter.
“Karen Walsh went straight from 21 years at the bureau to become director
of corporate resilience at the Silicon Valley giant,” MacLeod wrote.
“Twitter’s deputy general counsel and vice president of legal, Jim Baker,
also spent four years at the FBI between 2014 and 2018, where his resumé
notes he rose to the role of senior strategic advisor.”[548]
Straight from his role in helping to frame the president for treason,
Baker headed off to Twitter to censor American citizens who were not
buying the bureau’s story. Mark Jaroszewski, Douglas Turner and at least
six more former FBI agents and supervisors were joined at old Twitter by
officers from the CIA and political hacks from the Atlantic Council.[549]
The Council itself is famously funded by foreign governments,[550]
including at least some important Ukrainian firms, such as the gas giant
Burisma, owned by oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky,[551] as well as the
Ukrainian World Congress.[552]
In February 2021, Twitter announced they were removing
approximately 100 Russian-linked accounts accused of “undermining faith
in the NATO alliance and its stability.”[553] One wonders if they work as
hard against critics of the CIS, or more seriously, whether they would apply
that same criteria to NATO critics who were not determined to be working
for the Russian government.
Facebook, Amazon, Google (including YouTube) and Apple are riddled
with American spies and national security state apparatchiks[554]—they
helped build it all in the first place.[555] Mostly this is justified in the name
of protecting U.S. firms from foreign espionage,[556] but as we have seen,
they consider American citizens telling the truth to be spreaders of foreign
misinformation and censor them on that basis.
MacLeod also showed that Facebook had partnered with the Atlantic
Council and had even hired former NATO spokesman Ben Nimmo to be its
“head of intelligence.”[557] TikTok[558] and Reddit[559] both also hired
some of these pseudo-spooks from the Atlantic Council.
An anonymous Twitter account, showing his or her work,
demonstrated that Meta, Facebook’s parent corporation, had hired more
than 160 former members of the U.S. intelligence community since 2018:
14 from the CIA, 26 from the FBI, 16 from the NSA, 29 from DHS, 32
from the State Department and 49 from the Department of Defense.[560]
This included the agency’s Aaron Berman, who “built” Facebook’s
Misinformation Policy Team.
Journalist Michael Shellenberger pointed out to Congress that “the bar
for bringing in military-grade government monitoring and speech-
countering techniques has moved from ‘countering terrorism’ to ‘countering
extremism’ to countering simple misinformation.” The rules had become so
loose that the only excuse they needed to censor Americans was “simply the
assertion that the opinion you expressed on social media is wrong.”[561]
When the federal judge in the Missouri case issued his injunction, he
called the whole arrangement “Orwellian,” saying the plaintiffs’ case
revealed that the government had “used its power to silence the
opposition.”[562]
Journalist Jacob Siegel railed against the new order, condemning the
State Department’s Global Engagement Center (GEC) and their “whole-of-
society” approach to supposedly countering “disinformation,” as
determined by them. Regular Americans had no idea what was happening.
In the name of enforcing lies, the Washington regime censored people who
told the truth in their “war against disinformation,” which was “the great
moral crusade of its time.” This was how, Siegel wrote, “CIA officers at
Langley came to share a cause with hip young journalists in Brooklyn,
progressive nonprofits in D.C., George Soros-funded think tanks in Prague,
racial equity consultants, private equity consultants, tech company staffers
in Silicon Valley, Ivy League researchers, and failed British royals.”
And “Never Trump Republicans joined forces with the Democratic
National Committee.”
It was really as easy as semantics. By simply conflating disagreement
with statements and acts of foreign governments, “it justified turning
weapons of war against Americans citizens. It turned the public arenas
where social and political life take place into surveillance traps and targets
for mass psychological operations,” all by unelected officials who had no
legitimate authority to do so and no accountability to the people. Just like
the War Party’s lies about Iraq justified a “wartime state of exception,” so
did their lies about Russiagate justify this war on the American people and
their most important First Amendment protections.
Drawing a direct line from the military’s failed attempt to pacify
Afghanistan with their counterinsurgency doctrine (COIN) during the
“surge” of 2009–2012[563] to the post-2016 censorship regime, Siegel
wrote, “In the wake of the populist upheavals of 2016, leading figures in
America’s ruling party seized upon the feedback loop of surveillance and
control refined through the war on terror as a method for maintaining power
inside the United States.”
To our rulers in Washington, the American people have no more rights
than the Pashtun insurgency in the Helmand province—that is, none. “For
the American ruling class, COIN replaced politics as the proper means of
dealing with the natives.”[564]
Perhaps it is only fitting that such an evil domestic censorship regime
would be born to counteract the consequences of President Obama’s
treasonous support for al Qaeda terrorists in Syria—the rise of the ISIS
“Caliphate” of 2013–2017[565]—and then be turned against the American
people to protect an absolute hoax such as Russiagate, and to further the
most potentially destructive policy imaginable: “cold” or even very hot
conflict with the Russian Federation.
Center-left mainstream conspiracy kook Philip Bump from the Post
says the Twitter Files have been debunked,[566] but his article about
Hamilton 68 now has a giant correction at the bottom of the page admitting
that he had easily been defrauded by liars: “A previous version of this
article incorrectly stated that the Twitter accounts tracked by the Hamilton
68 online dashboard were believed to be tied to Russian actors. The
Hamilton 68 researchers said the accounts echoed Russian propaganda but
did not reveal the identities of the Twitter accounts they monitored or who
controlled them. The article has been corrected.”[567] They added similar
corrections to seven more stories that cited Kristol, Berger and Watt’s lies.
[568] They went from claiming Russians were manipulating Americans and
the election to admitting they were censoring Americans for saying things a
bunch of sheep-dipped feds posing as Twitter employees disagreed with.

Roy Moore

The Hamilton 68 dashboard was created in part by New Knowledge, a

company run by Democratic Party-tied activists and former Justice
Department and CIA employees posing as “disinformation experts.” They
framed Republican Roy Moore of Alabama for being promoted by the
Russians, but were simply lying. There were no Russians. New
Knowledge’s disgraced CEO, a former State Department employee named
Jonathon Morgan,[569] and his team created sock puppet accounts on
Twitter and Facebook in a fraud they called “Project Birmingham.”[570]
“We orchestrated an elaborate ‘false flag’ operation that planted the idea
that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian
botnet,” an internal New Knowledge report gloated.[571] Further, they
claimed credit for driving Democratic turnout, depressing Republican
turnout and directing people to write in other candidates instead.[572]
 The media ran with it,[573] character assassinating a bad
candidate[574] as a traitor to his country. He was defeated by only 1.5
percent of the vote.[575] Before this mini Russiagate hoax, he had been
ahead by six to eight points.[576] Times reporter Scott Shane was later
revealed to have known about the scam all along and remained silent.[577]
New Knowledge was the same group that told the U.S. Senate that
Russian internet bots had “reached 126 million people” and had been
endlessly cited by credulous supposed journalists like Timberg.[578] They
later changed their name to Yonder, so keep an eye out for them to commit
further acts of fraud under that name in the future.
Later a whistleblower named Betsy Dupuis, a former New Knowledge
employee who worked on Hamilton 68, revealed that as many as 10 former
NSA employees came to work for the company and got a contract from the
Department of Defense to create a disinformation system similar to what
they had done to Roy Moore, “to allow the government to manipulate the
perception of their own elections.” She was fired for complaining about
what they were doing, which violated their previous promises to her, and
says Morgan simply told her, “If we don’t do it, someone else will.”[579]

Tulsi Gabbard

Then New Knowledge turned right around and launched a smear campaign
against Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii just a few weeks after she
declared her presidential campaign in early 2019. Gabbard, a still-active-
duty major in the National Guard, had deployed to the Middle East twice
during Iraq War II, once to a medical unit at Balad Air Base just north of
Baghdad. Just a few short years later she was smeared as a traitor by
already-proven liars. But Robert Windrem of NBC News claimed to believe
it, and ran a big story declaring: “The Russian propaganda machine that
tried to influence the 2016 U.S. election is now promoting the presidential
aspirations of a controversial Hawaii Democrat who earlier this month
declared her intention to run for president in 2020.” That actually just meant
Russian news outlets RT and Sputnik had done stories about her and social
media accounts we were supposed to believe were “affiliated with known
and suspected propaganda operations” were mentioning her. Obviously
Russian media found her interesting due to her refusal to support Obama’s
dirty war for al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, since she understood who the
“moderate rebels” really were from the war before,[580] and called for
prioritizing peace with the major nuclear powers.[581]
Instead of letting the American people decide their opinions based on
her arguments, NBC leveled a desperate McCarthyite smear. Windrem even
cited former FBI agent Clint Watts, the self-admitted fraud behind Hamilton
68[582] and co-author of the article “The Good and Bad of Ahrar al-
Sham”—which carried the subheading: “An al Qaeda–Linked Group Worth
Befriending”[583]—to call her a traitor for opposing his support for
terrorism. Windrem also cited Renee DiResta from New Knowledge
alleging they saw random “chatter” on the 8chan message board saying
Gabbard was someone to “amplify.” NBC News and Robert Windrem went
with the avowed al Qaeda supporter against the Iraq war veteran. So did the
Democratic Party, the liberal media and the Twitter swarm. They did not
care what a baseless smear it was. As Glenn Greenwald pointed out,[584]
the Times had already exposed New Knowledge’s Roy Moore hoax in
December 2017,[585] two months before Windrem let them use his name to
publish more of their lies.
In October 2019, Hillary Clinton accused Gabbard, as well as perennial
Green Party candidate Jill Stein, of being “groomed” by Russia to run as
third-party candidates to help Trump win reelection. It was an obvious and
shameful lie based on nothing.[586] Clinton was clearly taking revenge
against Gabbard for endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders in the 2016 primary
race,[587] and against Stein for splitting the liberal vote in the general
election.[588] She did not even have the courage to accuse Gabbard by
name, while making the obvious implication, using the pronoun “she,” and
when, as CNN noted, none of the other Democratic candidates had ever
been said to be favored by Russia. Gabbard challenged Clinton to enter the
race and fight like a woman, then tried to sue her over it.[589] When it
came to Stein, Hillary falsely claimed that “[s]he’s totally a Russian
asset,”[590] which is totally a damned lie. Stein went to a dinner in
Moscow hosted by RT, where Putin briefly showed up. Mike Flynn was
there too. It did not mean anything. But that is all they had on Stein—she
sat at a table.[591] There were also false claims about supposedly all-
powerful Russian “bots” that control all anti-Democratic Party thought
patterns, as raised by Robert Windrem, who cited New Knowledge. Even
then, these very important and influential tweets were still only alleged to
be about her, not that she had anything to do with them.[592]

DeRensis
Windrem will never live down his shame and humiliation for also blatantly
lying and smearing Libertarian Institute editor Hunter DeRensis as some
kind of Russian agent promoting Gabbard’s candidacy on the Russia Insider
website.[593] The first problem with Windrem and NBC’s knowing and
willful libel was that DeRensis’s article was actually written for the
prestigious American foreign policy journal The National Interest.[594]
Russia Insider simply poached and reprinted it, as they themselves noted at
the bottom of the piece. Russia Insider also linked back to the original
article, though they did not even spell the author’s name correctly, facts
which Windrem did not notice or wonder about.[595] Also, despite Russia
Insider’s rewritten headline, the article did not, in fact, promote Gabbard,
but was an evenhanded assessment of her foreign policy stances. Moreover,
Russia Insider is not a Russian publication. Its founder is an American who
has lived in Russia and has pro-Russian partisan takes.[596] He has never
been accused by authorities of being a Russian agent.[597] Regardless,
DeRensis has never had any association with the man in his life. And
finally, the only other evidence presented by Windrem was that a couple
American hosts on the Russian-funded radio broadcaster Sputnik said they
appreciated Gabbard’s approach to Syria, which had no relation to Mr.
DeRensis or his article. Robert Windrem is just a washed-up old has-been
whose most important pieces in a lifetime of forgettable journalism were
nothing but preposterous lies against an active-duty Army National Guard
officer, war veteran, member of Congress, presidential candidate and
patriot,[598] a sweet little old environmentalist lady[599]—and this
author’s associate and friend.[600]
Treason Summit

When Trump met with Putin in Helsinki in July 2018, TV went crazy,
calling it the “treason summit.” All the cable stars went through a complete
breakdown because Trump said “I don’t see any reason why it would be”
true that Russia had intervened in the election, which was a smart take since
it was not true. Former CIA Director Brennan, who became a paid expert on
MSNBC and repeatedly claimed to have seen secret proof of Trump’s guilt,
said Trump’s dismissal of his lies was “nothing short of treasonous.”
Brennan then claimed in an essay in the Times that “Mr. Trump’s claims of
no collusion are, in a word, hogwash. The only questions that remain,” he
said, “are whether the collusion that took place constituted criminally liable
conspiracy, whether obstruction of justice occurred to cover up any
collusion or conspiracy, and how many members of ‘Trump Incorporated’
attempted to defraud the government by laundering and concealing the
movement of money into their pockets.”[601]
People with a partisan motive to believe took the former CIA director
as the ultimate authoritative source, in place of ever-forthcoming proof.
Coverage of the Helsinki meeting was beyond hysterical. Alex Lockie at
Business Insider even claimed a soccer ball that Putin had given Trump
must be rigged with a bug to pilfer the nation’s secrets.[602] Sen. Lindsey
Graham warned Trump not to let it in the White House.[603] The chip was
a standard Adidas radio frequency ID chip they put in all their soccer balls
to interact with their smartphone app, not a microphone or other kind of spy
device.[604]
Maria Butina

The pretty, red-headed Russian gun rights activist, Maria Butina, whom the
Justice Department and major media, led by the Times,[605] ruthlessly
smeared as a so-called honeypot trading sex “for a position with a special
interest organization,” was locked in solitary confinement and forced to
plead guilty to failing to register as a foreign lobbyist.[606] If that were
truly a crime, half the population of Washington, D.C., would be in prison.
As investigative reporter James Bamford showed, Butina was completely
innocent; her accusers liars.[607] She was not trying to influence American
politics. She was seeking Americans’ help fighting against gun control in
Russia. U.S. district court judge Tanya S. Chutkan denounced the feds’ lies,
saying it took her five minutes to figure out the suggestive text messages on
Butina’s phone were simply jokes.[608] Fools let themselves be convinced
this was more proof of Russian collusion—Did someone say “sex”?![609]
—but the special counsel had refused to prosecute this trumped-up case,
leaving it to lesser government lawyers.[610] Even CNN seemed
embarrassed for all the attention they had given the story, noting that “many
of the sensational details surrounding her case have crumbled. Prosecutors
have recanted some allegations and already dropped one charge against her
as part of a plea deal.”[611] David Smith at the Guardian still called her a
spy anyway.[612]

Havana Syndrome
While not directly connected to the Trump-Russia “collusion” narrative,
another major old wives’ tale of the Trump years and overall Russiagate
scandal was the “Havana Syndrome,” in which U.S. government employees
claimed the Russians and Cubans were shooting them with a mind-zapper
ray gun, causing all sorts of terrible psychosomatic effects on the poor State
Department and CIA victims.[613] Frank Wisner’s Mighty Wurlitzer[614]
blasted the message out to the hordes of cable TV news heads. But it turned
out the science-fiction blaster fire the diplomats thought they heard was just
the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket.[615] Microwaves do not
work like that.[616] The contagious mass hysteria inside the CIA and State
Department on this issue was quite impressive,[617] even for the 21st
century, though it was ultimately debunked by the CIA itself and its board
of scientific advisers.[618] For TV anchors like MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace,
the former George W. Bush administration spokeswoman, the use of this
imaginary Russian ray gun was absolutely terrifying, an “act of war” which
signaled a new level of enemy aggression against the United States, and the
utter depravity of President Trump, the supposed Russian agent.[619] But it
was completely fake.[620]
Michael Weiss—the same kook from the Atlantic Council who spent
years shilling for al Qaeda in Syria,[621] then anonymously and falsely
accused good journalists of being Russian agents through the ridiculous
PropOrNot website—put out a report in 2024 claiming the Havana
Syndrome was real after all.[622] He did not explain how the Russians are
able to keep track of so many American intelligence agents; perhaps they
have a spy at the top of the FBI counterintelligence division again.[623]
While some supposed victims are Russia experts, “others have expertise in
different fields, such as the Middle East or Latin America, but were
assigned after the takeover of Crimea to sensitive U.S. government roles
aimed at countermanning [sic] Russian aggression” after 2014. But how
could the Russians know all of that? Their story is that Russia is shooting
U.S. government employees with “a strong energy beam,” “nonlethal
acoustic weapons,” or “radiofrequency-based directed energy devices.” In
other words, they have no idea what they are talking about.
Weiss’s whole article is speculative garbage. The wife of a Justice
Department employee in Tbilisi said a GU officer shown to her in a picture
three years after the fact “looks like the man” she saw in the street after she
got a headache one day. The magic ray gun he was not holding—and that
they cannot describe—can do anything, apparently, including the ability to
cause “chronic headaches, vertigo, tinnitus, insomnia, nausea, lasting
psychophysiological impairment, and, in some cases, blindness or hearing
loss.” And what made them think someone was using a ray gun on them?
“Many victims have said they were . . . stricken with an intense pain or
pressure in their skull . . . usually localized to one side of the head, as if
they were caught in a beam of concentrated energy.”
We are supposed to believe the Indians and Chinese had no problem
with the Russians zapping American officials on their soil. They also
claimed a senior Trump official was blasted “right outside the Eisenhower
Executive Building” in Washington just after the 2020 election. Maybe they
were punishing a top-secret agent for not rigging the election well enough.
The supposed Russian spy who looks like the guy seen by the wife of the
Department of Justice employee may have had his phone turned off—and
so could have gone to Tbilisi if you use your imagination. Their big story
goes on like that, but includes nothing more substantial than “could have
easily boarded flights to and from Frankfurt using fictitious identities,”
“[a]ssuming this is true,” “I don’t believe in coincidences” and so on.[624]

Mockingbird

Besides the fake scandals investigated by the feds, there were too many
embellished stories in the media along the same lines to even keep up with.
There was a huge Post story about the Russian plot to hack Vermont’s
power grid in the dead of winter,[625] thus “sparking a wave of fear,” as
Forbes put it.[626] To their partial credit, three days later the Post admitted
this was complete nonsense with no basis in factual reality.[627] What
actually happened? Well, allegedly someone—no one knows who—sent an
attempted phishing email to an employee’s private laptop, which had
nothing to do with any other thing in the world, including the electric grid
and the intelligence services of the Russian Federation.[628] But they still
got their mini-Y2K computer panic out of it at the turn of 2017, just weeks
before Trump was sworn in, which was very exciting and scary for people
who signed up to take the ride.[629] Luckily no one froze.
The same day CNN broke the big news about Comey’s briefing to
Trump on the dossier, numerous outlets claimed C-SPAN TV was hacked
by the Russian news channel RT.[630] This was obviously just an error on
C-SPAN’s part that was not the result of any outside interference, as they
later conceded.[631] It sounds ridiculous, and it is. But for national
government employee types in Washington, D.C., stories like this
accumulated in their minds like rumors of Iraqi chemical weapons. They
were terrified.[632]
We cannot omit the Russians’ alleged support for the Black Lives
Matter movement to stir up those otherwise perfectly contented survivors of
state violence[633]—and future big-money grifters[634]—in order to “sow
division,” as they liked to claim when they had to make up a motive for
supposed interference that would seem to benefit the Democrats.[635] The
Post warned that the Russians were “encouraging distrust in black
communities,” while the paper’s authors and editors were encouraging other
Americans to distrust black protesters for being Russian puppets.[636] Law
professor William J. Aceves embellished the tale so far that he declared the
Russians had “tried to start a race war in the United States.”[637]
Another widely hyped Russiagate story[638] was about a website
called peacedata.net, which was accused of being a Russian propaganda
front. They had recruited a few American writers and had posted articles of
typical leftist antiwar fare, including pieces about intervention in Somalia
and Yemen, but these had been viewed essentially by no one.[639] Before
the story broke, no one in the antiwar movement had ever heard of it. The
Facebook page promoting the site had fewer than 200 “likes.” As the
Grayzone pointed out, there was no reason to believe this was a legitimate
story at all. No evidence was ever cited. It could have just as easily been a
false-flag dirty trick like what New Knowledge did to Roy Moore.[640]
Remember when Trump told the Russians that the Israelis had a spy
inside ISIS? The Post ran that on the front page, burning the source to
falsely claim the president had shared sensitive intelligence with an
enemy[641] when there was no reason to believe the secret would have
been revealed by the Russians. It was America’s allies Saudi Arabia[642]
and Turkey[643] who supported ISIS. Russia was bombing them,[644] and
being bombed by them right back.[645] The Post and assorted parrots made
it seem as though Trump was collaborating with an enemy instead of
sharing some laughs about a success against a common foe—a secret the
Russians had no incentive to leak. Perhaps he should have followed better
operational security, but he did not betray anyone, the Post did.
CNN claimed that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved in a
corrupt Russian hedge fund under investigation by Congress and implied
the strong possibility he also was helping to handle Trump for the Russian
regime.[646] They were beaten down so badly on that one that reporter
Thomas Frank, editor Eric Lichtblau and supervisor Lex Haris were all
forced to resign from CNN.[647]
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and the Democrats screamed and cried
over accusations about Russia’s hacking of all the state party voter rolls.
[648] This was an obvious fraud[649] long before they admitted it.[650]
One should always doubt when the reports originate with the Department of
Homeland Security.[651] They just want some attention.[652]
Then there was the Russian GU’s alleged intervention in Brexit[653]—
the British vote to leave the European Union in 2016—and in French,
German and EU parliamentary and other elections throughout Europe,[654]
claims which were debunked by their own intelligence agencies.[655]
George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, however, did donate at least
$200,000 to the “Yes” campaign in the Dutch consultative referendum on
the Ukrainian EU association agreement that year.[656] When they lost, the
Times claimed the Russians had somehow brainwashed the Dutch into their
decision,[657] but there was nothing to it. The individuals involved in
supposedly advocating pro-Russia positions were not shown to be agents of
the Russian government or to have had any notable effect on the vote. In
fact, the public had been against the initiative by two-to-one from the start.
[658]
Then-British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson admitted in March 2017,
“We have no evidence the Russians are actually involved in trying to
undermine our democratic processes at the moment. We don’t actually have
that evidence. But what we do have is plenty of evidence that the Russians
are capable of doing that.”[659]
The often-wrong reporter Luke Harding claimed in Newsweek that
Russia was blackmailing Trump over debts to Deutsche Bank.[660] There
was no substance to these claims, as journalist David Enrich explained in
the Times.[661]
Putin’s influence was said to explain Trump’s choice of Exxon CEO
Rex Tillerson for his first secretary of state.[662] The Post found dangerous
links, such as “Tillerson and [Igor] Sechin sign the first in a series of deals
as part of a landmark ‘Strategic Cooperation Agreement’ that involved
drilling in the Russian Arctic and the Black Sea. The agreements led to
Tillerson having several direct interactions with then-Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin.” Interactions! They found 10 points of contact—all of them
acting in his official capacity as chief of Exxon or secretary of state, without
any particular negative connotation to any of them.[663] Imagine supposed
journalists being so caught up in this fad that they believed the CEO of the
most successful and influential multinational corporation in American and
even world history—the Rockefeller family’s flagship Standard Oil of New
Jersey—ExxonMobil,[664] and its leaders were agents of Vladimir Putin,
rather than the closest private partners to the American empire in the world
for more than 100 years.[665]
Tillerson was an establishment choice, named to bolster confidence in
Trump’s new administration, much like Trump’s center-right Vice President
Mike Pence and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who was hard-edged,
but well-known and respected in Washington. But to the Russiagate
truthers, it was just another brick in the wall. They might have said the same
thing if he hired Hillary Clinton herself by that point.
Later, when Trump fired Tillerson, they imagined that was on behalf of
Russia as well.[666]
Twitter liberals are still very concerned that Republican Party strategist
Jesse Benton was convicted of funneling money from a Russian national
into the 2016 Trump campaign. The only problem with the red alert is that
the amount donated was only $25,000, no one from the Trump campaign
knew anything about it and the Russian in question, Roman Vasilenko, is
just some nobody, criminal pyramid schemer who wanted his picture taken
with Trump.[667] The guy could have been from anywhere in the world.
This story in no way bolstered the Clinton campaign’s, spies’ or national
police’s lies about the GU plot to overthrow American democracy or even
bolster Trump’s campaign.[668]
 A Ukrainian-American[669] businessman, Yuri Vanetik, also liked to
get his picture taken with Republicans and take part in their politics.[670]
McClatchy Newspapers ran a four-part series about the guy full of terrible
truths like he knew Paul Manafort and Rep. Dana Rohrabacher.[671]
They repeatedly called him a “Soviet émigré,” since he moved here as
a young boy in 1976, 42 years prior, to make him sound like a Russian
enemy rather than a Ukrainian friend. Reporters Kevin G. Hall, Ben Wieder,
Greg Gordon and Peter Stone’s[672] editor apparently forced them to admit
there was “no evidence that Vanetik is under investigation for election
issues, or that he factors into the ongoing probes of possible collusion
between Russia and Trump campaign officials.” (Angela Hart from the
Sacramento Bee got in on the baseless attacks as well.)[673] But they still
went on pretending to have found a scandal: Vanetik is the connection
between Rep. Rohrabacher and . . . himself. Okay, the congressman stood
accused of knowing Julian Assange, so . . . nothing, and there was no
connection to Vanetik there anyway. He knew Rinat Akhmetshin, a lobbyist
with “links to Russian intelligence”—in other words, Akhmetshin had been
a counterintelligence officer in the Red Army that ceased to exist 30 years
earlier—who was present for Trump Tower New York meeting, but did and
delivered nothing there. But that did not have anything to do with Vanetik
either.[674]
Well, Vanetik’s name may have been accidentally included as part of a
GOP Public Action Committee (PAC) that got in some other trouble when a
British journalist pretended to donate Chinese money to it, but he did not
work with the PAC at all, and had nothing to do with that. Can you believe
the guy once embellished that he was valedictorian at Berkeley? And his
father owed the IRS money—$5,000—and took care of it three decades
ago. And then the kicker: Vanetik was slightly overdue registering as a
foreign lobbyist representing Ukrainian politician Serhiy Rybalka. And is
Rybalka a Russian spy? No, he is a Western Ukrainian nationalist from the
Radical Party and supporter of the post-Maidan regime. They claimed
Vanetik had “run-ins with the law,” implying that he was a convicted, or
even an accused criminal, when what they really meant was that he had
been sued by a businessman over a deal that had fallen through a decade
before—and that businessman had donated to Trump and was later
suspected of influence peddling. It was just another red herring. The worst
thing they actually accused him of was raising money for John McCain.
[675] He also raised money for Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio and donated to
Hillary Clinton.[676]
In a follow-up, in which they falsely identified their subject as a
“Russian émigré,” McClatchy said Vanetik had registered to lobby for the
Ukrainian Agrarian Party. And are they a front for the Kremlin? No, they
are a center-right party backed by some of the same oligarchs who
supported President Poroshenko.[677] He had an overdue credit card bill.
And he registered his company in Wyoming, which is also something
Russians do sometimes. “It is impossible to know what other purpose, if
any, [the company] served,” because after all, companies could be “used for
a wide array of nefarious purposes, including tax evasion and money
laundering,” Hall ominously intoned, in place of any substantive
accusation.[678]
 In another follow-up, they again fudged Vanetik’s identity from
Ukrainian-American to “Soviet émigré,” then outright falsely to “Russian
émigré,” obviously because that sounds more incriminating than pointing
out the man’s interests were aligned with Kiev, or at least certainly were not
with Moscow, which he was not associated with in any way. It was a
desperate, substanceless smear.[679]
As for his connection to Manafort? Vanetik later wrote in the Journal,
“I met Mr. Manafort at a restaurant in New York and posted a thumbs-up
photo with him on Instagram. That was our only contact.” Here was Hall’s
big nut-graph on that point: “It’s unclear whether Vanetik and Manafort
have done business together; both have represented prominent Ukrainian
clients.” The entire series might have been summed up in one headline:
California man with Russian-sounding name has met some Republicans.
Vanetik hired a lawyer to threaten McClatchy to add corrections.[680] He
should own it by the time they are done.[681]
All of these accusations—quite literally 533,000 news stories’ worth,
according to former Times reporter Jeff Gerth in his years-long examination
of the scandal for the Columbia Journalism Review[682]—were eventually
walked back or abandoned. Many of the intelligence officials involved in
the hoax went straight into the media to help enforce its narratives.[683] In
a couple of tweets, Taibbi listed just a few of the former spies and federal
police who have gotten jobs as paid talking heads on cable TV news in this
era, virtually all of whom championed the Russiagate hoax:

John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael

Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall,
 Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha
Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan
Hennessey, Ned Price, Rick Francona . . . Michael Morell,
John McLaughlin, John Sipher, Thomas Bossert, Clint Watts,
James Baker, Mike Baker, Daniel Hoffman, Susan Rice, Ben
Rhodes, David Preiss, Evelyn Farkas, Tony Blinken, Mike
Rogers, “Alex Finley,” Malcolm Nance.[684]

In another case, BuzzFeed breathlessly[685] reported that wire

transfers revealed a disbursement of $30,000 from Russia to its American
Embassy “to finance election campaign of 2016.”[686] This was obviously
a reference to the provision of ballots for Russian citizens in the United
States to vote absentee in the upcoming Russian elections that September,
as explained even by Russiagate promoter Philip Bump in the Post.[687]
But it was a big headline for a day or two.
“[H]ave Democrats assumed too much in their zeal to bring Mr. Trump
down? Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add
up?” the Times’s Peter Baker finally asked in March 2019, after it was all
over.[688]

Jerking Your Chain

Former FBI Director Mueller could have made it known from the very
beginning of his appointment as special counsel in May 2017 that their
investigation was not showing the president of the United States was guilty
of treason or in league with the Kremlin to destroy our democracy. Again,
as Bob Woodward explained in his 2018 book, Fear, Trump told his lawyer
to give Mueller’s team every scrap of paper from the 2016 campaign—no
problem, not a thing to hide in the world.[689] Just as Woodward
understood and the Department of Justice must have known, this meant that
from the very beginning there was nothing there to find. They could have
clarified that most important point in a reasonable amount of time after that.
In the summer of 2017, just six months into Trump’s first term, former
DNI Clapper admitted to Congress—in secret—that “I never saw any direct
empirical evidence that the Trump campaign or someone in it was
plotting/conspiring with the Russians to meddle with the election.”[690]
Obama-era officials like former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates,[691]
Secretary of State Susan Rice,[692] Deputy National Security Advisor Ben
Rhodes[693] and UN Ambassador Samantha Power[694] all admitted the
same in closed congressional intelligence committee hearings.
But for another two years, the public was subject to 1,000 leaked lies
from the spies, congressmen[695] and federal cops trying to make us
believe it was all true. When BuzzFeed somehow crossed the line by falsely
claiming that Trump had instructed his lawyer to lie to Congress,[696]
Mueller quickly put out a press release denying it was true.[697] But
whether the sitting chief executive of the U.S. government and commander
in chief of its military forces was guilty of High Treason, of past and current
blackmailed subordination to and “collusion” with the most potentially
lethal foreign power on the planet? Sorry, you will just have to wait and
wonder and watch hysterical TV news ladies speculate wildly among
themselves for a couple more years until we get back to you.
 Meanwhile, Mueller knew the truth all along, as admitted in his final
report. After Trump won the election, the Russians “appeared not to have
preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around
the President-Elect.” When Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner needed to
authenticate a congratulatory note from Putin, he had to contact Dimitri
Simes from the Center for the National Interest to ask him the Russian
ambassador’s name.[698]

Obstruction

The president’s shameless political enemies took the Mueller report’s

admission of a total lack of evidence and failure to demonstrate any plot
between Trump and Russia and instead launched a public relations
campaign to demand his impeachment on charges that he had obstructed
justice, for which Mueller had explicitly refused to exonerate him. Notably,
in the American system, accused criminals are supposed to be presumed
innocent, and it is up to the state to prove charges beyond a reasonable
doubt. “Failure to exonerate” is not a thing. Mueller was still acting not as
any objective agent of the law, but as a criminal co-conspirator in a frame-
up job, just like the hundreds of innocent American Muslims he entrapped
on bogus terrorism charges to scare people into supporting W. Bush’s
aggressive Middle East wars.[699] The case for obstruction was a
smokescreen for a total lack of charges related to Russiagate. It is hardly
worth mentioning, other than the problem of the brazen abuse of power by
state agents against their own elected leader.
 The fact is, as ham-handed as Trump was in the few meager half-steps
he took—he did not fire the special counsel or anything close to it—there
was no justice for him to obstruct. Mueller’s investigation amounted to
nothing but a half-assed coup attempt against the president by the FBI, CIA,
Department of Justice and their media partisans on behalf of Hillary
Clinton, the Democrats and the new Cold War with Russia, which they were
determined to prevent Trump from thwarting.
If he had been wise, Trump would have obstructed the investigation
entirely by firing Mueller and the top 100 people at Justice, FBI and CIA—
but then declassified everything the police and intelligence agencies had on
him and sent copies by the truckload to his enemies in Congress and at the
Post, the Times and NPR, as well as interested friends at Fox News, the
Journal, the Federalist, the Daily Caller and so on. We know what the result
would have been. They would have found nothing, because there was
nothing to find. John Brennan, Hillary Clinton, James Comey and their
agents made it all up.
Perhaps upon retaking the office, Trump will declassify the most
important documents in this case, so that the public can finally see the full
truth behind this fraud.

Even the Senate Republicans

An often-repeated talking point of national security state partisans during

this time was that even the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence
Committee report agreed the Russiagate story was all true.[700] So it did.
[701] But there was no evidence in it or even an indication of anything new
to investigate. The report simply claimed the intelligence agencies said it
was true and that was how they knew. It was no more confirmation than
consensus among opinion-havers on daytime TV.

2020

And last but not least, let us not forget that in February 2020, in the heat of
the primary election season, Shelby Pierson, the “election threats executive”
for the director of national intelligence, lied to Congress, the press and the
American people that the Russians were attempting to intervene in the
electoral process on behalf of then-President Trump and Democratic Party
challenger Bernie Sanders.[702] Fiona Hill popped up to tell CBS it
sounded true to her.[703] They did not even attempt to prove it. That did not
matter. It was a media hit.[704]
Just a few days later they walked back both stories. A “senior national
security official” corrected CNN: “The intelligence doesn’t say that. A more
reasonable interpretation of the intelligence is not that they have a
preference, it’s a step short of that. It’s more that they understand the
President is someone they can work with, he’s a dealmaker.”
It was just another empty story. The intelligence said Russia thought
Trump was someone they could deal with, not someone they had a deal
with, and not someone they were doing anything at all to help in the
upcoming election. Like always, the accusation did not have to be true. The
headline was the weapon. The retraction meant nothing.
As far as Sen. Sanders goes, even if his previous support for
Russiagate conspiracism about Trump[705] did not mean he deserved to be
smeared with the same lies, it did apparently help prepare the senator to
accept the propaganda line against himself, denouncing Russia for trying to
help his own campaign and absurdly bolstering the alleged legitimacy of the
story at his own expense.[706] For his part, President Trump said he had
never been briefed on any Russian effort to help Sanders.[707]

Uranium One

Much of the hoax was just a case of the Democrats accusing their enemies
of that which they themselves are guilty. It was Bill and Hillary Clinton
who were compromised by the Russians. They had bribed the former
president with speaking fees and the former secretary of state with massive
donations to her foundation in exchange for her State Department
authorizing a Russian firm to buy American uranium mines, amounting to
one-fifth of the U.S. supply.[708] The Times published a series on it in the
spring of 2015.[709] They wrote that as a Russian firm bought the
American company Uranium One, they donated three separate times to the
Clinton Foundation, totaling $2.35 million, payments they did not disclose
to the government like in the deal the then-secretary had made with the
Obama administration. On top of that, as soon as the Russian company
announced their intention to buy Uranium One, a bank connected to the
deal paid former President Clinton half a million dollars to give a speech in
Moscow.[710]
It was entertaining to read the Post insist, even as they revealed the
total to be much higher, “Individuals related to Uranium One and
UrAsia . . . donated to the Clinton Foundation, totaling about $145 million,
[but] these were donations made to the Clinton Foundation, not directly to
the Clintons.”[711] Democratic spokespeople gloated that Republican
congressmen had overstated witness claims of a clear quid pro quo,[712]
but neither a secret deal nor direct influence by the secretary over the
approval process is necessary for what they did to be wrong.
The Russians and associated business partners knew who to pay and
the government officials on the approval board must have known that the
secretary wanted the deal authorized. Though the very Obama
administration-friendly Times reported it, the “fact-checkers” would have us
believe no influence was bought with all that money. Former President Bill
Clinton just likes to travel to Kazakhstan to finalize mining deals with his
businessman friends solely due to his own charitable instincts, they say. He
would never do such a thing if there were something in it for himself or his
family, and certainly not because he was paid for one speech more than
what the average American man makes in 10 years.[713] Nor would the
nearly-merely $150 million donated to the Clinton Foundation by
companies associated with the deal have any effect on Mrs. Clinton or her
underlings’ decisions at the State Department.[714] This is not some third-
world dictatorship.
On the other hand, think of it this way: what if this was the one
Russiagate story about Trump that was true? He traveled to Kazakhstan
with the CEO of America’s most important uranium mining company to
finalize its sale to the Russians, and then on to Moscow—where he gave a
$500,000 speech to a bank with direct ties to the Russian firm buying it—
all while Secretary of State Melania Trump’s department handled the
license for the sale and her foundation cashed checks for more than $140
million from both the company being sold and the one buying it.
It sounds pretty bad if you put it like that.
Special Counsel Durham later complained that the FBI had an entirely
different and much softer approach to the Clintons than their opponent. In
one case, when a foreigner donated to the Clinton Foundation, the FBI gave
them a defensive briefing. In another, an informant made a donation “as a
precursor” to a possible larger contribution on behalf of a foreign entity, but
the bureau shut down the investigation rather than see how far it would go.
Most importantly, when it came to the Clinton Foundation, “both senior FBI
and Department officials placed restrictions on how those matters were to
be handled such that essentially no investigative activities occurred for
months leading up to the election.”[715]
There is every reason to suspect this was why Clinton’s team had
deleted more than 30,000 emails from her private server. She claimed they
were personal emails with Bill,[716] but he has stated he has only used
email twice in his life.[717] More likely, they revealed corruption—direct
and indirect influence peddling from the office of the secretary of state.
Their scam really worked, too. When the Trump team tried to cite the
uranium scandal, the typical reaction was that he was the one guilty of
crooked deals with Russians, and was trying to distract from it by pointing
at her.[718]

Lying About Russia

Of course, besides the political assassination of Trump, there was the built-
in smear of the Russians concerning their intentions and actions against the
United States. Congress passed, and Obama and Trump both signed and
implemented, new sanctions and threats against Russia over the hoax,
massively ratcheting up of tension in 2016–2019 and beyond.[719]
The Times later reported that due to their Russiagate hoax, Congress
had voted to strip the president of his authority to lift what they called
“Fried’s and Nuland’s sanctions.” They wrote, “In the words of one Russia
hand, the congressional bill makes the United States-Russia confrontation
‘structural.’ ‘The president is like a captain holding a wheel that isn’t
attached to anything.’”[720]
The Russian coup d’état against Hillary Clinton that never happened
was routinely compared to, and apparently seriously considered by many to
be, an act of war against the United States, a dastardly attack on American
democracy itself. It was terrifying, like the 1980s miniseries Amerika (with
a ‘k’) where the Soviets take over,[721] except made for center-left, neo-
liberal, NPR News types. And it made the U.S. relationship with Russia that
much worse.

Reining Him In

“Reining in Trump”[722] worked in spades. He simply did not have the

intelligence, the allies or the strength to stand up to the national security
state’s onslaught. Desperate to prove he was not a traitor to the foreign
policy establishment, Trump betrayed the American people and his promise
to end the recent era of enmity and work things out with Russia.
 The hawks had outflanked Trump from the very beginning. In March
2017, just weeks after he was sworn in, the White House announced he was
backing off plans to work with Russia on the war against ISIS in Syria “and
other national security matters,” the Associated Press reported. “[T]he
reconsideration of a central tenet of his foreign policy underscores the
growing political risks in forging closer relations with Russia, as long as the
FBI investigates his campaign associates’ connections to Moscow and
congressional committees step up their inquiries into Russia’s meddling in
the 2016 election.” This was due in large part to the influence of Defense
Secretary Gen. James Mattis and National Security Advisor Gen. H.R.
McMaster, and the flack Trump had received over the fake scandal
drummed up against Gen. Flynn. “It would be unpopular for a politician to
make a deal,” Trump told reporters. “It would be much easier for me to be
so tough—the tougher I am on Russia, the better.”[723]
He oversaw the addition of Montenegro to NATO in 2017[724] and
Northern Macedonia in 2020[725]—and frankly, credibly denied any
knowledge of doing so to TV host Tucker Carlson.[726] Trump sent more
American troops and equipment to Poland[727] and the Baltics,[728]
sponsored an attempted color-coded revolution in Belarus and, just like
Obama, went ahead with arms sales to Ukraine’s Banderist-infested armed
forces by the end of his first year in office. These included sniper rifles,
[729] armed boats,[730] RPGs and Javelin anti-tank missiles.[731] He also
authorized hundreds of millions of dollars in nonlethal equipment, such as
Humvees, night vision goggles, radars and armor, along with training and
joint military exercises. This only incentivized more violence after the
Minsk II peace deal had already been signed two years before he was sworn
in.[732] Trump also imposed massive new sanctions on Russia in August
2017. As reporter John Hudson noted, this was likely intended to “enrage”
the Russians and endanger the president’s plans to repair relations. He also
noted that “[k]ey U.S. allies including Germany oppose the decision out of
concern that it could trigger Russia to step up its military intervention in
Ukraine in ways that spiral out of control.” The president was a pushover.
Once he said he wanted peace, they told him that was what the weapons
were for: not killing people, just deterring Russian escalation. Besides, if he
did not go along with the plan, “Democrats would likely seize on the move
as evidence of Trump’s friendliness with Russia.”[733]
By the end of 2017, Trump gave in and sent his first shipment of
Javelin missiles to Ukraine. “The move is likely to become another sore
point between Washington and Moscow, as President Donald Trump
contends with ongoing questions about whether he’s too hesitant to confront
the Kremlin,” the AP noted. They added, “Both the Obama administration
and the Trump administration had expressed concerns in the past that
injecting more weapons into the conflict was unlikely to resolve it,
especially considering that Russia is well-equipped to respond to any
Ukrainian escalation with an even stronger escalation of its own.” The
outlet also said, “Sending lethal weapons to Ukraine also creates the
troubling possibility that American arms could kill Russian soldiers, a
situation that could thrust the two nuclear-armed nations closer to direct
confrontation.”[734]
 In the big Times piece on the CIA in Ukraine in the years between the
coup and Russia’s “full-scale invasion,” they described how Trump allowed
his staff to walk all over him.[735] “Mr. Trump had put Russia hawks in
key positions, including Mike Pompeo as CIA director and John Bolton as
[his second] national security adviser,” the paper wrote. “They visited Kyiv
to underline their full support for the secret partnership, which expanded to
include more specialized training programs and the building of additional
secret bases.”[736]
The struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He
was Big Brother.
This is the deadly legacy of the Russiagate hoax invented by the
Democrats, the FBI and the CIA. Millions of Americans, caught up in these
lies, came to believe their country had quite literally been conquered by the
Russians in a way the Communists only ever could in the movies: through a
successful coup they had installed a Manchurian Candidate, a compromised
white-supremacist agent of the Kremlin in the Oval Office, with his finger
on the big red button and everything. Narratives about politicians and
statesmen fighting over regional power and influence gave way to
cartoonish morality plays full of heroes and villains and black-and-white
perceptions about Russia taken from appraisals of Nazi Germany back in
the 1940s that do not apply to Russia today. It all helped to prevent
President Trump from normalizing relations with Russia and possibly
finding a way to end the war in the Donbas. You cannot negotiate with Evil,
as Dick Cheney might say.
 They were also able to avoid having to reckon with the fact that in one
year the American people had rejected the leadership of both President
George W. Bush’s brother Jeb and President Bill Clinton’s wife and
President Barack Obama’s first secretary of state Hillary and the previous
generation of failed leadership their families represented to the American
people after eight failed wars[737] and the worst financial disaster since the
1930s[738] in favor of a famous TV game show host and businessman[739]
with no political experience or collection of major interest groups behind
him. No, they told themselves, they had been doing a great job. Vladimir
Putin had tricked the people into not liking them anymore.[740]

OceanofPDF.com
 The Skripals

Assassination Times

On March 4, 2018, the Russian government allegedly tried to assassinate a

former double agent named Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia in
Salisbury, England, with a “military grade nerve agent” known as
“Novichok” that had been smeared on the father’s home’s front doorknob.
[741] Found unconscious on a park bench, they were both rushed to the
hospital. They both survived[742] after being put into induced comas.[743]
A police officer and two other unrelated civilians were said to have also
been sickened. Four months later, a woman named Dawn Sturgess died
after spraying herself with what she thought was perfume from a discarded
bottle in which British authorities said the poison was transported. Her
boyfriend Charlie Rowley had found it in a charity bin and given it to her as
a gift. Rowley was also sickened, but survived.[744]

Porton Down

Citing the conclusion by the UK’s own chemical weapons laboratory,

Porton Down, that the Skripals were poisoned by a substance “of a type
developed by Russia,” British Prime Minister Theresa May quickly accused
the Russian Federation and kicked 23 of their diplomats out of the country
in response.[745] This was despite the fact that the two Russian suspects
later charged in the case, Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, were not
identified until months later, after the death of Sturgess.[746]

Screwy Story

The motive was supposed to simply have been revenge for Skripal’s
treason. He had been convicted for giving the identities of Russian
intelligence agents in Europe to MI6. But the former spy had been living in
the open in England for almost a decade after having been traded in a
prisoner swap.[747] Typically, spies who have been traded in prisoner
exchanges are not targeted for assassination. That would ruin the potential
for further exchanges.[748]
The rest of the story does not seem to make much sense either. The
Novichok poisons, developed by Soviet scientists in the 1970s and ’80s, are
nerve agents said to be far more dangerous than sarin, VX or tabun.[749] It
certainly seems strange that this substance, which is said to be among the
deadliest known to man in the tiniest amounts, only affected the victims at
least three hours[750] after their alleged exposure and after they hung
around, fed some ducks and ate lunch, with a photo showing them in
obvious good health and spirits. They then went to the pub and the park
before finally becoming ill. The chemical weapon supposedly kicked in
against both the father and daughter just as they sat down on a bench. The
chemical agent did not kill the target, his daughter, or the many first
responders who would have been exposed. A nurse, one of the first on the
scene, and who treated the younger Skripal for nearly half an hour, told the
BBC she had no symptoms at all.[751] However, the OPCW reported that
“the chemical substance found was of high purity, persistent and resistant to
weather conditions.”[752] But they did not even get their samples until
weeks later, on March 21.[753]
“Up to 500 people who visited the pub or the restaurant at the same
time were told to wash their clothes and possessions” in case they had any
deadly nerve agent on them, reported the BBC.[754] Rowley apparently did
not call an ambulance for himself until five hours after he had called one for
Sturgess.[755] He later insisted the package had been unopened, sealed in
plastic, and so could not have been the origin of the poison in the Skripal
case.[756]

Nick Bailey

On the other hand, it apparently was something, since some of them were in
fact sickened and hospitalized, including one of the cops, Detective
Sergeant Nick Bailey, though he did not feel sick for hours, and even then
was sent home from the hospital after a quick check.[757] The OPCW
confirmed the UK’s claims about which “toxic chemical” was in the
victims’ blood samples, though they did not name it in their public report
summary.[758]
While Skripal was reported to be close to a man named Pablo Miller—
who worked for the notorious dossier fabricator and former MI6 spy
Christopher Steele at his firm Orbis Business Intelligence—there was no
indication he was involved in its sourcing or production, nor would that
have been a motive for Russia to attempt to kill him, as the British
Telegraph had speculated, especially since the dossier was a hoax anyway.
[759] Four days later, after Bailey had been identified in the media,
authorities still had apparently not determined that Skripal had been
exposed from the doorknob and were still speculating that his work for
Orbis may have gotten him killed.[760]
But when the London Times ran claims that 40 people required
treatment, a National Health Service (NHS) doctor wrote to correct them.
While his language was not perfectly clear—he may or may not have been
implying the two Skripals and the policeman were affected, though it seems
most likely not—but he definitely said no one else was: “no patients have
experienced symptoms of nerve agent poisoning in Salisbury and there have
only been ever been three patients with significant poisoning.”[761]

Dorks

The Brits charged the previously mentioned Petrov and Boshirov, claiming
they were agents of the Russian military intelligence unit GU and saying
they traced the men through close-circuit video, “near but not at, Mr.
Skripal’s house,” according to the New York Times.[762] The men
supposedly flew straight to England and back from Russia together, used
the same team of two to surveil the location, drew attention to themselves
with a loud party in their hotel room the night before the assassination,[763]
and after having planted the poison, walked around town, readily
identifiable by scores of surveillance cameras.[764]
The two eventually gave an interview to Russian government-
sponsored news channel RT. The strange story they told of their attempted
tourism in England may not have been convincing,[765] but the two may
very well have established how doubtful it was that they were highly
trained military officers and assassins. They came across as a couple of
nobodies who were legitimately terrified to have been falsely implicated in
such a scheme.[766]
If it was a Russian GU operation, the attempt was certainly a terrible
diplomatic and public relations move for seemingly very little return.
British officials speculated to Newsweek that perhaps some rogue agents
had done the deed since it made no sense for Putin to commit such an act,
just as his country was preparing to host the FIFA World Cup soccer
tournament.[767]

Easy Chemistry

As far as the poison’s origins, as conceded by the Wall Street Journal, the
chemical structure of this class of weapon had been published in a book by
a former Soviet scientist,[768] meaning that, assuming the accusations from
British military experts were true, its origin as a poison originally invented
by the Soviets back during the first Cold War in no way indicated the source
of this current batch.
An AFP reporter deadpanned, “‘Only the Russians’ developed this
class of nerve agents, said the chemist. ‘They kept it and are still keeping it
in secrecy.’ The only other possibility, he said, would be that someone used
the formulas in his book to make such a weapon.”[769] A French expert
also told the Journal that the “chemical formula has been publicized and we
know from publications from then-Czechoslovakia that they had worked on
similar agents for defense in the 1980s,” adding, “I’m sure other countries
with developed programs would have as well.”[770] The Russian mob used
one of these nerve agents to assassinate a banker named Ivan Kivelidi in
1995.[771]
David Collum, a professor of organic chemistry at Cornell University,
said that “to an organic chemist, these compounds are pretty trivial to make.
Any country in the world could make them. Any major chemistry
department would have the facilities to make them.” He said he would be
open to claims that they had traced the substance in a more particular way,
but that was not the argument they were making.[772] Collum put the
question on the final exam of his first-year graduate-level organic chemistry
course, showing students the finished compound and asking them to show
how to make it in three steps. All but one student got the answer right.[773]
Collum also dismissed the evidence against the two Russians the UK
eventually blamed for the attack, noting, “The residue detected in the
assassins’ hotel room found two months later could not be detected the
following day.[774] That’s not how chemistry works, folks.”
The Times found two experts, who, accepting the UK government’s
claims about poison being left on Skripal’s doorknob, were impressed by
the tradecraft since they said it would be difficult to effectively poison
someone that way with that type of substance. The medium carrying the
toxin would have to be sticky enough to adhere to the doorknob, but not so
sticky that it would be noticeable or fail to cling to the intended victim. The
way they described the scenario made it seem unlikely.[775]

CCTV
Local Salisbury writer Rob Slane pointed out a contradiction in the
government’s account. It said it had determined Russian responsibility, in
part, through prior intelligence showing the Russians had been practicing
how to leave Novichok on door handles. But if that were true, “why was
[Skripal’s] door handle not identified as a possible place of poisoning until
more than a week later, and only officially confirmed on 28th March?” This
was later shown to have been based on nothing but circular reasoning: it
must have been Russia and it must have been the doorknob in this case, so
the Russians must have practiced putting poison on doorknobs before doing
it for real.[776]
Slane also complained about the government’s assertions about the
CCTV footage. They claimed, “What the CCTV shows is the two suspects
on the way to Christie Miller Road. On the way to the Skripals’ home.” He
replied, “Oh no, it doesn’t. The CCTV referred to (of the two men on the
Wilton Road at 11:58 on Sunday 4th March) does not in fact show them in
the vicinity of the Mr Skripal’s house, and nor does it show them on the
way to Christie Miller Road.” Instead, he said, “What it actually shows is
the two men around 500–600 yards from Mr Skripal’s house, on a
completely different road, and not looking at all as if they are interested in
crossing the road to get to Christie Miller Road, either via Montgomery
Gardens or Canadian Avenue.” He was far from convinced. “For all I know,
they may have gone to Christie Miller Road after being seen on the Shell
garage CCTV. But this particular piece of footage of them in no way
indicates this, and to suggest to the public that it does is simply misleading
and disingenuous.” He warned, “Indeed, if this is the best evidence The Met
has against the pair, it is worse than flimsy and would convince no jury with
its wits intact.”[777]

Dodgy Dossier

Though the UK government claimed in a letter to the North Atlantic

Council that they somehow knew Russia had been producing and
stockpiling chemical weapons going back to the 2000s,[778] they did not
officially accuse Russia of violating the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Journalist Gareth Porter pointed out that if the Brits really had reason to
believe the Russians were in violation, they could have turned them in to
the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) “and
presented its evidence to the 41-member Executive Council, the governing
body of the organization. . . . The British government could also demand a
‘challenge inspection’ at the facility.” According to the treaty, any member
can demand a snap inspection. The Russians would have to comply or
essentially admit guilt. But the UK did not try to press the issue.[779]

Haspel’s Lies

To convince President Trump to push ahead with the government’s plan to

expel scores of Russian diplomats in response, Deputy CIA Director Gina
Haspel showed him pictures of dead ducks and sick children in the hospital.
[780] The true story was that the Skripals had shared their bread with
children to help them feed ducks before they went to lunch. One of the boys
supposedly even ate some of the bread himself. The children and the ducks
were just fine,[781] which would seem to be a counter-indication of the
British government’s version of events. The deputy director of the CIA
looked the president of the United States of America right in the eye and
lied to manipulate him into doing what she wanted was all. The Times later
retracted that part of the story, saying Haspel had instead “displayed
pictures illustrating the consequences of nerve agent attacks, not images
specific to the chemical attack in Britain.” So she just showed him pictures
of random, unrelated dead ducks and hospitalized children then? Either
way, the paper still had noted the seemingly important fact that none of the
three boys or any of the fowl they fed had been harmed in the slightest by
this deadly chemical weapon.

The Nurse

Here is something strange. The nurse whose daughter first stumbled across
the Skripals and tended to them just happened to be Alison McCourt, the
chief nurse of the British Army, a colonel, which was not revealed until she
nominated her daughter for an award over it a year later.[782] There is no
obvious reason for this beyond coincidence. A doctor who was at the scene
also asked the media not to identify her.[783]

Unsolved Mysteries

The version of the story promulgated by the British government leaves

much unexplained. The Russian state is ruthless enough to cross lines and
murder a guy. And the idea that their agents could screw up a spy-versus-
spy mission like this seems within the realm of possibility, maybe even
likely. But the alleged tradecraft here was bordering on the impossibly bad,
starting with the fact that they allegedly brought enough of the poison to kill
half of London, but failed to kill their target. Its inventor says that just one
gram could kill 1,000 people.[784] But they supposedly brought at least two
bottles full of the stuff to kill one guy. And there is no clear motive for the
Russian government or anyone else to kill Skripal. While there has been
speculation about his potential role in the creation of the Steele dossier
through his connection[785] to a former MI6 agent named Pablo Miller—
who worked for Steele’s company Orbis—it was never confirmed by any
official review or important journalism on that story, and would not seem to
provide an obvious motive for anyone else involved to try to murder the
man regardless.

Expulsion

According to the Washington Post, Trump’s aides also deceived him about
the government’s response to the alleged assassination attempt, enraging
him. They got permission from the president to expel an equal number of
diplomats as allied countries like the UK, France and Germany. So his
administration kicked 60 Russians out of the country, equivalent to the
amount expelled from all European countries combined.
As analysts Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter wrote, ever since that time
there has been an endless list of new sanctions against Russia. These are
said to have been in response to “‘worldwide malign activity,’[786] to
penalize alleged election-meddling,[787] for ‘destabilizing cyber
activities,’[788] retaliation for the UK spy poisoning,[789] more cyber
activity,[790] more election-meddling[791]—the list keeps growing.”[792]
Trump allegedly complained that Russiagate was preventing him from
dealing properly with Russian President Putin. “I’m not able to be president
because of this witch hunt.” A former White House official and professor at
Georgetown University named Angela Stent told the Post, “The United
States essentially has three Russia policies: the president’s, the executive
branch’s and Congress’s.”[793]

Cold Front

Navalny

America’s favorite Russian anti-corruption activist, Yale World Fellows

Program graduate Alexei Navalny,[794] may or may not have been an
actual recruited asset of Western intelligence. But the American government
and media establishments were very open about their wish that he would
rule the Kremlin one day.[795]
In another in a series of alleged unsuccessful poisonings by Putin’s
intelligence services, Navalny fell ill in August 2020. Russian doctors
insisted the man was simply in diabetic shock.[796] He did say that he had
diabetes in 2019.[797] But German doctors claimed it was Russian
Novichok poison. Navalny, along with Western governments and media,
agreed it was an assassination attempt by the FSB: they had put the deadly
nerve agent in his underwear. He later died of natural causes in prison in
2024.[798] Never missing a chance to preclude diplomacy with Russia,
President Biden declared Putin responsible regardless.[799]
The Wall Street Journal called Navalny “Putin’s most effective
opponent,”[800] but he never did have mass support. A 2021 poll had him
at 2 percent, less than the washed-up old radical nationalist Vladimir
Zhirinovsky.[801] Nor was Navalny a liberal democrat, but a right-wing
nationalist who was kicked out of the Yabloko party for demonizing
Muslim immigrants, comparing them to cockroaches and dental cavities,
[802] and who temporarily allied with urban liberals in a failed attempt to
gain power. He supported the annexation of Crimea until at least 2023,[803]
and urged both sides to implement Minsk II to end the war in the Donbas,
which was not the Western party line.[804] Fred Weir, a veteran Russia
correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, has said that Navalny was
a marginal figure inside Russia and that, while he surely had enemies, it
would make no sense for Putin to risk making an international issue out of
killing a man who is ultimately of little concern to him.[805]
Many discrepancies remain in the story. While the German military
doctors claimed to have found proof of the presence of a poison from the
Novichok “family,” claims said to be confirmed by French, Swedish and
OPCW experts,[806] the alleged connection to the FSB is less certain.
Though the British and American government-backed propaganda
outfit Bellingcat claimed to have tricked one of the plotters into admitting
his role in the poisoning, the call took place months after the alleged
incident.[807] While the call seems convincing in other ways, there is no
evidence the voice on the phone is the person they claim it is. Even the
British government-backed Institute for Statecraft’s Integrity Initiative,
whose articles they run, said about the group in a leaked document:
“Bellingcat was somewhat discredited, both by spreading disinformation
itself, and by being willing to produce reports for anyone willing to
pay.”[808]
Other than the call, Bellingcat claims that cellphone metadata proves
their case. But their argument is virtually self-refuting. The fact that the
same agents who had allegedly trailed the man for years—more than 30
times—were also nearby when he got sick is “the strongest evidence to date
that the Russian government was behind the assassination attempt,” the
Times said, when it could just as easily indicate nothing at all. They also
admitted that the CIA and MI6 had raced to Germany to provide their side
of the story just after Navalny arrived.[809]
The insightful German writer and foreign policy analyst at the Moon of
Alabama website, Bernard, asked some pertinent questions about the story
right away, including: why was Navalny allowed to leave the country? Why
did the Russian labs report they found nothing? And why was no one else
sickened by the supposedly deadly poison? He also pointed out that the
statement by the German Charité hospital indicated they had seen evidence
of the “potential effects of a cholinesterase inhibitor, not . . . a specific
substance itself.”[810]
If this story is real, then it has to raise questions as to just what a
pathetic threat Russia has turned out to be. They used poison, supposedly,
on Yushchenko, the Skripals, now Navalny and his wife, with the only
effect of making themselves look like incompetent attempted murderers.
Perhaps they are. But when the Russians poisoned Ibn al-Khattab, the
former chief of the bin Ladenites in Chechnya, all it took was a drop.[811]
Navalny was convicted for fraud and sentenced to 9 years of hard
labor. Unfortunately, it was not for pushing the lie that Putin was
controlling Donald Trump through his campaign manager Paul Manafort
and his former associate Oleg Deripaska.[812]
Navalny died in prison in the Arctic Circle in February 2024. American
politicians and media stars’ outpourings of lament at his death seemed to
reinforce the idea that they had really believed they could install him in
power someday, and now their great chance had been lost. “Make no
mistake: Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. What has happened to
Navalny is even more proof of Putin’s brutality. No one should be fooled,”
President Biden said.[813] For weeks, the Biden administration and media
pretended to believe Putin had ordered him killed.[814] But Ukrainian
intelligence said he died of a blood clot[815] and U.S. intelligence finally
acknowledged they did not believe he was murdered.[816] Still, it is
doubtful that his fraud conviction was anything but a political hit in the first
place.[817] So if an innocent man died in prison, that is still really bad, if
not murder like they claim.

The Gerasimov Doctrine

In 2014, an intelligence contractor named Mark Galeotti invented a giant

myth that the rest of the War Party loved, and still loves to believe very
much,[818] that General Valery Gerasimov, Russia’s military chief of staff,
had coined a new doctrine of hybrid warfare to deploy against all of
Russia’s weak and unsuspecting neighbors.[819] That is not what he said,
[820] but the hawks still love to cite it, even though it was debunked as fake
propaganda by the Army War College back in 2016. Roger N. McDermott
wrote in Parameters that the purpose of the article was to identify
Washington’s color-coded revolutions as a threat to Russia and suggest
ways to resist the strategy. “Western analyses soon transmogrified the
article into supporting the theory that Gerasimov was discussing Russia’s
adoption of hybrid warfare as a new tool at the state’s disposal.”[821]
As the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) explained in 2017, the
Russians have “a deeply entrenched sense of insecurity regarding a United
States that Moscow believes is intent on undermining Russia at home and
abroad.” They added, “The Kremlin is convinced the United States is laying
the groundwork for regime change in Russia, a conviction further
reinforced by the events in Ukraine,” and that they saw the “overthrow of
former Ukrainian President Yanukovych [as] the latest move in a long-
established pattern of U.S.-orchestrated regime change efforts, including the
Kosovo campaign, Iraq, Libya, and the 2003–05 ‘color revolutions’ in
Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan.”[822]
Galeotti later admitted that he, not Gerasimov, made up the Gerasimov
Doctrine, and said he was sorry—not that self-described experts Molly
McKew,[823] Martin Murphy[824] or any of the others[825] ever retracted
their articles based on it.[826]
These things may seem unimportant standing alone, but taken together
with all the other false claims about Russia, and the incredible lies, mostly
by omission, about the U.S. and allied role in fomenting the second Cold
War, Americans, especially the professional political class, have become
subsumed by the overall narrative of Russian perfidy and of course their
own inverse innocence. But what was the guy even saying? That they need
to figure out how to prevent the U.S. from overthrowing every government
that is friendly to them and their interests—an absolute outrage.[827]

The Four-Day War

At the beginning of April 2016, the Azeris attacked Armenian forces at

Nagorno-Karabakh, after which they fought a short, four-day war. Nearly
200 soldiers were killed on each side before ceasefire was declared. The
Azeris had seized a small amount of territory.[828] Secretary of State Kerry
seemed to imply the U.S. would support further action by Baku when he
called for “an ultimate resolution” to the problem that had already been
solved with the status quo: de facto independence for Artsakh.[829] He may
have given Aliyev the green light to launch the attack, which he seemingly
ordered just before boarding the plane home.[830] As Justin Raimondo
noted, the U.S. was firmly on the Azeri side of the issue by 1999. As in
Ukraine, but not Yugoslavia, national sovereignty was paramount.[831]

Armenia’s Way Out

In 2018, after a series of protests backed by Western-funded NGOs,[832]

after his disputed reelection, the longtime prime minister, Serzh Sargsyan,
resigned from power.[833] Opposition groups had aligned into the new pro-
Western Way Out Alliance,[834] and then elected Nikol Pashinyan prime
minister. The Trump administration still increased military aid to Azerbaijan
from $3 million per year under Obama to $100 million in 2018 in the name
of containing Iran.[835]

The Second Nagorno-Karabakh War

Azerbaijan went back to war in the fall of 2020, after the Armenian
government declared their intention to officially annex Artsakh. Over 6,500
people were killed, and the Azeris again got the better of the Armenians and
seized more territory surrounding the enclave. Following six weeks of
fighting, the Russians finally brokered a ceasefire. The Western-supported
Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan had traded Russia’s previous
protection for nothing. They even had to concede an easement across the
Zangezur Corridor in Armenian territory between Azerbaijan and their
Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic on Turkey’s eastern border.[836] After
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Pashinyan declared his intent to distance
himself from Russia and move toward the United States,[837] including
holding joint military exercises,[838] for all the good it would do him.[839]

A New Security Architecture

In 2017, Brookings Institution scholar Michael O’Hanlon, who had been

instrumental in selling the second Iraq War to American liberal Democrats
in the early W. Bush years,[840] nonetheless wrote a monograph calling for
“a new security architecture” for Europe, published in 2017. Unfortunately,
due to all the Russiagate hype, no one was listening. His plan called for a
halt to NATO expansion and an end to the sanctions regime in exchange for
Russia removing its troops from Transnistria, Georgia and Ukraine and
permanent neutrality for Finland, Sweden, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus,
Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cyprus and Serbia. This was to “reduce the
risks of rivalry and war by focusing on what may be, in Putin’s mind, the
fundamental cause of the problem: NATO expansion.” He blamed W. Bush
for the situation, saying that by his half-invitation to Ukraine to join NATO
at Bucharest in 2008, he had “inadvertently built a type of NATO-
membership doomsday machine that raises the likelihood of conflict in
Europe.” Proving he was still a member of the foreign policy establishment
in good standing, O’Hanlon wrote, “Western leaders should pursue this path
confidently and unapologetically, and not portray it as an admission of
previous wrongdoing,” adding, “If Russia refuses to negotiate in good faith,
or fails to live up to any deal it might initially support, little will be lost and
options for a toughening of future policy against Russia will remain.” It was
a reasonable proposal.[841]

A Missed Chance for Peace

In September 2017, Vladimir Putin proposed a deal to bring in blue-helmet

UN peacekeepers to stand on the border zone separating Kiev’s forces from
the Donbas rebels. Though the Germans thought the proposal looked
promising, the Americans and British rejected the deal. They claimed
Putin’s plan was too limited, insisting that peacekeepers must be deployed
to the entirety of the Donbas—including the international border that Kiev
no longer controlled—or nothing.[842]
 But James Sherr of the Royal Institute for International Affairs
explained what they were really worried about: not lives, but leverage. He
said the Russians knew the U.S. could not accept their proposal as first
presented. “A radical question therefore arises: supposing his ultimate
gambit is to meet the West’s terms? A full ceasefire comes into effect, UN
peacekeepers deploy throughout the territory, and, to all intents and
purposes, Russian troops and ‘volunteers’ depart.” He was worried this
would be “the perfect trap” because it “would transform the target of
pressure from Russia to Ukraine.” Up until then, he said, Kiev had resisted
holding elections, despite the terms of Minsk II, under the theory that the
Russians’ presence made a fair vote impossible. “Take away the occupation
and the conflict, and you take away the argument. You also take away the
argument for maintaining (non-Crimea related) sanctions and hand financial
responsibility for the welfare of the territories to Kyiv.”[843] In other
words, if they came to an agreement to stop the fighting and remove alleged
Russian soldiers from the battlefield, that would ruin Kiev’s excuse to
continue to ignore the Minsk peace deals.
Even though Trump had won the 2016 election on a platform of
“getting along with Russia,” and the accusation that he was a compromised
agent of the Russian Federation was as dumb a lie as the CIA ever told,
Sherr enthused that his administration “has turned out to be a far tougher
proposition than anticipated. However warm Trump’s personal feelings
towards Russia, his national security team has shown itself to be orthodox
in its grasp of U.S. interests and unyielding.” He singled out Kurt Volker—a
W. Bush and Obama NSC official and former U.S. ambassador to NATO,
later named special envoy to Ukraine by Trump and his first Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson—for praise on this account. The establishment
magazine Foreign Policy also celebrated Volker’s appointment since they
considered him someone who would not let the elected president get in the
way of U.S. foreign policy when it came to Russia and Ukraine.[844]
Obviously Vladimir Putin is a tough character who had reason to keep
the war in the east going until he got what was agreed to in the Minsk deals
—and for all we know, if it had been easygoing, perhaps he would have
demanded more. But the facts again are clear. The U.S. government under
Donald Trump, just like under Barack Obama before him, did not want to
see the implementation of the deal America’s French and German allies had
struck.[845] It offered too much autonomy to the Donbas oblasts and gave
them too much say over Ukraine’s foreign policy, a threat to future
membership in the EU and NATO. As Sherr wrote, they would rather
continue the low-level war in eastern Ukraine—the Russian “occupation,”
as he described it—so they could keep their sanctions regime and the rest of
the new Cold War going, than have third-party peacekeeping troops defuse
the situation. So an obvious solution, one that both sides had proposed in
different forms, went in the trash. The U.S. poured in more weapons and the
war went on.
At the same time, the Ukrainian government under Poroshenko
abandoned any pretense of ratcheting down tensions. As the NATO website
details, “In June 2017, the Ukrainian parliament adopted legislation
reinstating membership in NATO as a strategic foreign and security policy
objective.”[846]
Nuclear Posture Review

Trump’s February 2018 Nuclear Posture Review, like his National Security
Strategy, announced a return to “Great Power competition,” and showed
total continuity with Obama and the national security state’s nuclear
weapons policy. The document placed a focus on continuing his
predecessor’s massive overhaul of the entire inventory and industry, but
said his last NPR was based on the “outdated” belief that the “prospects for
military confrontation with Russia, or among Great Powers, had declined
and would continue to decline dramatically,” and that the world would
continue to trend towards disarmament. They blamed Moscow’s reaction to
Bush and Obama’s policies—the modernization of their weapons and
seizure of Crimea—as necessitating a U.S. turn back to “Great Power
competition.”
They noted Russia was modernizing its nuclear triad of land-, sea- and
air-based weapons delivery systems, including “at least two new
intercontinental range systems, a hypersonic glide vehicle, and a new
intercontinental, nuclear-armed, nuclear-powered, undersea autonomous
torpedo.” Due to the renewed threat, the administration said they needed a
whole new class and fleet of nuclear submarines, a full replacement of land-
based Minuteman ICBMs and the new B-21 Raider long-range stealth
bomber, as well as an increase in the foreign deployment of “dual-capable
aircraft” such as F-15 and F-35 fighters, which can also carry nuclear
weapons.
The review also said that since the Russians were expanding their
production of tactical-strength atom bombs, the U.S. needed to match them
as further deterrence against Russia’s perceived new, more reckless posture
with potentially more “usable” nuclear weapons. They said the Russians’
development of a new arsenal of low-yield A-bombs revealed their belief
that these would be more usable in war without necessarily escalating to
major conflict and a changing doctrine based on that belief. The review
added, “Correcting this mistaken Russian perception is a strategic
imperative.” To do so, the U.S. would have to create its own new generation
of low-yield usable nukes—not to enable “nuclear war fighting,” they said,
but just to expand deterrence by matching Russia’s moves.[847]
It also announced that the United States would not seek ratification of
the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and even denounced the Non-
Proliferation Treaty, which America and most of the other nuclear powers
signed back in 1968, promising to abolish our nuclear weapons stockpile,
but have always ignored anyway.
The report says that American use of nuclear weapons need not be
limited to defense of the nation, or even its allies, but instead to “protect our
vital interests,” which can mean anything. And they implied a willingness to
use U.S. nukes in response to their use by other nations, including against
non-allied countries, anywhere in the world. This, they argued, is progress:
“In no way does this approach lower the nuclear threshold. Rather, by
convincing adversaries that even limited use of nuclear weapons will be
more costly than they can tolerate, it in fact raises that threshold.” It is good
to know they have thought this all through very carefully.

Russia’s New Arsenal

The next month, Putin confirmed in his annual address to the Duma that the
Russian military had indeed developed a new generation of nuclear
weapons. This included reintroducing the new heavy MIRV (Multiple
Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle) missile, the RS-28 Sarmat,
which is designed to travel around the South Pole, approaching from a
direction where the U.S. has no early warning or defense, and is armed,
they claim, with enough warheads that just one missile could kill as many
as 10 cities.[848] American experts confirmed the amount of independent
warheads its ability to attack from the south “posed a challenge to ground
and satellite-based radar and tracking systems.”[849] Land-based MIRV
missiles like the Sarmat had been banned by Clinton and Yeltsin’s START II
Treaty, but Russia quit that treaty in 2002 in protest after W. Bush tore up
the ABM Treaty.[850] They successfully test launched one in April 2022.
[851]
Putin also boasted of new “Petrel” nuclear-powered cruise missiles
with essentially unlimited range for evading U.S. defenses; virtually
undetectable “Poseidon” nuclear torpedoes for destroying American coastal
cities and ports; new “Borei-class” nuclear submarines; and “Iskander”
tactical ballistic missiles. He also announced “Avangard” and “Kinzhal”
hypersonic delivery vehicles that travel at speeds above Mach 5, which
completely skew the balance of Mutually Assured Destruction by reducing
the time that policymakers have to decide whether to go to nuclear war
from 15 or 30 minutes to perhaps less than five.[852]
In his speech Putin complained, “Nobody really wanted to talk to us
about the core of the problem, and nobody wanted to listen to us. So listen
now.”[853]
FM Lavrov later told an interviewer they went to work on hypersonic
missiles in direct response to the ABM systems going into Romania and
Poland. “We needed weapons that were guaranteed to overpower missile
defenses. Otherwise, a country that has missile defense systems and
offensive weapons may be tempted to launch the first strike thinking that a
response will be suppressed by its missile defense systems.”[854] A year
later, Russia launched their Belgorod submarines, said to be capable of
deploying its new nuclear torpedoes. In 2024, the intelligence agencies
warned that Russia’s development of ICBMs and nuclear torpedoes would
continue, as well as a broad range of tactical missile systems that would
have nuclear or non-nuclear capabilities.[855] The Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists warns that Russia still possesses approximately 4,477 warheads,
with around 1,588 strategic warheads deployed, with another 977 H-bombs
and 1,912 A-bombs in reserve, and that they are proceeding with their
nuclear modernization program.[856]
The primacy project did not create a permanent state of dominance and
security. Instead, we got endless new liabilities with nothing to show for it,
and a new nuclear arms race, which it looks like America is losing.

The Kerch Strait Incident

In November 2018, the Russians seized three Ukrainian ships and 23 crew
members in the Kerch Strait—located east of Crimea, between the Sea of
Azov and the Black Sea—claiming they had breached the line into what
Moscow considered to be its own waters. Trump’s UN Ambassador Nikki
Haley condemned Russia’s “outrageous violation of sovereign Ukrainian
territory.” A consultant told CNBC he thought it would be good for Ukraine
since it would squelch sentiment in Europe toward softening the sanctions.
[857] Indeed, the Trump administration added more.[858]

Bin Ladenites Still Lurking

In late 2019, the Ukrainian government worked with the CIA to arrest a
Georgian-born ISIS commander named Cezar Tokhosashvili (a.k.a. Al Bara
Shishani, Arabic for “Al Bara the Chechen”) in a raid in Kiev where the
man, previously thought dead, had been living for two years.[859]
“He appears to be one of many to have made Ukraine their home,”
reporter Oliver Carroll wrote in the Independent. The same was true about
the terrorist who had recruited Tokhosashvili, Akhmed Chatayev (a.k.a.
“Akhmed the One-armed”), who blew himself up rather than be captured in
a raid in Tbilisi in 2017. Chatayev had previously been arrested on a
Russian Interpol warrant in western Ukraine, where police said they found
bomb instructions and pictures of dead bodies on his cellphone, but rumor
has it that he bribed his way back to freedom in Georgia. The black market
in fake passports was said to be thriving, and obviously a threat to Europe
since Ukraine had achieved visa-free travel status with most of the
European Union.
Vera Mironova, an expert on international terrorism, told the
Independent she believed “hundreds” of former ISIS fighters were currently
living in Ukraine, and they were certainly a threat. “This isn’t a random
selection. The slower guys stop as soon as they get to Turkey. After all, it is
a multiple-step operation to get to Ukraine. The ones who get there are the
dangerous ones,” she said.[860]

Volodymyr Zelensky

The Eastern Front

Throughout Trump’s first term, the supposedly “low-level” fighting

continued to rage in the Donbas, killing thousands. Despite his promises to
implement Minsk II, President Poroshenko was trapped. He was dependent
on numerous far-right militias to fight for him, yet they continued to
threaten him from time to time, to remind him who was really boss.[861]

Ran on Peace

Poroshenko, running on the anti-Russian chauvinist slogan “Language,

Army, Faith,” was crushed in a landslide in 2019, just five years after taking
power. He lost to political upstart Volodymyr Zelensky,[862] a man who ex-
President George W. Bush—the former Winston Churchill of our time[863]
—insisted in 2022 was the “Winston Churchill of our time.”[864] Perhaps
Poroshenko was better off. The Nazis had just tried to murder him over a
corruption scandal a few weeks prior.[865]
A Russian-speaker, Zelensky was elected with a decent amount of
support in the eastern regions on a promise to implement the Minsk
agreements and bring an end to the war. But he could not. Former state
historian Volodymyr Viatrovych declared before the second round of voting
that even if he won the majority, it did not matter because he “lost the active
minority and will not be able to master it. And this minority is the engine of
changes in society.”[866] Right Sector’s Dimitry Yarosh threatened to kill
Zelensky one week after he took power, saying he was sure Zelensky would
not sell them out. “No, he would lose his life. He will hang on some tree on
Khreshchatyk [the main drag in Kiev] if he betrays Ukraine and those
people who died in the revolution and the war.”[867]
Russia expert Richard Sakwa noted that Poroshenko had also been
running as a peace candidate with close ties with Russia in the election of
2014. “Yet neither of them could go forward with cooling tensions” because
of the threat from the radical right.[868]
Despite all the propaganda about how poorly the Nazis do in Ukraine’s
party politics, a former political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev who is
very sympathetic to the Maidan cause, Jonathan Brunson, warned on the
eve of Zelensky’s election that “[t]hough national revolutionaries are
unrepresentative of Ukraine’s population, they are overrepresented in
government.[869] They comprise nearly 10 percent of the 423-member
parliament: the speaker, around 20 directly elected members,[870] and
perhaps 20 more on lists of parties unaffiliated with the far right.” He added
that since many of them were appointees, they could not be voted out by the
people. This included “a deputy interior minister, a state broadcasting
deputy, several regional police chiefs, and various officials who select
grants for patriotic education programs,[871] plan the de-occupation of
Crimea and Donbas, and track guns among activists who attend rural
vyshkoly[872] militia camps.”[873]
 As Brunson pointed out, the powerful then-speaker of the parliament,
Andriy Parubiy, was still a proud Nazi, merely “euphemizing” his ideology
as national liberationism.[874] In his 2019 piece for War on the Rocks,
Brunson begged Western political leaders and public relations men to drop
the line about how these militants were merely “nationalists” and
“activists,” and had probably stopped believing what they always said about
themselves a few years back. While wrong in its own right, he warned that
this defense only “feeds the Kremlin narrative” about Ukraine—and could
lead to war. “Far-right parties like Svoboda, aided by mainstream parties
harboring similar elements, advance legislation which feeds the Kremlin
narrative that fascists are taking over Ukraine, just like Yanukovych warned
they would.”[875] Ignoring the problem would not make it go away. Under
Nazi rule, they passed language laws to “Ukrainianize” schools,
government and media, while Poroshenko demonized the Russian Orthodox
Church as spies[876] and official government historical policy whitewashed
the Ukrainian role in the Holocaust.[877]
Brunson writes, “When I suggested to a far-right member of Ukraine’s
secret police that social-nationalism might be a Kremlin plot to sully
Ukraine’s reputation, he responded that right-wingers actually count on
such skepticism.” The “secret police” member told him, “If the West won’t
even believe us when we say it ourselves, then we can get away with
anything. They won’t believe you either, man.”[878]

No to Capitulation!
In early 2019, Austrian diplomat Martin Sajdik proposed a plan to replace
Minsk II, under which a UN-OSCE detachment of international bureaucrats
and peacekeeping troops would move in to oversee elections and administer
the reintegration of the Donbas into Ukraine.[879] Poroshenko shot it
down.[880]
After the election, the new Zelensky administration did negotiate two
prisoner exchanges, but achieved little else in resolving the war.[881] He
officially signed on to the “Steinmeier Formula” in October 2019. Named
after then-German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, it stipulated a
chronological order to the implementation of the different aspects of the
Minsk agreements along with some other details. The OSCE was to monitor
new elections in the Donbas. If they judged them to be “free and fair,” then
a new “self-governing status” would begin and Kiev would gain control of
its eastern border.[882] But the Trump administration and the Ukrainian
Nazis intervened to prevent Zelensky from making peace. In something that
read like a replay of Ambassador Warren Zimmermann’s sabotage of the
Lisbon deal for Bosnia in 1992,[883] when Zelensky said he was interested
in pursuing the German proposal, William Taylor, chargé d’affaires at the
U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, told him to forget it. According to the
Washington Post, when Zelensky expressed interest Taylor ridiculed the
plan: “No one knows what it is. Steinmeier doesn’t know what it is. . . . It’s
a terrible idea.”[884]
Foreign Policy reported that “U.S. officials have pushed for the
reinstatement of Ukrainian control of its international border, a sentiment
that has not been publicly expressed by Germany or France.” In other
words, they were, along with the Ukrainian radical right in the street,
encouraging Zelensky to move the goalposts to make compromise more
difficult. “Both Obama and Trump administration officials have grown
frustrated with the European Union’s unwillingness to take a tougher stance
on Russia’s annexation of parts of Ukraine,” they explained.[885]
The new president signed on to the Steinmeier Formula, but even
though polls showed a “vast majority” wanted to see an end to the war, he
then introduced a caveat: unlike in the previous agreements, now Russian
troops would have to withdraw and Ukrainian troops would have to regain
control over the eastern border before the OSCE-monitored elections could
be held.[886] But it was not Russian troops, but the rebel forces of the
Donbas preventing that from happening, and he knew they were not going
to stand down before they were granted at least the opportunity to vote on
self-rule.[887] Even still, the radical right—the Azov Battalion, National
Corps, Right Sector, Democratic Ax and Svoboda, among others—launched
what they called the “No to Capitulation!” movement, a series of massive
protests in the fall of 2019, leading up to Zelensky’s December meeting
with Putin in Paris.[888] “Black-clad men holding up red flares like torches
led the procession, some in white masks to conceal their identity,” the
Associated Press reported. Waving red and black UPA flags alongside the
yellow and blue,[889] they accused Zelensky of being a “servant of the
Kremlin” and trying to “strike a deal with the devil.” “Glory to Ukraine!”
they chanted. “No capitulation!”[890]
Former President Poroshenko and former Prime Minister Yulia
Tymoshenko both denounced the deal, calling it “Putin’s formula” and the
“Putin-Steinmeier formula.”[891] After a rally in October, Euromaidan
Press insisted that while there were many “neo-Nazis” in attendance, “the
overwhelming majority were not.”[892]
In September 2022, a delegation of three Azov Nazis and two women,
one the wife of an Azov commander and the other the leader of an “anti-
feminist” group linked to Azov, were welcomed on a tour of the United
States, as exposed by the journalist Moss Robeson. They were said to have
met more than 50 congressmen. At an event in Chicago was “Borys
Potapenko . . . an international coordinator of Stepan Bandera’s
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) who is also among the
leadership of the far-right ‘Capitulation Resistance Movement’ in Ukraine,
which allied with Azov’s National Corps against Volodymyr Zelensky in
2019–22.”[893]

They Needed Help

Russia scholar Stephen Cohen told journalist Aaron Maté in 2019 that
Zelensky would have needed help facing down the Right Sector and
friends. “Zelensky ran as a peace candidate,” Cohen told Maté. “He won an
enormous mandate to make peace. So, that means he has to negotiate with
Vladimir Putin.” However, noting the repeated Nazi threats to assassinate
the president if he crossed them, Cohen said, “[H]e can’t go forward with
full peace negotiations with Russia, with Putin, unless America has his
back. Maybe that won’t be enough, but unless the White House encourages
this diplomacy, Zelensky has no chance of negotiating an end to the
war.”[894]
 Poroshenko had also said he could not implement the Minsk II deal
without U.S. support. He never got it. Instead, Right Sector and C14 set the
terms. As Dimitry Yarosh explained in 2019, “The Minsk format—and I
talk about this all the time—is an opportunity to play for time, arm the
armed forces, switch to the best world standards in the system of national
security and defense. This is an opportunity for maneuver. But no more.”
He made it clear they would never allow the peace deal to be implemented.
“And this must be understood. Poroshenko played at Minsk, and played
well. Fact. He played for time.”[895]
Later, Poroshenko and all the other important European leaders
confirmed this was the case. Just like they had accused Russia of doing.
[896]

Biletsky Pulls Rank

When Zelensky traveled to the east to try to get the Azov militiamen to
withdraw from their positions inside the demilitarized “grey zone” between
the warring factions, they told him to go to hell. “Listen . . . I’m the
president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you
and told you: remove the weapons. . . . I wanted to see understanding in
your eyes. But, instead, I saw a guy who’s decided that this is some loser
standing in front of him,” the president pleaded. Andriy Biletsky, the head
of the Azov Battalion, was defiant. He warned Zelensky not to try to
remove the Nazis from the town of Zolote. “There will be thousands there
instead of several dozen,” he threatened.[897] These are the same “national
socialists” who told the Guardian that Ukraine needs “a strong dictator to
come to power who could shed plenty of blood but unite the nation in the
process,” and threatened to overthrow and murder then-President Petro
Poroshenko.[898] What was he supposed to do? Biletsky had threatened to
overthrow Poroshenko from the floor of the Rada in 2017, and the president
could do nothing about it.[899]
Singer Sofia Fedyna, an MP from Poroshenko’s party, threatened
Zelensky with an “accidental” fragging: “Mr. President thinks he is
immortal. A grenade may explode there, by chance. And it would be the
nicest if this happened during Moscow’s shelling when someone comes to
the front line wearing a white or blue shirt.”[900]
The British Center for Analysis of the Radical Right (CARR) warned
in November 2019, not long after Zelensky was elected, that even though
he clearly did wish to seek peace in the east, sign onto the Steinmeier
formula and engage in prisoner exchanges, “this goal remains unattainable.
Moreover, this is due to the tough position of the Ukrainian radical right.”
To be clear, they said they were referring to “the militants of the National
Corps Party, linked directly to the ‘Azov’ National Guard Corps of Ukraine
(the former ‘Azov volunteer battalion’), and the neo-Nazi organization C-
14.” They quoted Biletsky saying all compromise was null and void. “If the
President and the Government do not fulfill their direct duty to protect
every inch of the Ukrainian land, then we, the volunteer veterans, will do it
again,” adding that if troops were withdrawn from the front, his Nazis
would replace them, ruining any implementation of the Minsk II deal.[901]
Apparently, Zelensky’s philosophy is: “If you can’t beat ’em, join
’em.” In Paris in December 2019, he was completely intransigent, insisting
the Minsk deals be revised so the border question would be resolved before
any plebiscite could be held, and that the “special status” of the Donbas be
made temporary instead of permanent. Zelensky shook his head and
laughed at Putin during their joint press conference when Putin insisted the
deals be honored.[902]

Sivokho’s Plan

Journalist Aaron Maté told the tragic story of Donbas native Sergei
Sivokho, Zelensky’s former friend and comedy producer. The new president
appointed Sivokho to the National Security and Defense Council of
Ukraine, where, with Zelensky’s support, in March 2020, he introduced a
new “National Platform for Reconciliation and Unity.”
But it did not work out. National Corps Nazis attacked him at his
presentation debuting the concept in Mariupol. “Rather than defend his
friend, and their shared peace initiative,” Maté wrote, “Zelensky sided with
the assailants. Two weeks later, Sivokho was fired from his government
post.” Biletsky publicly gloated at their victory.[903] For what it was worth,
Sivokho kept pushing reconciliation, dialogue and peace, at least until the
worse war of 2022.[904]
Two years later, on December 1, 2021, Zelensky, a Jewish man,
honored Right Sector commander Dmytro Kotsyubail with the “Hero of
Ukraine” and “Order of the Golden Star” awards on the floor of the
Ukrainian parliament.[905] Kotsyubail had previously told the New York
Times, joking in a Nazi-sort of way, that he feeds his pet wolf “the bones of
Russian-speaking children.”[906] Kotsyubail was killed fighting the
Russians in Bakhmut in 2023.[907] Zelensky later explained how some
Ukrainians feel Stepan Bandera was a “hero.” “That’s normal. That’s cool,”
Zelensky said, being careful not to upset his partisans. Bandera was fighting
for “freedom of Ukraine” the president insisted.

Kolomoysky

Zelensky, a TV sitcom star who ran on an anti-corruption platform and

promised to negotiate peace in the east, was supported by billionaire
oligarch Igor Kolomoysky,[908] former owner of PrivatBank, the popular
TV channel 1+1 and, for a time, governor of the Dnipropetrovsk province,
though they later had a falling-out. Kolomoysky was also seemingly shown
to have been the secret former owner of the notorious Burisma gas
company of Hunter Biden’s laptop and Ukrainegate fame.[909] He has been
credibly accused of stealing $5.5 billion from his own bank, which the
government then nationalized under pressure from the IMF,[910] and of
murder by rival Ukrainian oligarch Victor Pinchuk.[911] Zelensky’s show
was featured on 1+1. His presidential run was almost certainly an act of
revenge by Kolomoysky against Poroshenko for firing him from his
governor position and nationalizing his bank.
Like Zelensky, Kolomoysky is a man whose Jewish heritage has not
prevented him from financially supporting the Nazi Right Sector and Azov
and Aidar Battalions, among others,[912] and directly so, not through taxes
to the national government or even payments to their official armed forces.
[913] Some credit his support for the Dnipro Battalion militias for
stemming the advances of the Russian-backed rebels in the spring of 2014.
[914] Both militias have been credibly accused of war crimes, including
“disappearances,” torture and blocking civilian food supplies, by Amnesty
International[915] and Reuters news agency.[916] He even used his Dnipro
Battalion to stage a violent raid on the government-owned oil company
UkrTransNafta to keep his loyal man in charge of it.[917] Kolomoysky
backed down to Poroshenko after Vice President Biden weighed in with
Prime Minister Yatsenyuk on the latter’s behalf.[918]
Though he plays a great leader on TV, Zelensky is just another crook
like the rest of them. In October 2021, just as his and Biden’s policy was
pushing this crisis to a head, somebody leaked the Pandora Papers to the
International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), exposing “a
coterie of bankers, lawyers, accountants, and registration agents who help
hundreds of billions of dollars move undetected around the world every
year.”[919] These included the leaders of America’s client regimes in
Jordan, Ukraine and Azerbaijan, among others.[920] They showed that
Zelensky and his aide Serhiy Shefir, set up offshore businesses to run his
TV production company and invest in expensive properties in London.
After ostensibly giving up his shares upon assuming the presidency, the
ICIJ wrote that “an arrangement was soon made that would allow the
offshore to keep paying dividends to a company that now belongs to his
wife.”
The New York Times reported in 2019 that Kolomoysky, after his break
with Zelensky and the international banking system—the IMF was leaning
heavily on the government not to give him back his bank—announced that
Ukraine should pivot back toward Russia. They quoted him: “They’re
stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations. People want peace, a
good life, they don’t want to be at war. And you”—America—“are forcing
us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it.” In an interview, he
told the Times that since the EU and NATO will not accept Ukraine, they
would be better off making a deal with Russia. He complained that the West
was not giving them enough aid or opening their markets to Ukrainian
goods. “Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to
weaken its geopolitical rival. ‘War against Russia,’ he said, ‘to the last
Ukrainian.’”
The State Department immediately warned Zelensky that he had better
make his break with Kolomoysky now, since he was increasing his
influence in the government, “which could cause you to fail.”[921] The
president surely disappointed his former patron when he refused to return
the bank the government had seized from him under Poroshenko at the
insistence of the IMF, whose money he had stolen.[922] Kolomoysky had
come up with a clever scam in which his PrivatBank would take the IMF
money and loan it to his companies, which would then make large
purchases from other overseas companies he also owned, paying upfront
and never delivering any goods.[923]
After the courts ruled the nationalization illegal, Kolomoysky got
ahead of himself, publicly boasting that he had won.[924] In February
2023, police raided Kolomoysky’s home, accusing him of embezzling more
than $1 billion from Ukrnafta, Ukraine’s biggest oil company, and its
largest refiner, Ukrtatnafta, which Zelensky nationalized under martial law
in November 2022.[925]
 Also in 2022, Zelensky had his predecessor Poroshenko—President
Obama’s guy—indicted for “high treason” on accusations that he had
conspired to sell coal for the benefit of the pro-Russian rebels in the Donbas
in the crucial years of 2014 and 2015.[926] The truth was either that
Poroshenko had committed this treason in a Sith-like plot to support his
enemies—eastern Ukrainians—in war,[927] or that Zelensky was now
falsely accusing the previous president of not just corruption, but treason
over some trumped-up lies.[928] Neither option speaks very well of the
supposed “democracy” that American money and weapons are going to
support. In December 2023, Poroshenko, again America’s favorite guy right
up until the other guy beat him on a peace promise in the 2019 elections,
was stopped at the border from leaving to meet with Viktor Orban of
Hungary, supposedly on suspicion of a Russian plot to “exploit” the
meeting as a “psychological operation” against Ukrainian interests. Well, it
is martial law over there until Zelensky cancels it, Reuters helpfully
reminded us.[929]

The More Things Change

Still, Zelensky has continued Poroshenko’s foreign and domestic policy. As

Ukraine’s minister of transportation, Volodymyr Omelayan, said in 2019,
“Each new president of Ukraine begins his cadence with the conviction that
he is the one who can conduct a constructive dialogue with Moscow, and
that he has been given the role of peacemaker, who will do business and
develop good relations.” But instead, “every president of Ukraine has ended
up becoming a de facto follower of Bandera and fighting the Russian
Federation.”[930]
In 2019, an amendment to Ukraine’s constitution entered into force
declaring it official policy to seek membership in the NATO alliance. The
next year Zelensky’s government unveiled their new National Security
Strategy, which provided for “the development of the distinctive partnership
with NATO with the aim of membership in NATO.”[931]

Ukrainegate

End Run

If you can believe it, the House of Representatives of the United States of
America actually impeached President Donald J. Trump for allegedly
holding up part of a Ukrainian arms deal for a few days until he could
generate some bad public relations for ex-Vice President Biden, already by
then the Democratic Party’s frontrunner to challenge him in the election of
2020.
“Mr. Trump had done an end run around his own national security
team,” the New York Times railed. They made it sound like that time Vice
President Dick Cheney and his men proposed an end run around President
George W. Bush to work with Israel to start a war with Iran in 2007.[932]
That was an “end run” because the hesitant president was the end they were
trying to get around.[933] But Trump’s “team,” meaning all his enemies he
was too ignorant to fire from his own National Security Council, is
supposed to work for him, the man who stood for election and won.
Political Cover

The backstory to the impeachment began with the fact that within three
months of the 2014 coup, Hunter Biden’s company, Rosemont Seneca, got a
$1 million per year[934] contract with a major Ukrainian gas company,
Burisma Holdings,[935] owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky
—though as previously mentioned, there are credible reports that at least for
a time it was owned by Ihor Kolomoysky.[936] The then-vice president’s
son spent the money on crack cocaine while cheating on his wife with his
dead brother’s widow and prostitutes, ultimately siring an illegitimate child
with a stripper. President Biden refused to acknowledge the girl was his
granddaughter until July 2023, when she was four years old. He cruelly still
refuses to meet her despite the sweet little girl’s public begging for his
affection. For years, Biden would deliberately lie and say he only had six
grandchildren.[937] Just the facts.[938]
The younger Biden got this cushy spot, along with Secretary Kerry’s
former chief of staff David Leiter, Democratic Party donor and Hunter
Biden’s partner Devon Archer, former CIA head of counterterrorism in the
lead-up to September 11 and Mitt Romney adviser Cofer Black, and former
Polish President Aleksander Kwaśniewski.[939] Zlochevsky had been
minister of ecology and natural resources and deputy secretary for
economic and social security on the National Security and Defense Council
under Yanukovych, and was now looking for some protection from
potential hostility by the new regime.[940] He had fled the capital during
the Maidan coup, but left his assistant Vadym Pozharskyi in Kiev to focus
on trying to build relations with the West. Evidently sensing the changing
winds, they hired Kwaśniewski in January 2014. In April, they hired Biden
and Archer, in May the sitting secretary of state’s former aide Leiter. They
were in the middle of setting up another incredible deal where Zlochevsky
would put up $120 million in a new joint company with Rosemont, and
would get 25 percent of the profits, and they would put up no money at all,
trading on the Biden name alone, in the hopes of making oil deals around
the world. It fell apart when Rosemont associate Jason Galanis was indicted
for securities fraud in September 2015.[941] Soon after, Burisma hired
Washington-based consulting firm Blue Star Strategies, which had been
founded by Sally Painter—a Commerce Department adviser in the Bill
Clinton years—and Karen Tramontano, Clinton’s former deputy chief of
staff.[942] The firm specialized in advising Eastern European countries on
how to prepare for consideration by the NATO alliance.[943]
In 2019, the New York Times conceded the true reason the vice
president’s son had been hired: “Hunter Biden and his American business
partners were part of a broad effort by Burisma to bring in well-connected
Democrats during a period when the company was facing investigations
backed not just by domestic Ukrainian forces but by officials in the Obama
administration.” They added, importantly, “Hunter Biden’s work for
Burisma prompted concerns among State Department officials at the time
that the connection could complicate Vice President Biden’s diplomacy in
Ukraine, former officials said.” The paper went on to say that Zlochevsky
fled the country for good reason, the new regime had opened “multiple
investigations into him and his businesses.”
 Then Poroshenko hired a new prosecutor general in February 2015,
Viktor Shokin. As the Times reported, “he inherited several investigations
into the company and Mr. Zlochevsky, including for suspicion of tax
evasion and money laundering.” They added that “Shokin also opened an
investigation into the granting of lucrative gas licenses to companies owned
by Mr. Zlochevsky when he was the head of the Ukrainian Ministry of
Ecology and Natural Resources.”
Again, this is the New York Times, not the New York Post, saying
Devon Archer and Hunter Biden’s “support allowed Burisma to create the
perception that it was backed by powerful Americans at a time when
Ukraine was especially dependent on aid and strategic backing from the
United States and its allies, according to people who worked in Ukraine at
the time.”[944]

Fired

So Viktor Shokin, who was then accused by the U.S. of being corrupt,[945]
was investigating Burisma when Vice President Biden intervened to have
him fired. Biden told the Council on Foreign Relations: “I said, ‘We’re not
going to give you the billion dollars.’ They said, ‘You have no authority,
you’re not the President.’ I said, ‘Call him. . . You’re not getting a billion.’”
He continued, “I look at him and say, ‘We’re leaving in six hours. If the
prosecutor’s not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch,
he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the
time.”[946] Biden later told the same story to The Atlantic.[947]
 He defended this by saying, “Look, my son did nothing wrong. I did
nothing wrong. I carried out the policy of the United States government in
rooting out corruption in Ukraine.”[948]

Audio Leaked

But in May 2020, Andriy Derkach, a pro-Russian Ukrainian member of

parliament, released edited, but otherwise apparently not doctored audio of
a phone call between Biden and President Poroshenko, which Derkach said
was recorded by Poroshenko himself, and which appears to show the
Ukrainian president updating Biden on Shokin’s firing. He told Biden,
“And despite of the fact that we didn’t have any corruption charges, we
don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I especially
asked him . . . to resign in his position as a state person.” After saying
Shokin did resign as requested, Biden answered, “Great.”
Discussing Shokin’s replacement, Yuriy Lutsenko, Biden told the
Ukrainian, “[C]ongratulations on installing the new prosecutor general. It’s
going to be critical for him to work quickly to repair the damage that
Shokin did. And I’m a man of my word. And now that the new prosecutor
general is in place, we’re ready to move forward to signing that new $1
billion loan guarantee.”[949] They did not discuss the then-vice president’s
son or Burisma, but Poroshenko’s insistence to Biden—on a call he was
recording—that Shokin did not actually do anything to deserve his
dismissal partially corroborates the claim at least.
Taibbi noted, “Biden did not push back at this declaration of Shokin’s
innocence, which is damning in itself, given that Shokin’s corruption
continues to be the official explanation for what happened.” Though such
an argument could have been edited, Biden never claimed that.
Taibbi explained that while some Trump partisans believed Shokin
must have been on the side of law and order, and the Biden camp was
assuring everyone that all those investigations were “dormant,” the more
likely reality was that Shokin was shaking down Burisma for protection
money. This would not have been out of the ordinary for Ukraine, plus,
Taibbi highlighted a “2014 note from Burisma adviser Vadym Pozharskyi to
Hunter and his cohort Devon Archer detailed how ‘representatives of new
authorities’ were hitting up the firm for bribes.”[950]

Dormant

Taibbi went on to explain how the common narrative that any investigation
into Burisma was by that time “dormant” as the media endlessly repeated
was baseless.[951] Whichever public relations firm coined that phrase in
this case certainly earned whatever price they demanded. Major media
editors were apparently having a hard time claiming these investigations
were “closed,” but by calling them “dormant,” were able to insist they were
somehow on indefinite hold anyway.[952] It was not true.
As noted above, Shokin had opened at least one new case against the
company.[953]
The Financial Times ran a famous piece insisting the investigations
under Shokin were “dormant” and quoted anonymous EU and State
Department officials claiming they had already wanted to fire Shokin before
Biden forced the issue. However, this article is suspect since it also quotes
Biden denying he had ever even heard of Burisma, which is an obvious lie.
We now know Biden had dinner with the firm’s owner and his right-hand
man years before. Another anonymous official told the outlet, “The idea
that Shokin was investigating Burisma, I learnt that theory for the first time
from [Trump lawyer and adviser] Rudy Giuliani.”[954] But we know the
John Kerry State Department was concerned about Hunter Biden’s role at
the gas company and launched an official review on it at least.[955] And the
New York Times editorial page warned in December 2015 that “Burisma’s
owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, has been under investigation in Britain and in
Ukraine. It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a
Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not
a board he should be sitting on.”[956] Bringing up Giuliani was obfuscation
at best.

Fired for Corruption

Christopher Miller of Radio Liberty also ran a big piece citing experts like
Anders Åslund from the Atlantic Council—a member of the Harvard
Institute for International Development (HIID) group that helped wreck the
Russian economy in the Bill Clinton years[957]—supposedly debunking
the claim that Shokin was investigating Burisma and that he was fired for
corruption rather than the lack of it. They literally printed this claim from an
anonymous Ukrainian “activist”: “Ironically, Joe Biden asked Shokin to
leave because the prosecutor failed [to pursue] the Burisma investigation,
not because Shokin was tough and active with this case.”
 Got that? Vice President Biden had the prosecutor general fired
specifically for not investigating the company that had hired his son for a
million dollars per year, according to an article printed by the U.S. Agency
for Global Media. The article now includes an important update:
“Correction: This article has been amended to include reference to reported
donations by Burisma to the Atlantic Council.” Their conflict of interest
with the American national government is just a given.[958]

Shokin’s Side

This was all highly suspect. Shokin had seized property belonging to
Zlochevsky, who was living in Dubai, just one month before Biden had him
sacked. So every single media source who said Shokin was not
investigating Burisma or Zlochevsky and therefore there was no possible
motive for the elder Biden to have him fired other than his crusade against
corruption, and even better, that Shokin was fired for refusing to investigate
Burisma, were wrong.[959] The pro-Western Russian journalist[960] Yulia
Latynina showed with documents that Shokin had opened a new case
against Burisma, which traced corrupt money flowing through the company
and on to Hunter’s firm Rosemont Seneca, before Biden moved to have him
fired.[961]
The “solid guy” that had been appointed to replace Shokin did as he
was told and closed down the investigation into Burisma,[962] though he
reopened it in 2019.[963]
For his part, Shokin told ABC News, “Biden was acting not like a U.S.
vice president, but as an individual, like the individual interested in having
me removed—having me gone so that I did not interfere in the Burisma
investigation.”[964] He later released a video in which he denied
accusations that he was somehow responsible for the UK releasing the
money they had seized from Zlochevsky, supposedly an example of his
guilt. The Times had previously conceded the truth: “The British
prosecution later collapsed because of what American officials said was a
lack of cooperation from the office of the Ukrainian prosecutor general who
preceded Mr. Shokin”—Vitaly Yarema—not because of him.[965]
It turned out Burisma had paid a $7 million bribe to Yarema to scuttle
the British investigation. Journalist John Solomon wrote that a State
Department official named George Kent had “demanded action” against
Yarema for undercutting the British and Ukrainian criminal investigations
of Burisma and Zlochevsky and the embassy was told he had been bribed
millions to do so, as revealed in State Department documents.[966]
Shokin further stated that his and the court’s seizure of Zlochevsky’s
property just weeks before his firing had been nearly complete: “his
personal savings, his properties, his cars, etc. And in the course of our
previous investigation, Zlochevsky’s [oil] wells and other properties were
also seized. The depiction [of these investigations] as dormant has nothing
to do with reality of the facts.” He further claimed that “we were about to
reach the outcome of this case,” and continued, “I would like to point out
that there was no criminal investigation against Hunter Biden. The case was
against Burisma because of the violations it had committed.” It is
apparently true, so it was fair of him to mention to show he did not have
some unreasonable vendetta against the Biden family, only a legal one
against Zlochevsky, though he also claimed suspicion was beginning to fall
on Archer and the younger Biden by the time he was fired.
Shokin also insisted he never had a problem with American or
European officials previously, including Amb. Geoffrey Pyatt. He even
showed an encouraging letter from Victoria Nuland dated June 2015. A
readout of a call between Vice President Biden and President Poroshenko
from November 2015 reveals no statements against Shokin of any kind.
Biden promised them a $1 billion loan guarantee, “contingent on continued
Ukrainian progress to investigate and prosecute corruption.”[967] He got
the call from his son, at dinner with Burisma’s owner and corporate
secretary, on December 4.[968]
At least we now get to hear Shokin’s side of the story after almost a
decade.[969]
It was not true that the Europeans were demanding Shokin’s firing for
corruption, as told in the Democrats’ retconning of this history. The
European Commission praised Shokin for his efforts fighting corruption in
December 2015. In a report that was published nine days after Vice
President Biden had demanded Shokin’s firing,[970] then-EU
Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos announced, “I congratulate the
Ukrainian leadership on the progress made towards completing the reform
process which will bring important benefits to the citizens of Ukraine in the
future,” adding, “The hard work towards achieving this significant goal has
paid off. Now it is important to keep upholding all the standards.”[971] The
Carnegie Endowment also praised Shokin’s efforts at fighting corruption.
[972]
 It is uncertain whether Hunter Biden broke any Ukrainian laws by
sitting on the board of a company for money. But even any action he might
have taken on their behalf would amount to little more than a red herring.
[973] The corruption at issue here was the protection that hiring the son of
the sitting American vice president provided to the company on various
other matters they were under investigation for, whether they would have
led directly to charges against his son or not.
Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop[974] even contained emails that
Burisma executive Vladym Pozharskyi had written to him and Archer, as
well as their other colleague Eric Schwerin, in which he said shutting down
the criminal investigations was the entire reason they were hired and they
needed to hurry the hell up about it. He said he was disappointed at the lack
of detail and specific proposals of whom to target in their pressure
campaign. He wrote that if that was just because they were being cautious
he understood, just as long as they all understood “the true purpose of the
BS [Blue Star] engagement,” and agreed they should “proceed
immediately.” He wanted a specific list of “deliverables,” including getting
U.S. officials to make it known to “decision makers” in Kiev that they
supported Burisma, including the “President of Ukraine, president Chief of
Staff, Prosecutor General, etc.” He also wanted them to arrange for U.S.
officials to visit Ukraine to “conduct meetings with and bring positive
signal/message and support on Nikolay [a.k.a. Mykola Zlochevsky]’s issue
to the Ukrainian top officials above with the ultimate purpose to close down
for any cases/pursuits against Nikolay in Ukraine.”[975]
 “Devon and I do feel comfortable with BS [Blue Star] and the ability
of Sally & Karen to deliver. You should go ahead and sign. Looking
forward to getting started on this,” Hunter Biden replied.
Schwerin then responded to Biden and Archer: “I would tell Vadym
[Pozharskyi] that this is definitely done deliberately [to be] on the safe and
cautious side and that Sally [Painter] and company [Blue Star Strategies]
understand the scope and deliverables.”[976]
At the end of July 2023, Archer testified before Congress about the
Biden family’s relationship with Zlochevsky and “corporate secretary”
Pozharskyi. He explained, “I think they were getting pressure and they
requested Hunter, you know, help them with some of that pressure . . .
government pressure from Ukrainian Government investigations into
Mykola, et cetera.”
When asked, “What did Hunter Biden do after he was given that
request?” Archer replied, “Listen, I did not hear this phone call, but he—he
called his dad.” Pressed about how he knew that, he answered, “[B]ecause I
think Vadym told me.”
Though Archer did not hear the conversation, in his speech to the Rada
five days later, Vice President Biden announced his new agenda against
Shokin. “It’s not enough to set up a new anti-corruption bureau and
establish a special prosecutor fighting corruption. The Office of the General
Prosecutor desperately needs reform.”[977]
It was later revealed that the vice president used various pseudonyms,
including Robert L. Peters, Robin Ware and JRB Ware. Biden aide John
Flynn (no relation to the general) copied Hunter on 10 emails with the vice
president’s daily schedule in the spring and early summer of 2016.[978] The
National Archives later confirmed they had 5,138 emails and 25 “electronic
files.”[979] As this book goes to press, the Southeastern Legal Foundation’s
Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking those records remains pending.
[980]
Archer also testified that Vice President Biden joined his son, himself,
Burisma’s Vadym Pozharskyi and others for dinner twice in 2014 and 2015,
confirming the controversial email on Hunter Biden’s laptop from the
Ukrainian executive was about an event in the past rather than a proposed
one,[981] as some Biden defenders had argued.[982]
The fact that the vile Rudolph Giuliani, Trump loyalist and henchman,
was sent to try to track down this dirt to use it against the Democrats in the
election of 2020[983] does not negate the truth of it.

Perfect Phone Call

Trump’s so-called impeachable or “perfect” call, depending on who you

ask, went like this: after Zelensky thanked Trump for enforcing sanctions
on Russia, Trump said:

I would like you to do us a favor though because our country

has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I
would like you to find out what happened with this whole
situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike. . . . I guess
you have one of your wealthy people . . . The server, they say
Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the
whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with
some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney
General call you or your people and I would like you to get
to the bottom of it. As you said yesterday, that whole
nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man
named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but
they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can
do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible. . . .

I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was
shut down and that’s really unfair. A lot of people are talking
about that, the way they shut your very good prosecutor
down and you had some very bad people involved. Mr.
Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of
New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call
you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney
General. Rudy very much knows what’s happening and he is
a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be
great. The former ambassador from the United States, the
woman, was bad news, and the people she was dealing with
in the Ukraine were bad news, so I just want to let you know
that. The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son,
that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want
to find out about that so whatever you can do with the
Attorney General would be great. Biden went around
 bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look
into it. . . . It sounds horrible to me. . . .

I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going
to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the
bottom of it. I’m sure you will figure it out. I heard the
prosecutor was treated very badly and he was a very fair
prosecutor so good luck with everything.[984]

That was it. He just said please “look into it.” He never demanded a
criminal investigation or threatened to hold up any arms deals, nor even
implied it. The worst one could say is that the president mentioned it after
Zelensky brought up Javelin missiles, but he also raised the issue after
everything Zelensky said the rest of the call. There is no reason to believe it
was a threat or implied trade.[985]
But Eric Ciaramella thought otherwise. A former CIA analyst placed
on the National Security Council by former agency Director John Brennan,
[986] Ciaramella had been forced out of the White House for supposedly
“leaking against Trump” in mid-2017, according to a former NSC official.
[987] Ciaramella had worked closely with then-Vice President Biden and
also welcomed Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian Embassy-backed
Russiagate conspiracist who had attempted to link Trump to Russia in 2016,
into the Obama White House for meetings, including lobbying for Ukraine
aid in 2015.[988]
Back at the CIA, Ciaramella kicked off the impeachment effort against
Trump with a whistleblower complaint in which he claimed to have heard
secondhand, through the “interagency,” that “the President of the United
States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign
country in the 2020 U.S. election.”[989]
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, director for European affairs
on the National Security Council, a Ukrainian-American with a massive
conflict of interest, played a major role in this first impeachment of
President Trump. He was the one who overheard Trump’s phone call and
leaked it to the supposed whistleblower Ciaramella. The CIA analyst, in
turn, wrote up a report with the cooperation of several officials and passed
the information on to Congressman Adam Schiff.[990] Vindman openly
declared that his motive was to prevent the elected president from changing
his—Vindman’s—foreign policy regarding his home country. As he later
wrote, “We’d long been confused by the president’s policy of
accommodation and appeasement toward Russia. . . . This time the issue
was the president’s inexplicable hostility toward a U.S. partner crucial to
our Russia strategy: Ukraine.”[991]
The White House had put a temporary hold on $400 million worth of
aid to Ukraine. In Vindman’s judgment, “Not only was it a 180-degree turn
from the stated policy the entire U.S. government supported, but it was also
contrary to U.S. national-security interests in the region.” He went on and
on about their fears that the president might make “an impulsive decision
that could throw carefully crafted policy—official policy of the United
States—into total disarray.”[992]
Who in the hell did this guy—President Trump—think he was
anyway? “The official Ukraine policy was, in fact, a matter of broad
consensus in the diplomatic and military parts of the administration. What
exactly, we wondered, was the president doing?”
Vindman and his colleagues had held a deputies committee meeting,
chaired by the Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger.
Vindman remained certain their “interagency” consensus far outranked the
decisions of the elected president and chief executive of the government’s
departments. Trump’s job was to obey the commands of this lieutenant
colonel on the NSC: “I knew the president had clear and straightforward
talking points—I’d written them. He was to congratulate Zelensky, show
support for Ukraine’s reform and anti-corruption agenda, and urge caution
regarding the Russians.” Instead, “[t]he president wasn’t using my talking
points at all. . . . As the conversation progressed, my worst fears about the
call kept being reconfirmed. Off on a tangent of his own, the president was
aggravating a potentially explosive foreign-policy situation.”[993]
If the president wanted to change American foreign policy, well that
was just too damn bad, declared the O-5 from the deputy’s committee
meeting. Vindman says he immediately started planning for how he could
get National Security Advisor Bolton or Secretary of State Pompeo to
intervene with Trump.
Vindman also said, “It may seem surprising that my colleagues and I
were busy thinking up ways to pursue a Ukraine policy out of sync with the
direction that the president of the United States himself now seemed to be
taking.” But, he rationalized, “[t]he policy of U.S. support for Ukraine had
remained in place all along, with the unanimous consent of the secretary of
state, all the Cabinet deputies, and bipartisan congressional leadership,
including Trump’s most loyal followers.” This was obviously meaningless
nonsense. None of those people’s authority outranked the president on this
question, nor all of them combined either. Still, Vindman said, “people far
senior to me” did not take Trump’s orders seriously either. “Because Tim
Morrison, my new boss at NSC, had also directed that we continue on
course and not treat anything the president might say as a change in policy,
there was really nothing else to do.”
As far as rationalizing White House employees ratting on the president
for what he said in a phone call, Vindman claimed that “the president’s
bringing up such an allegation against a political rival, or any American
citizen at all, and demanding an investigation on a call with a foreign head
of state was crossing the brightest of bright lines.” Vindman failed to cite
any law the president was breaking. The bright line he referred to was just
his own opinion.
Vindman then quoted Trump on the phone call: “A lot of people want
to find out about that,” he told Zelensky. “So whatever you can do with the
attorney general would be great. Biden went around bragging that he
stopped the prosecution, so if you can look into it.”
The arrogance of this lowly dual-citizen staffer is impressive. He
simply embellished this statement into something it was not. He claimed the
president had demanded Zelensky, “in essence, manufacture compromising
material on an American citizen in exchange for that support . . . in a wholly
improper effort to subvert U.S. foreign policy in order to game an
election.”[994]
 “In essence,” in this context was a lie. Vindman was begging the
question and assuming Biden’s innocence, then further imagining that
Trump simply must agree with him about that and therefore was asking
Zelensky to find what he knew what was not there. Again, Vindman
invoked the authority of “U.S. foreign policy,” as determined by “the
interagency” of a bunch of lowly staffers on the deputies’ committees of the
NSC, as the true authority in Washington.
Vindman made himself very clear in his statement to Congress during
the impeachment hearings. “I realized that if Ukraine pursued an
investigation into the Bidens and Burisma, it would likely be interpreted as
a partisan play which would undoubtedly result in Ukraine losing the
bipartisan support it has thus far maintained,” he said. The president could
not be allowed to determine policy. The “interagency” decided they would
stop him.[995]
While it was unseemly for the president to go that far in asking a
foreign nation to “look at” a relation of his presumed frontrunner challenger
in the upcoming election, there was no extortion on the call whatsoever.
Besides, the gas company Burisma’s hiring of Hunter Biden was corrupt on
its face. His company Rosemont Seneca was paid more than $1 million for
no service rendered beyond political cover and obstruction of justice. And
despite all the spin by the Democrats and permanent establishment about
Shokin’s corruption, there was every reason to suspect that Biden had him
fired to protect the company that had hired his son for exactly the purpose
of gaining political cover against pending prosecutions.
 Again, the arrangement had been investigated by Obama and John
Kerry’s State Department due to “concerns among . . . officials at the time
that the connection could complicate Vice President Biden’s diplomacy in
Ukraine,” officials told the Times.[996] Any nonpartisan observer might
wonder why they did not refer the matter to the U.S. Justice Department as
well as Ukrainian authorities. Secretary Kerry’s stepson Christopher Heinz
broke off his relationship with Hunter Biden and Devon Archer as soon as
this caper began.[997] Vice President Biden’s insistence on the firing of the
prosecutor looking into the company would certainly raise the question in
any fair person’s mind whether important cases shut down with his firing
might need to be reexamined.

Impeachment

No witnesses at the impeachment hearings demonstrated the

implementation of any quid pro quo either. The media said for weeks that
Gordon Sondland, then-ambassador to the EU, could prove an impeachable-
level extortion attempt by the president, as he had supposedly passed the
threat on to the Ukrainians.[998] But under oath Sondland admitted, “I
never heard from President Trump that aid was conditioned on an
announcement” of investigations into Burisma. “Nobody told me directly
that the aid was tied to anything.” He was only “presuming. . . . This was
speculation.” The Ukrainian who supposedly received these threats from
Sondland based on his speculation, Andriy Yermak, said he remembered no
such conversation anyway.[999] Sondland said he called the president and
asked him directly, “What do you want from Ukraine?” Trump would only
say, according to Sondland, “I want nothing. I want no quid pro quo. I want
Zelensky to do the right thing.”[1000]
For his part, Zelensky said the Ukrainians did not notice any delay in
the delivery of their weapons and he did not interpret Trump’s comments as
an attempt to blackmail him.[1001] “I never talked to the president from the
position of a quid pro quo,” Zelensky told Time magazine.[1002]
John Bolton, the neoconservative fellow-traveler[1003] and former W.
Bush administration State Department official and UN ambassador whom
Trump had made national security adviser, was also said to be the lynchpin
in the case against Trump. He had referred to the whole thing as a sordid
“drug deal” which he wanted no part of.[1004] Though he did not testify at
the hearings, Bolton stated in his memoir that Trump “said he wasn’t in
favor of sending [Ukraine] anything until all the Russia-investigation
materials related to Clinton and Biden had been turned over.”[1005] This
seems to be in reference to the Trump-Giuliani red herring theory that the
DNC server from the Russiagate hoax had somehow been moved to
Ukraine. Or possibly he was just confused because the owner of
CrowdStrike, Dmitri Alperovitch, is a Russian-American. This was a
strange obsession of the two,[1006] but has no connection to the Bidens,
Shokin or the Burisma case at all. In the phone call with Zelensky, Trump
seemed more interested in finding out about this story than the firing of
Shokin.
But Congress thought not-quite holding up that arms deal was really
bad, worse than Trump’s continuation of President Obama and Saudi Crown
Prince Salman’s genocide[1007] in Yemen,[1008] worse than doubling
down on a lost war in Afghanistan for four years before finally making a
deal to end it,[1009] and much worse than picking a fight with Russia,
which is what Trump was actually doing.
In June 2020, Zlochevsky was charged with bribing prosecutors with
$6 million in cash to drop an embezzlement case against him. The
Washington Post emphasized that the case predated Burisma’s hiring of
Hunter Biden so he was not accused in this crime. But of course that was
the whole point.[1010]

Eric Ciaramella

An important side issue to this topic was the outrageous online censorship
of the name of the supposed “whistleblower”[1011] on this case, CIA
analyst Eric Ciaramella.[1012] They never gave a good reason for why an
intelligence analyst who divulged a confidential conversation involving the
U.S. president should remain anonymous in the first place, especially if he
really was heroically exposing a crime. There was certainly no law that
banned it, nor could there be due to the First Amendment. But when
journalist Paul Sperry revealed the identity of the leaker, what Sperry said
was already “an open secret in Washington,”[1013] the continued
censorship on social media of the man’s identity was doubly illegitimate.
[1014] What the hell is this? Russia?[1015]

Aftermath
Obviously, the Russiagate and Ukrainegate hoaxes both served to sour
relations between the United States and Russia that much more, not that
their regime had done anything to deserve it.

October Surprise

Hunter Biden’s Laptop

In a case related to the Russia- and Ukrainegate scandals, the CIA, FBI and
media teamed up to claim that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, which
he had left at a computer repair shop, was planted by the Russians as
“disinformation” before the 2020 election.[1016] It became another huge
media scandal: the implacable Russian dictator would stop at nothing to
sabotage his servant Donald Trump’s opponent. Had America ever faced an
enemy so determined to overthrow our constitutional system of democratic
self-government since Rear Admiral Cockburn burned the White House in
1812?[1017] It was Russiagate all over again, in both senses: another
completely fake hoax by the national security state; and one that virtually
all of D.C. and TV bought and repeated to each other and the nation in fear.
[1018]
The computer held dozens of pictures of the younger Biden smoking
crack and cavorting with prostitutes, as well as more than 22,000 emails
and text messages, including some which seemed to implicate the son in
abusing his influence doing business with powerful foreign corporations,
[1019] laundering money and committing tax fraud. It also showed that Joe
Biden—identified as “the big guy”[1020] in his son’s correspondence and
by Hunter’s business partner Tony Bobulinski—as well as Jim Biden, Joe’s
brother, was involved in and profiting from the son’s business dealings.
[1021] While Hunter denied leaving his computer at the repair store, he was
a crackhead at the time and federal prosecutors and FBI and IRS agents
claimed to have financial statements, cellphone records and a paper receipt
that proved it.[1022]
Perhaps most importantly, emails from the laptop showed that Hunter
had introduced his father, then the vice president, to Burisma executive
Vadym Pozharskyi. “Dear Hunter, thank you for inviting me to D.C. and
giving an opportunity to meet your father and spent [sic] some time
together. It’s realty [sic] an honor and pleasure,” the Burisma executive
wrote to the younger Biden.[1023] Again, Archer’s testimony shows this
was not a reference to a possible future date,[1024] as alleged Washington
Post “fact checker” Glenn Kessler, had argued at the time.[1025] As one of
the many, many updates and corrections to his “fact check” explain, Hunter
himself admitted it was true in 2024.[1026] Kessler believed and repeated
Joe Biden’s lies was all.[1027]
The FBI knew the laptop was real and verified it was legitimate in
November 2019—two months after the Trump-Zelensky phone call scandal
began[1028] and 11 months before the laptop story broke in the press,
according to the sworn testimony of Gary Shapley Jr., an IRS
whistleblower.[1029] They took possession of it the next month.[1030]
Later, the younger Biden’s lawyers officially demanded a criminal
investigation into the Republicans who had leaked its contents and federal
prosecutors held it up in court and used its evidence against Hunter in his
drug and gun trial in 2024.[1031] And after surveilling Trump adviser Rudy
Giuliani, they knew the shop owner, John Paul Mac Isaac, had given him a
copy of the hard drive too.[1032] So, the Department of Justice literally had
an ongoing criminal investigation of Hunter Biden that included as
evidence his laptop which contained proof of Burisma executive’s orders to
Hunter to get U.S. officials to intervene for him, along with his agreement,
and a direct connection between the former vice president and Burisma
executives[1033] during President Trump’s impeachment over Ukrainegate
in early 2020. They kept those facts buried so deeply that when news broke
of the laptop more than half a year later, they were able to pretend to
believe it had been planted by spies from Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
To prevent the Republicans from making the most of this
compromising material on the younger Biden, the feds came up with an
elaborate scheme to inoculate the press and social media companies against
the idea of its legitimacy. They held an exercise at the Aspen Institute where
they prepped all the most important leaders of the Silicon Valley tech
companies to expect a massive Russian disinformation campaign—“the
Burisma leak” in their scenario—right before the election. As
Representative Jim Jordan later wrote in a memo to FBI Director
Christopher Wray, we now know for certain that the agents who were
warning social media companies to suppress the laptop story as “Russian
disinformation” were aware they were lying. Compartmentalization was not
an issue on this question. The FBI and Cybersecurity and Infrastructure
Agency (CISA) held more than 30 meetings with Silicon Valley companies
warning them of coming foreign intervention in the election, including the
danger of a “hack/leak” operation, and “all while in possession of Hunter
Biden’s laptop.” They said then-Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF)
Section Chief Bradley Benavides, as well as individuals assigned to its
Russia Unit, knew the laptop was real, but when a Twitter employee asked
them about it, “an analyst in the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division
embedded in FITF began to respond that the laptop was real, when an FBI
lawyer interrupted to say that the bureau had ‘no further comment’
regarding the laptop’s provenance.” Soon after that, they decided they
would refuse all further discussion of the issue,[1034] which let Clapper
and Brennan’s lie stand.
Jordan wrote to Wray: “Put simply, after the FBI conditioned social
media companies to believe that the laptop was the product of a hack-and-
dump operation, the Bureau stopped its information sharing, allowing social
media companies to conclude that the New York Post story was Russian
disinformation.”
Once the Post ran the story,[1035] the plot kicked into gear. Fifty-one
ex-intelligence officials—many of them involved in the Russiagate hoax,
including former Acting Directors of the CIA Michael Morell and John
McLaughlin, as well as former CIA Directors Michael Hayden and Leon
Panetta, and former DNI Clapper—claimed the laptop had “the classic
earmarks of a Russian information operation.” They even admitted they had
no proof of this whatsoever: “We want to emphasize that we do not know if
the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal
attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have
evidence of Russian involvement,” adding, “just that our experience makes
us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role
in this case.”[1036] It was just another case of the unelected secret police
interfering in an American presidential election.
For anyone careful enough to actually read the letter, it was obvious
they were simply bluffing, and not even claiming to have secret information
indicating it was true. But the disclaimers did not matter. Twitter and
Facebook[1037] then both actively suppressed the story, with Twitter
locking the account of the oldest newspaper in America and preventing
anyone from sharing the link to the story, even in private direct messages.
[1038]
And they did not only lie to the American public, but also briefed the
same blatant falsehood to members of Congress as well. Senator Ron
Johnson later wrote an angry letter demanding an investigation into this
official government disinformation used against the legislature, saying, “If
these recent whistleblower revelations are true, it would strongly suggest
that the FBI’s August 6, 2020, briefing was indeed a targeted effort to
intentionally undermine a Congressional investigation.” He continued, “The
FBI being weaponized against two sitting chairmen of U.S. Senate
committees with constitutional oversight responsibilities would be one of
the greatest episodes of Executive Branch corruption in American
history.”[1039]
Morell later admitted to Congress that it was a call from then-Biden
campaign adviser Antony Blinken that “triggered” his move to write the
letter lying that Russia must have been behind the laptop “to help Vice
President Biden . . . because I wanted him to win the election.” He also
admitted that the spies coordinated with the Biden campaign on when and
how to release their disinformation to the media and the public.[1040]
Polling data shows this censorship of the true story of Biden’s son’s
corruption was likely the margin of his victory in the 2020 election.[1041]
This is plainly criminal behavior by the national police force.
Meanwhile, the major media refused to even attempt to confirm that it
was in fact legitimate. As CBS’s Leslie Stahl insisted to Trump, “It can’t be
verified.” When asked why not, she simply repeated, “Because it can’t be
verified.”[1042]
Speaking for the whole industry, NPR News’s managing editor Terence
Samuels justified their total blackout of the true story with the arrogant
official statement, “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not
really stories, and we don’t want to waste listeners’ and readers’ time on
stories that are just pure distractions.”[1043] To be fair, Samuels and most
of the other mainstream media players involved in suppressing the story are
likely not deliberate liars. They are merely servants of the national security
apparatus who believe whatever lies they are told by officials in power, and
measure their virtue by their unanimity with their peers and willingness to
crush the voices of those who know better. The liberals of NPR News were
no less credulous when it came to regurgitating the government’s lies
during the days of George W. Bush’s aggressive wars to remake
Afghanistan and Iraq in the 2000s.[1044]
However, conservative news site the Daily Caller proved the laptop
was genuine within days. All that was required was a willingness to attempt
to track down those on the receiving end of the younger Biden’s emails to
see if they matched.[1045] Eleven months later, Ben Schreckinger, a
reporter from Politico, the same outlet that had run the outrageously
fraudulent lie by the intelligence agents claiming Russia was behind the
leak, also proved beyond any doubt that every single thing in that laptop
was legitimate.[1046] The New York Times and the Washington Post finally
admitted it too—but not until March 2022, nearly a year and a half after the
fact.[1047] So CBS’s Stahl was wrong that it could not be verified. She and
her producers and company executives clearly did not want to do their job
and verify the story because they wanted to help the Democrats win the
election. They knew the former vice president’s son was a corrupt drug
addict and were afraid that would hurt Biden’s chance to win the
presidency. Is there another explanation for Stahl’s absurd lie?
A significant number of journalists attended the Aspen tabletop
exercise, where the FBI prepped the tech companies to censor the laptop
story. These included The Dispatch’s Steven Hayes, notorious spreader of
disinformation[1048] about Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s relationship
with al Qaeda,[1049] which helped start a war that killed more than a
million people;[1050] David Sanger of the New York Times, most famous
for falsely accusing Iran of running secret nuclear weapons program for the
last 20 years;[1051] and Rolling Stone’s Noah Shachtman, best known for
covering up for his friend, ABC News’s James Gordon Meek, after he was
indicted[1052] on child pornography charges and revealed to have boasted
about his violent crimes against babies and toddlers.[1053] None of these
journalists told the public what they knew about the FBI-CIA laptop fraud.
[1054]
 It was later revealed that Antony Blinken had his own personal reason
to see the laptop suppressed. He knew it contained evidence that he had lied
to Congress about his knowledge of Hunter Biden’s role on the board of
Burisma and its hiring of the Washington, D.C., lobbying firm Blue Star
Strategies.[1055]
The laptop itself was also important, beyond just the story of its
suppression, though less important for the story here, it did seem reveal a
disturbing amount of co-mingling of finances between the father and the
son that would be questionable at least considering Hunter’s dealings and
attempted dealings with powerful firms in foreign countries.[1056]

The Whitmer Kidnap Hoax

Not only did the CIA, FBI, major media and tech companies all criminally
collude to interfere in American democracy by suppressing the laptop,
falsely making it look like a Russian plot, but the FBI also launched their
own surprise at the beginning of October with their ridiculous lie that a
group of Trump supporters had been caught conspiring to kidnap and
murder the Democratic governor of Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer. This was
a complete hoax. No fewer than 12 of the conspirators involved were FBI
informants who set up the others.[1057] But the media storm was intense
and surely cost the Republicans a few points on the margin. The Democrats
certainly played up Trump’s alleged responsibility for the plot as much as
they could.[1058]

War Games
Extending Russia

In June 2019, the Pentagon-sponsored RAND Corporation think tank

published a study called “Extending Russia: Competing from Advantageous
Ground.”[1059] By “extending,” they meant overextending: provoking,
needling, annoying, and finding ways to force Russia to expend time,
energy and resources responding to American moves against their interests
and otherwise “causing the regime to lose domestic and/or international
prestige and influence.” Though it may be hard to prove the Trump and
Biden administrations adopted this paper as policy, they obviously did. It is
a circumstantial case, but like FDR’s implementation[1060] of the
McCollum memo[1061] to provoke Japan into attacking American territory
in World War II,[1062] it is a virtually certain one. They followed every bit
of it.
The report includes entire sections recommending a full-scale
sanctions regime, overthrowing Russia’s crucial ally Belarus, fueling
tensions in the South Caucasus, “exploiting Armenian and Azeri tensions,”
reducing Russian influence in Central Asia, and “challenging” Russian
influence in Moldova’s breakaway province of Transnistria, in what they
call a new “great game” in Eurasia, as well as promoting heightened
tensions in Ukraine and Georgia.
In fact, the Trump administration reaffirmed the Bucharest Declaration.
In Tbilisi, Georgia in August 2017, Vice President Mike Pence said,
“President Trump and I stand by the 2008 NATO Bucharest statement
which made it clear that Georgia will one day become a member of NATO,”
adding, “We strongly support Georgia’s aspiration to become a member of
NATO and will continue to work closely with this Prime Minister and the
government of Georgia broadly to advance the policies that will facilitate
becoming a NATO member.”[1063]
The RAND report suggests that Trump or his successor could occupy
the oil-rich eastern regions of Syria and restart Obama and Brennan’s
program of backing Jabhat al-Nusra (a.k.a. Hayat Tahrir al Sham) terrorists
in the northwestern Idlib Province so that “Russian costs might be driven
up.”
They talk about freedom and democracy and the liberal, rules-based
international order of laws and governance, but this is how the War Party
really thinks and behaves: “Benefits: Increased U.S. support to the
moderate Syrian opposition could perpetuate and intensify a civil war that
had begun to wind down, thereby imposing attritional costs on both Russia
and Iran.” The RAND authors added, “These costs might be increased if the
United States increases its backing for anti-regime fighters. Washington
might also resume U.S. assistance to the remaining opposition forces in the
west, which the Donald Trump administration has reportedly discontinued.”
They were writing this in 2019, five years after Obama’s and allied
support for the Syrian rebels helped to create the ISIS Caliphate in eastern
Syria and western Iraq,[1064] and just two years after the U.S. and its allies
had finished destroying it again.[1065]
Unlike all the pretend TV experts back then, at least the RAND wonks
acknowledged that it would be “difficult to disentangle the moderates from
the extremist al Qaeda-linked opposition elements,” and that Syria and Iran
would also bomb them, so it would not necessarily drive up Russia’s costs,
while it would certainly hurt our European friends, “not to mention the
Syrian people themselves.” Not only that, but “supporting the rebels could
run counter to the most prominent objective of the Trump administration’s
Middle East foreign policy—fighting radical Islamist terrorism.” It was a
polite way of describing proposed treason on behalf of head-chopping
lunatics. “As Trump argued, by defeating the Syrian government, the
United States would also destroy an enemy of the radical Sunni Islamic
terrorist groups.”
The whole report reads like that, absolutely heinous proposals followed
by heavy disclaimers about why wise leaders should ignore their ideas.
They say, “Most of these measures—whether in Europe or the Middle East
—risk provoking Russian reaction that could impose large military costs on
U.S. allies and large political costs on the United States itself.”
Along the same lines, the authors also proposed another attempt at
regime change in Belarus, whom they called “Russia’s only real ally.” They
said, “Successfully promoting regime change and altering the country’s
orientation westward would be a real blow to Moscow.” It would hurt their
attempts to create an Eastern European Economic Union, make any future
action against the Baltics more difficult and would further isolate
Kaliningrad. Even if it failed, “the existence of such a campaign would
create apprehensions among Russian leaders who have tended to exaggerate
the Western role on other color revolutions and even worry about the
prospect of such a movement in their own country.” However, they noted,
chances of success were low, warning that Russia could intervene militarily,
which “would extend Russia but generally be regarded as a setback for the
United States.”
When it came to Ukraine, the RAND authors advised, “Increasing
military advice and arms supplies to Ukraine is the most feasible of these
options with the largest impact, but any such initiative would have to be
calibrated very carefully to avoid a widely expanded conflict.”
Continuing on that provocative yet cautionary note, they wrote that
expanded U.S. military aid to Ukraine would increase Russia’s costs “in
blood and treasure” to continue operating in the Donbas. Larger numbers of
casualties “could become quite controversial at home, as it did when the
Soviets invaded Afghanistan.”
They warned that if the U.S. did follow that advice and escalate, they
could lead Russia to respond by “mounting a new offensive and seizing
more Ukrainian territory,” adding that “[w]hile this might increase Russia’s
costs, it would also represent a setback for the United States, as well as for
Ukraine.” They reiterated, “Increasing U.S. military aid would certainly
drive up the Russian costs, but doing so could also increase the loss of
Ukrainian lives and territory or result in a disadvantageous peace
settlement.” According to the RAND authors, Lieutenant General Ben
Hodges, the former commanding general of U.S. Army Europe, “argued
against giving Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine for precisely this
reason.”
The study also suggested the U.S. could “heighten” “Russian
anxieties” and “paranoia” with “periodic bomber deployments to European
and Asian bases,” and that “[m]ore-aggressive U.S. and allied patrolling
near Russian naval base areas [in the Black, Baltic and Arctic seas] could
cause Russia to adopt expensive countermeasures.”
To get Moscow to take the bait and extend themselves on these various
provocations would be difficult and require further careful study because
“that can happen only if these strategies play to the fears of leaders or of the
Russian people.” They elaborated, “The Russian government will not react
to very real threats to its security if it does not perceive them, so strategies
need to be tailored to the psychology of Russian leaders and of the Russian
people rather than just to objective reality.”
You might think these people are insane. Keeping Moscow constantly
in fear of real and phantom coup plots against them and their neighbors, the
RAND authors argue, helps “stultify” the development of Russia’s pseudo-
democratic political system, “marginaliz[ing] would-be reformers,” which
is good, representing one of the “intangible costs” imposed on Russia by the
color-coded revolutions.
But no. They know exactly what they are saying, for example
acknowledging how “the nightmarish consequences of Russian bombing of
Syrian civilians illustrates the significant moral and humanitarian
considerations at play with these options and why this is a questionable
strategic choice.”
Again, the study’s authors reiterated that they have no idea whether
they are coming or going, and warned that following their advice could
cause catastrophe: “Russia might escalate, possibly seizing more of
Ukraine, supporting further advances of the Damascus regime, or actually
occupying a wavering Belarus.” Since doing so would hurt Russia but
America and its allies as well, “any U.S. moves of the sort described in this
chapter would need to be carefully calibrated and pursued within some
larger policy framework.”
For all the eggheads’ disclaimers about the danger of doing what they
suggest, it seems like the Trump and Biden administrations must have only
gotten a summary with the warnings cut out. They implemented virtually
every part of the program, however careful calibration seems to have had
nothing to do with it.
For another example, the authors also advised the U.S. to attempt to
obstruct the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which circumvented
Ukraine. Even though Europe would still have to buy at least some Russian
gas, “at minimum it would have to pass through other countries, such as
Ukraine, which would earn transport fees.”
They go on to encourage the further expansion of pipeline networks
westward from Azerbaijan, fracking and imports of liquefied natural gas
(LNG), presumably from the United States.
Authors of another RAND Corporation study from 2019 attempted to
explain what the U.S. could do to deter Russia without inadvertently
“provoking” the aggression they were trying to prevent. They identified
Russia’s major “red lines” as being “NATO enlargement, disruption of the
strategic balance, direct threat to eliminate or overthrow the Russian
regime, and loss of influence in the near abroad.” They also noted the way
these different questions affected each other. For example, NATO expansion
“might allow the United States to deploy weapons in new areas that could
threaten the strategic balance and the regime in Moscow, and it would also
de facto pull the new member away from Russia’s sphere of influence.”
They said NATO’s relationship with Russia had “faltered” due to “NATO
intervention in and recognition of Kosovo,” the invasion of Iraq, NATO
expansion, Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and deployment of
missiles systems in Poland and the Czech Republic.
The RAND authors wrote, “Russia is particularly wary of further
NATO enlargement, which it perceives as an encroachment on its sphere of
influence,” adding that “Russia seeks to maintain a buffer zone between its
territory and that of NATO, and preserving its sphere of influence is
important economically, politically, and culturally.” They also wrote, “A
broader NATO presence also revives Russia’s traditional fear of
encirclement by hostile powers that, from the Russian perspective, seek to
contain and weaken Russia.” Lastly, they added that the Russian
establishment was terrified by the color-coded revolutions in Georgia,
Ukraine and Belarus, and feared that it could happen in Moscow, as
mentioned in their national security strategy document from 2015.[1066]

Interoperability

The Trump administration increased training and equipment transfers to

Ukraine soon after taking office and before the end of the year had one-
upped Obama by sending weapons the last president was afraid to.
As journalist Zach Dorfman wrote, citing a former CIA official, “[I]n
many ways the U.S.-Ukraine intelligence relationship ‘is about as robust . . .
as just about anybody else in Europe.’” The Ukrainians provided valuable
signals intelligence to the U.S., and in “retaliation” for supposed Russian
intervention in the 2016 election, they started working together on “joint
offensive cyber operations” against Russian government targets. This
cooperation increased during the Trump years, he reported, because just like
in all the wars, Trump devolved decision-making authority down to lower
levels in the CIA and NSA from the NSC.[1067]
Approximately 300 U.S. soldiers worked for years to train the
Ukrainian army at the Yavoriv Combat Training Center in western Ukraine.
“Every 55 days we have a new battalion come in and we train them,” U.S.
Army National Guard Capt. Kayla Christopher, spokesperson for the Joint
Multinational Training Group-Ukraine, told Defense One. “And at the end
of that 55-day period, we’ll do a field training exercise with that battalion.”
They were said to have trained seven battalions between 2015 and 2017.
Emphasizing the role of other neighboring militaries in the mission, the
spokeswoman said, “Our overall goal is essentially to help the Ukrainian
military become NATO-interoperable.”[1068]
In February 2019, lawmakers amended the Ukrainian constitution to
make membership in the alliance a permanent objective.[1069]

The Perpetual Policy

Trump was either a Russia hawk with the worst of them or he had no
control over the Pentagon’s world empire and its policies on such matters.
Trump had said he thought the U.S. should try to win over Russia to split
them away from China, just as Nixon and Kissinger had split China away
from the Soviet Union back in the 1970s, and that the United States should
“get along with Russia.”[1070]
 But Washington was sure acting like Trump had not just been elected
on a peace-with-Russia platform. During Obama’s lame-duck period in
December 2016, Senators John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Amy
Klobuchar went to Ukraine to announce America’s continued support. “I
believe you will win. I am convinced you will win. And we will do
everything we can to provide you what you need to win,” McCain told
them. Graham added, “Your fight is our fight. 2017 will be the year of
offense. All of us will go back to Washington and we will push the case
against Russia. Enough of Russian aggression. It is time for them to pay a
heavier price.”[1071]
Just five months after Trump took office, NATO ran a major war game
on the border between Poland and Lithuania.[1072]
In December 2017, his administration released their National Security
Strategy. The document said that the War on Terrorism, while not over yet,
would now have to take a back seat to great power competition with Russia
and China. Invoking the crises the U.S. had previously created in the Bush
and Obama years, Trump’s top men wrote that “[w]ith its invasions of
Georgia and Ukraine, Russia demonstrated its willingness to violate the
sovereignty of states in the region. Russia continues to intimidate its
neighbors with threatening behavior, such as nuclear posturing and the
forward deployment of offensive capabilities.”[1073]
The next month, the Pentagon released their National Defense Strategy.
After building up the danger from Russia and China, they got to the heart of
the matter in plain language: “Our network of alliances and partnerships
remain the backbone of global security.” Anyone who is not within
America’s so-called security umbrella is a “rogue” or “revisionist” state—
the enemy.[1074] It is not the international law, which the U.S. and its allies
largely have written, including the UN Charter, which sets the terms for the
“world order,” but America and its allies pursuing their own naked
ambition.
Under Trump, the U.S. Navy stepped up its presence in the Black and
Baltic Seas and armed U.S. frigates in the Baltic with medium-range cruise
missiles that reduce first-strike warning times, which makes the Russians’
launch-on-warning defensive posture that much more precarious.
He also increased U.S. Air Force bomber missions right up to the line
of Russian airspace in the Baltic, Black, Norwegian as well as the Okhotsk
Seas in the Far East, testing their radar and anti-aircraft abilities, essentially
dry runs for a nuclear first-strike.
Ralph Clem and Ray Finch reported in War on the Rocks that during
Obama’s second term and under Trump, there were approximately 2,900
reported incidents where NATO and Russian forces came into close
proximity to each other, mostly at sea. Their military claimed more than
2,600 foreign surveillance missions near their frontiers just in 2019 and
2020. They said, “Show of force and freedom of navigation activities,
especially by the United States and NATO, have pushed aircraft and naval
operations into areas that hitherto had seen little, if any, probing by the
opposing sides since the height of the Cold War.” They cited, for example,
greatly expanded B-1, B-2 and B-52 bomber training missions and naval
deployments in the Arctic and Black Seas.[1075]
 We saw the potential for disaster from these activities in the case of the
HMS Defender. Just after Biden and Putin met in June 2021, the British
sailed their frigate into Crimean territorial waters, provoking a series of
Russian fly-bys and warning shots from a coast guard ship.[1076]

Paul Whelan

In December 2018, a former marine named Paul Whelan was arrested for
spying in Russia. Admitting to possessing a USB drive that allegedly
contained classified data, he claimed to have been set up by an
acquaintance. He was convicted in 2020 and given a 16-year sentence.
Ambassador John Sullivan and Secretary of State Pompeo protested and
denounced the Russian government over it.[1077] It seems possible that the
charges were bogus. Would the CIA send an unprotected, Non-Official
Cover (NOC) spy just to get a thumb drive that an agency employee with
diplomatic cover probably could have obtained just as easily?
Whether or not he was guilty, the relatively small story had an
exaggerated effect due to all the Russiagate hype in the media at the time.
Ambassador John Sullivan complained that, “I came to Moscow with a
charge from President Trump to improve the relationship between the
United States and Russia, and I am working hard on doing exactly that.”
However, he said, Whelan’s continued imprisonment “represents a
significant obstacle in the U.S.-Russia bilateral relationship.”[1078] Whelan
was released in a prisoner swap in August 2024.[1079]

A Vision of War
In February 2019, Zelensky’s adviser Alexey Arestovich gave an interview
which was very revealing about their view of the coming inevitable war. As
he described it, neutrality was not an option since both Russia and Poland,
at minimum, have ongoing or at least major potential claims to territory in
their border regions. And, he said, there was no way to prevent a Russian
invasion other than joining NATO. “If we don’t join NATO we are
finished.” But Arestovich also acknowledged that NATO membership
would also likely get them attacked. It was better, he reasoned, to start the
fight sooner over the threat of joining than to wait for the inevitable and
lose the chance forever.
The problem, he said, was that the West was reluctant to bring Ukraine
into the alliance due to “all these Yanukovyches,” meaning the threat that
the pro-Russia side could win an election, leaving an adversary nation
inside the Atlantic alliance. But if they fought a war with Russia soon,
Arestovich said, they could break the power of pro-Russian forces, prove
their usefulness to NATO and end the possibility that they could ever be
allies of Russia in the future.[1080] Once Zelensky wins the election, his
adviser said, the first thing he should do is seek a Membership Action Plan
to join NATO. After the interviewer asked if that would help to end the
ongoing civil war in the east, Arestovich answered, “On the contrary, this
will most likely prompt Russia to launch a major military offensive against
Ukraine, because they’ll have to degrade us, in terms of infrastructure, and
to turn everything here into devastated territory so that NATO would be
reluctant to accept us.” When the interviewer asked which was the best
choice, Arestovich answered, “Of course, a major war with Russia, and then
to join NATO after our victory over Russia.” He went on to predict with
great accuracy what that invasion would look like, including Russia
occupying the Donbas, reopening travel and fresh water to Crimea, strikes
on infrastructure and so on.
But then, he said, once the wars are over and NATO begins to station
troops and equipment there, then Russia will never try it again. He
concluded, “The price of joining NATO is likely to be a larger war with
Russia, or a sequence of such conflicts.” However, he added, “But in this
conflict, we will be very actively supported by the West—with weapons,
equipment, assistance, new sanctions against Russia, and quite possibly the
introduction of a NATO contingent, a no-fly-zone, etc. We won’t lose, and
that’s good.”[1081]
This all sounded much more like a plan than a prediction. His certainty
about the move to NATO provoking war and the guarantees of Western
assistance raises questions about just whose plan he was referring to.

Nord Stream 2

Mercantilism

The Trump administration also worked overtime to try to prevent the

completion of the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline from Russia to
Germany, which lay under the Baltic Sea and bypassed Ukraine, a country
that has been greatly dependent on Russian transit fees on gas piped to the
rest of Europe through the old Soviet “Brotherhood pipeline,” to cover the
costs of their own imports. Nord Stream 1 had gone online back in 2011.
[1082] They even went so far as to sanction the Swiss and German firms
working on the project. On one hand, as Senator Rand Paul[1083] pointed
out in a floor speech, this was about mercantilism: the power of American
firms to lobby the U.S. government to intervene so they could sell natural
gas to the Germans at a nice markup instead. It was no coincidence that his
friend Senator Ted Cruz, Republican from Texas, had been leading the
charge against Nord Stream 2 for years. “[T]he shade of mercantilism is
dimming the light of experience. Opponents of the pipeline, not
surprisingly, are largely from states that compete in the sale of natural gas.”
But Paul wisely advised: “History demonstrates that trade and
interconnectedness between nations is a barrier to war. Engaging in
mutually beneficial commerce coupled with a potent military deterrence is
the combination that best promises peace.”[1084]
But that is the War Party’s real point. Blocking the pipeline also
seemed to be an effort to prevent the Germans from deepening their ties
with Russia. As Lord Hastings Lionel Ismay, NATO’s first secretary-
general, said, the purpose of the alliance was “to keep the [Russians] out,
the Americans in, and the Germans down.”[1085]

Bastiat’s Warning

Strengthening economic ties between Russia and Germany could lessen

their supposed need for the latter’s dependence on the U.S. military and
NATO alliance to protect them.
The reader may remember from history that the last two times Russia
and Germany fought, it was the worst thing that ever happened. Forty
million people were killed on the eastern front in World War II. That is a
conservative estimate.[1086]
No matter the cost in dollars, that pipeline of economic
interdependence between these two major powers might have been the
greatest invention in the history of peace, valuable beyond measure in
money. As the 19th-century French free market economist Frédéric Bastiat
said, “[W]hat would be the use of large standing armies and powerful
navies if trade were free . . . But that is the concern of the politicians. And
let us not confuse, by probing too deeply, their affairs with ours.”[1087]
But the American establishment saw it quite differently. As Trump’s
former campaign manager and anti-Russian partisan Paul Manafort put it,
Angela Merkel was “Putin’s patsy” for pursuing the Nord Stream 2 deal at
the expense of the Ukrainians and for giving Russia such leverage over
Germany.[1088] Inverting Bastiat, the War Party worried that too much
economic interdependence might give Russia “leverage” against Germany,
which could prevent them from doing things like supporting Ukraine.[1089]

‘Making Russia Richer’

In November 2019, Congress passed and Trump implemented sanctions

against the German and Swiss firms working on the project in a vain
attempt to stop it. The president also ridiculed the Germans in a speech at
the UN and elsewhere for supposedly allowing the Russians to obtain such
leverage over them through dependence on their resources. He also pointed
out the absurdity of Americans being forced to subsidize Germany’s
defense from a country they were paying billions for energy. But instead of
telling them they were on their own since they apparently did not feel
threatened, he demanded they halt progress on the pipeline.[1090]

Broken Treaties

Intermediate Nuclear Forces

Worst of all, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Intermediate Nuclear
Forces (INF) Treaty and the Open Skies Treaty and promised to let New
START expire had he been reelected in 2020.
The INF Treaty was Ronald Reagan’s great achievement from 1987
that banned all American and Soviet land-based nuclear or nuclear-capable
missiles of short and medium range—500 to 5,500 kilometers (300 to 3,400
miles).[1091] This meant the withdrawal of all American Pershing ballistic
missiles and Tomahawk cruise missiles, as well as Soviet SS-4, -5, -12, -20,
and -23 ballistic missiles of short, medium and intermediate ranges[1092]—
removing approximately 2,700 from Europe.[1093]
But again, the Mark 41 missile launchers Bush and Obama installed in
Romania and Poland, ostensibly meant to fire defensive missiles, also fit
medium-range Tomahawk cruise missiles, which can be tipped with H-
bombs.[1094] So the U.S. broke at least the spirit of the INF Treaty first.
[1095] The State Department tried to dispute it, saying the software was not
compatible,[1096] but MIT rocket scientist Theodore Postol refuted their
claims, explaining that the smart canisters for several different types of
missiles communicate with the launch system automatically when plugged
in,[1097] analogous to a USB drive in your computer. He added, “An
upgraded Tomahawk with a nuclear warhead, if based at U.S. Aegis sites in
Eastern Europe, could be used to implement a near-zero warning nuclear
strike on multiple Russian targets.” Postol said, “This capability is what the
Russian government fears. And rightly so, because the capability is far from
theoretical. It is a capability the Aegis system was designed to
accommodate.” He added that Washington would also “strenuously object if
Russia were to deploy a similar kind of system within the area covered by
the INF Treaty. It is therefore hard to see why Russia would not be
concerned about such a U.S. system and its substantial offensive breakout
capabilities.”[1098]
Back in 2004, U.S. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor recommended that
the U.S. set up an inspection regime with the Russians in Romania so they
could see with their own eyes that only limited numbers of anti-ballistic
missiles were installed there and not take them as a threat. His advice was
dismissed.[1099]
Nuclear weapons policy expert Joe Cirincione, widely regarded as
America’s most articulate defender of Vladimir Putin’s point of view on this
subject, explained:

I was on the advisory board in the State Department during

the Obama years. I heard the Russian complaints, and they
were brushed off by State Department officials as
“ridiculous,” the same way Reagan thought it was ridiculous
that [they believed] we would ever attack Russia. Obama
officials said, “No, NATO is a defensive alliance.” Well, it
doesn’t look defensive to Russia. And we don’t need these
 weapons. They’re serving no purpose. So what is the point of
keeping those interceptors in Poland and Romania? It looks
like you’re preparing for an attack on Russia.[1100]

The same was true with the ships in the Baltic Sea, which also
employed possible dual-use launchers, in those cases in fact armed with
Tomahawks. Russia then developed some new missiles designated SSC-8
by the U.S., apparently also the land-based version of their seaborne
medium-range cruise missiles.[1101] These were credibly alleged to also be
in violation of the treaty—but were only intended for deployment near
Russia’s frontier with China.[1102] In 2013, Putin said, “Nearly all of our
neighbors are developing these kinds of weapons systems,” and that
Gorbachev’s decision to enter the deal was “debatable at best.”[1103] That
should have only been a reason for U.S. objections and demands and
possibly new negotiations, or perhaps some other low-level response to
attempt to achieve a positive outcome. Unfortunately, that is why the U.S.
wanted out of the treaty too, so they could deploy medium-range missiles in
the Pacific against China.[1104] So instead of trying to find a way to
negotiate, this important Reagan-era treaty that had kept medium-range
nuclear missiles out of Europe for 30 years was now dead. Of course, it was
President W. Bush’s decision to quit the ABM Treaty and install alleged
defensive missile sites in Poland and Romania that had started it all.
Richard Burt was a former U.S. chief negotiator of the START Treaty.
He told the press, “The overwhelming view of people, not only in the
United States and Russia but around the world, will be that it was the
United States that killed this treaty.” He lamented that “[t]he handling of
this decision is just simply god-awful.”[1105]
For what it is worth, the Russians denied they were in violation of the
treaty and denounced Trump’s move. When Trump’s National Security
Advisor John Bolton—the same man who had advised President W. Bush to
tear up the ABM Treaty in 2002[1106] and led the effort to convince Trump
to leave this one[1107]—came to Moscow to announce U.S. withdrawal,
Putin said to him, “As far as I remember, the U.S. coat of arms features a
bald eagle that holds 13 arrows in one talon and an olive branch in another,
which is a symbol of a peace-loving policy.” But then he asked, “Looks like
your eagle has already eaten all the olives; are the arrows all that is left?”
“I didn’t bring any more olives,” Bolton answered.[1108]
As soon as the treaty was dead, Putin suggested a moratorium on the
deployment of short- and medium-range nuclear missiles in Europe.[1109]
He later added proposals for verification and promised not to deploy
missiles unless the West did first. The administration never even answered.
[1110]
After Joe Biden was sworn in, Putin asked him to get back in the
treaty. After all, Trump was supposed to be this crazy, wildcard nationalist,
whereas Biden and the NPT were both solid cornerstones of American
foreign policy consensus. But no. The military had wanted to kill Reagan’s
treaty for years because, as they said, “weapons the U.S. could develop and
deploy if freed from INF treaty constraints . . . would improve the ability of
U.S. nuclear weapons to destroy military targets on Russian
territory.”[1111]
 A report by the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and Strategic Command showed
that in 2013 the military was already looking at which kind of missiles to
develop if the treaty was killed. This was a year before the Obama
administration had first publicly accused the Russians of violating the
treaty.[1112]
Seizing on alleged Russian violations back in 2015, Obama’s Secretary
of Defense Ashton Carter said “disregard for treaty limitations was a ‘two-
way street’ opening the way for the U.S. to respond in kind.”[1113]
However, at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Pavel Podvig made a
strong case that while the Russians may have been in “technical violation”
of the treaty, it was an arguable point since the language on tests from
“fixed” launchers was vague enough to leave room for disagreement or
different understandings. But the Americans exploited the discrepancy to
scrap the treaty and escalate the nuclear arms race.[1114] As soon as the
INF was dead, the Pentagon began testing a new mid-range nuclear missile.
[1115] In the summer of 2023, the Marine Corps deployed a Tomahawk
battery—using Mark 41 missile launchers—at Camp Pendleton, California,
in preparation to move them to the Pacific.[1116]
As Brennan Deveraux from the U.S. Army War College wrote, this
terrible policy by Trump was another major factor in Putin’s decision-
making before invading Ukraine in 2022. America’s withdrawal from the
treaty made it much more likely that they would deploy similar supposedly
defensive missiles in Ukraine. He also recommended that the INF’s
reintroduction could have been the basis for new talks to avert war.[1117]

Open Skies
The Open Skies Treaty, President Dwight Eisenhower’s idea, was finally
signed by President Bush Sr. in 1992. It allowed for unarmed overflights of
the U.S. and Russia by each other’s air forces for surveillance so that each
side could reassure themselves the other was not mobilizing for war. Trump
tore it up.[1118] After Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Putin offered to revive
both the INF[1119] and Open Skies[1120] treaties, but the new president
refused.[1121]

Ukrainian Culture War

Divisions Deepen

During the “low-level” war period between 2015 and 2022, the Kiev
government kept up what seemed like either an absolutely vain attempt to
Ukrainize the ethnic Russian south and east with Galician culture or a fairly
effective attempt to kick them out of their own country for refusing to give
in. A 2016 law required local radio and TV stations to play at least 75
percent Ukrainian language songs and at least 50 percent Ukrainian
language television to start as they transition to 100 percent Ukrainian.
[1122]
When in 2019, the Polish and Israeli ambassadors complained about
the mayor of the Ukrainian city of Ivano-Frankivsk’s dedication of a
monument honoring the OUN-UPA’s Roman Shukhevych, a Nazi
collaborator who murdered Jews and ethnic Poles in the war,[1123] the
director of the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance denounced
their concerns as “Russian propaganda.” Average American internet users
are used to that, but the Times of Israel actually seemed a bit shocked at the
accusation.[1124]

Orthodox Split

What would a border war be without some religious strife thrown in? The
Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate (UOC), which is
“canonically linked” to the Russian Orthodox Church and is led by its
Patriarch Kirill, began to be marginalized by President Poroshenko’s
government in favor of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), led by
Patriarch Filaret.[1125]
While there are about 3.6 million Greek Catholics in Ukraine,
particularly in the west,[1126] and 40,000 Jews,[1127] the vast majority of
the population is Eastern Orthodox. Even though two-thirds of Orthodox
parishes in the country belonged to the UOC,[1128] on December 15, 2018,
with the support of the Trump administration,[1129] the Orthodox Church
of Ukraine split away from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.[1130] A month
later, the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople recognized it as an
independent entity, revoking a letter from 1686 that had granted authority
over the Ukrainian church to the patriarch of Moscow.[1131]
Then-President Petro Poroshenko had enormous influence over the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church and was a strong advocate of the 2018 split.
[1132] He called the church a “national security threat,”[1133] and
denounced the UOC as “separated from the [Russian] state only on paper”
and for supporting Russia’s “revanchist policies.”[1134] He signed a law
forcing the church to change its name to the Russian Orthodox Church
(ROC) after the split.[1135]
The UOC claimed persecution at the hands of the Ukrainian state, with
dozens of its leaders fleeing to Russia,[1136] while the OCU claimed
violence on the part of the Russian-backed rebels in the Donbas and
Crimea.[1137]
In 2019, Patriarch Filaret himself quit the OCU, rebuking the decree
that legitimized the new church and announced he was restoring the old
OUC Kyiv Patriarchate (KP).[1138]
In December 2022, Zelensky essentially outlawed the Ukrainian
Orthodox Church. According to the Wall Street Journal, the new law is
“making it impossible for religious organizations affiliated with centers of
influence in the Russian Federation to operate in Ukraine.” Further, they
reported, “The government has also decided to examine the UOC’s
canonical connection to Moscow and the grounds for its control of the
Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra [monastery in Kiev], and to apply sanctions to UOC
priests linked to Russian intelligence services.”[1139]

Afghan Bounties Hoax

Savage Takedown

In the summer of 2020, New York Times reporter Charlie Savage wrote a
trash article reporting an obviously fake rumor that the Russians were
paying the Taliban bounties to kill U.S. troops in Afghanistan. The story
caused a huge outcry in Washington and on cable TV news. President
Trump had refused to do anything about it![1140]
The truth is there was no truth to this at all. The Russians paid the
Taliban for the same reason the U.S. spent the last years of the war flying as
their “air force,” as the Washington Post admitted.[1141] They had won the
war, and were a far better bet for fighting ISIS terrorists[1142] than the
phony Afghan government the U.S. had created in Kabul, whose
intelligence agencies had obviously made up the bounty lie—or beat it out
of some poor guy[1143]—in a desperate attempt to get America to stay and
support them in power.
Ultimately, the general in charge of the war,[1144] the chief of
CENTCOM,[1145] the secretary of defense,[1146] chairman of the joint
chiefs of staff,[1147] the Pentagon,[1148] the DIA,[1149] the National
Security Agency[1150] and even other analysts at the CIA[1151] debunked
the claims, as Savage himself was forced to admit.[1152] In the end, all he
had were claims from unknown Afghan interrogators who had used
unknown methods to obtain this “intelligence” from unknown captives.
[1153] Savage’s co-author told MSNBC that “the funds were being sent
from Russia regardless of whether the Taliban followed through with killing
soldiers or not. There was no report back to the GU about casualties. The
money continued to flow.”[1154] So then even if this money existed at all,
it still had nothing to do with bounties for murdering U.S. troops.
“I think you have overlearned the lessons of the pre-Iraq War reporting
failures—almost 20 years ago now—and see that dynamic as the norm
rather than the aberration that it was,” Savage insisted.[1155]
 But in a series of articles, the Times itself walked back the story nearly
to the point of a complete retraction.[1156] In April 2021, President Joe
Biden’s White House admitted the story was fake. Even the CIA had given
the story only “low to moderate” confidence,[1157] leading the extremely
partisan Daily Beast to acknowledge that those who called the story a
hoax[1158] “might have been right” after all.[1159]

Withdrawal Postponed

But the bounties hoax was enough to preemptively cancel any attempt
Trump might have made to pull out the troops that summer, a possibility he
had begun to float in the spring.[1160] All other things being equal, the best
choice would have been to leave in the winter when fighting was
necessarily at a low point, but leaving in the summer nine months ahead of
schedule, and during a long-term ceasefire, would have almost certainly
avoided the disaster that took place when Biden postponed the withdrawal
to September 2021, trying to evacuate just as the Taliban was marching into
the capital city.[1161] Though the story already had made withdrawal a
political loser, to make sure, former Vice President Cheney’s daughter and
former State Department official[1162] Republican Rep. Liz Cheney
teamed up with Democrat Jason Crow to pass an amendment to the
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) to prevent any money from
being appropriated for withdrawal from the war.[1163] It was completely
unconstitutional grandstanding—as though the president can start any war
he wants but lacks the power to remove troops from the battlefield—but it
turned withdrawal into a major controversy,[1164] helping to make an
earlier end to the war impossible.[1165]
Regardless, it was another major smear against Russia as the
determined, dastardly and implacable enemy of the United States, and all
because of how willing Charlie Savage is to pass on obvious lies by the
operations side of the CIA that their own analysts did not even believe.

Press Your Luck

The Slipper Revolution

The Trump administration—or at least the U.S. national security

establishment during his presidency—tried to overthrow the government of
Belarus again in the “Slipper Revolution” of 2020, the gimmick being that
President Alexander Lukashenko was a cockroach who needed to be
swatted with a slipper.[1166] Blogger and opposition activist Siarhei
Tsikhanouski was arrested after announcing his intention to run for
president, though his wife Svetlana was allowed to run in his place. On the
Georgia 2003 model, U.S.-backed groups,[1167] after losing the August
election,[1168] claimed the vote was rigged,[1169] refused to
concede[1170] and staged massive and ultimately violent protests for two
months.[1171] Hundreds of thousands of protesters turned out, but
thousands were arrested and the movement ran out of energy.[1172]
Lukashenko had arrested other prospective candidates as well, so at
least in that very real sense the election was unfair. As with several of the
previous color-coded revolutions, the U.S.-backed side had sincere
complaints. The problem was that the U.S. and its allies were supporting
them, intervening in a sovereign nation’s affairs, jeopardizing Americans’
security and making their chosen faction even less legitimate than the one
they were trying to overthrow, if they were not already. The U.S.
government’s Radio Free Europe declared Tsikhanouski the victor, with exit
polls giving her 80 percent of the vote and Lukashenko less than 6 percent.
[1173] Secretary of State Mike Pompeo denounced the election and the
incumbent,[1174] and declared U.S. support for the opposition.[1175] After
the putsch failed, Tsikhanouski fled to Lithuania.[1176] Her husband was
later sentenced to 18 years in prison on charges of “organizing mass
unrest.”[1177]
A few months later, National Endowment for Democracy head Carl
Gershman gave a speech demanding that the Western nations denounce
Lukashenko as illegitimate, add massive sanctions on Belarusian officials at
all levels and kick them out of the SWIFT international payments network.
He also insisted that the West continue and increase support for the
opposition.[1178]
In 2021, the Russian prankster comedians Vladimir Kuznetsov and
Alexey Stolyarov, who call themselves Vovan and Lexus, tricked Gershman
into admitting that the U.S. backed opposition groups in Belarus and
Russia. They also baited Nina Ognianova, leader of the NED’s efforts in
Belarus, into taking credit for the protests the year before. The London
Times reported that even though they had been banned by the Russian
government, Gershman told them, “We support many, many groups and we
have a very, very active program throughout the country, and many of the
groups obviously have their partners in exile.” A senior NED official named
Barbara Haig also said, “We have a very ample program in Russia [which]
goes even down to the grassroots in provinces outside of Moscow. It is very
deep and it is very broad.” Probably not very helpfully, Gershman also said
he was “in touch with” Alexei Navalny’s chief aide, Leonid Volkov.
Ognianova boasted that the NED had helped to “inspire” protests in Belarus
in 2020. “We believe that this long-term trust building with partners in
Belarus has brought [about] the events in Belarus last summer. We don’t
believe that this movement came out of nowhere. We have our modest but
significant contribution to that.”[1179]
In this case, the attempted revolution not only failed, but backfired.
Though Belarus had signed the Union State treaty with Russia in 1999,
[1180] Lukashenko had delayed implementing most of it. But after his
attempts to make nice with the United States, such as formally
reestablishing diplomatic relations and buying nearly 1.5 million barrels of
American oil,[1181] only led to an attempted putsch anyway, he then
doubled down on his country’s relationship with Russia, signing new
agreements on the implementation of the further integration of the two
nations’ economies and security forces.[1182]
Geopolitical and military analyst Lyle Goldstein, then at the U.S.
Naval War College, said he thought this U.S. intervention in 2020 is what
finally forced a change in Russia’s Eastern European strategy toward
outright intervention in Ukraine. “Unquestionably, Belarus casts some
major shadows over all of this. I think for Putin and the Russian elite that
was a . . . kind of existential moment where they considered whether Russia
might be toppled by external forces.” He said “that really unnerved them
and made them think that that was time to draw these red lines, which I
think they would say they had already drawn, but to color them in in a
deeper shade of red.” Goldstein added that the attempted revolution had
made the Russian foreign policy establishment that much more aggressive.
“The idea [is] that if you don’t try to save your regime and your ideology
and your national ethos, then you’ll just be swept up in one of these colored
revolutions and you’re going down. So that explains part of it.”[1183]
In New York, Tsikhanouski told the Council on Foreign Relations, “We
don’t have a lot of space inside the country. That’s why we are so [grateful
for a large] amount of help from outside.” Asked by Thomas Graham, “And
have you found support from many of these other democratic activists in
Central, [and] Eastern Europe as well, for your movement?”
Tsikhanouskaya answered, that yes, though there were differences, their
movement was of a kind with the other color-coded revolutions, also
admitting, “We met with some ambassadors from those countries.”[1184]
The NED’s website indicates they spent over $2.7 million on more
than 40 active projects in Belarus just in 2021.[1185] NED’s senior Europe
Program officer, Nina Ognianova, boasted on a private call which was later
leaked that the organization had trained the groups leading the protests.
Gershman added that since they were organizing online and out of the
country, there was nothing Lukashenko could do to stop them.[1186]
One must keep in mind that democracy in other countries simply
means loyalty to the U.S. government’s goals. As journalist Alan MacLeod
noted, the CFR’s English counterpart, the Royal Institute for International
Affairs, showed in their opinion research—and against interest, since they
have long supported regime change in Belarus[1187]—that in 2021 only 10
percent of Belarusians believed Tsikhanouskaya would make a good
president.[1188] Perhaps this is because, as MacLeod noted,
Tsikhanouskaya has asked for the West to do more to overthrow
Lukashenko, saying “I think it’s high time for democratic countries to unite
and show their teeth.” Gershman, the chief of the NED for decades, said the
U.S. continues to work “very, very closely” with her.[1189] Avowed treason
is not typically a great campaign point. But Gershman is the expert, after
all.
Shortly after, the London Sunday Times claimed the U.S. was training
a Belarusian terrorist group called Bypol in Poland, including hundreds of
fighters and plotters, for the next time they try to overthrow the government
in Minsk. One of the leaders of the plot “believes the protests were
unsuccessful in 2020 because they were no match for the well-trained and
well-armed security forces. Next time things will be different.” The Times
explained that their members had already successfully sabotaged railways
transporting troops to the front and blown up a Russian plane at an airport
with drones. Echoing the failed planners from the Cuban Bay of Pigs
disaster of 1961, a young Belarusian fighter told the paper, “Whether we are
ready or not, there will be a moment when the Russian federation leaves.
Then we’ll be ready to enter. I am sure that even people without any
training will stand up and fight.”[1190]
Harvard’s Stephen M. Walt said in May 2022: “The more the United
States is willing to violate the principles it claims are so important, the more
that other states are going to try to take actions to make it harder for the
United States to do that.” He added, “Whether or not the United States ever
ultimately intends to [come after Russia], they are going to have to hedge,
because it’s a realist world where every country is ultimately responsible for
trying to safeguard its own security.”[1191]

OceanofPDF.com
Joe Biden

“So, Ukraine is a country in Europe. It exists next to

another country called Russia. Russia is a bigger
country. Russia is a powerful country. Russia decided
to invade a smaller country called Ukraine. So,
basically, that’s wrong, and goes against everything
we stand for.”
—Kamala Harris

“Everybody is afraid to die, but we try to make them

look at it from a different perspective.”
—Ukrainian military recruiter

“Russia will suffer a strategic defeat no matter what

short-term tactical gains it may make in Ukraine.”
—Antony Blinken

“I don’t know about decades but at least years, for

sure.”
—General Mark Milley

“The Russians are dying. It’s the best money we’ve

ever spent.”
—Lindsey Graham

“There are no more ‘innocent,’ ‘neutral’ Russians

anymore.”
—Michael McFaul

“He went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close

to his borders.”
—Jens Stoltenberg

“Patriot missile for air defense batteries, made in

Arizona. Artillery shells manufactured in 12 states
across the country, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas. And
so much more. You know, just as in World War II,
today patriotic American workers are building the
arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of
freedom.”
—Joe Biden
OceanofPDF.com
 War Horse

New START

Joe Biden came to power seemingly determined to increase tensions with

Moscow. Within his first two months in office, the new president vastly
increased provocative naval missions in the Black Sea,[1] sent B-1 bombers
to Norway,[2] had F-15s practice cruise missile launches over the Baltic
Sea,[3] leveled blatant personal insults against Putin[4] and added new
sanctions.[5]
In 2021, he kept U.S. warships deployed in the Black Sea for 182 days,
[6] an increase of 125 percent over Trump’s last year in office,[7] and
expanded weapons transfers to Ukraine.[8] On the other hand, Biden did
save New START, the last standing treaty limiting overall and deployed
nuclear weapons,[9] extending it until 2026.[10] And he also finally gave
up and lifted the sanctions on firms building the Nord Stream 2 pipeline,
[11] at least until the worse war began.[12]

Staying Relevant

Early in his presidency, Biden vowed to reinforce America’s “sacred”

commitment to NATO in Europe to roll back Russia.[13] It has to be
something. After helping hand over Kosovo to a bunch of terrorists and
gangsters,[14] losing a 20-year war in Afghanistan to the Taliban[15] and
turning Libya into a warring den of militias,[16] slavers[17] and bin
Ladenite terrorists,[18] the bureaucrats at headquarters were getting
nervous. Reminiscent of the conversation back in 1993 about the alliance’s
desperate need for a mission after the first Cold War, a New York Times
headline from 2020 says it all. “NATO Needs to Adapt Quickly to Stay
Relevant for 2030, Report Urges.”[19] If the NATO alliance is not relevant,
then why do we have it at all? How can its mission be “sacred” when they
had to hold an emergency study group to decide what it even is? The
answer they came up with? China. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s
new reason for being is China. “Out of area or out of business,” as they say.
Only now they got lucky and a new lease on life in Eastern Europe as well.
The Times updated the narrative in March 2022, quoting Obama’s
former Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes: “It feels like we’re
definitively in a new era. The post-9/11 war on terror period of American
hubris, and decline, is now behind us.” Rhodes added, “We’ve been trying
to get to a new era for a long time. And now I think Putin’s invasion has
necessitated an American return to the moral high ground.”[20] Times
columnist and neoconservative hawk Bret Stephens[21] demanded
Americans forget all their government’s sins of foreign intervention of the
recent past, at least from Vietnam up through the final withdrawal from
Afghanistan in the summer of 2021, and to think instead of Yorktown and
the Berlin Airlift as they poured a hundred billion dollars in weapons into a
hot war with a nuclear superpower.[22]
David Ignatius wrote that at 2022’s Munich Security Conference,
“[d]espite the grim news from Ukraine, there was an almost-celebratory
tone among many of the Western leaders gathered. Many speakers boasted
that the NATO alliance was back, after a soggy period described . . . as
‘Westlessness.’”[23] This is how the Bush and Obama governments had
talked about the Afghanistan war as well. It was a “team-building exercise”
for the Atlantic alliance.[24] In other words, these murderous policies exist
in part because all the vested interests want to stay paid without having to
get a real job. It is understandable but unacceptable.

2021

Reckless Joe

One could probably write an entire book focusing just on the Biden and
Zelensky administrations’ roles in fomenting the 2022– Russian-Ukrainian
war in the former’s first year in office. Washington’s absolute failure to
correctly “calibrate”—their term—military support for Ukraine in 2021 is a
major part of the story. Even the RAND Corporation, in its “Extending
Russia” study, gave stark warnings about the potential risks if their
suggestions were acted upon.[25] One might guess Biden’s staff had only
read a version of the memo with all the warnings redacted. Or perhaps they
were not so opposed to having a war.

Knocking

In the fall of 2020, President Zelensky issued Ukraine’s new National

Security Strategy, which abandoned language indicating a willingness to
negotiate with Russia and adopted a much harsher stance. The document
condemned Russian “aggression” eight times and laid out a strategy to
convince NATO to offer them a Membership Action Plan.[26]
In February, Zelensky declared that he would build up Ukraine’s navy
in the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov[27]—waters claimed by Russia since
2014, a dispute which had already come to a head during the Kerch Strait
incident of 2018.[28]
In March, NATO launched its large-scale “Defender Europe” exercises,
[29] which would last through June, including two dozen nations and joint
land, sea and air force drills.[30] Zelensky announced his government’s
official “Crimean Platform” soon after, which set out a “strategy of de-
occupation and reintegration of the temporarily occupied territory of the
Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol.”[31] Putin
explicitly cited this in his declaration of war a year later.
The U.S. and UK both also increased surveillance flights over the
Black Sea after America’s European Command elevated its watch condition
from “possible crisis” to “potential imminent crisis”—its highest alert level
—over Russian troop movements near the Ukrainian border.[32]
On April 15, Ukraine’s ambassador to Germany threatened to make
nuclear weapons if the nation was denied entry into NATO.[33]
But Biden’s National Security Council held up two arms shipments to
Ukraine, “arguing the move could be perceived as escalatory and only
exacerbate tensions with Russia,” according to Foreign Policy magazine. In
both cases they ultimately went ahead anyway.[34] Still, this seemed to
reveal some sort of debate inside the administration at the time about how
hard to push their luck.
Medvedchuk

Viktor Medvedchuk is an influential Ukrainian businessman, friend of

Vladimir Putin and father of the Russian president’s goddaughter, Daria. In
October 2020, Medvedchuk’s opposition political alliance won elections in
six regions. In response, Zelensky banned three TV channels owned by
Medvedchuk’s associate Taras Kozak,[35] ZIK, NewsOne and 112 Ukraine.
[36] In May 2021, his party was outlawed, and he was charged with treason
and confined to house arrest. The investigation against him had been
opened in 2019 when he had first proposed enhanced autonomy for the
Donbas in an attempt to end the war.[37]
Journalist Simon Shuster explained that as soon as Biden was sworn in
and Zelensky started cracking down on opposition media, “Ukraine
announced that it had seized the assets of Medvedchuk’s family. Among the
most important, it said, was a pipeline that brings Russian oil to Europe,
enriching Medvedchuk . . . and helping to bankroll Medvedchuk’s political
party.” After Zelensky failed to secure Western Covid vaccines and rejected
a deal brokered by Medvedchuk to procure supplies from Russia, the
president’s approval ratings plummeted and those of Medvedchuk’s alliance
started to grow. So Zelensky launched a “deoligarchization” crackdown,
which in practice meant acting like Putin and freezing out the disloyal
billionaires, but letting Western business take control instead.[38] The
Biden administration welcomed Zelensky’s purge, calling it a legitimate
move to “counter Russian malign influence.”[39]
The Kremlin saw Medvedchuk’s arrest as a major provocation.[40] In
what seemed to be a direct reaction, Putin deployed thousands of
paratroopers to the border for exercises[41] and began increasing military
forces in Crimea and adjacent to the Donbas, the first in what became the
major buildup for the invasion months later. U.S. officials threatened more
sanctions and more weapons for Ukraine in response.[42]

An Anti-Russia

Also in May, the U.S. and NATO held an extensive war exercise[43] as part
of “Defender Europe,” including live-fire rocket artillery drills in Russian
neighbor Estonia.[44] And Putin complained in a statement to the UN
Security Council that the U.S. was turning Ukraine into “an anti-Russia, a
territory from which . . . we will never stop receiving news that requires
special attention in regard to protecting the national security of the Russian
Federation.” He noted the purging of Ukrainian media and selective
accusations of pro-Russian sentiment among the Ukrainian elite, saying this
was meant to prevent peace in the east and normal relations with Russia.
[45]

Biden Meets Putin

On June 14, NATO “reconfirmed” its commitment to Ukraine in the

Bucharest Declaration.[46] But Biden also said the Minsk II deal should be
implemented to end fighting in the Donbas and poured cold water on NATO
membership for Ukraine due to corruption and the opinions of other allies.
[47] Two days later, Biden met Putin in Geneva. He told the media that
Putin “is concerned about being, quote, ‘encircled.’ He still is concerned
that we, in fact, are looking to take him down.”[48] It is enough to show
that Biden knew better than to proceed with his belligerent policy before
continuing on regardless.
Three days later, the Russians again warned that NATO membership
for Ukraine was a “red line” for Russia[49] after the alliance again affirmed
eventual membership for Ukraine and its sovereignty over Crimea.[50]
Britain then agreed to increase Ukraine’s naval capability, including with
new weapons, training, new bases and two minesweeping ships.[51]

Sea Breeze

In July, 39 countries participated in the massive Sea Breeze exercises in the

Black Sea, which included 30 warships and 40 aircraft from NATO states,
as well as Ukraine,[52] and aimed to boost interoperability between the
participants.[53] A British destroyer again breached Russia’s claimed
territorial waters, prompting angry Russian warning shots.[54]

Putin’s Essay

Putin also published an essay on the history of Russian-Ukrainian relations

which made it clear that he considered Ukraine to still be within Russia’s
sphere of influence, lamenting that the two nations were once part of the
same civilization, the Ancient Rus, whose center had been in Kiev. Putin’s
real point was to complain that Lenin and Stalin had put millions of ethnic
Russians inside southern and eastern Ukraine 100 years ago, and Crimea 30
years later, when they were all answerable to Moscow, but after 1991 were
left behind as a resented minority in a country that did not respect them. “It
is no longer important what exactly the idea of the Bolshevik leaders who
were chopping the country into pieces was. We can disagree about minor
details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal
clear: Russia was robbed, indeed,” he wrote.[55] Commenting on Putin’s
essay, historian Richard Sakwa said that “his main point that the Soviet
Union gave form to the modern Ukrainian state was correct, with land
added from Russia and Ukraine’s western neighbours.” He added, however,
that Putin had “suggested that Ukraine was not a real nation and that
Ukrainians were not a real people, which was quite a different and plainly
wrong proposition.”[56]
Putin went on to detail the consequences of Ukraine’s war against the
rebels in Donetsk and Luhansk for the preceding seven years and said he
was “more and more convinced . . . Kiev simply does not need Donbas.” He
noted that the locals would not accept the rule of the post-Maidan
government on its current terms, and claimed the West would never allow
the Minsk deals to be implemented, because to do so would “contradict the
entire logic of [Kiev’s] anti-Russia project. And it can only be sustained by
the constant cultivation of the image of an internal and external enemy. And
I would add—under the protection and control of the Western powers.” He
cited the rise of Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups, the presence of foreign
advisers embedded in their military establishment and moves to integrate
their command and control systems with NATO.[57]
The War Party of course accentuates the most superficial interpretation
of Putin’s essay: He is just jealous, thinks less of Ukrainians and wants that
land for his own glory and that of the new Russian empire.[58] But as
always, this is just a coping mechanism for those on the Western side who
bear responsibility for provoking this war. They dismiss and omit all of
Putin’s substantive complaints about U.S. and NATO policy—and for that
matter, the simple timeline of events. He did not move in Crimea until the
new coup regime threatened Russia’s important naval base. And he did not
invade and occupy the east for seven years as Washington and Kiev refused
to implement the peace agreement they signed, made outlaws out of
Ukraine’s last prominent Russia supporters, intensified the culture war,
escalated the fighting and announced broad new measures toward Ukraine’s
further integration into the NATO military alliance. After the 2014 coup,
Obama had remained somewhat cautious. Though Trump escalated matters,
there was goodwill there and it made sense for Putin to wait and see if he
would be reelected and a diplomatic breakthrough made possible. But when
Joe Biden came to power, determined to play the tough hero forcing the
bully to back down, the bully instead decided to come out swinging.
Instead of seeing Putin’s warnings as cause to find compromise, the
Biden administration only doubled down. Anything else would be
“appeasement,” like when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain
failed to prevent World War II.[59] So they continued down the path of
confrontation. In reaction to Putin’s essay, Biden authorized another $60
million in weapons for Ukraine on August 27.[60]

Had My Fingers Crossed

It turns out, as Right Sector neo-Nazi Dimitry Yarosh said in 2019, that
Poroshenko signed the Minsk deals just to “play for time” and never meant
to implement them.[61]
Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel later told Der Spiegel that
she also considered Minsk to have been a ruse all along to buy time and
prevent Ukraine from being overrun.[62] She repeated this to Die Zeit,
saying, “[T]he 2014 Minsk agreement was an attempt to give Ukraine time.
She also used this time to get stronger. . . . The Ukraine of 2014–15 is not
the Ukraine of today.” Merkel cited the battle for Debaltseve in February
2015, saying that “Putin could easily have overrun them at the time. And I
very much doubt that the NATO countries could have done as much then as
they do now to help Ukraine.”[63]
Former French President François Hollande confirmed it, saying,
“Merkel is right on this point. The Minsk agreements stopped the Russian
offensive for a while. What was very important was to know how the West
would use this respite to prevent any further Russian attempts.” He said in
the meantime the West had built up Ukraine’s army, and that due to the
relative peace, Europe had united to support the effort. “Thus, the time that
Putin thought was an asset for him turned out to be, in fact, an opportunity
for the Ukrainians.”[64] Hollande confirmed this in a prank call with a
Russian YouTube host who was posing as Poroshenko, telling him,
“Everyone thought it was Putin who was playing for time. No, we were
playing for time to strengthen Ukraine, to improve its military capabilities.”
He added, “[T]hat’s why we should defend the Minsk agreements. . . . They
have to be defended because during those seven years, Ukraine got the
resources to strengthen itself.”[65]
The real Poroshenko also indicated the deals were never more than a
delaying tactic, saying, “I think this was a great diplomatic achievement.
Having the Minsk agreement, we kept Russia away . . . from a full-sized
war.”[66] He later said the Minsk deals, “gave Ukraine eight years for
building up the army, for building up [the] economy, for building up [a]
global pro-Ukrainian, anti-Putin coalition.”[67]
Former Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin also said, “Ukraine’s sole
objective in signing Minsk-2 was to rebuild the Ukrainian army and
strengthen the international coalition against Russia. Read literally, the
Minsk Accords are impossible to implement.” Andrei Yermak, President
Zelensky’s chief of staff, said the same.[68] In January 2022, the secretary
of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, said
the Minsk agreement meant “the country’s destruction. When they were
signed under the Russian gun barrel . . . it was already clear for all rational
people that it’s impossible to implement those documents.”[69]
Zelensky also later said the deals were dead upon his arrival in office.
When asked if he was under foreign pressure to give in on Crimea or “other
territorial concessions,” he said that was why he refused to implement the
agreements. He argued the only value in the deals was the official forum
they set up for discussion, which was used to negotiate a prisoner exchange.
“But as far as Minsk as a whole is concerned, I told Emmanuel Macron and
Angela Merkel: We can’t do it like that.”[70]
 It seems reasonable to conclude this was Obama and Trump’s policy as
well. It would certainly explain why Obama never attempted to pressure
Kiev to implement the deal.[71] And again, the Trump administration
accepted the one-sided revision of the agreement which said Kiev had to
control the eastern border before any elections could be held, with Amb.
Taylor deliberately intervening to prevent Zelensky from implementing the
Steinmeier Formula and carrying out the deal as written.[72] However, it is
doubtful the Germans and French were truly in on a ruse back then. They
were worried about the consequences of the war and trying their best to stop
it, hence their various sub-proposals for implementing Minsk II during the
eight-year conflict.
But they were not in control. It was pressure from the Americans and
the Ukrainian radical right in the Rada that led to the corruption of the
Minsk deals in 2015, when they changed the order of implementation to
require the Russians to give up control of the border before Kiev would
negotiate or allow elections, closing that important off-ramp from a much
worse war back when the getting was still good.[73]

The Reznikov Plan

In August 2021, the Rada passed legislation authored by lawmaker Oleksiy

Reznikov that codified Ukraine’s doctrine for the reoccupation and
reconstruction of the Donbas.[74] As Zelensky’s old friend Sergei Sivokho
complained, it treated eastern populations as “conquered people.”[75] The
bill made Ukrainian the only language allowed in official documents or
proceedings, permanently barred all state enemies from government
employment and ruled out any special status for the Donbas or Crimea. It
also banned use of the Russian ruble, “restructured” pension payments to
the regions’ elderly and suspended infrastructure spending through 2030.
[76] This was the opposite of compromise, and was either meant as a
deliberate provocation or they just could not help but openly declare their
intent to ruthlessly oppress the people of the east if they regained control of
the land, which served as a major new obstacle to peace nonetheless.
Three months later, Zelensky named Reznikov defense minister in
preparation for the coming war.[77]

State and Defense Double Down

On August 20, at a press conference with outgoing German Chancellor

Merkel, Putin complained that they had agreed about the Minsk deals, and
further, they had been ratified by the UNSC, making them international law.
Yet, he noted often the “Ukrainian side says one thing, but inside the
country it says something very different. In fact . . . top public officials are
saying . . . they are not going to comply with the Minsk agreements.”[78]
On August 24, Zelensky held a large military parade in Kiev to mark
the 30th anniversary of Ukraine’s declaration of independence from the
USSR, which included representatives from the U.S., British and Polish
militaries. After describing advances in Ukraine’s recent arms buildup in his
speech, he announced that “[s]uch a country becomes a NATO partner with
enhanced opportunities.”[79]
Days later, the Pentagon debuted the new U.S.-Ukraine Strategic
Defense Framework “to advance the military capabilities and readiness of
Ukraine to preserve the country’s territorial integrity, progress toward
NATO interoperability, and promote regional security.” The plan described
a new “closer partnership of defense intelligence communities in support of
military planning and defensive operations.”[80]
Zelensky visited Washington soon after and asked to begin
negotiations toward Ukraine’s admission to NATO.[81] The State
Department issued a “Joint Statement on U.S.-Ukrainian Charter on
Strategic Partnership,” announcing its “elevated status,” boasting that the
U.S. had already given Ukraine $2.5 billion in military aid[82] and
promising $60 million more.[83]
They absurdly claimed that “Ukraine’s success is central to the global
struggle between democracy and autocracy.” But that is the same thing
Biden said about Iraq War II: “I am certain the President’s right about how
important it is to succeed. This is a seminal event in the Middle East. . . .
Walking away from this is not an option, in terms of our security.”[84]
The administration also again officially rejected Russian claims to
Crimea and repeated their announcement of the new, finalized Strategic
Defense Framework, which emphasized that “the United States supports
Ukraine’s right to decide its own future foreign policy course free from
outside interference, including with respect to Ukraine’s aspirations to join
NATO.” They added, “We intend to continue our robust training and
exercise program in keeping with Ukraine’s status as a NATO Enhanced
Opportunities Partner.”[85]
At the same time, Ukraine hosted the Rapid Trident exercise with a
focus on building interoperability with NATO.[86] “In unity and with Rapid
Trident, we have opened a new page of history . . . for peace, happiness and
prosperity,” said Ukrainian Maj. Gen. Ihor Palagnyuk, chief of the training
of the Land Forces Command. U.S. Army Col. Michael Hanson, the drill’s
co-director, agreed: “Our main job at Rapid Trident is to provide the
methods and the tools to help enable . . . both partnerships and
interoperability amongst partner nations.”[87]

The Fall of Kabul

It is not known what the Kremlin made of Biden’s completely botched

withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. Just as the author predicted
beginning in 2008,[88] and in Fool’s Errand in 2017,[89] once U.S. forces
withdrew, the Taliban walked right into the capital city of Kabul, facing
virtually no resistance from the phony government and military the U.S.
had built there at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives[90] and trillions
of dollars[91] over the previous generation. Trump had negotiated a deal to
withdraw by the first of May.[92] Who knows if Trump would have stuck
with it if reelected, but Biden, by banking on the strength of the Afghan
National Army and delaying the withdrawal for four months, set himself
up[93] for a deadly and humiliating catastrophe of 13 servicemen and 170
local Afghans slaughtered[94] by ISIS-K in a deadly suicide attack at the
gates of the Kabul airport,[95] and then 10 more in a drone raid against an
innocent family in a mistaken attempt to stop another.[96]
It is plausible that Putin had factored the weakness Biden demonstrated
into his assessment of whether it was a good time to go ahead with the
invasion of Ukraine.[97]
Turkish Drones Join the Fight

In September, Russia and Belarus held their Zapad 21 exercises, practicing

how to repel a NATO intervention in Belarus.[98]
Meanwhile, the war continued on in the Donbas with approximately
93,000 ceasefire violations on both sides and 16 civilian deaths in 2021,
according to the OSCE.[99] In early 2022, the UN reported that 81 percent
of the 381 civilian casualties caused by the fighting from 2018 to 2021
occurred in separatist-held areas.[100]
At the end of October, the Ukrainian military deployed Turkish
Bayraktar TB2 drones against the Donbas rebels[101] in violation of Minsk
II. As the Washington Post said, “For Russia, it was another signal that
Ukraine is boosting its arsenal to potentially change the military balance in
the region—and why Moscow is demanding NATO end all defense
cooperation with Ukraine and other former Soviet republics such as
Georgia.”[102]
These were the same drones that were described as crucial to
Azerbaijan’s victory over Armenia in the Nagorno-Karabakh war of 2020.
[103] A representative of the self-styled Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR),
Rodion Miroshnik, accused the Ukrainian government of violating the
Minsk deals. The Germans also condemned the strikes, saying they were
“very concerned” about them.[104] Richard Sakwa later said that with the
new drone strikes and a large new buildup of Ukrainian troops, “there was
genuine alarm in Moscow that [Kiev] could do what Croatia did in
Operation Storm, in attacking the Serbian enclaves way back in the mid-
1990s.”[105]
 Also in October, NATO expelled eight Russian diplomats from its
Brussels headquarters based on the accusation they were spies. Russia
suspended its mission to the alliance in response.[106]
The Post revealed Russia’s buildup on Ukraine’s borders and threat of
invasion at the end of the month.[107] This began a major public relations
campaign by the administration to loudly proclaim Putin’s intentions and
warn him not to try it.

Rules of the Road

On November 2, CIA Director William Burns went to Moscow to warn

against an invasion.[108] Newsweek’s William Arkin later wrote that since
Burns could not talk Putin out of war, they at least agreed upon some rules
almost four months in advance. “In some ironic ways . . . the meeting was
highly successful,” an intelligence official told Arkin, adding, “the two
countries were able to accept tried and true rules of the road.” They
established that the U.S. would not directly fight or attempt to overthrow
Putin and the Russians would keep hostilities confined to Ukraine.[109]
Also in November, after the administration had already announced
Russia’s threatening military buildup, they still went ahead and signed the
“U.S.-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership” they had announced back
in September. It declared that based on the Bucharest Declaration of April
2008, Washington would support “Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against
threats” and “counter armed aggression,” while reaffirming Kiev’s NATO
aspirations. But they also made it clear they would pick the fight, not join it,
threatening only sanctions until Ukraine’s borders were restored. That
included Crimea, as specified later in the text, which again pledged
America’s “unwavering commitment to Ukraine’s sovereignty,
independence, and territorial integrity within its internationally recognized
borders.” They added, “The United States remains committed to assisting
Ukraine with ongoing defense and security reforms,” and vowed to
continue to promote interoperability.[110] Biden promised $200 million in
weapons.[111] There would be no attempt at accommodation. That would
be “appeasement.” America and NATO would instead dig in their heels,
forget anything they might have done to provoke the crisis, and simply
continue to “deter,” after that policy had seemingly already failed.
Apparently the Kremlin looked at the situation in much the same way.
Henri Guaino, a former Sarkozy adviser, wrote that it was this charter
which finally “convinced Russia that it must attack or be attacked. It is the
ineluctable process of 1914 in all its terrifying purity.”[112]
Later that month, U.S. bombers carried out exercises 12 and a half
miles off Russia’s coast, which the latter characterized as rehearsal for a
nuclear strike,[113] and added another warship to the Black Sea[114] just
days after Putin warned that he considered the U.S. military presence a
“serious challenge.”[115]
Samuel Charap of the RAND Corporation urged Biden to seek a
diplomatic solution, beginning with pressure on Kiev to implement Minsk
II, which “Ukraine has shown little desire to do since the deal was brokered
six years ago.” Though he said Russia’s threats were morally wrong,
encouraging Kiev to make the first move could prevent a much worse war
and loss of territory. “If Ukraine took visible steps on Minsk that it has thus
far refused to take, that would put the onus on Moscow to deescalate and
return to the negotiating table.” Charap argued that Biden’s policy of
warning Moscow and arming Kiev would likely not be enough to stop the
war but that real compromise might.[116] Just the fact this was coming
from a top analyst at the famous Pentagon-sponsored think tank indicates it
was certainly a debatable question, not the kind of marginal position safe
for the administration to ignore. They did anyway.
In public meetings on November 18 and 30, Putin restated his “red
lines” and warned that the U.S. and its allies were not taking them seriously.
He invoked the possibility of U.S. or NATO missiles being stationed in
Ukraine.[117] This did not seem to be a reference to any specific plan, only
to what had happened with the anti-ballistic missile systems and dual-use
launchers deployed in Romania and Poland. His point being that if the U.S.
attempted the same in Ukraine, it would be too late for Russia to react
without full-scale war between the powers.

Take This Exit

On December 1, 2021, Putin reiterated his concerns at a ceremony for new

ambassadors. He cited NATO’s incorporation of the Eastern bloc and the
placement of bases near Russia’s borders, and proposed a new agreement
which would forbid expansion or deployment of Western forces in the East.
Since he was dealing with Washington, Putin emphasized, “we need
precise, legal guarantees, because our Western colleagues have failed to
deliver on verbal commitments. Specifically, everyone is aware of
assurances they gave verbally that NATO would not expand to the
east.”[118]
The next day, Lavrov explained that added to their longstanding
concerns about the missile launchers was the end of the INF Treaty and
increased threat of the deployment of medium-range nuclear missiles in
Eastern Europe. He also complained that American arms shipments had the
negative effect of encouraging Ukraine to refuse to implement the Minsk
deals. Lavrov cited the Georgia war of 2008 as proof of how destabilizing
the Budapest Memorandum had been and how nonsensical the “Open-Door
Policy” was for its insistence that no other nation’s positions be taken into
account. They “are playing with fire,” Lavrov said. “I am convinced that
they cannot be unaware of this.”[119]
On December 7, presidents Biden and Putin spoke on a video call.
According to Shane Harris, from the Post, Putin again invoked NATO
expansion as a “major factor” in his decision to build up forces at the
border. Biden again said Ukraine was “unlikely” to join NATO soon, and
that they could reach an agreement about the ABM launchers in Romania
and Poland. As Harris said, “In theory, there was room to
compromise.”[120]
But the War Party was determined to prevent it. On December 15, the
secretary-general of NATO, Norwegian politician Jens Stoltenberg, met
with Zelensky and declared that NATO still stood by the Bucharest
Declaration, though “without specifying a time frame.”[121]

No Deal
Draft Treaties

Soon after, on December 17, Putin issued his draft “Agreement on

Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member
States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.” The demands were tough,
but ultimately they were at least a reasonable basis to begin real
negotiations. Frankly, America should have implemented them long ago.
Putin’s terms included: A “reaffirmation” that the two powers are not
adversaries; an agreement to improve communication “to prevent incidents”
in the Baltic and Black Seas; a stipulation Russia and all NATO states as of
May 1997 will not deploy military forces in any other European state
beyond what had been stationed there by that date, other than in exceptional
cases with the agreement of all parties; an agreement not to deploy land-
based intermediate- nor short-range missiles near each other’s forces—
essentially a return to the INF treaty that President Trump had torn up only
two years before; a demand to end NATO expansion, including to Ukraine;
an end to NATO military exercises in Eastern Europe; and finally, new
“security zones” where the allies would respect new limits on their
militaries’ presence.[122] There were actually two proposed treaties, one for
NATO and one for the U.S. separately.[123] Putin was clearly throwing
down the gauntlet, in a case of the most coercive diplomacy. But he was not
threatening the United States, only demanding that Washington cease
threatening him.[124]
Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder advised, “Nobody wants
to hear it in the West: No matter who is in power, there is a conviction in
Russia that the West wants to spread further with NATO, in the post-Soviet
space.” He added, “No one who is at the head of Russia will allow this. This
danger analysis may be emotional, but it is real in Russia. The West must
understand this and accept compromises accordingly; otherwise, peace will
be difficult to achieve.”[125]

1997? Ancient History

The media ridiculed Putin’s references to Bill Clinton’s promises made in

the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997, which stipulated there was to be
no “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” in new
NATO member states.[126] Again, the Washington Post said in January
2022 that “Parts of the texts were so unrealistic that many Western
lawmakers dismissed the Russian approach as unserious. Among other
things,” they said, “Russia demanded the United States and its Western
European military allies agree not to put weapons or forces in any of the
former Warsaw Pact countries that are now members of NATO.”[127]
Those had been then-Senator Biden’s promises too.[128] But the
administration just obfuscated, claiming force deployments were “limited,
proportionate, and in full compliance with commitments under the NATO-
Russia Founding Act.”[129]
It goes without saying that Washington can simply alter any deal it
makes, and that those who find their words meaningful are unserious people
whose views are to be disregarded. For example: Bush Sr.’s 1989–1991
non-expansion agreements with the Soviets, ignored by Clinton, W. Bush,
Obama and Trump;[130] Clinton’s 1994 Agreed Framework deal with
North Korea[131] and Founding Act deal with Russia,[132] both broken by
Bush Jr.; W. Bush’s 2003 normalization deal with Libya,[133] bombed to
bits by Obama;[134] Obama’s 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action
with Iran,[135] canceled by Trump;[136] and for that matter, Nixon,
Reagan and Bush Sr.’s 1972, 1987 and 1992 ABM,[137] INF and Open
Skies treaties with the old USSR, later Russia, which W. Bush and Trump
tore up as well.

Negotiable

One Russia specialist, presumably from the NSC or State Department, told
the Post the Russians wanted a “real dialogue” to “see whether Washington
is willing to discuss any sort of commitment that constrains U.S. power,
which for example could include placing limits on U.S. missile
deployments in parts of Europe that could threaten Moscow,” as they put it.
“The Russians are waiting to see what we’re going to offer, and they’re
going to take it back and decide is this serious?” he said. “Is this something
we can sell as a major victory for security, or is it just, from their point of
view, another attempt to fob us off and not give us anything?”[138]
The Times reported that “the Russian proposal [was] immediately
dismissed by NATO officials,” even though it might “represent an opening
position, with Russia willing to later compromise in talks. That the demands
were put forth by the deputy foreign minister, Mr. Ryabkov, and not by his
boss, Sergey V. Lavrov, or by Mr. Putin himself, left wiggle room, analysts
said.”[139] In other words, very reasonable centrist foreign policy
establishment types cited by the Post and Times, including administration
officials, said at the time that Russia’s proposed treaty was not junk, but a
decent starting point for real negotiations toward a major new security pact.
But the Russians had no partner for peace.

Non-Negotiable

Derek Chollet, counselor to Secretary Blinken, later admitted they had not
been willing to negotiate Ukraine’s potential NATO membership, saying it
was not on the table, and adding, “We talked about NATO in saying that
NATO is a defensive alliance. NATO is not a threat to Russia,” essentially
boasting about the administration’s obstinance and dishonesty.[140]
Blinken at least pretended to be just as blind. He said the “narrative”
that “NATO is threatening Russia” is “false.” Simple as that. They are not
mistaking our massive defensive buildup as an offensive one. No, they are
simply lying when they pretend to be concerned. “That’s like the fox saying
it had to attack the hen house because its occupants somehow pose a threat.
We’ve seen this gaslighting before,” Blinken said.[141]
During this time, Zelensky was told Ukraine of course could not join
NATO, but that he should never say so publicly. He explained, “I requested
them personally to say directly that we are going to accept you into NATO
in a year or two or five, just say it directly and clearly, or just say no.” He
added, “And the response was very clear, ‘You’re not going to be a NATO
member, but publicly, the doors will remain open.’” He then quite fairly
complained that “you cannot place us in this situation.”[142]

Peace Slips Away

On December 30, 2021, Biden and Putin spoke by phone. They agreed to
hold substantive talks on January 9 and 10. According to the Russian
readout—the White House did not publish one—Biden told Putin that
“Washington had no intention of deploying offensive strike weapons in
Ukraine.”[143] However, at the talks in January, when Deputy Secretary of
State Wendy Sherman met with Ryabkov, they did not get any further than
telling the Russians they were open to discussing side deals regarding the
missiles at best.[144] Ryabkov again demanded a halt to any further NATO
expansion and said it must cease activity in the countries that had joined in
1999 and later, like in the deal they thought they had made with President
Clinton in 1997. The administration rejected those conditions entirely,
instead offering “trust-building measures” regarding the stationing of troops
and weapons in Eastern Europe. And the offer for these talks, based on a
complete rejection of Russia’s terms, was only on the condition that Russia
pulled its forces back from the border first.[145]
A White House source told the Post the meeting was “a chance to test
whether the Russians were serious about the substance of the concerns . . .
and if there was a way forward for any kind of diplomacy,” concluding, “I
think it became pretty clear, pretty quickly that [the Russians] were
performing diplomacy, not actually undertaking diplomacy. They weren’t
even doing it with much seriousness.”[146]
Experienced American diplomat Chas Freeman disagreed. He said that
while Putin’s proposed treaty was obviously not acceptable to the
Americans on its face, it was not their fallback position, but their opening
bid, and a reasonable basis for real negotiations.[147] George Beebe, the
former CIA chief of Russia analysis echoed that view, saying, “I think this
was their opening position. I think it’s designed to be a basis for
negotiations. It will be a difficult negotiation . . . but not an impossible one.
I think there’s potential middle grounds on many of the issues that the
Russians are talking about.”[148] But the Biden administration refused to
treat it that way.
Washington would not sign a new bilateral agreement with Russia, nor
consider “closing the door” on NATO membership for Ukraine, dismissing
both as “nonstarters.”[149] In their written reply to the Russians, the
administration simply reiterated their warnings not to invade and to
demobilize their military buildup on Ukraine’s borders. They would only
agree to “refrain from deploying offensive ground-launched missile systems
and permanent forces with a combat mission in the territory of Ukraine,”
and offered to allow Russian inspections of the Mark 41 missile launchers
in Eastern Europe, though they would not sign a treaty saying so.
Humorously, they also insisted that Russia live up to its commitments in the
NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997—the same one where they promised
never to station “substantial” Western forces in the new NATO states of
Eastern Europe. And that was it.[150]
So Biden had no real intention of bringing Ukraine into NATO, but
refused to take membership off the table as a supposed matter of principle,
all the while making Ukraine nearly a de facto member of the alliance
militarily—with all of the West’s focus on scaling up the interoperability of
their forces—and yet forever without that elusive war guarantee.
 This strange spectacle continued, where Biden would acknowledge
Russia’s legitimate concerns about NATO expansion,[151] and the potential
placement of offensive weapons in Ukraine, but then refuse to negotiate
these positions in good faith.[152] It was clear a decision had been made to
warn Russia not to invade, but not attempt to accommodate their concerns
in any meaningful way. Biden told the press on January 19, 2022, that Putin
had asked for guarantees that “Ukraine will never be part of NATO,” and
that there would not be “strategic weapons stationed in Ukraine.” He then
said, “Well, we could work out something on the second piece,” but on the
first he refused. Then, like always, he said Ukraine was in fact not welcome
anyway, “based on much more work they have to do in terms of democracy
and a few other things going on there, and whether or not the major allies in
the West would vote to bring Ukraine in right now.” The U.S. would not
bring Ukraine into the alliance but would (send others to) die for the sacred
principle that Russia cannot tell anyone they cannot join—only America,
Germany and our other friends can. Biden could have mentioned the missile
sites in Eastern Europe. In their counter-proposal, the U.S. had offered a
side deal for Russian inspections.[153] But they knew such piecemeal
agreements would not be enough.
As a questioner put it, Biden was offering “informal assurances” only,
an interpretation he did not dispute. The idea that the U.S. would sit down
and negotiate a new treaty with Russia was dead on arrival. Avowedly
meaningless promises were all they were going to get. As Blinken said of
the administration’s belated counter-offer, “There is no change. There will
be no change” to Ukraine’s potential NATO membership status.[154] The
U.S. and NATO had separately responded that the “open-door” was
permanent, including for Ukraine, and that “allied deployments of troops
and military equipment in Eastern Europe are non-negotiable.”[155]
Lavrov denounced the U.S. response to the proposed treaty: “There is
no positive reaction in this document on the main issue. The main issue is
our clear-cut position on the inadmissibility of NATO’s further eastward
expansion and the deployment of strike armaments that may threaten the
territory of the Russian Federation.”[156]
But as Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan later admitted,
“every NATO ally, including the United States, needs to look squarely at the
fact that admission to Ukraine into NATO at this juncture means war with
Russia. That is an inescapable fact.” Of course it is, and everyone in the
White House knew it. But they could never negotiate a deal promising not
to go that far.[157]

What Door?

Steven Pifer, Bill Clinton’s ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000, said
the Open-Door Policy “was a real mistake. It drove the Russians nuts. It
created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which then were never met.
And so that just made that whole issue of enlargement a complicated one.”
Since NATO requires unanimous agreement to add a new member,
insistence on the policy “put Ukraine in an untenable position: an applicant
for an alliance that wasn’t going to accept it, while irritating a potential
opponent next door, without having any degree of NATO protection.”
 Scholar Marie Elise Sarotte agreed. “The open-door policy is the one
that maximizes friction with Russia, which has culminated in the crisis we
have now. I . . . believe [Putin] is genuinely aggrieved at the way the post-
Cold War order includes no stake for Russia.”[158] Zachary Paikin, a
researcher at the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS), said that in
the past the West had nurtured Ukraine’s ambitions to join NATO without
having any intentions of actually allowing it to do so. “This only served to
irritate Moscow to no apparent end,” he told Foreign Policy.[159]
“Open-Door” is a policy position NATO adopted in 1999, not an iron
law of the universe.[160] There is no door. It is just jargon the bureaucrats
made up. They could change it tomorrow. Instead they pretend Ukraine—or
any other country—has an unalienable right to join an alliance with the
United States, and no other nation’s interests, views or potential reactions
are allowed to be considered under any circumstances.[161]

Appeasement!

In early 2022, Samuel Charap warned this framing of the situation had
created a “vicious cycle”: the more the Russians protested, the more the
administration figured that changing their mind would be seen as
capitulating to Putin, which they could never do. Ukraine and Georgia had
become extras in the drama.[162] The realist thinker Stephen Walt wrote
just before the war that it was understandable the West did not want to be
seen as giving in to Putin’s demands, but that it was clear they were going
to have to negotiate on some key points if they wanted to avoid war.
“There’s little reason to think Putin will be satisfied with minor concessions
on missile defense radars or other weapons deployments,” he wrote. Russia
had “local military superiority and cares more about the outcome” than the
United States, so it only made sense that our side should give a little. “This
isn’t a question of right or wrong; it’s a question of leverage.”[163]

Uprising in Kazakhstan

The Biden administration has largely pursued the agendas laid out in the
2019 RAND study. Another apparent example of this would be an
attempted putsch against President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev in Kazakhstan
in January 2022, right at the height of tensions over Ukraine. Protests broke
out in the town of Zhanaozen on January 2, one day after the government
lifted caps on fuel prices.[164] For the next few days, while protesters filled
the streets, armed teams attacked banks, airports, power plants, military
bases, police stations[165] and government buildings[166] in what was
evidently a highly coordinated attempt to topple the state.
In all, more than a dozen cops and other security forces were killed,
along with “scores” of protesters and fighters, while more than 8,000 were
arrested.[167]
The German analyst Bernard of the Moon of Alabama blog inferred
that the U.S. and its allies had played a role in the short-lived uprising in
Kazakhstan, observing that the official demands of the attempted
revolutionaries included the withdrawal from all alliances with Russia.[168]
He also cited efforts by the National Endowment for Democracy to support
anti-regime forces there[169] and the U.S. Embassy’s promotion of anti-
government protests on its website under the guise of warnings about
possible unrest.[170] Protesters had been chanting “Shal ket!” (“Old man
out!”) in reference to Nursultan Nazarbayev, the previous president, who
had become head of the Security Council and was still seen as the power
behind the throne. This was reminiscent of previous Otpor-type
sloganeering, and perhaps another indication of Western intervention.
Bernard also correctly predicted that the effort would backfire and
“strengthen Russia.”[171] In fact, Russian troops did intervene when
Tokayev called them in under the Collective Security Treaty Organization
(CSTO) alliance.[172] They quickly crushed the insurrection and took
credit, with Putin declaring they had stopped another “color revolution” led
by “terrorists, criminals, looters and other criminal elements,” and
announced that Russia would never again allow a color-coded revolution in
a former Soviet state.[173]
“I think one lesson in recent history is that once Russians are in your
house, it’s sometimes very difficult to get them to leave,” Secretary Blinken
warned the Kazakhs.[174] Russian forces then withdrew[175]—with the
Kazakh government more dependent on their power than before. Again, this
was all in the first month of 2022, in the middle of the Russian buildup on
the eve of the invasion of Ukraine.
Kazakhstan is a massive country, by far the largest of the Central Asian
“stans,” which shares a long frontier with Russia and still contains millions
of ethnic Russians with close ties across the border.[176] It is as important
to Russia as Mexico is to the United States. That the U.S. would apparently
dare attempt a regime change operation there is no less reckless than their
efforts to overthrow Belarus or any of their other provocations in the run-up
to the 2022– Ukraine war.
The RAND study authors had accepted as a natural fact that the U.S.
could never dominate these nations for long. But they could cause Russia
extra expense by agitating there, and ultimately risk to the U.S. was low, so
why not proceed?
A year later, Blinken returned to Kazakhstan to tell them their
problems were all due to the war in Ukraine and that the solution was to cut
ties with Russia and allow more U.S. investment instead. Directly and
favorably comparing America, Russia and China’s contest for domination
of Central Asian mineral and energy resources to the Great Game of the old
19th century imperial powers, Foreign Policy reported: “The sweetener of
Blinken’s trip was cash. Speaking ahead of the trip, U.S. Assistant Secretary
of State Donald Lu said the United States would provide $41.5 million this
year.” He promised $50 million more.[177]

Miscalibration

The administration poured hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of

weapons into Ukraine in January 2022,[178] and launched a major public
relations campaign depicting all the armaments they and their allies were
sending, sharing numerous photos of pallets full of weapons being unloaded
and delivered.[179]
CIA officers later attempted to exonerate themselves for the
provocation, credibly blaming the bosses and politicians for not listening to
their warnings; the calibration was off. They were not deterring a war; they
were instigating one. Reporter Zach Dorfman spoke with dissenting
intelligence officers who said that at first Obama’s military aid “was tightly
circumscribed . . . calibrated to avoid aggravating Moscow.” But “some
former officials believe it put Kyiv in an impossible position, with the U.S.
support setting Russia on edge while being insufficient to actually help
Ukraine deter or fight an invasion.” Jeffrey Edmonds, a Russia expert from
Obama’s NSC, explained that sending Javelin shoulder-fired anti-tank
missiles was not enough to deter Russia nor help Kiev wrap up the fight in
the Donbas. He said there was “cognitive dissonance” over the policy since
people wanted to help Kiev but knew it was counterproductive. As he put it,
“[W]hy would you want to give these [weapons] if it’s just going to
increase the chances that Russia does something?” Some at the CIA blamed
Trump for being “more . . . aggressive on weapon transfers” than Obama,
which they believed all along was a mistake, saying that with the increased
aid came “the risk of a deadly Russian response.”
One CIA official told Dorfman that “most U.S. intelligence community
analysts” thought “Russia felt sufficiently provoked over Ukraine,” and that
a war could start at any time. They tried to warn policymakers that it was
not only a particular Russian reaction to a specific weapons system that
mattered, as much as the fact that “the Russians are taking all of this stuff in
the aggregate, and they’re drawing this picture of this ever-increasing
relationship between the U.S. and Ukraine.” He said, “We had given all the
warnings, all the caveats” to policymakers. “And it was pretty clear that
U.S. foreign policy, regardless of administration, was just going to keep
rolling forward. It’s gutting, but it is what it is.”
 It is what it is.[180]

Blinken’s Blinders

Blinken met with Lavrov one last time on January 21. Perhaps the
American diplomats simply could not believe they were the ones making 30
years of their predecessors’ warnings come true. After again refusing to
address Russia’s concerns, Blinken claims he pulled Lavrov aside to ask
him, “Sergei, tell me what it is you’re really trying to do?” The Post
paraphrased, “Was this all really about the security concerns Russia had
raised again and again—about NATO’s ‘encroachment’ toward Russia and a
perceived military threat? Or was it about Putin’s almost theological belief
that Ukraine was and always had been an integral part of Mother Russia?”
Lavrov, they say, just walked away.[181]
Amb. Matlock, who had helped Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush
end the last Cold War, was scornful of Biden’s belligerence. On the eve of
war, he wrote that Putin’s demands against NATO expansion and for
Ukrainian neutrality were “eminently reasonable.” He was not threatening
NATO or any member of the alliance. “To try to detach Ukraine from
Russian influence . . . was a fool’s errand, and a dangerous one. Have we so
soon forgotten the lesson of the Cuban Missile Crisis?”[182]

C’mon, Man

On February 1, Putin spoke of Ukraine’s stated policy to someday retake

the Crimean Peninsula. He asked what would happen if Ukraine were a
NATO member, with foreign troops and weapons stationed in the country,
like in Romania and Poland, and Kiev then tried to take Crimea, which has
been back under Russian sovereignty since 2014. “What are we supposed to
do? Fight against the NATO bloc? Has anyone given at least some thought
to this? Apparently not,” he said.[183]
Putin then snapped at a French reporter, “Do you want France to go to
war with Russia?” Again predicting that once in NATO, Ukraine would
attempt to retake Crimea, he declared, “That’s what will happen!”[184]
He stated the problem again 20 days later, on the eve of war, specifying
that since Ukraine and the West refused to recognize Russian sovereignty
over Crimea, that would mean that from Washington, Brussels and Kiev’s
point of view, in any fight with Russia over the peninsula, Ukraine would
be the defender from aggression, and NATO’s Article 5 would then be
claimed to be in effect. That, he said, could represent a major step toward
real war between NATO and the Russian Federation.[185]

Alliance with China

A generation ago, establishment grand strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski

warned that the greatest challenge to American dominance in Eurasia was
the potential for a Russian-Chinese-Iranian alliance. He advised the
government to carefully formulate its policy to prevent it.[186] But that is
just what the U.S. has created. Knowing the West would be certain to
launch a massive economic war against Russia, Putin moved to shore up his
strategic, economic and political depth in the East. Chinese Chairman Xi
Jinping was happy to oblige him, no doubt in response to American
provocations beginning with President Obama’s “pivot to Asia” policy
declared in 2011, which Trump and Biden continued.[187]
On February 4, at the opening of the Beijing Winter Olympics, Putin
and Xi signed a joint statement declaring a “new era” of Russian-Chinese
relations. This was short of an official military alliance, but they did agree
to oppose “attempts by external forces to undermine security and stability in
their common adjacent regions,” and that they intended “to counter
interference by outside forces in the internal affairs of sovereign countries
under any pretext, oppose color revolutions, and . . . increase cooperation in
the aforementioned areas.” They accused the U.S. and its allies of
“seriously undermin[ing] the international security order and global
strategic stability,” demanded an end to NATO expansion and urged
Washington to “abandon its ideologized cold war approaches.” The
statement added, “The Chinese side is sympathetic to and supports the
proposals put forward by the Russian Federation to create long-term legally
binding security guarantees in Europe.”[188]
This affirmation of Chinese support may have been the turning point in
Putin’s decision to go forward with the invasion later that month.
Once the war began, the Russian government also moved closer to
Iran, with Putin visiting Ayatollah Khamenei in Tehran in July 2022 and
ordering thousands of Shahed attack drones.[189] Despite centuries of
animosity, U.S. foreign policy has brought the two former empires together.
Washington accuses Iran of also supplying Fath-360 ballistic missiles to
Russia for use in the war.[190] The Atlantic Council, noting Putin’s help
pressuring Iran to sign Obama’s nuclear deal of 2015, which Trump
canceled in 2018,[191] said the U.S. can no longer expect Russia to work
with the West to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. That threat
has been vastly overblown anyway,[192] but things could change, and
Putin’s incentives to cooperate with the allies on the question have been
undermined, and possibly reversed, as the council report admitted.[193]

Macron’s Last Shot

French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz

spent early 2022 attempting to get the major parties to acknowledge that the
Minsk deals were the key to avoiding war.[194] Putin said he agreed. On
February 11, the “Normandy Format”—Germany, France, Ukraine and
Russia—held one last set of talks in Berlin to try to keep the peace. While
giving him credit for it, the Post conceded that it was Zelensky’s
stubbornness which killed the talks, noting his refusal to negotiate with the
Donbas rebels, as he was already obligated to do under Minsk II since
February 2015, while leaving the reader to believe this must be a new
demand.[195] They said Russia had “called on Ukraine to grant greater
powers to the breakaway regions within Luhansk and Donetsk,” and that
those provinces “should have a say, if not veto, over the policies of a
Ukrainian federal government—a notion Kyiv opposes as it could preclude
Ukraine from becoming a member of NATO or the European Union.” The
constitutional changes Ukraine had already agreed to regarding the status of
the revolting regions were “deeply unpopular,” the Post continued, adding
that “[d]irect talks with the separatists, whom many Ukrainian officials
consider ‘terrorists,’ also are deeply controversial.”[196]
 Macron was as intransigent as Zelensky, ridiculing Putin for his
insistence that Kiev talk with the separatists, again, as though that had not
been part of the previous Minsk agreements. If his were the West’s best
efforts to try to stop the war, they fell far short for obvious reasons.[197]

WMD

On February 19, at the Munich Security Conference, Zelensky brought up

the Budapest Memorandum of 1994 and said that without Western “security
guarantees for our country, Ukraine will have every right to believe that the
Budapest Memorandum does not work, and all 1994 commitments will be
called into question.”[198]
This was a barely veiled threat to leave the Non-Proliferation Treaty
(NPT) and make or acquire nuclear weapons.[199] It is important to
understand that no nuclear weapons state on the planet is going to hand over
atom bombs or fissile material in any quantity to Ukraine. The U.S., Britain
and France are party to the NPT, as are Russia and China, who are on the
other side of this conflict anyway. And the nuclear weapons states that are
not party to the treaty—Israel, Pakistan, India and North Korea—do not
want that kind of trouble. So Ukraine would have to quit the NPT and
embark on a crash project to acquire uranium on the black market and
enrich it to weapons-grade, and/or produce enough plutonium to make at
least a few bombs, before Russia had the chance to do whatever it took to
stop them, which the Ukrainians would not have the time to do. So why did
Zelensky even say this? It served only to incite.
Do Not Give In to Provocations

German Chancellor Scholz made his own last attempt at peace on February
19. He advised Zelensky to renounce his intent to join NATO and declare
neutrality in exchange for new security guarantees from the U.S. and
Russia.[200] Consider that one of America’s closest allies was proposing
that NATO and Ukraine should back down in the face of Russia’s legitimate
concerns and the rising danger of a terrible escalation of the war. It was
reasonable.
Speaking of escalations, while the administration was accusing Russia
of preparing some sort of massive false-flag attack on the Donbas rebels to
justify the war, that seems to have served as de facto cover for a significant
escalation by the Ukrainian military in Donetsk, according to the OSCE.
[201] They counted 3,400 shell and mortar detonations between February
18 and 20, with about two-thirds to three-quarters on the rebel side of the
demarcation line. This was compared to about 60 explosions per day earlier
in the month.[202]
Perhaps this is what Macron was referring to when on February 20, he
warned Putin, “Do not give in to provocations of any kind in the hours and
days to come.”[203]
Who knows for sure if this intense escalation at the height of these
tensions was a deliberate plan by the U.S. and Ukraine to provoke the
Russians into finally crossing the line, but it seemed to be one of the final
straws before Putin pulled the trigger. But they still had more fuel to add to
the fire.
Kamala Harris Is Speaking

At the Munich Security Conference on February 20, Vice President Harris

seemed to forget about—or to have never heard of—Soviet totalitarianism,
their crushing of the Hungarian revolt and the Prague Spring, the Balkan
wars of the 1990s or the many al Qaeda and ISIS terrorist attacks in the
region over the previous two decades when she said: “We’re talking about
the potential for war in Europe. I mean, let’s really take a moment to
understand the significance of what we’re talking about. It’s been over 70
years and through those 70 years . . . there has been peace and security. We
are talking about the real possibility of war in Europe.”
Worse, she reiterated the administration’s position that “the founding
principles of NATO is that each country must have the ability—unimpaired,
unimpeded—to determine their own future, both in terms of their form of
government and, in this case, whether they desire to be a member of
NATO.” She added, “And isn’t that at the heart of the very issue we’re
presented with in terms of Russia’s aggression, or stated aggression, toward
Ukraine?”[204]

Declarations of War

Blame Wilson

Putin declared war twice. In his speech of February 21, when he announced
his government’s recognition of the independence of the Donbas region, he
again complained in quite explicit terms about the Communists’ previous
decisions which had helped lead to the current crisis: Lenin had drawn the
eastern border there to include more Russians inside Ukraine without
thought for the future; Khruschev had given away Crimea for a song, again
not considering the long-term consequences; and Gorbachev had allowed
independence not only for the Warsaw Pact states, but also for the former
“republics,” the Baltics (Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), as well as Belarus
and Ukraine, leaving millions of ethnic Russians behind and allowing for
security threats on their borders.
This was the situation Putin had inherited, and he said it was tolerable
until the U.S. installed right-wing nationalists in power and started the war
in the east. He described a state of emergency in which America and NATO
were supporting Kiev’s “aggressive actions,” while the U.S. was preparing
“for hostilities against our country” and “developing Ukrainian territory as
a theatre of potential military operations” against Russia, citing the danger
of Ukraine’s admission to NATO and the eventual deployment of missiles
and other American armaments there. “The information we have gives us
good reason to believe that Ukraine’s accession to NATO and the
subsequent deployment of NATO facilities has already been decided and is
only a matter of time.” He added that “given this scenario, the level of
military threats to Russia will increase dramatically, several times over. And
I would like to emphasize . . . that the risk of a sudden strike on our country
will multiply.”[205]

There’s Options
Again, this does not justify what Putin did in response, or the worsening
problems that are almost certain to result from his war. He still had plenty
of options. As journalist Aaron Maté suggested, he could have again
insisted on bringing in UN peacekeepers from a third nation with no direct
interest in the fight.[206] He could also have threatened to obstruct all UN
Security Council business with Russia’s veto until the Western powers
actually implemented the Minsk II agreement they had all signed onto. He
could have turned off all natural gas supplies to Ukraine and Europe in the
dead of winter to make his point too.
Antiwar activist David Swanson came up with a list of 30 nonviolent
options Putin could have pursued instead of resorting to war. At least a few
of them would certainly have been worth a try, including joining the
International Criminal Court (ICC) and asking them to investigate the war
in the Donbas, insisting on international supervision for new plebiscites in
Crimea and the Donbas, repeatedly demanding the implementation of
Minsk II, or “ask[ing] the Baltic states that have planned nonviolent
responses to Russian invasion to help train Russians and other Europeans in
the same.” The latter may sound naïve at first, but in fact it worked to rid all
three Baltic states of the USSR in 1990 and they continue to have similar
plans and training in place for their national defense.[207]
Swanson also said Putin could have sent in thousands of unarmed
peacekeepers to occupy the Donbas with nonviolent resistance.[208] Again,
perhaps this may seem foolish at first glance, putting unarmed people in
danger, but it would have shifted the dynamics of the argument in his favor,
and look how many innocent people have been killed and had their property
destroyed in the war since then. The damage is incalculable. Of course they
could also have just sent lightly armed blue-helmets to stand around on the
demarcation line in the typical fashion.
It also might have helped if Putin had not been so damned coy about
the entire thing and, instead of repeatedly denying it, simply threatened that
he sure as hell would invade, and in the most violent way, if the U.S. and its
client state did not enter into serious negotiations immediately. Perhaps
military necessity required diplomatic incompetence.

Putin’s Case

Still, many of the Russian president’s worst accusations about the U.S.-led
West were true. These include: the breaking of Bush Sr.’s NATO promises;
CIA support for the bin Ladenites in Chechnya, Libya and Syria; the
Kosovo War; Bush’s withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and installation of
dual-use launchers in Eastern Europe; the color-coded revolutions and 2014
coup in Ukraine; the failure of Kiev to implement Minsk II; the ongoing
war in the east; all the foreign trainers and advisers in the country; and
cooperation with the U.S. Navy that he said put the Russian Black Sea Fleet
at risk. He also claimed Ukrainian forces had already effectively been
integrated into NATO, with their military being given access to U.S.
surveillance drones and planes.[209] Professors Mearsheimer and Walt have
long characterized America’s military relationship with Ukraine as “de
facto” NATO membership. It is the arms, training and integration without
the war guarantee, though always promising one will come someday.[210]
 In his February 21 speech, Putin continued, complaining that the U.S.
and EU were picking Ukrainian judges in the name of fighting corruption,
which, he noted, still reigned supreme. He added, “[T]heir country has
turned not even into political and economic protectorate, but has been
reduced to a colony with a puppet regime.”[211] In his May 9 Victory Day
speech, Putin cited the increased violence and the arrival of advisers and
delivery of weapons by the West to claim he had “launched a preemptive
attack against this aggression.”[212]
This all provided Putin a compelling narrative for his domestic
audience that Ukrainian independence was a mistake because it just cannot
be without the West taking it over. The Russian president purposely echoed
the arguments of Bill Clinton for his intervention in the Serbian civil war,
George W. Bush for launching Iraq War II and Barack Obama’s regime
change war in Libya. He invoked an illusory nuclear weapons threat
—“weapons of mass destruction”—from Ukraine and his determination to
protect the people of the Donbas from so-called “genocide.” Escalating the
conflict to such a massive degree was surely not reasonable. But his
statement was rational if angry, more substance than bluster. He left the
West’s argument that they represent the rule of law, as compared to him,
purely laughable.
Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who pointedly ignored
every word of caution against offering NATO membership to Ukraine when
in power, publicly wondered if Putin was mentally ill. Why else could he
possibly be acting that way?[213]
 Is this crazy talk? “Many Ukrainian airfields are located close to our
borders. NATO tactical aircraft stationed here, including carriers of high-
precision weapons, will be able to hit our territory to the depth of the
Volgograd-Kazan-Samara-Astrakhan line.” He continued, “The deployment
of radar reconnaissance assets on the territory of Ukraine will allow NATO
to tightly control the airspace of Russia right up to the Urals.”
He observed that after the U.S. ripped up the INF Treaty, the Pentagon
was quite openly developing new mid-range, land-based nuclear ballistic
missiles. If these were to be installed in Ukraine, “[t]he flying time of
Tomahawk cruise missiles to Moscow will be less than 35 minutes; ballistic
missiles from Kharkiv will take seven to eight minutes; and hypersonic
assault weapons, four to five minutes.” He concluded, “It is like a knife to
the throat.”[214]
Are these not specific and serious security concerns?
Even the Reuters news team finally started to tell the story clearly. The
danger was that the Russians might invade “to prevent Ukraine from ever
joining the NATO Western security alliance,” because “Putin fears that
Ukraine’s growing ties with the West could turn it into a potential
launchpad for NATO missiles targeting Russia.” They added, “The prospect
of NATO admitting Ukraine as a member or stationing weapons there that
could strike Russia is a ‘red line’ for Moscow.”[215]
So it has come to this—a massive, catastrophic war—over alliance
membership which is not truly on offer, missiles the U.S. has no real intent
to install and the failure of our client state to implement a peace deal signed
with our country’s closest allies and approved by President Obama. His
former vice president, Biden, argued those were just pretexts for war.[216]
Well, maybe the U.S. should have given in and called their bluff by offering
these security guarantees—since they are supposedly their policies anyway.
Biden could have just put it in writing.
Geoffrey Roberts, emeritus professor of history at University College
Cork, wrote in his short study, “‘Now or never’: Putin’s Decision for War
with Ukraine,” that it would be a mistake to take what the Russian president
said at face value. As we have learned, politicians say lots of things when
they want to start a war. At the same time, “what [politicians] say publicly
invariably reflects a core of authentic belief. Their rhetoric both reflects and
constructs their version of reality, however warped that may be.” Roberts
noted the common disbelief among many in the West that Putin would
really invade. “What these commentators missed was Putin’s apocalyptic
vision of a future nuclear-armed Ukraine embedded in NATO and intent on
provoking a Russian-Western war.” That understood, it was much easier to
see why the decision was not a difficult one. “Putin concluded that it was
‘now or never’—invade Ukraine before NATO’s position in the country
became too strong to risk war. And the hard fighting of the actual war with
Ukraine can only have reinforced that calculation of Putin’s.”[217]
Samuel Charap thought compromise was preferable to open warfare.
He wrote in January 2022 that the U.S. should openly declare that NATO’s
door was now closed to Ukraine. After all, Washington had promised not to
deploy nuclear weapons on the soil of new NATO members back in 1996, a
pledge they had kept so far. So a “commitment to self-restraint” would
clearly be consistent with previous NATO diplomatic history. Besides, he
wrote, “It concedes nothing to declare that Nato is not planning to do
something it has no intention of doing anyway. If acknowledging this
reality averts a conflict that might destroy Ukraine and destabilize Europe,
that seems like a small price to pay.”[218]
MSNBC, which is very close to the Democratic Party,[219]
surprisingly ran an important off-narrative piece on March 4, 2022. Zeeshan
Aleem wrote that crueler than denying Ukraine’s sovereign right to join
whatever alliance their government wanted would be “Ukrainians . . .
paying with their lives for the United States’ reckless flirtation with Ukraine
as a future NATO member without ever committing to its defense.” He said
that everyone knew they would not be allowed to join the alliance due to
corruption in economics and politics anytime in the indefinite future, “and
because NATO has no interest in going to war with Russia over Ukraine’s
Donbas region.” He described the moral hazard built into U.S. intervention:
by bringing up the possibility of alliance membership they had
“emboldened Ukraine to act tough and buck Russia—without any intention
of directly defending Ukraine with its firepower if Moscow decided
Ukraine had gone too far.” He quoted Thomas Graham, George W. Bush’s
former Russia desk chief at the NSC, who said, “NATO is a defensive
organization; I don’t think it had any plans on Russia. All that said . . . if
you put yourself in the position of people in the Kremlin, you can see why
they came to [the opposite] conclusion.”[220]
Russia had very real security concerns at stake, and the U.S. and its
allies should have recognized that and treated them with the respect they
deserve. Not more than that, but just what is right. And they should have
dealt honestly with Ukraine, letting them know the limits of U.S. protection
up front. Instead, as Professor Mearsheimer warned in 2015, “The West is
leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is Ukraine is
going to get wrecked.”[221]
In his second declaration on the 24th, Putin sounded like a mirror
image of the Washington foreign policy establishment. Instead of invoking
Chamberlain at Munich, he invoked Molotov at Moscow[222] and the
failure of Soviet appeasement of Hitler’s Germany. “The attempt to appease
the aggressor ahead of the Great Patriotic War proved to be a mistake which
came at a high cost for our people. In the first months after hostilities broke
out, we lost vast territories of strategic importance, as well as millions of
lives,” he said. “We will not make this mistake a second time. We have no
right to do so.”[223]

New Lies for Old

Missing the USSR

The hawks love to take people out of context to suit their needs. One
example is the famous quote of Vladimir Putin complaining that the fall of
the Soviet Union was a “major geopolitical disaster” for Russia. What was
his point? Now is the time to undo that failure by conquering Eastern
Europe and reestablishing the Communist empire? No, of course not. The
April 2005 speech in question was about Putin’s future agenda, focused on
rooting out corruption. He said, “Above all, we should acknowledge that
the collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the
century. As for the Russian nation, it became a genuine drama.” He then
went on to cite ethnic Russians left behind in the newly independent states,
the collapse of the economy and domestic social order, the deal to end the
First Chechen War and the rise of the oligarchs, all part of his narrative
about how he had already saved the country from these problems. “Many
thought or seemed to think at the time that our young democracy was not a
continuation of Russian statehood, but its ultimate collapse, the prolonged
agony of the Soviet system. But they were mistaken.”[224]
As Professor Gerard Toal wrote, “Putin’s rhetorical device was a
conventional decline-and-renewal trope, describing the era of national
decline and humiliation that set the stage for his heroic mission of restoring
Russia’s strength.” But the Associated Press and BBC, he complained, only
quoted part of the speech, and even gave it a different translation than the
one released by the Kremlin.[225] The truncated quote has been invoked
endlessly by liberal and conservative hawks, and the major media alike to
make it sound as if he was arguing for a new expansionist foreign policy,
when he was not talking about that at all.[226]
Another one is Putin’s statement “Whoever does not miss the Soviet
Union has no heart.” Half the time they omit the rest: “Whoever wants it
back has no brain.” Even the Post did not mind debunking that one.[227]
But overall, the Washington War Party loves this narrative because it
absolves them of responsibility. Strobe Talbott, Bill Clinton’s adviser who
thought NATO expansion was unnecessarily provocative but then
championed the policy anyway, now claims that Putin means to recreate the
old Russian Empire, “with himself the tsar.” Obama Defense Department
official and Azov movement apologist Evelyn Farkas[228] said he wants
“nothing short of a revanchist imperialist remaking of the globe to take
control of the entire former Soviet space.”[229]
President Biden apparently talked himself into really believing, as he
constantly repeated, that Putin had sworn to reconquer all of Eastern Europe
at his first opportunity.[230] But Russia’s entire GDP in 2021 was $1.5
trillion. When you include the VA and the Energy Department’s care and
feeding of the nuke stockpile, the U.S. spends more than that on its military
alone.[231] Russia spends $60 billion. We have more than a million-man
army spread throughout the world. They have 420,000 men, and prior to the
current war almost all of them stayed home, except small numbers of
special operations types in the Donbas and some air power in Syria, where,
again, the U.S. provoked Russian intervention through irresponsible
policies in the first place.[232] The Russians have one old, broken-down
diesel-powered aircraft carrier. America has 11 nuclear-powered carrier
battle groups stationed across the world at all times—20 carriers overall—
and more than three times as many military aircraft as Russia. As Lyle
Goldstein, formerly of the Naval War College, has written, “[I]f Putin had
been plotting the conquest of Eastern Europe over the last decade, it stands
to reason that Russia would have been steadily increasing its defense
budget.”[233]
But Congressman Adam Schiff of California insists we fight them over
there so we don’t have to fight them here. He really said that—to justify
sending arms to Ukraine during the impeachment of Donald Trump in early
2020,[234] helping pick a fight that Kiev cannot win when there never was
any threat to us in the first place.

Alexander Dugin

According to the CIA, it was Ukrainian spies who murdered Darya Dugina,
daughter of one Alexander Dugin, in a botched assassination attempt on her
father in August 2022.[235] Dugin, the former chief ideologist of Eduard
Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party, is a Russian mystic and philosopher
of the political right, a “neo-Eurasianist” who urges a program of national
greatness and a return of ethnic Russians left behind in the former Soviet
republics to Russian national sovereignty.[236]
To distract from their own responsibility for Putin’s reactions, the War
Party often pretends that the Russian president is under the influence of
Dugin as though he were Rasputin and Putin the hapless Tsarina. Foreign
Affairs called Dugin “Putin’s Brain.” The Post and the Times also give
Dugin credit for Putin’s thinking and strategy.[237]
Beliefs can be powerful, but Vladimir Putin is essentially a hard-nosed
technocrat, grounded in the political realities of his time, not a romantic,
swept away by daydreams of lost glory. Besides, as Alex Hu noted, Dugin
is simply “one courtier among thousands.” He explained that the Kremlin
supports an ecosystem of opinion-makers of every description that do not
necessarily represent official decision-making, including radical dissenters,
“to make itself look moderate in comparison.”
He said that in the days when Putin was working with President W.
Bush on the terror wars, Dugin’s content was less promoted. In the
aftermath of the color-coded revolutions, he and other nationalists were
given more exposure to suit Moscow’s needs. “But,” Hu concluded, “there
is no evidence that Dugin ever came in contact with Putin. Indeed, Dugin
has never claimed to have met Putin, nor has he spoken as though he
has.”[238]
Russia scholar George Barros agrees that Dugin is “granted far more
credibility than deserved” in the U.S. media echo-chamber, calling his
influence a “myth . . . grown grossly out of proportion.”[239]
Dugin’s book Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of
Russia, which the Post claims is the “blueprint” for Putin’s foreign policy,
is full of half-baked ramblings and hare-brained schemes, such as proposing
that Russia and Japan should divide northern China between themselves but
let China invade Southeast Asia as “compensation.” Some have given
Dugin credit for the brilliant idea of encouraging ethnic and racial strife in
the U.S., which, as Hu pointed out, was ineffectual Soviet policy for
decades and was nothing but a “single throwaway line” in a 20-page section
of Dugin’s book about “space in the West of Eurasia.” He could have added
that there is no reason to believe the Russians have done any such thing in
the United States since the days of the USSR—ridiculous claims about
Russian troll farms instigating black Americans’ dissent against police
brutality in 2016[240] notwithstanding because they were obviously
ridiculous nonsense.[241] Hu says Dugin’s other famous recommendations
are also given with the “abstraction” of “an ideologist—not a
strategist.”[242]
 The RAND Corporation also determined that, though he supported
Putin’s effort to create a new Eurasian Economic Union, Dugin’s theories
that Russia should rule all of Europe and seek to “splinter” and “partition”
China “do not appear to be realistic concepts that have any significant buy-
in from Russian officials.” They added that “while Dugin is reported to
have connections and ties with Russian officials . . . it does not appear that
he is directly influential in Russian policymaking.” Instead, they concluded
Dugin was merely “an extremist provocateur with some limited and
peripheral impact.” They noted that he does not seem to participate in any
major anti-Western political parties, and that he had been fired from his job
at Moscow State University for publicly accusing Putin of not being tough
enough against Ukraine.[243] As Jeffrey Sommers noted in 2017, “This
would be a curious outcome if he were Putin’s adviser.”[244]
According to French historian Marlene Laruelle, Dugin has been
publicly “very disappointed” by Putin since early 2005. She wrote,
“According to him, Putin hesitates to adopt a definitively Eurasianist
stance, and his entourage is dominated by Atlanticist and overly liberal
figures.”[245]
Why is the American think tank and media establishment so
determined to push this scare story about “Putin’s ‘brain’”? It is fairly
obvious. The subtitle to a March 2014 Foreign Affairs article explains it:
“Alexander Dugin and the Philosophy Behind Putin’s Invasion of Crimea.”
They were just making excuses for themselves. Surely it was not the U.S.
government’s fault this had happened. It was that Putin had adopted the
thinking of a crazy nationalist ideologue.[246]
 As historian Jane Burbank put it in the New York Times, Dugin’s
Eurasianism is “the grand theory driving Putin to war.” Just as the national
security establishment lied that al Qaeda attacked America due to the
Muslim religion’s psychopathic hatred of our country’s virginal innocence,
[247] the Russians, they claim, are now waging war in Ukraine out of a lust
to create a new Eurasian empire. This narrative allows the professor to
dismiss the idea that “NATO’s eastward expansionism” or other
“developments external to Russia” could have motivated the war.[248] It is
a very convenient take if one is to avoid writing a 650-page book about
America’s role in it all.
But a year and a half later, the hawkish NATO Secretary-General Jens
Stoltenberg admitted the war was launched in response to the West’s
encroachment, rather than some ideological ambition of Putin’s to rebuild
the old Evil Empire: “The background was that President Putin declared in
the [winter] of 2021, and actually sent a draft treaty that they wanted NATO
to sign, to promise no more NATO enlargement.” He added, “That was
what he sent us. And was a pre-condition for not invading Ukraine. Of
course we didn’t sign that.” Stoltenberg then referred to Putin’s insistence
that the U.S. abide by their 1997 agreement not to station forces in the new
NATO countries, which he characterized as “introducing some kind of B, or
second class membership.” He added, “We rejected that. So [Putin] went to
war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders.”[249] Despite the
unbelievable quantity of lies told by American politicians and their media
handmaidens about this question,[250] this was in fact the truth.

Buffer Zone, Left Behind

It is deemed by the Russian national security establishment that they must
have a neutral, if not compliant state in Ukraine, not only so they can retain
their Crimean naval base and access to the Mediterranean, but also because
it is their defensive buffer zone against invasion from the west. There are no
significant natural boundaries protecting Moscow. It is essentially wide-
open territory for an invading army to cross, so they want as much space
between themselves and potential enemies as possible.[251] And it is in
their interest to protect millions of ethnic Russians left behind as a “beached
diaspora,” as author David D. Laitin called them, “because the borders of
the Soviet Union receded, rather than being dispersed from their
homeland.”[252] As Putin told film director Oliver Stone, while he was
happy to see the Communist system replaced and the Warsaw Pact
dissolved, “the most important thing is that after the disintegration of the
Soviet Union, 25 million Russians—in the blink of an eye—found
themselves abroad. In another country.”[253]
Again, this does not mean the Russians are on the side of the angels or
that the angels are on their side. It means this war is about real, tangible
politics. It is a dispute over a border and the threatening security posture of
their Western counterparts. All this talk about grand Russian theories of
global dominance is just public relations. In fact, they did not move simply
in the name of absorbing that diaspora just for history’s sake, but in the
name of protecting their lives. The status quo of Ukrainian independence
had held for 24 years until the Obama-Biden administration forced the issue
with the 2014 coup and then demanded and supported Kiev’s war against
the people of the east.[254]
 Nicolai N. Petro wrote in The National Interest about the conflict in
Ukraine, describing the motives of the major players on different levels.
First is the West’s desire to maintain dominance in Ukraine, “the biggest
prize,” as the NED’s Carl Gershman put it. He says it is also a contest
between Russian and Ukrainian elites and regular people over national
identity and power between the “Russophile east” and “Russophobe west.”
Petro added, “This conflict over who gets to define Ukrainian national
identity and its future has been going on for at least 150 years and has
erupted in serious military hostilities inside Ukraine three times,” during the
world wars and the 2014 coup and subsequent war. “Each time, violence
erupted because external powers sought to tip the scales in their
favor.”[255]
The only risk to the United States itself is that our government would
get us into a nuclear war over a country like Ukraine, where we have no
national interests to speak of. The original Red Dawn invasion-occupation
scenario makes for a hilarious and awesome movie,[256] but despite Rep.
Schiff’s threats that the Russians will soon be parachuting into Colorado’s
Front Range, it is just a movie.[257]

Told You So

After initially hiding behind Secretary Albright and others in his

administration, Bill Clinton insisted in April 2022: “As Carl Bildt, the
former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, tweeted in December
2021, ‘It wasn’t NATO seeking to go East, it was former Soviet satellites
and republics wishing to go West.’” Well, so what? Of course, small
countries with powerful neighbors want the U.S. to protect them, but
Americans were only willing to go along if there was no enemy to fight.
Then, just as George Kennan predicted in 1998, Clinton insisted, “Now
Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine, far from casting
the wisdom of NATO expansion into doubt, proves that this policy was
necessary.”[258]
As Mearsheimer told the author in 2014, none of the major participants
who crafted this policy could ever admit the consequences of their own
actions, from Clinton—the “father” of NATO expansion—on down. All
their incentives align to insist they stay the course, deep into the big muddy
if they have to.[259]
The same was true for the Biden administration, which was made up of
the very same people who accomplished the coup against the old regime in
the Obama years: the president himself, Jake Sullivan and Victoria Nuland.
Presumably then-Deputy National Security Advisor Antony Blinken was
read in on the program as well.
Again, enough mainstream foreign policy establishment types who
said so before are still around to remind us. For example, even the normally
hawkish Thomas L. Friedman ran an I-told-you-so in the Times, quoting his
1998 Kennan interview, just before the invasion of 2022. He said it was “no
mystery” why the former Soviet states would want American protection.
“The mystery was why the U.S.—which throughout the Cold War dreamed
that Russia might one day have a democratic revolution and a leader who,
however haltingly, would try to make Russia into a democracy and join the
West—would choose to quickly push NATO into Russia’s face when it was
weak.”[260]
Ever-reliant on World War II as the founding myth of the American
empire, the War Party invokes Chamberlain at Munich, pretending the
lesson is always to fight every country you have problems with because
they are all Hitler’s Germany. Scholar Jack S. Levy reminds us that Munich
has virtually always been used as a cheap excuse to fight nearly every
American war since World War II: “by Harry Truman in Korea, Anthony
Eden in the Suez, John Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lyndon
Johnson in Vietnam, and George Bush in the Persian Gulf War.”[261] He
wrote that back in 1994. We could add Madeleine Albright in Kosovo,[262]
W. Bush in Iraq War II[263] and now Biden on Putin.[264] Bill Kristol had
been reminded of Munich at least 61 times before the Trump era even
began.[265]
Putin is much more like Paul von Hindenburg than Adolf Hitler.
Maybe instead of kicking Weimar Russia while they are down after the end
of Cold War I in such a Versailles Treaty fashion, the United States could
have been better sports and helped to cultivate their republic to stave off
darker forces waiting for their chance to exploit a crisis.
Instead, by misapplying the lessons of World War II and adopting a
policy of intimidation, Washington caused the conflict they were ostensibly
trying to avoid.

Rush’n Attack
Invasion

On Monday, February 21, the eighth anniversary of the 2014 coup against
Yanukovych, Putin announced he was recognizing the “independence” of
the two breakaway provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk[266] and three days
later began marching in his so-called “peacekeepers.”[267] In his statement
of February 24, Putin certainly made an argument broad enough to justify
seizing the entire nation of Ukraine and integrating it into the Russian
Federation, though it is doubtful he ever meant to cross the Dnieper River,
which more or less bisects the nation, other than the southern region of
Kherson which includes both banks.[268] It is not certain that he ever
intended to absorb the eastern oblasts of Kharkiv, Poltava, Chernihiv, Sumy
or Dnipropetrovsk.
Two major circumstances changed prevailing assumptions about how
the war would go. First of all, Putin chose not to apply the Bushes’ “shock
and awe”-style massive missile and air war before sending in his ground
forces. This was apparently a public relations decision, meant to prove the
invasion was a sort of soft annexation like what had happened in Crimea
eight years before,[269] on the assumption that Russian forces would be
just as welcome in eastern Ukraine.[270] It seems this was a strategic error.
People were just as mad at being invaded as they were going to be anyway.
While their intervention was more popular in the Donbas,[271] Anatol
Lieven wrote a year later that though they still loved the Russian people,
unlike in Crimea, “I found no sympathy whatsoever for Putin, the Russian
government or the Russian armed forces among the Russians and Russian-
speakers of Zaporizhzhia with whom I talked. The Kremlin’s claims that it
is protecting the Russian minority were dismissed with contempt.”[272]
Paul Manafort, who, again, worked for the “pro-Russian” President
Yanukovych and tried to get him to turn away from Russia and toward the
West,[273] later explained that in his time in Ukraine he had done 150 polls
and knew very well how determined the people of the south and east were
to preserve their Russian culture, but he said Putin underestimated how
much they valued their independence from Moscow.[274] Not that the
Russians are facing an indigenous insurgency there—some surely
welcomed them[275]—but nor were they cheered like the Yanks in Paris in
1944.[276]
So due to a badly conceived public relations ploy, as well as some
outdated intelligence, instead of the Ukrainian military’s planes, tanks,
trucks and heavy artillery being smashed to bits at the outset of the
invasion, it was all still available for use at the front. The Times later quoted
a Ukrainian air force pilot who just barely escaped an attack on his air base,
only to reach perfect safety at a base nearby. He said he kept waiting for
Russia to attack the second base—their radar operators must have seen
where the Ukrainians had all gone—but instead they had hours to rest and
prepare to head further west, out of enemy missile range.
Rather than being smashed, the Ukrainian military did far better than
expected in the first few weeks of fighting and stymied the Russian
invasion on several fronts simultaneously. Turns out those Javelin anti-tank
missiles were pretty effective. And the Americans helped. According to the
big 2024 Times story about the CIA’s secret war in the Donbas, “During the
invasion, the officers relayed critical intelligence, including where Russia
was planning strikes and which weapons systems they would use.”[277]
It is clear too that Russian ground forces invaded from too many
directions at the same time, preventing the quick destruction of Ukraine’s
army and getting themselves bogged down in a long slog for control of the
eastern regions.[278] Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Daniel L.
Davis assessed the weaknesses of the Russian invasion plan this way:
“Having allocated less than 200,000 total troops to try and subjugate a
sprawling country of 41 million, Putin’s generals divided up this
comparatively small force into four axes of advance, dissipating their
strength everywhere.” This was a major mistake, Davis wrote. “Had
Moscow prioritized one area as the main effort and massed its forces there,
it might have succeeded in overwhelming Zelensky’s troops and caused the
Ukrainian Armed Forces (UAF) to collapse.” Instead, “the opposite
happened: by dispersing its strength, the Russians allowed the Ukrainian
troops to contain the advance everywhere and quickly brought all four
drives to a halt.”[279]
It turned out the Ukrainians were more prepared for the war, and the
Russians less so, than almost anyone had anticipated. With homefield
advantage, defensive motive and morale, and a seemingly inexhaustible
supply of American money, weapons, training and intelligence, as this book
goes to press, the Ukrainian government has held out for more than two and
a half years.

The Right to Resist

Of course, natural and legal rights include resistance against aggressive war.
However, it is the United States of America and its imposed clients in Kiev,
not Russia, who quite literally attacked and invaded the Donbas back in
2014, and did more than their share to keep it in a state of low-level warfare
for seven years after that, complicating the question of who is resisting
whom. One can assume the worst of Putin’s motives, that he was simply
taking advantage of a crisis to get what he wanted, but the crisis was made
by the U.S.A., especially under President Obama and Vice President Biden,
back in 2014, and President Biden himself beginning in 2021. Certainly
opinion in those regions is mixed, with some considering Russia invaders
and others their protectors from a regime in Kiev that had made itself their
enemies.[280]
In Zaporizhzhia and Kherson Oblasts, the Russians’ case for the
consent of the governed is certainly weaker, but again, it is the American-
backed Kiev government which cut off the fresh water to Crimea,[281] and
has vowed since 2014 to retake the peninsula by force. They have created a
military necessity for Russia at the expense of the people of those regions,
some great percentage of which—no one really knows—must oppose this
new violent transfer of their sovereignty. This is not a justification, only an
attempt to properly distribute blame for the situation.

Strategic Defeat

The Afghan Model

It is clear that the original American plan for the war assumed a rapid
Russian victory over Kiev, then a long-term insurgency waged on the 1980s
Afghanistan model,[282] with U.S.-trained “stay-behind” militias and
saboteurs leading the fight against Russian occupiers, and the U.S. and its
allies providing safe haven in Romania and Poland.[283]
It seems likely that the Biden administration really did want this war to
happen, perhaps even attempted to deliberately provoke it. Their strategy
was to warn Putin of economic consequences if he invaded,[284] while still
refusing the kind of real negotiations that were necessary to avert the
conflict. At the very least, the administration saw great advantage in the war
if they could not prevent it.
There is precedent from recent history. In a now-infamous 1998
interview with the French magazine Le Nouvel Observateur, Zbigniew
Brzezinski explained the true chronology of the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan in 1979, when he was national security adviser to President
Jimmy Carter. The administration at the time had authorized aid to the
mujahideen starting in July, rather than December 1979,[285] “And that
very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in
my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention. . . .
We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the
probability that they would.” By then “a few stirred-up Muslims” in the
Taliban had taken over Afghanistan[286] and the bin Ladenites had already
attacked Americans at a hotel in Yemen in 1992,[287] killed six while
trying to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993,[288] killed five
Americans training the Saudi national guard in Riyadh in 1995[289] and
another 19 U.S. airmen in their barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996.[290] But
Brzezinski, the Polish aristocrat, had no regrets. “That secret operation was
an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan
trap. . . . The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to
President Carter, essentially: ‘We now have the opportunity of giving to the
USSR its Vietnam war.’”[291] He concluded, “Indeed, for almost 10 years,
Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a
conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the
Soviet empire.”[292]
As officials told the Times after the war began, Biden administration
policy “seeks to help Ukraine lock Russia in a quagmire without inciting a
broader conflict with a nuclear-armed adversary.”[293] Right around that
time, there were numerous mentions by think tanks and major political and
media figures of a coming American-backed stay-behind program, a
reference to U.S. support for rightist militia forces in Western Europe meant
to stymie a future Soviet occupation if they invaded during the first Cold
War.[294]
The White House announced a package of Javelin anti-tank missiles
and Stinger advanced shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, officially Man-
Portable Air Defense Systems (MANPADS). A Defense Department official
presciently noted that “[y]ou can’t take over a country with MANPADS, but
you can defend an airport from an airborne assault.”[295]
Robert Kagan’s brother, Frederick, of the American Enterprise Institute
and co-author of the failed counterinsurgency “surge” doctrine in Iraq War
II[296] and Afghanistan,[297] wrote a study for his wife Kimberly Kagan’s
Institute for the Study of War in December 2021. He assumed that the
Russian military would quickly smash the Ukrainians, but said, “It is
unlikely that Russian forces will be able to prevent the transition of
Ukrainian resistance into a low-level insurgency.” He went on to predict
that “Ukrainians who wished to continue fighting Russia would withdraw,
possibly establishing a government-in-exile and means for supporting
continued resistance and potentially insurgency within Russian-occupied
Ukraine,” and concluded, “NATO [can] take appropriate counter-
measures.”[298]
David Ignatius wrote in the Post in December 2021, “The Biden
administration is studying whether and how the United States could support
an anti-Russian insurgency inside Ukraine if President Vladimir Putin
invades that country.” He continued that they were providing weapons to
the Ukrainian military, “and similar logistical support to insurgent groups if
Russia topples the Ukrainian government and a guerrilla war begins.” He
cited the policy of providing shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles to the
mujahideen in the 1980s Soviet-Afghan War, saying such weapons “had a
devastating effect on Soviet forces during their 10-year war in
Afghanistan.” Ignatius said a CIA-led task force was studying how the
insurgencies fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and Assad’s forces in
Syria, as well against the U.S. in Iraq and their own Afghan failure as well.
“It’s an ironic example of turning the tables, weighing whether and how to
inflict harm similar to what U.S. forces have suffered in recent years.”
Anticipating a quick Russian rout of Ukraine’s conventional army,
Ignatius continued that the current military and militia forces “would be
among the building blocks for an insurgency. U.S. planners have discussed
weapons caches and other logistical tools that could support a potent ‘stay-
behind network’ if Russia invades.”[299]
This effort included not only years of training by the U.S. military and
the CIA Special Activities Division’s Ground Branch, or Ground Division,
at the Yavoriv Training Center in western Ukraine, but also in the United
States since 2015, according to reporter Zach Dorfman. Sources told him
the training had been increased by the Trump administration, and even
further by President Biden shortly after he took office in 2021. Dorfman
also reported that CIA officers had been deployed to the front in the Donbas
as advisers beginning in 2015. This was confirmed by the Times two years
later.[300] “The United States is training an insurgency,” a former CIA
official told Dorfman, adding that the program was teaching the Ukrainians
how “to kill Russians.” In the event of an invasion, those graduates of the
CIA programs “are going to be your militia, your insurgent leaders. We’ve
been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters.”
The officer continued, “That’s where the agency’s program could have a
serious impact. . . . There’s going to be people who make their life
miserable. [The CIA’s fighters] will organize the resistance. All that stuff
that happened to us in Afghanistan, they can expect to see that in spades
with these guys.”[301]
National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan also seemed to indicate a plan
to bait Russia into war to bleed them dry in the Afghan style. He told CBS
News, “Well, what the president has said is that we will continue to support
Ukraine even after an invasion begins, and I’m not going to get into the
specific details of what that will look like, but it is one of the three
fundamental elements of our response.”[302] He added to the AP, “If war
breaks out, it will come at an enormous human cost to Ukraine, but we
believe that based on our preparations and our response, it will come at a
strategic cost to Russia as well.”[303]
On January 14, 2022, a month before Russian troops crossed the
border, the Times ran a story called “U.S. Considers Backing an Insurgency
in Ukraine.” In it, Helene Cooper wrote, “In Afghanistan, the United States
showed itself to be dismal at fighting insurgencies. But when it comes to
funding them, military experts say it is a different ballgame.”
She quoted the former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in
Europe and Hillary Clinton adviser, retired Admiral James Stavridis, as
threatening with no irony that America had learned all the right lessons
from losing the Iraq and Afghan Wars: “Putin should realize that after
fighting insurgencies ourselves for two decades, we know how to arm, train
and energize them. The level of military support would make our efforts in
Afghanistan against the Soviet Union look puny by comparison.”[304]
Stavridis also wrote a piece for Bloomberg News, repeating the same
recommendation for support for an insurgency on the 1980s Afghan model.
[305] The Pentagon’s Stars and Stripes newspaper also referred to the
military’s efforts as preparing stay-behind forces, directly comparing it not
only to Afghanistan but to CIA support for the OUN-UPA during the first
Cold War.[306] NBC reported in early February that the Ukrainian military
also assumed it would be quickly smashed and reduced to fighting an
insurgency, and was already preparing for it.[307]
 Echoing the RAND corporation’s “Extending Russia” plan, officials
told the Times that the quantity and quality of weapons being sent to
Ukraine had all been supposedly “calibrated not to provoke Mr. Putin.”
Perhaps arming an insurgency truly was Plan B after an invasion they really
did mean to deter, and these Democrats are just very poor at “calibration.”
But they sure seem to be thinking ahead to how an invasion could hurt
Russia, with the poor Ukrainians serving as merely an instrument against
them. “[A]lready, particularly in the west, Ukrainians are joining territorial
defense forces that train in guerrilla tactics.” And this was all because “[t]he
Biden administration and its NATO allies want to capitalize on any distaste
the Russian body politic might have for troop casualties, U.S. and European
officials said in interviews.”
They revealed that the Biden administration had directly threatened the
Russians with this plan. “[A] swift victory would be followed, General
Milley told Gen. Valery Gerasimov, by a bloody insurgency, similar to the
one that led the Soviet Union to leave Afghanistan in 1989, according to
officials familiar with the discussion.” Again presuming a relatively rapid
Russian victory over Ukraine’s army, citing American officials, the paper
reiterated that “a long-term Ukrainian strategy . . . would be to mount a
guerrilla insurgency supported by the West that could bog down the Russian
military for years.”[308]
Emily Harding, writing for the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, urged U.S. support for the coming Ukrainian insurgency. “External
support is a decisive factor in the success of an insurgency. The direct
support of neighboring state military forces contributed to successful
insurgencies in Bosnia, Afghanistan in the 1980s, Tajikistan, Congo and
elsewhere,” she advised, saying support could include “safe haven,
financial support, materiel deliveries, intelligence support and training.”
The West could train fighters and pour in weapons from bordering states,
she said, noting NATO’s “decades of practice” in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Syria.[309]
“It’s time to make Mother Russia bleed for her crimes,” former State
Department official James Bruno wrote in late February. He said that to
send the greatest amount of “body bags” home to Russia, Biden should send
the CIA and special operations missions to “advise, assist, train, and equip
the Ukrainian military and intelligence organs as a main focus of this
effort.” He concluded, “Think of U.S. assistance to the mujahideen in
Afghanistan in the 1980s as the model.”[310]
This was just four, five and six months after the United States finally
withdrew its armed forces in absolute humiliating defeat at the hands of the
Afghan Taliban,[311] after a merciless 20-year war[312] against the
consequences of Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan’s covert
Afghan operation.[313] According to the most conservative count, more
than 45,000 Afghan civilians[314] and in excess of 2,400 Americans were
killed over the last two decades fighting against former 1980s CIA allies,
including mujahideen warlords Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin
Haqqani, along with the Taliban, which in many cases was also led by men
who had also fought against the Soviets. This was all because the Taliban
had provided a safe haven to al Qaeda terrorists—many of whom were also
veterans of that war—who attacked the United States, killing thousands of
civilians.[315] Boris Johnson promised the United Kingdom would be right
there with the U.S. for this one as well.[316]
So then who is the most likely Osama bin Laden character in this
analogy, the radical who turns on us, Andriy Biletsky, Andriy Parubiy or
Dimitry Yarosh? When Biletsky was put in charge of Ukrainian forces
fighting in Bakhmut in May 2023,[317] the Times forgot he was a Nazi.
[318]
Eliot Cohen, a co-founder of the Project for a New American Century
with Paul Wolfowitz and a member of the Defense Policy Board under
Richard Perle in the George W. Bush years,[319] had adopted the Afghan
model too. However, he was not thinking of the 1980s, but of America’s
humiliation there in this century. He wrote, “As the United States
discovered in Iraq and Afghanistan, no matter how large, technologically
advanced, and proficient an army is, motivated insurgents can still inflict
casualties in the tens of thousands.” Apparently the memo had gone out.
Cohen said, “Only one thing, in fact, can cause Russia to rethink and even
abandon its program of conquest: coffins,” and concluded, “That is why the
United States and its Western partners must help nourish an insurgency that
will cause the occupiers to bitterly regret, and then reverse, their attempt to
crush Ukrainian independence.”[320]
It turns out the neoconservatives did learn a lesson after they lost Iraq
War II and Afghanistan: from now on, the U.S. should fight like those who
defeated them.
Not to be outdone, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC) spin-off, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP),
invoked Obama’s supposed failure to support the terrorist insurgency in
Syria with enough money and arms to turn that country into a quagmire for
Russian troops, and argued that now America has a second chance in
Ukraine.[321] U.S. and allied backing for the terrorists in Syria did lead to
the rise of the Islamic State Caliphate and Iraq War III (2014–2017), as well
as enormous expense on the part of Russia and Iran to save their allied
government in Damascus.[322] Even though Russia’s intervention in late-
2015 thwarted U.S. goals there, multiple American figures had gloated at
the time that they loved to see Russia bogged down with expensive new
commitments.[323] This was why the RAND Corporation suggested that
increased support for the terrorists in 2019 could impose extra costs on
Russia.[324]
After the war began, Sean McFate of the Atlantic Council wrote that it
was “time to get sneaky.” The U.S., he said, should send Green Berets to
Poland to train Ukrainian insurgent fighters and arm them with Stinger and
Javelin missiles. He also urged the U.S. to “covertly engineer color
revolutions” against Russia’s allies, more support for their enemies inside
and outside the country, cyberattacks, false-flag operations and political
warfare.[325]
“The CIA’s recent experience in supporting and fighting insurgencies
in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria prepares it well for opposing Russia’s
modern, conventional forces,” former CIA officer Douglas London wrote in
Foreign Affairs that February. He added, “U.S. and Ukrainian officials have
long planned for this day. In all likelihood, a covert program to help
organize the resistance to Russia already has communications
infrastructure, intelligence collection capabilities, and operational plans in
place.”[326]
U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin Kahl also boasted
about the intended effect of prolonging the war. “I think with a high degree
of certainty that Russia will emerge from Ukraine weaker than it went into
the conflict. Militarily weaker, economically weaker, politically and
geopolitically weaker, and more isolated,” he said in March 2022.[327]
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s performance on MSNBC
just after the war began gives further reason to suspect this outcome was
welcome if not preferred:

Remember, the Russians invaded Afghanistan back in 1980.

And although no country went in, they certainly had a lot of
countries supplying arms and advice and even some advisers
to those who were recruited to fight Russia. It didn’t end well
for the Russians. And there were other unintended
consequences, as we know, but the fact is that a very
motivated, and then funded, and armed insurgency basically
drove the Russians out of Afghanistan.

Obviously the similarities are not ones that we should bank

on because the terrain, the development in urban areas is so
different, but I think that is the model that people are now
looking toward. And if there can be sufficient armaments that
get in—and they should be able to get in along some of the
borders between other nations and Ukraine—and keep . . .
 their military and their citizen volunteer soldiers supplied,
that can continue to stymie Russia.

Now, let’s be clear that Russia has overwhelming military

force. But of course they did in Afghanistan as well. They
have also brought a lot of air power to Syria. It took years to
finally defeat Syria in terms of the insurgencies, the
democratic forces—as well as others—who battled the
Russians, the Syrians and the Iranians.

After noting initial Russian setbacks in the invasion, Clinton continued,

“We have to provide sufficient military armaments for the Ukrainian
military and volunteers. And we have to keep tightening the screws.”
Readers really should watch the entire clip to see the way Clinton
smirks at the cute little irony of al Qaeda’s attacks against America and the
entire 20-year terror war, which she directly supported as senator and
secretary of state from 2001 to 2013 and rhetorically ever since. What are
two million dead humans, $10 trillion wasted, the 21st century and third
millennium begun soaking in blood just a decade after the peaceful victory
for the West in the Cold War and for the two decades since? Just a few
small “unintended consequences,” not even worth mentioning by name.
Regarding Syria, she nonsensically used the name of the country to mean
the bin Ladenite terrorists backed by the United States and its allies,
including during the latter two of her four years as secretary of state under
President Obama—the “others” she alluded to—saying Syria had been
“defeated” by its own national government. And still Clinton acknowledged
that after years of war, the U.S.-backed side lost anyway, at the cost of
hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides,[328] not that it seemed to
discourage her.
But perhaps the most compelling bit of information along these lines
came from CBS News’s Margaret Brennan, who wrote on March 1 that
“[g]iven the durability of the Ukrainian resistance and its long history of
pushing Russia back, the U.S. and Western powers do not believe that this
will be a short war.” She added, “The UK foreign secretary estimated it
would be a 10-year war. Lawmakers at the Capitol were told Monday it is
likely to last 10, 15 or 20 years—and that ultimately, Russia will lose.” This
indicates that the Pentagon and intelligence agencies had been planning for
some time to “give them their own Vietnam” again in Ukraine as they are
still giving us in the Middle East and beyond.[329]
In 2014, Washington started to warn that if Ukraine were to fall to
Russia, then other countries would be next. They even called it the “domino
theory,” the same term used to describe the discredited notion that guided
the decision to intervene in Vietnam to stop the Communists.[330] In the
end it was America’s war that spread Communism, in its most nightmarish
form, to the poverty-stricken nation of Cambodia next door.[331] Perhaps
they do not teach that at the good schools anymore.
Putin should have known better, and seemed to, but claimed to see no
other option. On February 1, 2022, he told reporters that the American
government was simply using Ukraine to hurt Russia, saying this could be
done “by drawing us into some armed conflict, compelling its allies in
Europe to impose tough sanctions . . . or by drawing Ukraine into NATO,
deploying attack weapons there and encouraging some Banderites to
resolve the issues of Donbas or Crimea by force.” He concluded, “In this
way, we could be drawn into an armed conflict regardless.”[332]
As historian Jeff Rogg wrote in the Los Angeles Times, declassified
CIA documents show that when they backed OUN-UPA forces in Ukraine
against the Soviets in the 1950s, the stated purpose of the operation was not
to liberate Ukraine, but to “bleed” Russia. He quoted a CIA historian who
wrote that since the Ukrainians had no chance at victory, the anti-Soviet
program “demonstrated a cold ruthlessness” because “America was in
effect encouraging Ukrainians to go to their deaths.” Rogg further warned,
“The CIA needs to be honest with the Ukrainians—and itself—about the
real intent. In the first U.S.-backed insurgency, according to top secret
documents later declassified, American officials intended to use the
Ukrainians as a proxy force to bleed the Soviet Union.” He continued,
“This time, is the primary goal of the paramilitary program to help
Ukrainians liberate their country or to weaken Russia over the course of a
long insurgency that will undoubtedly cost as many Ukrainian lives as
Russian lives, if not more?”[333]
Instead of negotiating an early end to the war, the U.S. foreign policy
establishment preferred to see an endless conflict with Russia in Europe. All
they talked about was supporting this new cross between the UPA and the
mujahideen to “kill Russians.”
Biden also ordered an increase of troops and equipment in the Baltics,
Romania and Poland, though not to levels truly indicating preparation for
war, just enough to be the tripwire for one.[334]
Hammer and Anvil

After Ukraine’s initial success at repelling Russian forces, the

administration launched a massive resupply effort.[335] In mid-April, they
announced expanding intelligence-sharing and increasing military support
by another $800 million,[336] including heavier weapons such as anti-
aircraft missiles, howitzers, drone boats, helicopters, tanks, armored
personnel carriers, advanced radars and laser-guided rockets.[337] This
brought the total since the start of the war up to more than $2.6 billion in
weapons. The Russians then responded that these shipments were
“legitimate targets”[338] and warned the U.S. and its allies to stop sending
arms, as they were “adding fuel” to the war and could have “unpredictable
consequences.”[339]
In late March 2022, British theoretician of American empire Niall
Ferguson[340] wrote that anyone who was anyone in Washington knew the
plan was to extend the war. He quoted a senior official brimming with
hubris: “The only end game now is the end of [the] Putin regime. Until
then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never
be welcomed back into the community of nations.” He noted they were
saying the same thing in London, and paraphrased the great consensus:
“[T]he UK’s No. 1 option is for the conflict to be extended and thereby
bleed Putin.” This, he said, was why they were not trying to negotiate, and
why Biden was so quick to call Putin a war criminal.[341]
Bloomberg News reported in late March that France and Germany
were still pushing for peace. President Macron and Chancellor Scholz were
both still talking about negotiating a ceasefire, while the Poles and Baltic
states were pushing for escalation.[342] On April 5, the Post ran a story
which explained that the Ukrainians were being used by the Americans and
by other Eastern European states as a sacrificial pawn in their game, based
on the assumed premise that Putin would just reinvade later no matter what.
They said leaders of neighboring countries did not even want Zelensky to
promise not to join the alliance. “That leads to an awkward reality: For
some in NATO, it’s better for the Ukrainians to keep fighting, and dying,
than to achieve a peace that comes too early or at too high a cost to Kyiv
and the rest of Europe.” A “senior European diplomat” told them, “The
problem is that if it ends now, there is a kind of time for Russia to regroup,
and it will restart, under this or another pretext.”[343] Around the same
time, Biden called for war crimes trials for Putin and his men,[344] while
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told Congress he
expected the war to last for years.[345]
Richard Haass, the former head of the State Department’s Policy
Planning staff under W. Bush, president of the Council on Foreign Relations
and Iraq war supporter,[346] said the establishment consensus was to keep
the war going. “The elements of a strategy for a long-term, open-ended war
are well known,” he wrote, adding that the Biden administration should
give Ukraine weapons, ammunition, training and intelligence support, build
up NATO forces and boycott Russian gas to put pressure on them as soon as
possible.[347]
Turkish Foreign Minister Çavuşoğlu told CNN Türk, “There are
countries within NATO who want the war to continue. They want Russia to
become weaker.”[348]
 As Secretary Blinken explained to NPR on March 16, 2022, “We will
want to make sure . . . that anything that’s done is, in effect, irreversible,
that this can’t happen again, that Russia won’t pick up and do exactly what
it’s doing in a year or two years or three years.”[349] Soon after, Blinken
and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin both made trips to Kiev, boasting that
their goal was to continue to arm Ukraine to “weaken Russia.” Austin said
that “we want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the
kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”[350]
In the Times, reporter David Sanger explained the official shift in
policy to one of deliberately prolonging the war. He said Austin’s statement
“was acknowledging a transformation of the conflict, from a battle over
control of Ukraine to one that pits Washington more directly against
Moscow.” Sanger continued, “[B]y casting the American goal as a
weakened Russian military, [the Biden team is] becoming more explicit
about the future they see: years of continuous contest for power and
influence with Moscow that in some ways resembles what President John F.
Kennedy termed the ‘long twilight struggle’ of the Cold War.” He said that
recent hawkish statements by Blinken also reflected a deliberate choice “to
talk more openly and optimistically about the possibility of Ukrainian
victory in the next few months.”[351]
After telling the Times that these statements were deliberately
authorized by the White House, Biden then publicly chastised Austin and
Blinken for them.[352] But then, a few weeks later, his men told the Times
that it was still the policy, Biden just had to pretend to say that. “The
president called Mr. Austin to remonstrate him for the comment, then
directed his staff to leak the fact that he had done so.” They then officially
confirmed it again: “[O]fficials acknowledged that was indeed the long-
term strategy, even if Mr. Biden did not want to publicly provoke Mr. Putin
into escalation,” which he had obviously also authorized them to do.[353]
Author Tom Stevenson also wrote in the newspaper of record that the
strategy had changed from helping Ukraine survive to a new “bleed Russia”
plan: “Whereas once the primary Western objective was to defend against
the invasion, it has become the permanent strategic attrition of Russia.” He
said, “The outline of the new policy began to emerge on April 13, when the
Pentagon called a convocation of the eight biggest American arms
companies to prepare arms transfers on a grand scale,” and the resulting
$39.8 billion weapons package had marked a complete “abandonment of
diplomatic efforts.” Stevenson concluded: “When I was in Ukraine during
the first weeks of the war, even staunch Ukrainian nationalists expressed
views far more pragmatic than those that are routine in America now.”[354]
Jake Sullivan said much the same in April: “At the end of the day, what
we want to see is a free and independent Ukraine, a weakened and isolated
Russia, and a stronger, more unified, more determined West. We believe
that all three of those objectives are in sight.”[355]
British Armed Forces Minister James Heappey wrote in the Telegraph
that “Putin must be made to fail. His failure must be complete.” Sounding
like David Wurmser selling Iraq War II to weaken Iran,[356] he started
daydreaming about all the wonderful after-effects of the war. Failure, he
said, will result in “the Russian people [being] empowered to see how little
he cares for them. In showing them that, Putin’s days as President will
surely be numbered and so too will those of the kleptocratic elite that
surround him. He’ll lose power and he won’t get to choose his successor,”
and all for the low cost of a few hundred thousand ordinary lives.[357]
In late March 2022, the Times reported on the way the Biden
administration was parsing the type and quantities of weapons being sent
into Ukraine: they could have anti-tank missiles, but not planes; drones, but
not “cyberwar” capabilities. They had ruled out putting U.S. or other NATO
planes into Ukraine to enforce a no-fly zone as Ukraine was requesting, “a
move American officials fear could risk turning a regional war into a global
conflagration,” but were still sending surface-to-air missiles that could also
shoot down Russian jets. So they were again “calibrating” just the right
amount of intervention to avoid a violent reaction. Emphasizing how
dangerous this all was, the Times added, “As a matter of international law,
the provision of weaponry and intelligence to the Ukrainian Army has made
the United States a cobelligerent.” Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former CIA
and National Intelligence Council official from the Center for a New
American Security[358] told the Times the administration was “trying to
figure out how do you get right up to the line without crossing over in a
way that would risk direct confrontation with Russia.”[359]
Sullivan told The Atlantic that July, “[I]t is our strategic objective to
ensure that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not a strategic success for Putin,
but that it is a strategic failure for him. That means both that he be denied
his objectives in Ukraine, and that Russia pay a longer-term price in terms
of the elements of its national power.”[360]

Confidence Is High
Presidents Biden[361] and Zelensky[362] both at times admitted that they
would have to concede Russian sovereignty over Crimea and the
“independence” of the Donbas,[363] just as they both periodically
acknowledged that Ukraine would eventually have to foreswear NATO
membership[364] and maintain neutrality between Russia and the West.
But the U.S. government and media launched a massive propaganda
campaign on behalf of the war denying that reality, based on Ukraine’s pure
victimhood combined with its certain ability to turn the tide and defeat
Russia if only the West would lend a hand. They swore the war began with
an “unprovoked attack” by Russia—they must have repeated it a hundred
thousand times[365]—and that the policy was to help Ukraine take back
“every square inch” of territory lost, “including Crimea.”[366] The talented
video editor Matt Orfalea put together a nearly unbelievable montage of
these ridiculous claims by government officials and their media
handmaidens that Ukraine was winning and was sure to humiliate Russia
and drive them out in disgrace.[367] “Russia has the second strongest army
in Ukraine,” liberal Democrats who do not know the first thing about
Ukraine, Russia, war or anything else all joked to each other with the
confidence of consensus at a flat-Earth convention.[368]
CFR president Richard Haass[369] and Benjamin Wittes of the
Brookings Institution[370] both publicly threatened regime change in
Moscow in February 2022. Republicans and Democrats of all descriptions
began demanding no-fly zones over Ukraine and escalated intervention
against Russia there. The lesson of what can happen when the U.S. does so
was completely lost on them.
 Around the country, people bought in. They put up Ukrainian flags
everywhere, like yellow ribbons during Iraq War I—at the local civic
center,[371] at the car dealership,[372] in your neighbor’s yard.[373]
Americans who had no idea where Ukraine was,[374] or assumed it was
already part of Russia a few weeks before, were now on board for the
current thing. It was a massive influence operation.
The pre-Musk center-left liberal Twitter swarm went wild. According
to social networking analyst John Robb, they even got out ahead of the
White House with their demonization of the Russians, truly helping to
preclude the political possibility of productive talks before and just after the
war began.[375]
Popular culture, mostly led by Western governments,[376] went nuts:
Officials in New York poured out Russian vodka,[377] while the governor
of Utah banned it from all state liquor stores by executive order.[378] Rep.
Eric Swalwell said the U.S. should “kick every Russian student” out of
American universities,[379] while the Canadian Hockey League banned
Russian and Belarusian players from their import draft.[380] A private
hospital in Munich banned Russian and Belarusian patients,[381] a Russian
singer was fired from the New York Metropolitan Opera,[382] a Russian
star tennis player was excluded from Wimbledon[383] and Russian teams
were banned from international soccer.[384] Russian and Belarusian
runners were prohibited from the Boston Marathon,[385] Dostoevsky was
at least temporarily banned from a university in Italy,[386] the Welsh
Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra banned Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture,[387]
a Russian cellist who played with a Ukrainian pianist and denounced the
war, was still canceled in Switzerland,[388] the European Film Academy
launched a global boycott of Russian films.[389] Social media giants
Facebook and Instagram, meanwhile, lifted their bans against calls for
violence against Russians,[390] while the former ended its prohibition on
praise for the Azov Battalion.[391] Even Russian cats were banned from
international competition.[392]

The Censorship-Industrial Complex

After Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he allowed journalist Matt Taibbi
and a few others to dig through what have been titled the “Twitter Files.”
Taibbi and his partners revealed a vast apparatus: the “Censorship-Industrial
Complex”[393] or “Censorship Enterprise,” as one federal judge put it,
which unsurprisingly had its origins in the war on terrorism. After the dirty
war in Syria backfired to fuel the rise of the ISIS Caliphate, and the U.S.
switched sides in the war again,[394] they set up the Global Engagement
Center in the Department of Homeland Security with the goal of
deradicalizing those they had radicalized. From there an entire “anti-
disinformation” censorship-NGO complex has arisen, looking for easy
work. Their next job was enforcing social media orthodoxy in the
Russiagate hoax, before moving on to censoring any question about the
origin of Covid-19. And then Ukraine. If people will not choose correct
narratives on these crucial topics, they will simply have their reach
squashed by the algorithm until there is no longer any point in logging on,
or might be banned altogether.
 As reporter Susan Schmidt and co-authors wrote, “What the Mueller
investigation didn’t accomplish in ousting Trump from office, it did
accomplish in birthing a vast new public-private bureaucracy devoted to
stopping ‘mis-, dis-, and malinformation.’” They added, “The ‘Censorship-
Industrial Complex’ is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the
‘hybrid warfare’ age.”[395]
Another un-American agenda is the creation of blacklists to be used by
major online advertising groups like Xander, lest their clients be accused of
supporting “disinformation.” The Global Disinformation Index (GDI)—a
British group with American affiliates—along with the Pentagon-backed
alleged fact-checkers NewsGuard and others wage a supposedly private-
sector economic war against independent media. The GDI’s advisory board
includes former NATO spokesman Ben Nimmo—now the global lead for
threat intelligence at Facebook’s parent company Meta—and Anne
Applebaum, war hawk columnist at The New Republic, The Atlantic and the
Washington Post, and wife of Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski.
[396] They especially targeted independent conservative media such as the
Federalist and the American Conservative magazine, which questioned
dominant Russia and Russiagate narratives in the preceding years.[397]
With each crisis our government incites, We the People lose more of
our freedom.[398]

OceanofPDF.com
Google Threats

On April 13, 2022, Google AdSense warned their “partners”:

Dear Publisher,

Due to the war in Ukraine, we will pause monetization of

content that exploits, dismisses, or condones the war. . . .

This pause includes, but is not limited to, claims that imply
victims are responsible for their own tragedy or similar
instances of victim blaming, such as claims that Ukraine is
committing genocide or deliberately attacking its own
citizens.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team[399]

Their censorship guidelines are based on ridiculous

mischaracterizations, dissenting opinions and nonsensical begged questions
from the start. Is Google’s advertising department telling us the people of
the Donbas are not Ukrainians? Or is it their claim that there has not been a
war going on between the central government and the people of that region
for most of the last decade? They do not say. If Russia allegedly kills a few
hundred civilians in Bucha,[400] that can still be called “genocide,” but if
the Kiev regime kills thousands in the Donbas, your webpage better not
characterize it that way or you will suffer lost revenue at the hands of the
CIA-created[401] Western-world monopoly search engine’s algorithms.
Those who do not like it can just learn to code the banning of others.

Yellow Journalism

Chemical Weapons

Google would have their work cut out for them cracking down on “content
that exploits” the war, if they were not only targeting dissenters. The
government lied about this conflict from the start. For example, for some
reason, on April 6, 2022, NBC’s Ken Dilanian[402] wrote a story about
U.S. intelligence agencies lying to the world, including the American
people, about the war, beginning with warnings that the Russians were
preparing to use chemical weapons against Ukrainian forces and civilians, a
claim repeated by the president himself.[403] But three intelligence sources
told him it was just a bluff. There was “no evidence” Russia had brought
such munitions even “near” Ukraine. “Multiple U.S. officials acknowledged
that the U.S. has used information as a weapon even when confidence in the
accuracy of the information wasn’t high,” continuing, “Sometimes it has
used low-confidence intelligence for deterrent effect, as with chemical
agents, and other times, as an official put it, the U.S. is just ‘trying to get
inside Putin’s head.’”[404]
In another example, Dilanian cited popular media rumors that Putin
was isolated and misled by his advisers, which two of his sources said came
from speculation rather than real intelligence. And their claim that Russia
had turned to China to ask for help was said to have been only “a warning
to China not to do so.”[405]

Babi Yar

They lied at the beginning of the war, when, on March 1, 2022, the
Russians bombed a Kiev TV antenna, a symbolic strike probably meant to
echo Bill Clinton’s strikes on Serbian TV in 1999.[406] The U.S.
government and media claimed the Russians had instead bombed Babi Yar,
[407] the site of a massive Nazi massacre of Jews during the Holocaust.
[408] But that was a damned lie. Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai went
there and assured readers that “the closest hit to Babi Yar was in the Kyiv
media and television tower complex, about 300 meters from the new
monument, and about a kilometer from the old monument to the victims of
the massacre in World War II.”[409] The Post also quoted the Israeli
reporter saying it was not true, even as they pretended that bombing a
separate target somewhat near the massacre site was the same thing.[410]

The Ghost of Kiev

The War Party’s public relations machine went into overdrive immediately
after Russia’s invasion. For example, it pushed the story of the great
Ukrainian fighter ace, “The Ghost of Kiev,” who through his great patriotic
valor had destroyed at least six Russian fighters in Top Gun-style dogfights
in just a day, more than 40 in all.[411] Fox News insisted “the Ghost of
Kyiv is real.”[412] Who is this legend we have no reason to believe exists,
asked Newsweek,[413] while Rep. Adam Kinzinger fell for it in an instant.
[414] The claims were later debunked by the Ukrainian air force itself.[415]
The public relations men had literally just recycled some old cutscene
footage from a video game.[416]

Snake Island

The Ukrainians came up with a fantastic story about how a few of their
soldiers stationed at tiny Snake Island had bravely taken on the Russian
navy, telling them, “Russian warship, go fuck yourself,” and fighting until
the bitter end.[417] The men “died heroically,” President Zelensky said.
[418] The story was a hoax. Never happened. They just surrendered.[419]
But what great war propaganda. The papers and cable TV news loved it and
repeated it to their credulous audiences.[420] Truth is the first casualty in
war, as they say. But nobody believes in the word of the boy who cried wolf
for very long.[421]

Hit Lists

Just before the invasion, the Washington Post breathlessly reported on

American intelligence claiming Russia had lists of people to hunt down and
murder as soon as they invaded. A State Department official wrote to the
UN that they should expect “Russian . . . abuses . . . including targeted
killings, kidnappings/forced disappearances, unjust detentions, and the use
of torture.” Targets were to include “Russian and Belarusian dissidents in
exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, and vulnerable
populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons.”
They added, “Specifically, we have credible information that indicates
Russian forces are creating lists of identified Ukrainians to be killed or sent
to camps following a military occupation.”[422] This was nonsense. When
asked about it, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov rightly mocked the
reporter’s stupidity: “Do you realize that this is an absolute canard, a lie? It
is absolute fiction. There is no such list. It’s a fake.”[423] In retrospect, that
stuff about “LGBTQI+ persons” in danger was a little on the nose for the
Post audience.

Mariupol Theater

Amnesty International said the Russians bombed a theater in Mariupol on

March 16, 2022, “killing at least a dozen people and likely many
more.”[424] But the original claim was that 300 innocent people, mostly
children, hiding in the basement had been slaughtered.[425] The AP then
raised it to 600, but since they had no evidence of that, they simply assumed
that Russia had removed all the bodies of those they “estimated” had died.
[426] But Amnesty debunked the AP’s propaganda, concluding the true
count was likely “much smaller than previously reported.”[427]
Journalist Max Blumenthal pointed out[428] that a Russian reporter
had revealed what he said were plans by the Azov Battalion to blow up the
theater just days before, and that at least a few people on scene had blamed
Azov for the explosion.[429] They did have motive for such a provocation.
On March 7, Azov commander Denys Prokopenko put out a message on
YouTube begging for an American “no-fly zone” over Ukraine,[430] which
was a major talking point of the Ukrainian government and much of the
media before the idea had been definitively shot down by American military
officials.[431] One attempted debunking of Blumenthal’s analysis said that
since Ukraine was unlikely to get a no-fly zone, that is all you need to know
to dismiss the claim.[432] But as Blumenthal showed, Azov fighters on
scene were asking for one, while Zelensky was in Washington begging for a
no-fly zone that same day, just hours before.[433] The theater attack was
immediately seized upon by U.S. politicians demanding one as well.[434] If
the Russians were responsible, then damn them, but there is ample reason to
doubt the official narrative, beginning with the media being forced to revise
their initial casualty numbers by many hundreds.

The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Plant

The Ukrainians tried numerous times to convince Americans that the

Russians were bombing the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant,[435] when
Moscow had already taken control of it at the beginning of the war and it
was Kiev who was attacking. They had launched a massive, failed attempt
to retake the plant in October 2022.[436] Its power function was shut down,
although the facility still required some power to run safety and heat
exchange systems.
In early April 2024, after the Russians accused Ukraine of attacking the
facility with drones, the Ukrainians said it was a false flag meant to
undermine support for their side.[437] Neither have a clear motive to
damage it other than to accuse their enemies of doing so. The International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) did not attribute blame for the strikes but
demanded they stop immediately.[438]

Viagra

If a ridiculous lie is good enough to start one war, why not two? After
falsely claiming Muammar Gaddafi was passing out Viagra to his troops to
rape every woman and girl on their way to Benghazi as an excuse to start
that war in the spring of 2011,[439] they used the same lie against Russia in
the 2022– war. The UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in
Conflict Pramila Patten lied: “When women are held for days and raped,
when you start to rape little boys and men, when you see a series of genital
mutilations, when you hear women testify about Russian soldiers equipped
with Viagra, it’s clearly a military strategy.”[440] Headline writers and TV
news readers around the world repeated it to the masses.[441] Yet the
investigation she referred to accused Russian forces of committing nine
rapes and contained no mention of the drug at all.[442] Patten later admitted
to Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus that she was just repeating
unconfirmed rumors, telling them when asked if she had any evidence, “No,
no, no. . . . [I]t’s not my role to go and investigate. I sit in . . . an office in
New York—and I have an advocacy mandate.” And then she conceded,
“The investigation is going on by the Human Rights Monitoring Team and
the International Commission of Inquiry. In their reports so far, there’s
nothing about Viagra.”[443]

Crystallizing Public Opinion

Just like with the wars in Afghanistan[444] and Iraq—and both wars’ failed
“surges”—the attack on Libya and allied support for the bin Ladenites in
Syria, the American people were fed a massive load of propaganda by the
government and media to raise the tension and get them excited for the
conflict. The bad guys were very bad. They needed to be stopped. Thank
goodness the U.S.A. was here to play Superman and deliver the world from
evil again. Just imagine, giving Viagra to soldiers to commit mass rapes on
a national scale. Good men knew there was only one way to deal with scum
like in the narrative they were told.

The Negotiations Were Short

U.S., UK Prevent Peace

Early indications that Russia and Ukraine could achieve a quick negotiated
solution soon gave way to the reality that the Biden administration was
instead determined to drag out the war to “weaken Russia.”
One day after Russian forces invaded Ukraine, State Department
spokesman Ned Price was asked about the proposed terms to begin
negotiations. Though an innocent third person might have assumed that
achieving a ceasefire and early end to the fighting would be the highest
priority, Price made it clear this was not the case with the American
administration. “Those are not the conditions for real diplomacy,” he said.
[445]
As Secretary Blinken confirmed in October 2022, the only time he had
spoken to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov since February 15, 2022, nine
days before the invasion, was over the release of the basketball player
Brittney Griner, who had been convicted of bringing a THC vape pen into
the country.[446] Otherwise, the policy was “Do not engage.”[447]
Two days after the war began, Zelensky said he wanted to negotiate.
“We are not afraid to talk to Russia. We are not afraid to say everything
about security guarantees for our state. We are not afraid to talk about
neutral status. We are not in NATO now.” But he said the main question was
“what security guarantees will we have? And what specific countries will
give them? We need to talk about the end of this invasion. We need to talk
about a ceasefire.”[448]

Belarus Talks

The two sides met in Gomel, Belarus on February 28. Though they did not
make a deal, they departed on positive terms and agreed to talk again on
March 3.[449] Early attempts at negotiation by Belarusian President
Alexander Lukashenko, Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Turkish
President Recep Erdogan, though they showed some promise,[450] went
nowhere without American interest or support. The Financial Times
reported on March 16 that negotiators had “made significant progress” on a
ceasefire deal, based on a Russian withdrawal in exchange for neutrality
and limits on the size of Ukraine’s armed forces. They said Lavrov had also
told them they were very close to a deal.[451]

Bennett
Both sides trusted former Prime Minister Bennett, so at the same time their
agents were meeting in Belarus, Putin and Zelensky were communicating
through him, outlining the major points of the ceasefire. As Bennett later
explained in an interview, Putin promised not to kill Zelensky and dropped
his demand for the “disarmament of Ukraine.” In return, Zelensky vowed to
drop his attempts to join NATO. Instead, they agreed on something they
called the “Israeli model,” which would keep Ukraine outside of NATO, but
well-armed enough to guarantee its own independence. “I had the
impression at the time that both sides were very interested in a ceasefire,”
Bennett said.[452] But the Americans decided to “crush Putin rather than to
negotiate.” The former PM did not seem to disagree with the policy, but
was just being honest about it. “I think there was a decision by the west (a
legitimate one) that right now what’s needed is to keep hitting Putin and not
to reach a ceasefire. . . . I’ll tell you what—I’m not sure they were
mistaken.” He said he was merely “acting as an intermediary,” adding,
“Everything I did was coordinated to the smallest detail not just with the
U.S. but also Germany and France.”
When asked if the U.S. stopped the negotiations, Bennett replied, “Yes,
basically they stopped it and at the time I thought they were making a
mistake.” He continued, “[T]here’s a not-too-bad chance they could have
reached [an agreement] if they didn’t stop it. Not for sure. But I’m not
arguing that it was correct to try. In real time I thought it was correct to
reach a ceasefire—now I don’t know.”[453]
Though Bennett later tried to walk back his claims, saying there was
only a 50 percent chance of making a deal at the time, it is obvious he was
being honest the first time and trying to get out of trouble for it.[454]

Fiona Spills

It was only later we found out that was exactly what had happened: both the
Ukrainians and Russians had been prepared to make serious concessions to
bring the war to an early end.[455] The diplomats had ironed out a few
differences, and it was time for the presidents to meet to make the bigger
decisions. Fiona Hill confirmed in Foreign Affairs in the fall of 2022 that
they had been on the verge of a deal, citing former U.S. officials. “In April
2022, Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively
agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” she explained.
“Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled
part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine
would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security
guarantees from a number of countries.”[456]

Nay No Ned

On March 21, State Department spokesman Price shot down a question

about the peace talks, saying the president had “made it very clear that he is
open to a diplomatic solution that does not compromise the core principles
at the heart of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine.” He elaborated, “[T]his is
a war that is in many ways bigger than Russia, it’s bigger than Ukraine.”
This was about the whole world order. “[T]here are principles that are at
stake here that have universal applicability everywhere, [including] the
principle that each and every country has a sovereign right . . . to determine
for itself with whom it will choose to associate in terms of its alliances.”
The reporter got his drift. “But does that mean that if under pressure of
negotiation and war, that Zelensky gives up the previous desire to join
NATO . . . that the U.S. wouldn’t go along with . . . a negotiated
agreement?” Price refused to answer.[457]
At that time, Kiev was in a better position to negotiate than at any
point after. And by the end of March, Zelensky was signaling that he was
willing to make major concessions to achieve an early end to the war.[458]
As Anchal Vohra wrote in Foreign Policy, “These include a commitment to
Ukrainian neutrality with respect to military alliances, a rejection of any
nuclear arsenal, and an acceptance of Russian control over Ukraine’s
eastern regions.” She said, “He even indicated a readiness to change
language policies that had disadvantaged Russian speakers. Zelensky’s
announcements gave the face-to-face talks convening this week in Istanbul
some hope of a ceasefire.”[459]
When White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki was asked what the U.S.
was doing to encourage diplomacy, she responded only that “[t]he role that
we feel we can play most effectively is by continuing to provide a broad
range of security assistance, military assistance to them as well as economic
and humanitarian assistance to strengthen their hand in these
negotiations.”[460]

Turkey
On March 29, the parties convened in Istanbul, where they issued the
Istanbul Communiqué based on Ukraine’s proposals. The key concession
from the Ukrainian side was an offer of “permanent” neutrality, to refrain
from developing nuclear weapons, recognize de facto Russian sovereignty
over Crimea, punt on the question of the future of the Donbas and promise
not to host any foreign forces on their soil. In exchange they would receive
security guarantees from Western nations and Russia, including a promise
to be allowed to join the EU.[461] These represented major concessions by
Russia compared to its attempt to sack the Ukrainian capital and achieve
regime change just weeks before.[462] For their part, “Russian negotiators
said they would look into these proposals while Russia [would] ‘drastically
reduce’ military activity near the cities of Chernihiv and Kyiv ‘to increase
mutual trust and create the necessary conditions for further
negotiations.’”[463]

Alexey Arestovich

Then-Zelensky adviser Alexey Arestovich, the same man who had seemed
to predict the war and accept its inevitability three years before,[464] later
said that the talks had been “completely successful.” Having participated in
the Istanbul negotiations, he explained that “it was the most profitable
agreement we could have done. . . . We opened the champagne bottle. We
had discussed demilitarization, denazification, issues concerning the
Russian language, Russian church and much else.” He continued, “And that
month, it was the question of the amount of Ukrainian armed forces in
peacetime, and President Zelensky said, ‘I could decide this question
indirectly with Mr. Putin.’” Arestovich added, “The Istanbul agreements
were a protocol of intentions and was 90 percent prepared for directly
meeting with Putin. That was to be the next step of negotiations.”[465]

Boris Johnson

But then UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson came to town with an offer of
weapons[466] and a message from the Biden administration: now was not
the time to negotiate. They should instead increase the pressure on Putin. If
Ukraine made a deal with Russia, they could not count on U.S. and UK
support. So the talks were canceled. This tragic tale was told in extensive
reporting by Ukrainska Pravda—a paper with a similar name but no ties to
the Russian publication. In fact, it is owned by Dragon Capital,[467] in a
fund managed by Soros Fund Management LLC,[468] and has a strong pro-
Kiev slant. They said Johnson “appeared in the capital almost without
warning” with two messages from Biden. The first was, “Putin should be
pressured, not negotiated with,” and the second was that “even if Ukraine is
ready to sign some agreements on guarantees with Putin, they are not.”
Then they got right to the heart of the issue: “[T]he collective West . . . now
felt that Putin was not really as powerful as they had previously imagined,
and that here was a chance to ‘press him.’”[469]
As Michael von der Schulenburg, a former UN assistant secretary-
general, later explained: “As late as 27 March 2022, Zelensky had shown
the courage to defend the preliminary results of the Ukrainian-Russian
peace negotiations in public in front of Russian journalists—despite the fact
that NATO had by then already decided at its special summit on 24 March
2022 . . . to oppose these peace negotiations. In the end, Zelensky gave in to
NATO pressures and opted for a continuation of the war.”[470]
Lavrov later said that after a workable proposal was on the table, in
mid-April the Ukrainians simply broke off talks.[471] Putin complained
that after Istanbul, “Kyiv representatives voiced quite a positive response to
our proposals. These proposals concerned above all ensuring Russia’s
security and interests. But a peaceful settlement obviously did not suit the
West, which is why, after certain compromises were coordinated, Kyiv was
actually ordered to wreck all these agreements.”[472] He was obviously
being a major hypocrite in saying this, since he was surely playing his own
role in the conflict. But he was not wrong.

Multiple Confirmations

Zelensky adviser David Arakhamia, who had led Ukrainian delegations at

Liaskavichy and Kamyanyuki in Belarus, conceded, “They really hoped
almost to the last moment that they would force us to sign such an
agreement so that we would take neutrality. It was the most important thing
for them.” He continued, “They were prepared to end the war if we agreed
to—as Finland once did—neutrality, and committed that we would not join
NATO. In fact, this was the key point. Everything else was simply rhetoric
and political ‘seasoning.’”[473] Though he backtracked a bit afterwards,
Arakhamia also confirmed that “when we returned from Istanbul, Boris
Johnson came to Kyiv and said that we would not sign anything with them
at all, and let’s just fight.”[474]
 The London Times ran a piece citing Johnson’s later denials, but the
article included confirmation from Downing Street[475] that he had “urged
against any negotiations with Russia on terms that gave credence to the
Kremlin’s false narrative for the invasion, but stressed that this was a
decision for the Ukrainian government.” Yeah, sure it was. The paper
paraphrased the ex-PM explaining that “during the discussions with
Zelensky after the Istanbul talks, he had been concerned about the nature of
any potential agreement.”[476] Johnson told the Wall Street Journal, “I was
a bit worried at that stage. I could not see for the life of me what the deal
could be, and I thought that any deal with Putin was going to be pretty
sordid.” Johnson says he told Zelensky, “[A]s far as I am concerned, Putin
must fail and Ukraine must be entitled to retain full sovereignty and
independence. . . . It’s the Ukrainians who are fighting and dying. But we
would back Ukraine a thousand percent.”[477]
He was doing a better job of confirming the story than denying it.
Ukraine’s former deputy foreign minister, Oleksandr Chalyi, said that
Putin’s government seemed to be sincere about reaching a deal, eventually
dropping demands for demilitarization and de-Nazification.[478] “We
negotiated with [the] Russian delegation practically two months in March
and April [for a] possible peaceful settlement.”[479] He also said, “We were
very close in mid-April 2022 to finalizing the war with a peace
settlement. . . . [A] week after Putin started his aggression, he concluded he
had made a huge mistake and tried to do everything possible to conclude an
agreement with Ukraine.”[480]
 Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder explained that he had
been asked by the Ukrainians to help negotiate. He said the Russians
wanted five major points addressed before they would withdraw from the
country: Kiev needed to renounce NATO membership, protect bilingualism
in law, accept strong federalism for the Donbas, receive security guarantees
from the UNSC and Germany, and recognize Russian sovereignty over
Crimea.
However, Schröder said, “The only ones who could regulate war with
Ukraine are the Americans. At the peace negotiations in Istanbul with
[Ukrainian diplomat] Rustem Umerov in March 2022, the Ukrainians did
not agree on peace because they were not allowed to,” adding, “They had to
ask the Americans about everything.” He said Umerov had agreed that
Ukraine no longer wanted NATO membership and would relegalize the use
of Russian in official documents in the east. “But in the end nothing
happened,” Schröder said. “My impression: nothing could happen, because
everything else was decided in Washington. That was fatal.” Referring to
the story that the talks had only failed because of the reported massacre at
Bucha, outside of Kiev,[481] Schröder said he believed the Americans had
scotched the talks before news of the killings had become known. He said
he thought Putin had made a terrible error in launching the war, but also
stressed the perceived threat posed by Ukraine’s integration into NATO.
[482]
In April 2022, CNN Türk reported that Turkish Foreign Minister
Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu accused the U.S. of wanting to extend the war. “After the
talks in Istanbul, we did not think that the war would take this long.”
However, he added, “following the NATO foreign ministers’ meeting, it
was the impression that . . . there are those within the NATO member states
that want the war to continue, let the war continue and Russia gets weaker.
They don’t care much about the situation in Ukraine.”[483] The outlet also
later carried an article by AK Party deputy chairman Numan Kurtulmus,
which said the U.S. and its allies “are launching a process for the
prolongation of this war. . . . Someone’s trying not to end the war. The
United States considers prolongation of war as its benefit,” adding, “Putin-
Zelenski were going to sign, but someone didn’t want to.”[484]
The Journal later described what they called “punishing” terms set out
in the April 2022 draft deal, which were not so unreasonable. They said the
document “appears loosely based on the 1990 treaty that created a united
Germany, where Soviet Union troops quit East Germany on the condition
that the country renounce nuclear weapons and cap the size of its army.”
They agreed to a “permanently neutral state that doesn’t participate in
military blocs,” though it would be allowed to join the European Union.
The deal would also have prevented them from rebuilding their military
with Western support and would leave Crimea under what the Journal
called “de facto” control, which is at once laughable nonsense and at the
same time possibly meant to obscure the fact that Ukraine may have been
able to keep Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson if they had
negotiated then. Zelensky himself said that the Russians wanted “neutrality
and the nuclear-free status of our state. . . . This is the most important point.
This was the first point of principle for the Russian Federation.”[485]
“Ultimately,” the Journal wrote, no deal was reached because “the scale of
Russian war crimes in Ukraine became apparent, Ukraine’s military
fortunes improved and the West poured in weapons to bolster Kyiv”
instead.[486]
In June 2024, the New York Times finally published a draft of the
Istanbul Communiqué, which, again, had been written by the Ukrainians,
showing they had offered to promise not to seek membership in the NATO
alliance or allow foreign troops to be stationed there, and accept the
occupation of the Donbas, though not Russian sovereignty over it. They
showed that the Russians had backed down from their demand that Kiev
recognize their sovereignty over Crimea, deciding to just leave it out of the
treaty altogether. “We managed to find a very real compromise,” Ukrainian
negotiator Oleksandr Chalyi said. “We were very close in the middle of
April, in the end of April, to finalize our war with some peaceful
settlement.” Apparently the Russians were even softening their position on
leaving forces in the Donbas, an issue which, like Crimea, they had already
agreed to settle later. The Times claimed that “a seven-point list targeted
Ukraine’s national identity, including a ban on naming places after
Ukrainian independence fighters,” as though they were talking about the
American heroes George Washington and Nathanael Greene[487] rather
than Adolf Hitler’s vile henchmen Stepan Bandera and Roman Shukhevych,
[488] and as though the Russians were being insanely petty rather than
eminently reasonable on that point. Did Gen. Eisenhower allow the
Germans to keep Nazi street names and monuments in West Berlin?[489]
In September 2024, Nuland herself finally confirmed U.S.-UK
intervention against the deal, telling an interviewer: “The Ukrainians began
asking for advice on where this thing was going, and it became clear to
us . . . that Putin’s main condition was buried in an annex to this document
that they were working on. And it included limits on the precise kinds of
weapons systems that Ukraine could have after the deal.” She added, “I
think that plenty of people, and perhaps Zelensky himself, were very
suspicious that they were about to fall into a trap, and if Putin could have
gotten that . . . completely neutered, demilitarized Ukraine for nothing, why
wouldn’t he take it?”[490]
So, in keeping with the Warren Zimmermann-William Taylor template,
[491] U.S. officials derided the deal as “unilateral disarmament,” while the
Poles, fearing French and German pressure to sign, challenged other NATO
members at a meeting, asking, “Which one of you would sign this?” After
further talks, Ukrainian demands for security guarantees from other nations,
including the U.S., and Russian insistence that they retain veto power over
any such intervention should the two go back to war, the deal fell apart.
[492]

No Real Talks Since

And that was the last time for, as of now, more than two and a half years
that the two leaders came close to an agreement.
Johnson and Biden both also publicly trashed the idea of peace talks,
with the PM comparing Putin to a “crocodile.” For his part, on March 24
and 26, in comments in Brussels and Warsaw, Biden put major emphasis on
new arms transfers and preparations for a long war, playing down the
prospect of negotiations and declaring the United States was not a party to
the ongoing talks. It was in these comments in Warsaw that Biden declared:
“For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power!” Though his staff later
walked back the statement, this may have been designed to ratchet up
tensions and help to sabotage the ongoing talks.[493]
Unfortunately, American leadership had never been less capable.
President Biden was far past his prime. “The White House”—whoever that
is—routinely walked back his reckless statements. In January 2022, Biden
seemed to imply that the NATO alliance would not react if Russia simply
made a “minor incursion” into areas the rebels already controlled,
essentially inviting Russian forces in. Then the people who ostensibly work
for him clarified he did not mean that. He did not mean anything by it at all.
[494] Biden threatened that the U.S. would respond “in kind” to any
Russian chemical attacks in Ukraine[495] and implied the elite 82nd
Airborne division was being deployed there to fight.[496]
Biden also ranted about how the Russian president was a “murderous
thug,” “dictator” and “war criminal.”[497] This obviously made it much
more difficult, if not impossible, for the two of them to ever talk in a
productive way again. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded to
these comments, saying, “Personal insults like this narrow the window of
opportunity for our bilateral relations under the current administration. It is
necessary to be aware of this.”[498] Former Amb. Freeman noted that these
statements could only deprive Putin of the incentive to compromise, “and
probably guarantee a long war.”[499]
A few weeks later, Biden said he wanted to see Putin tried for war
crimes[500] and declared him guilty of “genocide” in Ukraine.[501] Since
the U.S. had no ability to enforce these claims, such remarks also seemed to
be designed to prevent real diplomacy from ending the war too soon. As
scholar Ted Galen Carpenter pointed out after Biden’s call for Putin’s
prosecution, the only way such a trial could happen would be if he lost the
war and was overthrown. Thus, they were encouraging him to continue the
war indefinitely.[502]
After a deep dive into the record, RAND’s Samuel Charap and Johns
Hopkins professor Sergey Radchenko found that the American and British
reluctance to deal with Russia was part of what ruined the talks.
Paradoxically, they said the West was wary about a deal that would require
them to give security guarantees to Ukraine when their refusal to back off
eventual NATO membership for Kiev was the primary issue of the war.
Though Ukraine’s demand for such guarantees may have been too much for
them to ask, the Ukrainians knew that. Bennett had told Zelensky so.[503]
They could have negotiated down from there.
Zelensky said, “It is clear that Ukraine is not a member of NATO; we
understand this. . . . For years we heard about the apparently open door but
have already also heard that we will not enter there, and these are truths and
must be acknowledged.”[504] But instead of making a deal on these
reasonable grounds, Ukraine and its supposed allies decided to keep
fighting. Charap and Radchenko say this was also due to the reaction to
alleged atrocities at Bucha,[505] the perceived weakness of the Russian
military, which made Zelensky think his forces had a chance to defeat them,
as well as simply the bad judgment demonstrated by their attempt to forge a
permanent overarching deal instead of an immediate ceasefire.[506]
 This was the last chance for an early end to the war.

Poisoning Abramovich

The MI6 cutouts at Bellingcat, led by Christo Grozev, the same guy who
tried to make the case of Alexei Navalny’s poisoning back in 2020,[507]
claimed in March 2024 that Putin had poisoned his buddy Roman
Abramovich, who was attempting to negotiate with Ukraine. “Western
experts who looked into the incident said it was hard to determine whether
the symptoms were caused by a chemical or biological agent or by some
sort of electromagnetic-radiation attack,” the Journal elaborated.[508] The
BBC said the symptoms—“eye and skin inflammation and piercing pain in
the eyes”—were “consistent with poisoning with chemical weapons.” Well,
it must have been Russian “Novichok,” because nerve agents like sarin, VX
and tabun are actually deadly.
When U.S. and Ukrainian government sources said the story was false
and that Abramovich was just fine,[509] and he went right back to the talks,
[510] the BBC rationalized that “it would hardly be surprising that the U.S.
would want to dampen down suggestions that anyone—especially Russia—
had used a chemical weapon in Ukraine, as this could push them into
retaliatory action that they are extremely reluctant to take.”[511] They just
could not admit the story was a ridiculous hoax and that they had proved
themselves unfit for their jobs by believing and repeating it.

Bucha
In March 2022, there was a major battle for a town called Bucha, about 15
miles northwest of Kiev. After the Russians withdrew from the area in what
they called a confidence-building measure during peace talks in Turkey,
[512] a massive propaganda campaign was launched that claimed the
Russians had slaughtered thousands of civilians in the town in what
amounted to an act of “genocide,” comparable to the Srebrenica massacre
of 1995.[513]
“We know of thousands of people killed and tortured, with severed
limbs, raped women and murdered children,” Zelensky claimed.[514] Even
at the time it was obvious this was an influence operation, spread through
TV and social media. The story successfully changed the narrative of the
war from any kind of power conflict between nation states—business—to a
simple comic book story of villainous Russian “orcs”[515] devouring the
innocent, virginal civilian population of Ukraine in a Holocaust-style war of
extermination, thus necessitating a new strategy of resisting at any cost
rather than negotiating with evil itself.[516]
The military expert and Newsweek reporter William Arkin, who is anti-
Russian in his viewpoint, was still merciless in his denunciation of the
propaganda about Bucha, though he did call it an atrocity and suspect most
of the dead had been killed by the Russians.[517] He still said it was the
furthest thing from a genocide and that his sources in the DIA felt the same
way. Further, he said that the purpose of the propaganda campaign was to
undermine the talks.[518] It was later revealed that the U.S. and UK had
already succeeded in ruining the deal before the massacres at Bucha had
been discovered,[519] however the talks continued, revealing that there had
still been a chance for peace remaining.[520] The atrocity, such as it was or
was embellished to be, could have been cited as a reason to end the war just
as easily as an excuse to expand it. But the deaths at Bucha became a major
part of the propaganda justification to prolong the conflict in the name of
weakening Russia over the long term instead.[521]
Of course, the Russians bear responsibility for what happened at
Bucha, Irpin, Mariupol, Kharkiv and other Ukrainian cities where civilians
have been killed by their soldiers, although there are reasons to believe
there is more to the story of Bucha than what we have been told. For one
thing, reports of the massacres did not start to come in for two days after the
Russians had withdrawn,[522] and after Ukrainian forces had announced
the beginning of their “clearing operation in Bucha from saboteurs and
accomplices of Russia.”[523] Initial statements by the mayor[524] and
Ukrainska Pravda[525] made no mention of any massacres. Three days
later, on April 2, the same day that the London Times filed their first report
of large-scale atrocities in Bucha, their counterparts at the New York Times
reported only a half-dozen men apparently executed by Russians, and a
body lying next to a package of Russian rations, indicating perhaps this
person had been killed by Ukrainian irregular forces instead.[526] The
Times later released an in-depth series indicating that 36 civilians had been
shot and killed by Russian forces, not in any massacre or extermination
campaign, but because they had ventured outside for various reasons and
turned down the wrong street in an apparent free-fire zone.[527] In four
cases, they identified 13 men who witnesses said had been taken captive
and executed by Russian troops, including seven members of the armed
militia Territorial Defense.[528] PBS Frontline found another example
where five Territorial Defense members were captured and executed.[529]
These were irregular fighters, no longer civilians, murdered, but not
massacred in large numbers. Though still, if proven, these would be clear
war crimes.[530] A report by Amnesty International added another handful
of examples of executions by Russian forces.[531]
According to the Times, approximately 400 people were killed
“during” Russia’s occupation of the city, which the paper characterized as a
“bloody campaign against civilians.”[532] In fact, many of those killed in
Bucha died under artillery barrages from Ukrainian forces against Russian
armored columns, sacrificed to protect Kiev.[533]
If we assume the 400 figure is correct, and that all of the dead were
civilians deliberately killed by the invading force, that would clearly be
criminal, but still nothing approaching an attempted genocide nor a good
reason to call off negotiations. But it was not to be. As Ukrainska Pravda
put it, “Zelenskyy relayed Johnson’s message” to Putin: “I’m sorry, we saw
what happened in Bucha, the circumstances are changing.”[534]
“The essence of evil has come to our land—murderers, torturers,
rapists and looters who call themselves an army,” Zelensky said in a public
statement. “They have killed consciously, and with pleasure. . . . What has
happened here is genocide. It is very hard to keep talking when you see
what has happened here.”[535] Four hundred people killed is a tragedy, an
atrocity, but it is not a genocide.
But officials had already revealed to the major papers that a strategic
choice was made after the American military assessed that Ukraine had a
fighting chance at winning the war, or at least not losing it for many more
months. That was time enough for the U.S. to pour a whole new quantity of
equipment and weapons into the Ukrainian military and train them on how
to use it, including rockets, drones, radars and advanced, longer-range
artillery.[536] The accusations of atrocities at Bucha gave Ukraine a reason
to continue, and also reinforced Western governments’ willingness to back
them with weapons, diplomatic support and economic sanctions against
Russia.[537]
Putin later said that a deal, “the Treaty on the Permanent Neutrality and
Security Guarantees for Ukraine,” had been reached and it had already been
“initialed” for final approval from their capitals.[538] “After we pulled
troops back from Kiev as we promised, the Kiev authorities, as their
handlers usually do, threw it all away into the landfill of history.”[539]
In June 2022, Johnson again intervened to prevent French President
Macron from attempting to negotiate peace,[540] and during a press
conference with Zelensky in August he denounced the idea of holding talks
altogether: “This is not the time to advance some flimsy plan for
negotiation.”[541]
It is really too bad. As former diplomat Chas Freeman wrote, “Had the
West not intervened to prevent Ukraine from ratifying the treaty others
helped it agree with Russia at the outset of the war, Ukraine would now be
intact and at peace.”[542]

The Azov Battalion’s Big Chance

No Idle Threat

The war was avoidable. Then again, Ukraine’s Nazis had made it clear they
would not tolerate peace with the east. Svoboda, the National Corps,
Democratic Ax and others regularly showed up to violently protest the
slightest indication of negotiations with the Donbas rebels.[543] These are
credible threats. In America, if a group of Nazis made a serious threat
against the president, the Secret Service or FBI would just roll them right
up. They would never get near him.[544] But in Ukraine, it is different. The
Times reported that “the groups are a two-edged sword, threatening not just
the Kremlin but also the Ukrainian government, which could be rocked and
possibly overthrown by them if Mr. Zelensky agrees to a peace deal that in
their minds gives too much to Moscow.” The leader of Democratic Ax told
the Times, “If anybody from the Ukrainian government tries to sign such a
document, a million people will take to the streets and that government will
cease being the government.” Reporter Andrew Kramer pointed out that
after the last two revolutions, “this is no idle threat.”[545]
On the eve of war, the Nazis held a “Bandera reading” in Kiev, where
Yevhen Karas of C14 explained what may seem like a strange situation to
the casual observer: “We were now being given so much weaponry, not
because . . . they want the best for us, but because we perform the tasks set
by the West, because we are the only ones who are prepared to do them.”
He explained, “[W]e have fun killing and we have fun fighting. And they
are like, ‘Wow, let’s see what’s going to happen.’” He added, “And that is
the reason for the new alliance: Turkey, Poland, Britain and Ukraine.”
Karas went on to promise that once Russia was out of the way, Ukraine’s
armed forces would “immediately become a problem for all those who are
now trying to give us problems.”[546]
In March 2022, Ukrainian Nazi Dmytro Korchynsky, the former leader
of the Ukrainian National Assembly, told an interviewer that his opinion of
Zelensky had changed. “I was angry at the Ukrainian people. How could
they have elected president—one of the national symbols—a Jew? A Jew
can serve as a head of a national bank, even as a prime minister.” But, he
said, “the president is a national symbol, just like a flag, anthem, etcetera. It
has to be national. It has to be Ukrainian. As it turned out, it is for the best
that he is a Jew. Now try to accuse us of Nazism.”[547]

The Memory Hole

The American mainstream media agreed. Once the war started, all that
previous reporting about the Nazism of the Azov Regiment and related
groups went right down the memory hole. As Lev Golinkin complained in
The Nation, the British Guardian, which had run multiple articles about the
dangers of the Regiment, by 2023 had completely rehabilitated them,
claiming, the Nazis “are now leading the defense of Mariupol, insisting they
have shed their previous dubious politics and rapidly becoming Ukrainian
heroes.”[548] Golinkin also condemned Forbes for running a piece by
David Axe which falsely claimed that Azov had been denazified and had
ceased using the Wolfsangel,[549] when in fact, “The Wolfsangel is one of
the first things you see on Azov’s website, just as it was on the day the
Forbes story ran; in fact, it’s the profile photo for all Azov’s social media
accounts.” He noted it was the same at the British BBC and the German
Deutsche Welle. “The problem with insisting that Azov’s neo-Nazism is just
a Russian lie is the abundance of evidence to the contrary. Seven years’
worth of Western articles chronicling the group’s nature was too much to
ignore.” He continued, “This left Azov’s whitewashers with the unenviable
task of cobbling together a come-to-Jesus story in which Azov began as a
neo-Nazi paramilitary group but somehow saw the error of its ways before
2022.” But that is not true. As Golinkin pointed out, the claim Azov
renounced Nazism after being integrated into the National Guard was
completely belied by scores of Western media articles in the time since
then.[550] He went on to show the Nazi histories of Azov leaders the
Western press later insisted were more moderate and how in fact they had
not changed at all.[551]
As experienced Ukraine reporter Christopher Miller, formerly with
Radio Liberty, explained, when the threat of war became clear in early
2022, it was the Azov Regiment and movement which took the lead training
new volunteer fighters. Miller noted that their “weapons were displayed by
burly men wearing military uniforms adorned with an array of Nazi
symbols: the SS-favored Totenkopf, perhaps better known as death’s head;
the sonnenrad, or black sun; the Wolfsangel; and many more. One patch
with a masked skull read, ‘Born to kill for Ukraine.’” Their members told
him their highest goals were to create a “nationalist socialist” state in
Ukraine. “Glory to the nation! Death to enemies!” they chanted.[552]
On April 3, 2022, Fox News’s Bret Baier asked Zelensky about Azov
and their role in the war, noting the regiment was “said to be a Nazi
affiliated organization operating as a militia in your country, said to be
committing their own atrocities. What should Americans know about those
units, about those reports?”
Zelensky did not deny it. Instead, he answered, “So Azov was one of
those many battalions. They are what they are. They were defending our
country. . . . I want to explain to you everything, all the components of
those volunteer battalions later were incorporated into the military of
Ukraine.” He reassured the audience: “Those Azov fighters are no longer a
self-established group. They are now a component of the Ukrainian
military,” then referred to the prosecution of Azov members for war crimes
committed during 2014, neglecting to mention[553] that the convictions
were all overturned and the fighters returned to their stations.[554]
It was not true that all the paramilitary forces had been integrated into
the army and national guard. Right Sector’s Ukrainian Volunteer Corps,
[555] Svoboda’s C14,[556] Carpathian Sich[557] and the Aidar
Battalion[558] were still independent. And while the Azov Regiment had
been pulled back from the front in mid-2015 for public relations reasons—
Western governments were embarrassed by all their Nazi affiliations and
slogans—they returned at the beginning of 2019.[559] Imagine if a U.S.
president incorporated KKK and Aryan Nations groups into the army
during a civil war and said that was why not to worry that they were
dangerous anymore.
The Post now simply calls Azov “a nationalist outfit.”[560]
Some poor CNN headline writer got caught in a deadly grapple with
his dissonance before, defeated, finally choking out, “A far-right battalion
has a key role in Ukraine’s resistance. Its neo-Nazi history has been
exploited by Putin.” Reporters Tara John and Tim Lister insisted that
“Moscow has given the regiment an outsized role in the conflict. . . . In the
Russian disinformation playbook, the Azov movement is a tempting target
—one where fact and disinformation can be elided.” They went on to admit
that yes, it was founded by Nazis, trains child soldiers and is a major center
for the global fascist movement. They also quoted the U.S. State
Department’s complaints about their anti-Gypsy pogroms, and even cited
the Ukrainian expert from CNN’s favorite propaganda front group,
Bellingcat, warning that while there were limits to their electoral support,
Azov and like-minded groups “have enjoyed near impunity for violence
aimed at minorities, were unchecked in their efforts to build influence in
military and security forces, and have been normalized by Ukraine’s senior
leaders.” Still, CNN approvingly quoted Azov spokesmen and supposed
experts denying that they were still Nazis, and the thrust of the story
remained that this may have been a problem in the past, but not anymore.
“[E]xperts say Russia’s fixation on a minor player like the Azov movement
serves a purpose—allowing the Kremlin to frame the conflict as an
ideological and even existential struggle. However remote from reality that
may be.” Sometimes the Russians exaggerate the Nazi presence and the
threat they pose. Were there enough of them to warrant invasion? Not in
this author’s judgment. But CNN went much further, downplaying the
danger altogether. It was obviously driven by a need to serve an agenda,
though its authors deserve half-credit for disproving their own conclusion
throughout the article.[561]

Stormtroopers
On the eve of war, USA Today ran a piece about America’s allies, noting
Azov troops had filmed themselves dipping their bullets in pig fat for use
against Muslim Chechen troops. The paper reported that the video
“spotlights an uncomfortable truth for Ukraine’s military: The front-line
Azov Regiment was founded eight years ago by extremist right-wing
militants, including avowed neo-Nazis.” They added, “It has long served as
an inspiration for U.S.-based right-wing extremists and white supremacists,
some of whom traveled to Ukraine for training and combat experience.” For
balance, they also talked to Andreas Umland, an analyst at the Stockholm
Center for Eastern European Studies, who spun for the Banderists:
“Certainly, there are still white supremacists and far-right extremists present
in Azov . . . but in recent years the military wing of the movement has
moved away from open support of fascism.” Besides, “If you’re going to
fight a war, who is going to fight it? For war, you need a certain type of
people. The people who are willing to do that are the ultra-
nationalists.”[562]
Andriy Biletsky’s men remain at war, taking part in the fighting for
Bakhmut and Avdiivka in 2023 and 2024. Officially the 3rd Separate
Infantry Division in the army and the 12th Special Forces Brigade Azov of
the national guard, the men still call themselves the Azov Regiment. They
had their own recruitment centers, and Azov leaders, such as Denys
Prokopenko, who had been taken prisoner and traded back to Ukraine, had
been put in back charge, in violation of promises made to the U.S. on the
matter.[563] Prokopenko complained about what he called “the absurdity of
the situation: Azov is welcomed at the highest level in the Western world,
but cannot receive weapons.”[564] They continued to wear Nazi tattoos and
admitted their politics had not changed from the group’s early days.[565] In
August 2023, Zelensky met with Biletsky and his men at the front, thanking
them for defending the country.[566] “We are told Ukraine’s Nazis either do
not exist, or are so marginal they do not deserve acknowledgement,”
journalist Max Blumenthal noted, “So why is Zelensky unable to ignore
them, repeatedly holding court with the most virulent faces of Banderite
fascism during times of crisis?”[567]
Zelensky caused an uproar when he had an Azov member join him in a
live video presentation to the parliament in Greece. Some there thought it
inappropriate.[568]
In February 2023, the Ukrainian military actually put out a call to
recruit 20,000 “stormtroopers” to fight in the east. The Newsweek story
about it contains no irony or mention of either Reinhard Heydrich or Darth
Vader. It simply reads like a recruitment flyer from the Ukrainian military:
“These troops called stormtroopers by the Ukrainian National Guard will be
given several federal perks should they make it through the liberation of
Luhansk, Donetsk and Crimea from Russian occupiers.” They continued,
“Volunteers who will become stormtroopers receive a number of social
guarantees,” at American expense of course. “In particular, a stable and
competitive salary, the opportunity to receive housing and treatment and
rehabilitation in state medical institutions, study at departmental
universities, retire with mixed experience, acquire [combat veteran]
status . . . and other significant advantages,” National Guard of Ukraine
(NSU) spokesman Ruslan Muzychuk said.[569]
 In early June 2023, the Times ran an article which detailed how it is a
real problem that so many Ukrainian soldiers cover their uniforms and
helmets with symbols from Hitler’s Third Reich—“imagery that the West
has spent a half-century trying to eliminate”—not because Nazism is bad,
but because it “threatens to reinforce Mr. Putin’s propaganda and give fuel
to his false claims that Ukraine must be ‘de-Nazified.’” The article also
noted that all the swastikas and whatnot put the U.S. government and media
in an embarrassing position, public relations-wise, causing some
“journalists [to] ask soldiers to remove the [Totenkopf] patch before taking
photographs.” Their reporter wrote that “[t]he iconography of these groups,
including a skull-and-crossbones patch worn by concentration camp guards
and a symbol known as the Black Sun, now appears with some regularity
on the uniforms of soldiers fighting on the front line,” adding that this
included soldiers “who say the imagery symbolizes Ukrainian sovereignty
and pride, not Nazism.” They cited Bellingcat’s Michael Colborne
complaining that Ukrainian leaders were “not willing to acknowledge and
understand how these symbols are viewed outside of Ukraine.” Then they
quoted a Ukrainian historian saying, as the Times put it, “the symbols had
meanings that were unique to Ukraine and should be interpreted by how
Ukrainians viewed them . . . independently of how it is used in other parts
of Earth.”[570]
But the Holocaust is Ukraine’s history, not ours. At least 800,000 Jews
were murdered by the German Nazis and their Ukrainian Quislings during
the Second World War.[571] But these innocent little black suns and
Totenkopfs are supposed to be far more meaningful to Americans than
Ukrainians, who, we are told, wear them in battle for patriotic reasons,
certainly not as a deadly threat against their ethnic enemies, or to indicate
their plans for the future of their country.[572]
When Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau traveled to Kiev in June
2023 to promise more aid, he was palling around with Andriy Melnyk,
Ukraine’s deputy foreign minister, who had just been kicked out of
Germany for visiting Stepan Bandera’s grave and denying that his forces
had participated in the Holocaust.[573] The Poles were also understandably
unhappy with his appointment to high office.[574]

Purple-Brown Alliance

And in the category of ‘things you could not possibly make up,’ Golinkin
wrote in the Forward that: “On June 29, [2023], Stanford University hosted
a delegation from the Azov Brigade . . . The panel, during which Azov’s
neo-Nazi insignia was projected onto the wall, was attended by noted
political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who posed for a photograph with the
delegation.” Golinkin said, “This event—and the disturbing lack of reaction
from Jewish organizations—showcases the limits of America’s commitment
to combating white supremacy. Call it the Ukraine exception.”[575]
Fukuyama is not just a “political scientist,” he is one of the most
important gentile leaders of the neoconservative movement. His article and
later book, The End of History and the Last Man,[576] in which he argued
liberal democracy is “the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution,”
have been cited as justification for American global dominance for the last
30 years. And here he is palling around with the proud descendants of the
men who perpetrated the Holocaust in World War II, and telling the local
paper they “are heroes that I’m proud to support.”[577]
Michael McFaul, who had been Obama’s ambassador to Russia, was
there too. As journalist Moss Robeson observed, it did not seem to bother
the professor to give a speech under a large projection of Azov’s
Wolfsangel, even when the Stanford Center for International Security and
Cooperation, which is a part of the Freeman Spogli Institute for
International Studies, where he teaches, had released a study about the
dangerous Nazism of the Azov Battalion just a few weeks before.[578]
McFaul, rehabilitating the Führer to smear the president, also said, “You
know, there’s one difference between Hitler when he was coming in and
Putin. Hitler didn’t kill ethnic Germans. He didn’t kill German-speaking
people.”[579] McFaul was not “canceled” and forced to resign because his
preposterous Holocaust revisionism was in the service of demonizing the
Russians, and America’s liberals have their priorities.
Azov’s profile[580] was later quietly removed from the Stanford
website,[581] which is funny because if one searches the term “Azov” on
the site, it still returns hits for the Rise Above Movement (RAM),
Misanthropic Division, C14, Right Sector, Atomwaffen Division, the
Nordic Resistance Movement and Russian Imperial Movement—all of
them Nazis, and all of them, according to Stanford, close with their
associates in Ukraine’s Azov movement.[582]
Not to be outdone, shortly after, President Zelensky gave a hero’s
welcome to five leaders of the Azov Regiment who had been captured by
Russia but then sent to Turkey in a prisoner swap under the condition they
would be held there until the end of the war.[583]
In May 2024, the Germans expelled seven Ukrainian soldiers training
there for wearing Nazi symbols. The military announced that from then on
Ukrainian soldiers would be explicitly instructed not to wear their Nazi
symbols when they went to Germany.[584]
Again, this is part of the military and national guard, and still a few
independent militias, not the entirety of the military. But it is still far more
than enough for the United States to have nothing to do with backing any of
them, certainly not at war with their own countrymen or the Russian nuclear
weapons superpower.
The U.S. officially lifted restrictions on arming the Azov fighters in
June 2024.[585] But the Intercept showed they had at least been receiving
training all along. Antony Blinken’s State Department saw no problem since
they changed the name from Battalion to Regiment to Brigade, even though
the same men were still in charge.[586]

Blowback Coming

In May 2022, in a case of bad timing for the Biden administration, the
Department of Homeland Security warned that with the rush of new
volunteers headed to Ukraine to join the fight, “Ukrainian nationalist groups
including the Azov movement are actively recruiting racially or ethnically
motivated violent extremist white supremacists (RMVE-WS) to join
various neo-Nazi volunteer battalions in the war against Russia.” They
added, “RMVE-WS individuals in the United States and Europe announced
intentions to join the conflict and are organizing entry to Ukraine via the
Polish border.” And they were already worried about the domestic
blowback: “What kind of training are foreign fighters receiving in Ukraine
that they could possibly proliferate in U.S. based militia and white
nationalist groups?” the feds wondered.[587]
The Times also admitted the Azov movement was reaching out to neo-
Nazis across the Western world to recruit fighters for the war—and they
were responding. The danger, as the Times saw it, was not the
empowerment of legions of new battle-hardened Hitler-lovers in the world.
Instead, “[t]he apparent mobilization of far-right groups could be
problematic for the Ukrainian government, playing into Mr. Putin’s
depiction of Ukraine as a fascist country, and his false claim to be waging
war against Nazis who control the government in Kyiv.”[588] Reuters
reported that there were more than 100,000 men in these militias by the
time of the Russian invasion of 2022[589]—militias that neo-Nazis from
around Europe had rallied to join.[590] They did not have long to wait to
receive Western equipment.
Also in August 2023, the Forward ran an extensive investigative piece
on a group of American neo-Nazis training at a property near Springfield,
Maine, and calling themselves the “blood tribe.”[591] Just joshing around
on Twitter, the author asked rhetorically if they would be going to fight on
the eastern front with Azov and C14. Their leader, Christopher Pohlhaus
responded directly with “Yes, actually” with a smiley face emoji with cute
little hearts around it.[592] As he had previously posted on Telegram,
“There will likely not be another chance in my lifetime to fight alongside
other NS [National Socialist] men against a multi-ethnic invading empire to
defend an almost all white nation.”[593] Pohlhaus has longstanding
connections to Denis Kapustin of the anti-Putin, neo-Nazi, Russia Volunteer
Corps (RVC), as well as Robert Rundo of the American RAM.[594]

Disposable Heroes

It’s a Real Bargain

Of course, most Ukrainian soldiers are not Nazis at all, just conscripts—
slaves. So even though they are combatants and considered “fair game” in
war, they are in a sense just a shade over the line from innocent civilians,
with their lives put at risk in the most unfair and profane way by others.
While President Biden vowed to never put U.S. troops in harm’s way in
Ukraine—which he violated to a degree—several officials have said out
loud they thought it would be perfectly great for Ukrainians to die in place
of Americans in our eternal fight against Eurasia.
Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell explained,
“Continuing our support for Ukraine is . . . a direct investment in cold, hard,
American interests. That’s why Republicans rejected the Biden
Administration’s original request for Ukraine assistance as
insufficient.”[595] In justification of his ignoring polls showing the
American people were opposed to spending any more money on the war,
[596] McConnell later added that “we haven’t lost a single American.”
Then he just invoked subsidies for arms manufacturers, as though that was
in the interest, not at the expense, of the public, and went on to criticize
Biden for not escalating the war fast enough. “The weapons get there later
than they should, been a little too tentative in my view.”[597]
By the summer of 2022, Lindsey Graham was ecstatic: “Four months
into this thing, I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help
Ukraine with the weapons they need and economic support, they will fight
to the last person.”[598]
Democrat Senator Richard Blumenthal agreed: “Long-range artillery is
very, very important. But so is the hand-to-hand insurgency that we are
hoping to see in eastern Ukraine, in the territory that’s already been
occupied by the Russians.”[599] He later claimed that “Ukraine is at the tip
of the spear, fighting our fight for independence and freedom.” Based on
this utter nonsense, Blumenthal—who is most famous for repeatedly lying
and pretending that he had fought in the Vietnam War after receiving five
deferments and took “many other steps” to avoid the war that poor people
in his same county were not afforded[600]—then plunged the depth of the
cynicism and depravity of the American War Party, falsely boasting that
“we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment. For less than
3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade
Russia’s military strength by half.” He embellished further, “We’ve united
NATO and caused the Chinese to rethink their invasion plans for Taiwan.
We’ve helped restore faith and confidence in American leadership—moral
and military. All without a single American service woman or man injured
or lost, and without any diversion or misappropriation of American
aid.”[601]
 What he is really saying there is that while Russian soldiers’ lives have
value to “degrade,” and American soldiers’ lives have value to preserve, to
Sen. Blumenthal, Ukrainian soldiers only have value as cannon fodder. If
every last conscript bled out on the steppe, he clearly does not give a damn.
He did not even refer to them at all.
It is not true that Russia’s military has been degraded by half, as was
well reported long before his lie.[602] The senator was simply blowing
smoke on China-Taiwan. There is no evidence Beijing has changed its
calculations and is now less likely to attack Taiwan. Assessments of
America and NATO’s moral high ground will have to wait until after
Ukraine is done losing the war and the West abandons them like so many
Afghan Hazaras.[603] And no misappropriation of American aid? Not even
Zelensky would make such a laughable claim.[604]
Republican Senator Mitt Romney agreed with his Democratic
counterpart, telling an audience that backing the Ukrainians at war was “the
best national defense spending I think we’ve ever done. . . . We’re losing no
lives in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are fighting heroically against Russia.”
He boasted, “We’re diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a
very small amount of money.”
For a successful former financier,[605] when he talks about foreign
policy, the senator sounds like a young kid interrupting an adult
conversation: “The single most important thing we can do to strengthen
ourselves relative to China is to see Russia defeated in Ukraine, because
they’re allies and Russia being weakened weakens their ally China.” This is
brilliant analysis. Unless of course the West fighting Russia in Ukraine
makes their turn toward the East that much deeper and more permanent, in
which case this would be a great way to strengthen China by shoring up
their access to desperately needed Russian natural resources. Romney
added, “The best thing we can do for America is see people who have
nuclear weapons pointed at us getting weaker.” People in Washington call
this kind of thinking “calculus,” when it clearly falls short of basic
arithmetic. What if in their weakness Russian leaders were to feel desperate
enough to use those nuclear weapons against us all? Gamma ray-sickened
survivors might then wonder if treating them with a decent respect might
have been a wiser path instead.[606]
Timothy Ash of the British Royal Institute for International Affairs
says it would be just fine to go on like this indefinitely. “[W]hen viewed
from a bang-per-buck perspective, U.S. and Western support for Ukraine is
an incredibly cost-effective investment.” Tens of billions of dollars may
sound like a lot, but if you compare it to the overall military budget, then it
seems like a bit less. Besides, he said, “this war provides a prime
opportunity for the U.S. to erode and degrade Russia’s conventional defense
capability, with no boots on the ground and little risk to U.S. lives.” He was
also certain that “the new arms race that it has now triggered with the West
will surely end up bankrupting the Russian economy; especially an
economy subject to aggressive Western sanctions.”[607] Ash then told
Newsweek that American expenses in the war were “peanuts” compared to
the wonderous benefits of humiliating Russia, and could not help but to
fantasize that the war would lead to bankruptcy and “regime change in
Russia.”[608]
 When Fox News asked likely Republican presidential candidates their
position on the war in 2023, former Vice President Pence said, “We support
those who fight our enemies on their shores, so we will not have to fight
them ourselves.”[609] Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie agreed,
reasoning to CNN: “We can spend this money now, and have Ukrainian
soldiers fight our war, or we can spend a lot more money and American
blood later to fight in Taiwan.”[610] Assuming that was true, perpetuating a
war on Russia’s border for any such third-party reason of supposed
statecraft is unforgivable diplomatic malpractice and deeply immoral.
Besides, the United States is already deterred by China’s naval capability.
Our navy and air force have no ability to defend that island and they know
it perfectly well.[611]
The Post’s David Ignatius, speaking for the consensus of the American
foreign policy establishment, wrote in July 2023 that “[f]or the United
States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic
windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians).” The way he
calculated it, Russia had been hurt, Germany would no longer depend on
Russian methane, NATO had added Sweden and Finland and the
organization itself had been strengthened. The Ukrainians would just have
to remain in the parentheses.[612]
Steven Moore, a former staffer for Oklahoma Senator Markwayne
Mullin, runs the Ukraine Freedom Project and worked with his father
George Gorton to help rig the presidential election for Boris Yeltsin in 1996.
[613] “If you’re a fiscal conservative, you know this is a great use of
taxpayer dollars. And not one single American soldier has had to die,”
Moore told the GOP caucus in August 2023.[614] Pence’s former national
security adviser, General Keith Kellogg, told Congress in early 2024 that
supporting this war “takes a strategic adversary off the table” without
“using any U.S. troops.” That way, he says, we can focus on confronting
China.[615]
They do not even bother to pretend to care about the people of
Ukraine. The problem is that their military is running out of soldiers.[616]
Hundreds of thousands have been killed or wounded. Many others have
been fighting for more than two years and need to be relieved.[617]

Feeling a Draft

In early 2024, Zelensky passed a plan to expand conscription by 500,000

soldiers, since voluntary recruitment had dried up and fighting-age males
were hiding or bribing their way out of it. (Conscription is “forceful” when
the Russians do it, the AP reminds us.) The average Ukrainian soldiers were
in their 40s; many were in their 50s.[618] The draft age had been between
27 and 60, the law lowered the low end to 25 years old. All men between 18
and 60 are prohibited from leaving the country—like in the old Soviet
Union—in case the government decided it needed them too.[619] However,
more than 650,000 men have fled to elsewhere in Europe.[620] Thousands
have risked the treacherous swim across “Death River,” the river Tisza,
attempting to escape to Romania or Hungary.[621] Some drowned.[622] In
early 2024, the Zelensky government announced it would deny all consular
services to fighting-age nationals living abroad so they would have to come
home to get updated passports, and risk getting drafted.[623] Poland and
Lithuania promised to help Kiev repatriate individuals attempting to escape
military slavery in their countries.[624]
In 2024, former British naval intelligence officer Frank Ledwidge was
witness to poor, young Ukrainian conscripts from the countryside who were
so ignorant about the world that one asked why swimming pool water was
blue.[625]
The Times reported that approximately 500 top-level Ukrainian athletes
and coaches have been killed in the war.[626] They said in the summer of
2024 that Kiev was conscripting approximately 30,000 men per month,
including many who were not fit for combat.[627]
Sen. Graham traveled to Ukraine to demand they keep fighting. While
there, he denounced the Ukrainian law that says conscripts under the age of
27 do not have to deploy to the warzone, but only to supporting roles away
from the front. Graham demanded they lower the age to at least 25: “I can’t
believe it’s at 27. You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving—
not at 25 or 27. . . . We need more people in the line. . . . No matter what we
do, you should be fighting.”[628] The Wall Street Journal reported that one
crucial reason Zelensky remained hesitant to deploy younger conscripts into
battle was because they had not yet had a chance to have children and they
fear future demographic collapse.[629] Sen. Graham was less concerned
about that.
But what does it say about a government defending its country from
foreign invasion that it would need to conscript anyone to join the cause,
resorting even to kidnapping people off the street?[630] After numerous
delays, Zelensky signed the new law in April 2024.[631] State forces
stepped up[632] their impressment gangs,[633] sending thousands more
fleeing the country or attempting to go underground and stay a step ahead
of their own funeral.[634] “I’m afraid I won’t get enough training and then
I’ll be moved closer to the front and then I’ll die senselessly,” a 28-year-old
from Lviv told the Times.[635]
In October 2024, a Zelensky aide said the Biden administration was
pressuring Kiev to conscript and “mobilize” young men ages 18–25. “The
partners’ argument is as follows: when the US was at war in Vietnam, they
were taken there from the age of 19.” Joe Biden did not go to Vietnam. He
got five draft deferments, pleading asthma, even though he was a lifeguard
and played football.[636] Dodging the draft may have been the most
honorable thing Biden ever did in his life.[637] This goes to show him to be
the worst hypocrite, and on the worst issue: public enslavement into an
artillery war.[638]

Vanya Got His Gun

While things could change rapidly, this war could also drag on for a long
time if no one breaks out the negotiating tables or thermo-nukes first. For a
time, the battlefield seemed to represent the proverbial irresistible force
versus unmovable object. Russia is a far larger, wealthier country, fighting
for what its government sees as their most vital national interest, while the
poorer, smaller Ukraine is fighting on its own territory and is backed by the
wealthy Western alliance, which has provided over $175 billion in military
aid so far.[639]
 It has been an absolutely brutal fight, resembling World War I-style
trench warfare[640] in the oftentimes freezing mud,[641] with the likeliest
causes of death being artillery shells,[642] tank rounds[643] and landmines.
[644] Men on both sides are literally being blown to bits, and also in many
cases bleeding out slowly with no access to life-saving medical
techniques[645] that were often available to American forces in Iraq and
Afghanistan, for example.[646] Online footage, especially on the
warbloggers’ Telegram channels, brings the absolutely stomach-churning
violence right to eyes of the whole world in near-real time. Up to 50,000
Ukrainian limbs had been amputated by the summer of 2023, based on
estimates from hospitals and prosthetics firms.[647] The wounded were
then left to pay for all their own medical care.[648] It was clear Ukrainian
casualties were of no concern for the Biden team, as long as Russians were
being killed too.[649]
In the most shameful way, the administration diffused responsibility
away from themselves and onto Ukraine, all U.S. assistance
notwithstanding. Officials admitted they recognized “neither Russia nor
Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright,” but refused to urge
Ukraine to negotiate. “They say they do not know what the end of the war
looks like, or how it might end or when, insisting that is up to Kyiv.”[650]

Bakhmut

The battle for the Donetsk city of Bakhmut, known to the Russians as
Artyomovsk, began in August 2022. It saw some of the most brutal fighting
of the entire war. Reports from Bakhmut before Russian mercenaries seized
it in May 2023 described high-level combat at a pitch virtually unseen in 20
years of America’s wars in the Middle East—well, at least by Americans—
and a catastrophe for both sides. Yevgeny Prigozhin, owner of the Russian
mercenary firm the Wagner Group, said in late May that 20,000 of his men
were killed in the battle for the town.[651]
The press also portrayed a Ukrainian military full of untrained
conscripts being torn to shreds by Russian artillery.[652] The CBC
reported: “Both sides call it a ‘meat grinder.’ . . . The fighting is ‘the most
intense on the entire front line,’ said Ukrainian military analyst Oleh
Zhdanov. ‘So many remain on the battlefield . . . either dead or
wounded.’ . . . ‘They attack our positions in waves, but the wounded as a
rule die where they lie, either from exposure as it is very cold or from blood
loss.’”[653] The city was simply devastated. Well over half of it will have
to be bulldozed and rebuilt.
In another report from March 2023, the Post confirmed the absolutely
desperate conditions of Ukrainian soldiers at the front. A battalion
commander told them, “The most valuable thing in war is combat
experience. . . . [T]here are only a few soldiers with combat experience.
Unfortunately, they are all already dead or wounded.” Instead, he had only
new conscripts with no training, whose lives were being lost at
extraordinary rates. One battalion was completely destroyed with 400
wounded and 100 killed. A lieutenant colonel told them, “I get 100 new
soldiers, they don’t give me any time to prepare them. They say, ‘Take them
into the battle.’ They just drop everything and run.” He said a soldier at the
front had told him he was afraid to shoot because of the loud report of the
rifle and had never handled a grenade.
Asked by a congressman how much more support for Ukraine might
be necessary to give, Biden’s Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Colin
Kahl replied, “We don’t know the course or trajectory of the conflict. It
could end six months from now, it could end two years from now, three
years from now.”[654] The Biden administration regularly complained that
the Ukrainian military had wasted lives trying to hold towns like Bakhmut
and Avdiivka, which they were always destined to lose anyway.[655] Not
that the Americans had any better ideas.
In February 2023, Troy Offenbecker, a former U.S. marine fighting
with the foreign legion, told ABC News that life expectancy at the front in
Bakhmut was just four hours.[656]

Dystopian Drones

One of the worst things about this war is the advance in cheap weaponized
drone technology. Soldiers fighting mud-trench warfare are also killing one
another in large numbers with remote control planes and helicopters,
sneaking up and dropping grenades on each other’s heads,[657] as well as
hitting armored vehicles with one-way attack drones. The Ukrainians can
shoot down some of them, but only at inordinate, disproportionate cost.
[658] Both sides are cranking up production, but it looks like Russia has the
advantage in numbers, as well as in the ability to jam signals from the other
side.[659] The future of war, especially of guerrilla insurgency, will never
be the same.[660]
 War Crimes

Murder

Both sides are credibly accused of committing war crimes in the current
conflict. On balance, the Russians are the aggressors and have attacked
towns and cities where innocents are certain to be killed, and so it stands to
reason, all war propaganda aside, that they have been guilty of more and
worse crimes, including the torture of prisoners in their custody.[661]
Russian troops have posted videos of themselves murdering unarmed
prisoners,[662] and in March 2023 the UN accused both sides of torture and
summary executions.[663] One Azov Regiment veteran held prisoner by the
Russians and allegedly beaten, recalled that before his time in Russian
prison, “I’d never imagined that human beings could scream like
that.”[664]
Earlier in the war, Amnesty International complained about Ukrainian
forces posting up near civilians.[665] The Ukraine lobby went wild, causing
the group to issue an apology and some staffers to resign. Not that they had
gotten anything wrong. They had just made the wrong people angry.[666]
In September 2022, the Post wrote about Ukrainian “hit squads”
targeting alleged collaborators with the Russian occupation. They had
assassinated or wounded at least 20 Russians and their supposed allies,
including with car bombs. Reporter David Stern continued: “They have
been gunned down, blown up, hanged and poisoned—an array of methods
that reflects the determination of the Ukrainian hit squads and saboteurs
often operating deep inside enemy-controlled territory.” Identifying the
Ukrainian SBU as running the campaign, and citing the Geneva
Conventions, Stern wrote that it “raises legal and ethical questions about
extrajudicial killings and potential war crimes, particularly when the targets
are political actors or civilians.” Mykhailo Podolyak, a top adviser to the
Ukrainian president, told the Post that the assassination campaign was
backed by a “powerful partisan and active protest movement,” revealing
that “Moscow is absolutely incapable of controlling” the areas they occupy.
He boasted that Russian officials were supposedly too afraid to visit the
warzone. “The risks and consequences are extreme—and they understand
this very well.”[667]
The Times[668] and the Journal[669] also conceded that Ukrainian
forces had repeatedly filmed themselves executing Russian prisoners. The
Kyiv Post interviewed the boss of the SBU, Vasyl Malyuk, who bragged
about assassinating “very many” Ukrainian citizens—“more than a
dozen”—for “collaborating” with Russia.[670]
A unit led by American volunteers, the “Chosen Company,” repeatedly
murdered surrendering Russian soldiers with impunity. A German
whistleblower provided evidence to the Times, and an American veteran of
the group also confirmed it.[671]

Mariupol

Each side frequently exaggerated the other’s losses and atrocities while
downplaying their own. There is no question that thousands of civilians
have been killed in the war, some deliberately so. However, the U.S. and
Ukrainian governments and media have made extraordinary claims of
Russian brutality. In April 2022, there were several reports of mass graves
outside of Mariupol, where as many as 9,000 people were said to have been
slaughtered and thrown in a giant pit. But Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett
went to the site and found not a mass grave, but simply graves. Scores of
them perhaps, but individual graves.[672] In the Frontline documentary on
Mariupol, they claimed 20,000 had been killed.[673] Amnesty counted
fewer than 7,000.[674] Both convincingly complained, however, about
indiscriminate attacks on civilian targets in the city, evidently meant to
drive the population out. The same thing happened when Russian troops
withdrew from the area around Kharkiv in late 2022, leaving behind just
over 400 bodies, where previous accusations had again been in the
thousands.[675]

Kidnapping

On March 17, 2023, the ICC indicted Putin for war crimes, but not for the
invasion of February 2022. Perhaps clear-cut aggression was deemed too
difficult to prove. Instead, the indictment was essentially a political stunt
based on bogus claims. The prevailing theory in Western governments is
that all war refugees who fled from Donetsk and Luhansk east into Russia
at the time of the invasion were all kidnapped by the Russians, “taken
against international law,” as CNN’s Anderson Cooper would have it. This
is an “unlawful transfer of population,” in the words of the ICC. But of
course, virtually all of them are ethnic Russians and Russian speakers and
many have lived under siege by the Ukrainian government since 2014.
There is no reason to assume they were taken against their will.
 The ICC’s indictment[676] was based on[677] claims made[678] by
Nathaniel Raymond, from the U.S. State Department-funded[679] Yale
University Humanitarian Research Lab. His report claimed “genocide” and
“crimes against humanity” for the alleged forcible transfer of thousands of
Ukrainian nationals and their children. He boldly labeled every facility
hosting Donbas refugee children a “re-education camp,” where more than
6,000 kids are being “held.” He claimed the Russians had separated
children from their families for extended periods of time, but never
demonstrated this. Raymond made a major claim that the “[p]rimary
purpose of the camps appears to be political re-education: At least 32 (78
percent) of the camps identified by Yale HRL appear engaged in systematic
re-education efforts that expose children from Ukraine to Russia-centric
academic, cultural, patriotic, and/or military education.” He continued,
“Multiple camps endorsed by the Russian Federation are advertised as
‘integration programs,’ with the apparent goal of indoctrinating children
into the Russian government’s vision of national culture, history, and
society.” His only basis for this is a single anonymous source whose
identity had been “withheld due to protection concerns.”
Raymond apparently knew he was exaggerating his assertions, even
when they were taken as obvious truth, beyond question. Speaking with
CNN, he refused to state his major claim as a fact. Instead, as in his now-
famous study quoted above, he alleged only that he believed “[t]heir
primary purpose appears to be political re-education.” But Raymond then
got brave and went for it: Putin, he said, represents the deadliest
combination of dark forces in world history: Dee Snider and Joseph Stalin.
“And this is very important. Russia is running sort of what could be
described as a Twisted Sister Cities Program, where communities from
Russia are sponsoring communities in Ukraine on an individual town by
town basis to bring those children into Russia for re-education purposes,
including military training.” The interviewer asked if they were getting a
“Russian-focused re-education.” Raymond replied yes, and that it was a
violation of the 1998 Rome Statute, which says states may not “transfer one
group of children to another group for purposes of erasing national identity
or ethnicity.”[680]
All hype aside, inculcating the youth with nationalist propaganda
sounds like something the Russian government might do. They officially
claimed to have annexed Ukraine’s four easternmost provinces. That they
might emphasize Russian nationality to these kids sounds plausible at least.
But journalist Jeremy Loffredo showed that Raymond’s claims were vastly
overblown. He visited one of Raymond’s alleged “re-education camps,” the
“Donbas Express” in the Russian town of Pokrovskoye, and found a hotel
full of children and teenagers receiving classical music lessons. They were
at camp, not in a camp.
Raymond’s claims are obviously circular question-begging. Coercion
is never demonstrated, only taken for granted. If Ukrainians are inside
Russia, they must be under duress. If Ukrainian kids are separated from
their parents, they simply must have been kidnapped by Putin. The report
cited an article from the Russia’s RIA Novosti to melodramatically claim
that “[c]hildren have been transported [to camps] by bus, train, commercial
aircraft, and, in at least one case, by Russia’s Aerospace Forces,” as though
we should imagine Holocaust victims rounded up and crammed into
boxcars or Stalin’s exiles being worked to death in the Siberian Gulags.
“Alleged orphans and other children from Ukraine’s state institutions are
sometimes temporarily housed at camps and so-called family centers as
waypoints during transit.” Raymond forgot to quote the little girl in the
article describing her harrowing journey. “While we were driving from the
airport, we were very impressed with the local landscapes. I like to walk in
the fields, pick flowers. It is very interesting to see nature.” The horror
continued: “When we were driving, I saw small rivers flowing from the
mountains. Very beautiful, the views are simply gorgeous.”
When an American reporter stopped by, the kids were in the middle of
violin lessons. A teacher at the school explained that the kids were there for
12 days and would then go back to their parents. Raymond’s Yale report
admits this major self-contradictory fact. “Many children taken to camps
are sent with the consent of their parents for an agreed duration of days or
weeks and returned to their parents as originally scheduled.”
Here is the ICC’s source describing Russia’s “genocide”: “Many of
these parents are low-income and wanted to take advantage of a free trip for
their child.” He added, “Some hoped to protect their children from ongoing
fighting, to send them somewhere with intact sanitation, or to ensure they
had nutritious food of the sort unavailable where they live. Other parents
simply wanted their child to be able to have a vacation.”
Raymond also admitted in his report that there was “no documentation
of child mistreatment.” He claimed Ukrainian babies were being adopted by
Russian families, but again cited only a single anonymous source and did
not attempt to show any Ukrainian parents whose babies had been
kidnapped. In fact, Raymond and his team did not interview anyone at all or
attempt to visit any of the sites in question for the study. Instead, he cited a
story quoting only a deputy to the mayor of Kiev, but offered no
explanation for how he would know the whereabouts of children from
Donetsk.[681] Many of the claims about family separations have no citation
at all, not even to anonymous sources.[682] The report’s author admitted he
hardly had documentation of any kind.[683]
And since they had no evidence or even reports of sexual violence
perpetrated against Ukrainian refugees in Russia, Raymond and his team
helpfully added that “[u]nderreporting is particularly common for sexual
and gender-based violence (SGBV), which victims may not report due to
shame or fear of social censure.”[684] The absence of even unproven
claims is not even unproven claims’ absence.[685]
Raymond did cite two news reports which included parents
complaining that their children had been kept overtime at their summer
camps in Crimea in 2022, but this seemed to be more of a problem of
running such a massive government program in the middle of a war rather
than a crime against humanity. The Guardian reported that “[m]ost parents
and children who attended the camps said the conditions were good.
Children were given the equivalent of hotel rooms to share, taken to see
dolphins, to museums and to the beach.” They continued, “The Russian-
appointed authorities in Crimea claim to have spent 1.2bn rubles (£16.4m)
in 2022 on the camps, which were also attended by Russian children.”[686]
 The Yale report also said, “It is important to note that some parents
have expressed reluctance to report their missing child to Ukrainian
authorities for fear of being shamed or accused of being collaborators.”
They said that one camp had children whose parents had not consented to
them being sent there. “The camp, which had over 200 children from
Ukraine aged 14–17, publicly acknowledged that they were holding
children whose parents forbade them from attending.” He says they
“publicly acknowledged” it. Just check footnote 80 to find that “[s]ource
CC0122 has been withheld due to protection concerns.” Oh well. We can
trust that the anonymous source witnessed this official Russian admission
about holding children against their parents’ will somewhere, surely, right?
Questioned by Loffredo, Raymond admitted the other facilities were
also essentially benign, for some reason insisting on repeatedly using the
phrase “teddy bear” to describe them, evidently to emphasize just what war
crimes they were not. He also acknowledged that the U.S. National
Intelligence Council put “a lot of pressure” on his group to document
transfers of refugees out of the Donbas warzone into Russia. This was the
basis for a war crimes indictment against the leader of a major power in the
middle of a bloody stalemate, almost certainly serving to prolong the day-
to-day crime of a brutal artillery war.[687] But Raymond got to appear on
TV and get some attention. So it has all been worth it for him.
It is also worth noting that neither Russia nor the United States is a
member of the ICC, nor should we be. It has always been a lawless court
used by Western powers against much weaker, if guilty, leaders of third-
world “rogue states.” Were American government employees to be taken
before it someday, they would be deprived of the Bill of Rights protections
even they deserve. Holding American war criminals to account here in the
U.S. is our job.[688]

Co-Belligerents

Time for Some Game Theory

“We are engaged in a conflict here. It’s a proxy war with Russia, whether
we say so or not. That is effectively what’s going on,” former CIA Director
and Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told Bloomberg News in March
2022. The only solution: “Kill Russians.”[689] Western nations and our
East Asian allies have all announced massive new rounds of sanctions
against Russia. Biden has increased troop levels in the Baltics, though
thankfully still not to real fighting strength.
“We are fighting a war against Russia,” German Foreign Minister
Annalena Baerbock agreed in February 2023.[690]
Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne wrote in Harper’s Magazine
that the U.S. and its allies have armed Ukraine so extensively that
“Washington and NATO are probably responsible for the preponderance of
Russian casualties in Ukraine.”[691]
Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations was one of the
great champions of the massive, failed 2007–2008 “surge” of Iraq War II.
[692] Forgetting that he was part of the faction that pushed for strikes on
Iran over the hoax of their alleged supplying Shi’ite insurgents with
roadside bombs in 2007,[693] Biddle argued in March 2022 that it should
not be a problem to pour weapons into Ukraine, since the U.S. did not
attack Iran then. He also cited the USSR’s hesitance to hit mujahideen
hideouts in Pakistan in the 1980s and Hitler’s reluctance to sink Lend-Lease
shipping before actually declaring war on the United States—never mind
the 1915 German attack on the RMS Lusitania, a British ship full of U.S.
civilians and weapons, as well as 10 other merchant ships, before U.S. entry
into World War I.[694] Do not worry, Biddle wrote, it is a safe bet because
the other guy would have to make a risky one. If Moscow calls
Washington’s bluff it could lead to general nuclear war, but that is a risk
that Biddle is willing to take for us all.[695]

De Facto Member

In September 2022, President Zelensky said that his country was a de facto
member of the NATO alliance.[696] Four months later, Ukraine’s defense
minister, Oleksii Reznikov, also said Ukraine was already a member in all
but name, now that the “thinking approach” of the alliance had changed,
and they decided that Russia would not react if they escalated support.
“Ukraine as a country, and the armed forces of Ukraine, became [a] member
of NATO. De facto, not de jure. Because we have weaponry, and the
understanding of how to use it.”[697]
“There’s not a clear and easy mathematical formula. . . . There has
always been a balance between what is required to effectively defend, and
what is going to be seen by Russia as the United States essentially
underwriting the killing of huge numbers of Russians,” Jake Sullivan told
the Washington Post.[698]
Increasing Limits

All along there was a debate in the Biden administration about how much
support to Ukraine was too much. Earlier in the war, the president had said
that giving their military specific intelligence to use in the fight, could make
us co-belligerents in the war.[699] Then he gave it to them.[700] He also
ruled out Abrams tanks,[701] F-16s,[702] cluster bombs[703] and longer-
rage rocket artillery.[704] He then crossed those lines.[705] The Post
described the exciting game officials were playing: since Putin had not
lived up to his threats to retaliate against the West for their intervention,
“[h]is bluffing has given U.S. and European leaders some confidence they
can continue doing so without severe consequences—but to what extent
remains one of the conflict’s most dangerous uncertainties.”[706]
The administration told the Times that they were very reluctant to send
Abrams tanks to Ukraine, the announcement of which was necessary to
convince the Germans to send their Leopard tanks due to their fear of a
Russian response. The Defense Department opposed it, plausibly claiming
they are too advanced and require too much maintenance for the Ukrainians
to handle. However, since the administration believed “the threat that
President Vladimir V. Putin would reach for a tactical nuclear weapon to
eviscerate Ukrainian forces has diminished,” and desired to demonstrate
unity against Russia, they decided to go ahead. The Times matter-of-factly
called it “the latest in a series of gradual escalations that has inched the
United States and its NATO allies closer to direct conflict with
Russia.”[707] The absurdity is compounded by the fact that the German and
American tanks are the furthest things from game-changers for the
Ukrainian side. They provide a marginal tactical advantage at best, and are
as vulnerable to landmines as ever, and now drone attack as well.
They ended up withdrawing the remaining Abrams because they
proved too susceptible to Russian drones, though not before a captured one
was put on display in Moscow’s Red Square. America’s frontline battle tank
proved obsolete in conflict with the Federation in the face of cheap, plastic
drones.[708] Good to know.[709] Abrams tanks always were overly
sophisticated pieces of equipment with turbine engines, as well as fuel
filters that have to be cleaned several times per day and require constant
maintenance. Americans would also be at a great disadvantage using them
in a real war—other than against, say, the Iraqis[710]—since they were
designed primarily for taking money from taxpayers, not fighting enemies.
[711]
Biden later gave the green light for allies to send F-16 fighter-bombers.
By summer 2024, the U.S. had whittled down the number of jets to 15–24,
far fewer than the 300 Kiev had requested, and announced they only had six
qualified pilots, one of whom crashed and died within the first couple of
days.[712] The Pentagon warned that they would not change the nature of
the battle in any major way. Their airfields have already proven to be
tempting targets for the Russians.[713] They also faced issues of language
barriers, spare parts and expert maintenance requirements. According to
Bloomberg News, “the administration has been dragging its feet on
introducing the aircraft—partly out of fear that it will provoke President
Vladimir Putin.”[714]
 In September 2024, the Biden administration said they were close to an
agreement to supply Ukraine with Lockheed Martin brand Joint Air-to-
Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSMs) with a range of 230 miles, which can
be launched from Ukraine’s new F-16s.[715] Officials told Reuters their
only hesitation was “out of concern such strikes could prompt retaliation
that draws NATO countries into the war or provokes a nuclear
conflict.”[716]

Entangling Alliances

Sułwaki

As Pat Buchanan had warned years before, by including the Baltics in

NATO, the U.S. had left Kaliningrad, a small strip of land between Latvia
and Poland on the Baltic Sea—sovereign Russian territory and home of
their Baltic naval fleet—“behind NATO lines” from the eastern point of
view, an obvious major potential flashpoint for war. This became an issue in
Ukraine in 2022, when Lithuania, which owns the Suwałki corridor
easement which allows Russian trains to resupply Kaliningrad, held up
shipments in the name of new EU sanctions.[717] We are not particularly
worried about Russian threats,” Laurynas Kasciunas, chairman of the
Lithuanian Parliament’s national security and defense committee told the
Times. He added that “The Kremlin has very few options for how to
retaliate.” Illustrating perhaps the most dangerous moral hazard in history,
he explained that any Russian attack would be, “highly unlikely because
Lithuania is a member of NATO. If this were not the case, they probably
would consider it.”[718] The crisis was only resolved when the Russians
started making threats[719] and EU officials advised them to back down.
[720]

The Pit

According to the Times, the U.S. is really running the war from a tech
center they call “the Pit” in Germany. They said that “officials rarely
discuss its existence, in part because of security concerns, but mostly
because the operation raises questions about how deeply involved the
United States is in the day-to-day business of finding and killing Russian
troops.” The CIA-founded company Palantir[721] got the contract to sift the
data and help Ukrainian forces target the Russians. The military is debating
how much decision-making to leave to the algorithms and how much to
human judgment.[722] Meanwhile former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has
embarked on a project called “White Stork”—no relation to the failed 2001
coup plot in Belarus[723]—to make artificial intelligence-driven attack
drones for the Ukrainian military.[724]

SOCOM and CIA in Ukraine

The CIA has had an extensive presence in Ukraine for over a decade, and
played a major role in the 2022– war.[725] Special operations aircraft
provide support while SOCOM ground forces share intelligence. Officials
told the Intercept that they knew the danger they were putting us all in,
saying they had to “walk a fine line in which one wrong step could spell
disaster: providing Ukraine with as much assistance as possible without
becoming an active participant in the war and risking a direct conflict with
nuclear-armed Russia.” As reporters Ken Klippenstein and Sara Sirota
noted, “The balance relies on the assumption that Russia will recognize and
respect the United States’s compliance with its self-imposed rules.”[726]
The London Times reported in April and December 2022 that British
special operations forces were training Ukrainian troops on Ukrainian soil
and participating in missions there.[727] According to the Intercept, both
CIA and Special Operations Command not only had personnel in Ukraine,
but many more than before the war and on “far more extensive” covert
operations missions.[728]
In February and March 2023, top secret military and intelligence files
known as the “Discord leaks” were posted online by Jack Teixeira, a 21-
year-old airman first class in the Massachusetts Air National Guard.[729]
They showed, among other things, that approximately 100 special operators
from France, America, Britain and Latvia were on the ground in Ukraine.
[730] U.S. officials denied they were participating in combat, only
protecting dignitaries and tracking weapons shipments.[731] But as the
Washington Post noted, the documents revealed “how deeply the United
States is involved in virtually every aspect of the war.” They added, “The
leaked documents confirm in detail that the United States is using its vast
array of espionage and surveillance tools—including cutting-edge satellites
and signals intelligence—to keep Kyiv ahead of Moscow’s war plans and
help them inflict Russian casualties.”[732]
 A senior intelligence official told William Arkin in the summer of
2023, “It’s a tricky balancing act—the CIA being very active in the war
while not contradicting the Biden administration’s central pledge, which is
that there are no American boots on the ground.” He denied the U.S. was
involved in a series of sabotage missions behind Russian lines, insisting that
Zelensky was in violation of their “non-agreement” to refrain from
attacking inside Russian territory in exchange for American arms and
intelligence. But the official confirmed the massive CIA operation taking
place in the country, seeming to run the war “as primary spy, as negotiator,
as supplier of intelligence, as logistician [and] as wrangler of a network of
sensitive NATO relations.” Since the U.S. and Ukraine are not officially
allies, “much of what is normally in the realm of the U.S. military is being
carried out by the Agency.” A military official assured Arkin: “Black special
operators are restricted from conducting clandestine missions, [but] when
they do, it is within a very narrow scope.”[733]
In mid-March 2022, the Russians launched cruise missiles at the
Yavoriv base, where foreign fighters were gathering and training for the
war, killing at least 35 people.[734] So far this type of strike has not been
repeated, but it remains an important indication of how quickly this war
could escalate to a major conflict between NATO and Russia if high-enough
level foreign officers were killed.
Max Boot—the neoconservative who wrote “The Case for American
Empire” in 2001, advocating our endless wars in the Middle East for Bill
Kristol’s Weekly Standard,[735] supported every intervention and escalation
in the region the entire time since[736] and loudly supported the Russiagate
hoax[737]—was on board for arming Ukraine. In March 2022, he wrote in
the Post that a no-fly zone would be too hot, but providing insurgents with
Stinger missiles would be just right for punishing the Russians without
getting America into a war.[738] Boot would not allow the results of the
wars he supported in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen
to dissuade him from following his vision on Ukraine.
And Rep. Adam Smith told NBC News that the U.S. cannot share
“real-time targeting” intelligence “because that steps over the line to . . . us
participating in the war. So the Pentagon is really struggling and walking
that very fine line.” Officials told them that “the concern about being
considered a ‘co-belligerent’ is not the only impediment to getting
battlefield intelligence in the hands of the Ukrainians in real time.”[739]
But a few months went by and the mission crept. The Wall Street
Journal reported that the U.S. had been providing Kiev with location data
on Russian troops and equipment under a “virtually unprecedented”
intelligence-sharing program with a non-NATO country. A Defense
Intelligence Agency source said they had to change 27 policies to allow
such close coordination.
Ken Dilanian, an NBC reporter known to have his CIA sources check
his work before publishing it,[740] reported the intelligence-sharing,
including information that helped the Ukrainians shoot down a transport
plane full of Russian special operations forces on their way to Hostomel
Airport near Kiev in the early days of the war. Initially, Defense Department
and CIA lawyers imposed limits on sharing targeting data, but as the war
went on, and “under pressure from Congress, all of those impediments have
been removed,” Dilanian reported, adding that at the start of the war, the
U.S. had given Ukraine “details of Russian troops’ deployment, attack
routes and real-time targeting information.”[741] The Discord leak also
revealed massive NATO air reconnaissance missions over Eastern Europe
and the Black Sea, as well as more than 100 interceptor missions flown
every day from bases in Poland.[742]
It is enough to show that they knew what they were doing and how
dangerous it was from the beginning. In the time since, U.S. officials have
boasted to the press about their massive military assistance, intelligence-
sharing and training of Ukrainian forces, which have helped to kill Russian
troops, including generals,[743] and sink the Moskva, flagship of their
Black Sea Fleet.[744] Journalist Joshua Yaffa wrote that the U.S. assisted
with M777 howitzers and real-time intelligence during the May 2022 attack
on Russian infantry attempting to cross the Siverskyi Donets River, killing
hundreds.[745]
In June 2022, the U.S. began sending High Mobility Rocket Artillery
System (HIMARS), which is longer-range rocket artillery. In October, they
sent another shipment,[746] and have continued supplying them since.
Nearly a year after the system arrived, the Post reported that the Ukrainians
“almost never” launch a HIMARS attack without having the coordinates
confirmed by the Americans. “The issue is sensitive for the U.S.
government, which has cast itself as a nonbelligerent friend to the
government in Kyiv,” the Post said.[747]
In October 2023, the Post revealed a deeper level of cooperation
between the CIA and SBU, making the latter sound like the Afghan
National Directorate of Security during that war[748]—totally under the
control of the United States.[749]

Passionate Attachments

France, Britain and Poland have been especially belligerent in this war.
French President Macron had repeatedly threatened to send ground troops
to join the fight. Meanwhile the former British prime minister and later
defense minister David Cameron announced that he thought Ukraine had
the “right” to use British weapons to hit targets inside Russia. In response,
the Kremlin said they would have the right to bomb Britain in retaliation.
[750] The Russian Defense Ministry then held a new set of nuclear war
exercises with its tactical missile forces.[751] Gen. Waldemar Skrzypczak,
a former commander of Polish ground forces, sharply rebuked his allies,
warning, “The entry of any NATO member into Ukraine will amount to a
full-scale conflict and the outbreak of World War III.”[752]
The Discord leaks revealed that a British RC-135 signals intelligence
aircraft with more than 30 men aboard was in a “near shoot-down” situation
on September 29, 2022, leading to new rules meant to keep planes and
drones farther from Crimea in the Black Sea. Arkin noted that the Russians
had “reacted to” five U.S. and NATO reconnaissance sorties, which raised
the question of risk for what seemed to be fewer than once-daily symbolic
flights anyway.[753] Then-UK Defense Minister Ben Wallace later
acknowledged the incident, but said it did not mark a “deliberate
escalation” on Moscow’s part.[754] However, the Discord leaks later
revealed that a Russian pilot had deliberately taken the shot.[755] A
malfunction prevented the missile from hitting its target, thus sparing
mankind from the threat of a major escalation right then and there.
In March 2023, a Russian Su-27 fighter jet knocked an American MQ-
9 Reaper drone out of the sky over the Black Sea by dumping fuel all over
it and apparently nicking its propeller. Sen. Lindsey Graham and other
hawks began demanding escalation in response, including shooting down
Russian jets.[756] When Gen. Milley spoke about it cautiously at a press
conference, the Republican leadership in Congress mocked the
administration’s weakness.[757]

Killing Generals

In the summer of 2020, the American political establishment went

completely crazy over New York Times reporter Charlie Savage’s
dishonorable lie to American soldiers’ families that the Russians, paying
bounties to the Taliban, had been responsible for the deaths of their sons in
Afghanistan, a sin and betrayal that will remain attached to his name until
the end of time.[758] But imagine if the Russians actually had been pouring
in billions of dollars in sophisticated missiles and other weapons for years
during that war, openly trained Taliban troops and provided them with
intelligence to help kill U.S. soldiers by the tens of thousands, while
bragging and boasting about it every chance they had. Every U.S. official
and lawmaker would agree that it would be an act of war against our
country.
Here our government is gloating, in Savage’s same “paper of record,”
that the United States is providing direct intelligence support to the
Ukrainians, including to kill not only Russian troops, but generals in the
field. How their survivors and nation back home feel about that is not our
government’s concern beyond the superficial presumption that their deaths
will sow discontent against Putin, rather than rage against those who have
actually killed their military leaders and heroes.

Boiling the Frog

Administration officials told the Times in September 2022 that they “believe
they have, so far, succeeded at ‘boiling the frog’—increasing their military,
intelligence and economic assistance to Ukraine step by step, without
provoking Moscow into large-scale retaliation.”[759] A Defense official
said in October, “As we have gotten deeper into the conflict, we realized we
could provide more weapons of greater sophistication and at greater scale
without provoking a Russian military response against NATO.” He
wondered, “Was it that we were always too cautious, and we could have
been more aggressive all along? Or, had we provided these systems right
away, would they have indeed been very escalatory? In that scenario,
Russia was the frog, and we boiled the water slowly, and Russia got used to
it.”[760]
Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, a former commander of U.S. Army Europe who
is now at the Center for European Policy Analysis, is a man who, according
to RAND, opposed giving Ukraine Javelin missiles in the Trump years for
fear it could provoke further Russian intervention and loss of Ukrainian
territory.[761] He now constantly urges further escalation, reasoning that if
they will not nuke us over a thing, we should do it. We will know when it
has been too much when the nukes start going off. “We have somehow
convinced ourselves that if you ever end up in any situation with American
versus Russian, it’s going to be World War III—the last scene of Dr.
Strangelove with all the nuclear explosions. It’s not what’s going to happen.
The last thing the Russians want is a conflict with NATO.” The reporter
added, “[H]e said there has been no evidence so far that Moscow would
approve a massive escalation, such as a nuclear strike, over the provision of
a single weapons system, such as multiple rocket launchers.”[762] Asked
about NATO intervention, Putin responded, “We are, indeed, responding
rather restrainedly, but that’s for the time being. If the situation continues to
develop in this way, the answer will be more serious.”[763]
In early 2024, a series of revelations—including a leaked conversation
between top German air force officials,[764] as well as statements by
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz[765] and Polish Foreign Minister
Radosław Sikorski[766]—confirmed that at the very least, the U.S., Britain
and France each have deniable special operations forces on the ground in
Ukraine.
The Germans were heard discussing how to circumvent their own
chancellor to provide Taurus cruise missiles and targeting information to
Kiev to strike the Kerch Bridge, an operation they hoped to hand off to the
British to disguise their involvement. In the conversation, they confirmed
the presence of British and French troops helping Ukrainian forces operate
their more advanced systems and alluded to American intelligence officers
or contractors playing the same role. The Russians published it,[767] but
the Germans confirmed the legitimacy of the audio and transcript.[768]
 Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico warned in February 2024 that
some NATO member states were considering sending conventional forces
into the war.[769] Macron then said the option could not be ruled out.[770]
Sikorski was open to the idea of introducing regular troops as well,[771]
though Macron said this would only be for training, which is already being
done in Poland and Germany anyway. The Germans rebuffed him, saying
there was “no chance” of NATO ground deployments and that the French
should just send more weapons instead.[772] In May, Macron announced he
would indeed be sending regular army forces as trainers to Ukraine.[773]
Other countries could decide whether we go to war.
When asked about this, President Putin coolly responded that it would
be a mistake for Ukraine to welcome Polish troops, since they might want
to stay and attempt to retake control of what they consider to be their
historic territory in the country’s west, and hypocritically pointed out what a
bad precedent it could set if everyone started questioning the post-World
War II borders across Europe. He politely did not take the opportunity to
threaten general war with NATO. And when prodded on the possible use of
tactical nuclear weapons, he said Russian strategy had not changed, that
they would only use them to protect their “existence, sovereignty and
independence.” In other words, he would not use them to secure Russia’s
newly expanded borders in the current war, though he did also note just
how unnecessary that would be, leaving open the possibility that their
conventional advantage was the main reason he did not need to consider it.
[774]

War Games
In early- to mid-September 2022, Ukraine made major gains around
Kharkiv and Luhansk Oblasts. The next month, American and British
intelligence officers said they helped the Ukrainians run numerous tabletop
exercises in preparation for the attack. “We have algorithms and
methodologies that are more sophisticated when it comes to things like
mapping out logistics and calculating munitions rates,” a Defense
Department official told The New Yorker. “The idea was not to tell them
what to do but, rather, to give them different runs to test their plans.”
When the war games suggested the Ukrainians would have a hard time
taking Kherson in the south since the Russians had moved reinforcements
there from the Kharkiv region, they decided on a two-front attack, with a
feint in the south and major push in the north, which succeeded.[775]
In reaction, Putin called up 300,000 reserves and announced the
official annexation of not only Donetsk and Luhansk, but all of
Zaporizhzhia and Kherson as well,[776] supposedly ratified by quickly held
referendums in the four oblasts.[777] Though Russia did not control most of
that territory, this amounted to throwing down the gauntlet and making a
negotiated settlement much more difficult to achieve. Putin immediately
declared that the Americans and Ukrainians would have to recognize
Russia’s new expanded sovereignty for talks to even begin.[778] After
saying he wished to negotiate, Putin added an impossible poison pill:
“[T]he choice of the people in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and
Kherson will not be discussed.”[779] For his part, Zelensky responded with
a decree outlawing negotiations with Russia as long as Putin remained
president,[780] and demanded “accelerated ascension” to NATO.[781]
 However, later in October 2022, Dan Rice, a contractor for the U.S.
Military Academy at West Point[782] and special adviser to Ukrainian
Commander-in-Chief Valerii Zaluzhnyi, told CNN that the Russians were
“trying to get to the negotiating table, to try to go back to the 2014 lines.
Ukraine won’t have it. Ukraine wants all of their land back to the ’91
lines.”[783] It is difficult to know if that was correct, but coming from
someone working for the highest ranks of the Ukrainian military, the
administration had an obligation to attempt to achieve peace if they could.
But the American reaction was to reiterate that Russia must withdraw
from every last square inch of Ukraine, including Crimea, and that NATO
will support them “with as much as it takes for as long as it takes,” until
they achieve unconditional victory.[784]
Biden swore the U.S. would not fight for Ukraine, but still escalated
the economic, diplomatic and covert war to a point that it could break out
into a real conflict between NATO and Russia. Officials told the media that
even though they thought Ukraine had the ability to retake the peninsula, it
would raise the risk of nuclear war to an unacceptable degree.[785]
Half a year later, in March 2023, the Times and Wall Street Journal
reported that the United States was holding large-scale war games in
Wiesbaden, Germany, with the “highest level” American generals taking the
Ukrainians through what they saw as the best available options for their
planned spring offensive, including renewed assaults in the east or an
attempt to sever the so-called “land bridge” between the Donbas and
Crimea. For deniability’s sake, the Times said the final decisions were still
left up to the Ukrainians.[786] The U.S. also poured in weapons and
trainers.[787]
Biden’s National Security Strategy from October 2022 stated that
“[a]longside our allies and partners, America is helping to make Russia’s
war on Ukraine a strategic failure.”[788] But the president surely
recognized the risk. He had obviously assured himself he was keeping
America on the safe side of full intervention, but that was far from certain.
He explained that giving them “material that is fundamentally different than
[what] is already going there would have a prospect of breaking up NATO
and breaking up the European Union and the rest of the world.” This was
typical Biden hyperbole. He just meant that the allies were opposed to
doing so, not that they were threatening to break up the alliance over it.
Still, it is nice when the error is on the side of less violence and instability.
[789]

Seize the Moment

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen urged Ukraine to
negotiate in October 2022,[790] and not long after, the then-chairman, Mark
Milley, publicly agreed, saying that after the Ukrainian victory at Kherson
and Kharkiv, they should “seize the moment” and come to the table.[791]
The Russian terms to stop the war had actually softened a bit from the
beginning of the conflict—at least through July 2022.[792] After Russian
forces took Mariupol and began negotiating with Kiev in March, they
dropped the demands about denazification[793] and eventually traded many
Azov Battalion prisoners back to the Ukrainian side. How many of them
have been killed in the war is unknown.
It was not until after the Ukrainian Kharkiv offensive in September
2022 that Putin announced his annexation of all four eastern provinces[794]
and raised the ante on negotiations, saying they must begin with recognition
of the new facts on the ground.[795]
In February 2023, Milley admitted, “I still maintain that for this year, it
would be very, very difficult to militarily eject the Russian forces from
every inch of Russian-occupied Ukraine.” Sullivan and Blinken insisted the
Pentagon chiefs were just being defeatist and that U.S. support for the war
must go on.[796] It was only a year and a half later that we learned that
Putin had, in fact, offered a ceasefire based on the current lines at the time.
Biden and Zelensky refused to talk to them.[797] European officials said
that in November 2022, Sullivan had told Zelensky he needed to forget
about retaking Crimea and begin considering his priorities for talks, but
only to “gain leverage by showing openness to negotiations.”[798]
Meanwhile, on the ground, Ukrainian soldiers, mostly conscripts and
prisoners,[799] were being sent to the front with deteriorating tactical and
logistical support. The Guardian reported as early as June 2022 that
Ukrainian casualty rates were as many as 1,000 per day, approximately one-
fourth of them killed in action.[800] A senior aide to President Zelensky
confirmed those numbers.[801]

OceanofPDF.com
 Economic War

Crippling Sanctions

The U.S. is waging a massive economic war against Russia in response to

the invasion. In March 2022, Biden declared that “[a]s a result of our
unprecedented sanctions, the ruble was almost immediately reduced to
rubble.” He predicted, “The Russian economy is on track to be cut in half. It
was ranked the 11th biggest economy in the world before this invasion—
and soon, it will not even rank among the top 20.”[802]
A New York Times headline explained it all: “With Sanctions, U.S. and
Europe Aim to Punish Putin and Fuel Russian Unrest.” They wrote that the
Biden administration’s goals were to “devastate the Russian economy as
punishment for the world to witness, and create domestic pressure on
President Vladimir V. Putin to halt his war in Ukraine.” Even though they
had promised not to “inflict pain” on ordinary Russians, they had changed
their mind. “The thinking among some U.S. and European officials is that
Mr. Putin might stop the war if enough Russians protest in the streets and
enough tycoons turn on him.”[803]
Somewhat paraphrasing Osama bin Laden’s 2002 “Letter to
America,”[804] Secretary Blinken added that “the Russian people will
suffer the consequences of their leaders’ choices.” The Washington Post
reported that the U.S. and its allies were “planning for a far different world,
in which they no longer try to coexist and cooperate with Russia, but
actively seek to isolate and weaken it as a matter of long-term strategy.”
They said that “virtually every aspect” of America and Europe’s
relationship with Russia was being changed to align with this new cold war
posture, with the EU attempting to cut imports of Russian gas completely
by 2030.[805]
Daleep Singh, deputy NSC director for international economics, said
Russia’s “economy is in freefall” and will be “half of its size that it was
before this invasion.”[806] French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire added
that the West was “waging an all-out economic and financial war on
Russia” to “cause the collapse of the Russian economy,” while Prime
Minister Johnson’s spokesman added that the sanctions were “intended to
bring down the Putin regime.”[807]
Former Secretary of State Albright also imagined that Putin would
soon be overthrown. The new sanctions regime would “devastate not just
his country’s economy but also his tight circle of corrupt cronies—who in
turn could challenge his leadership,” she thought.[808]
Right after the invasion, Jake Sullivan came up with a scheme to seize
$300 billion in Russian assets. They called it the “economic equivalent of a
nuclear weapon.” Many U.S. firms also left Russia.[809] It did not work.
By the end of March 2022, the ruble had regained its value.[810] While the
Russian economy and currency declined in 2022, it had recovered by early
2023.[811]
University of Texas at Austin economics professor Jamie Galbraith
published a study in April 2023 examining popular claims about the
devastating effects of America’s economic war. He found that the partial
European embargo on Russian oil and gas was ineffective since “higher
prices compensated for smaller quantities.” The standard of living of the
average Russian has not been greatly affected by the sanctions. It is, after
all, a capitalist country with massive natural resources and plenty of highly
educated engineers. And of Biden’s $300 billion “economic nuclear bomb,”
Galbraith wrote, “Those balances, frozen or otherwise, are just balances.
They are reserves. Their loss would be reflected on balance sheets but not in
current activity.” He added that the policy had “no effect on general
economic activity in Russia, nor on the financial capacity of the Russian
state.”[812]
As far as their stated goals of degrading the Russian military-industrial
complex[813] and the government’s ability to fund it,[814] the
administration has clearly failed.[815]

Sino-Russian Alliance

It turns out that the Russians do not need Western Europe and the United
States that badly after all. They just strengthened their relationship with the
states of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and Eurasian Economic
Union and went on ahead with their war.[816]
Biden seemed to have gone after China too hard as well, threatening
sanctions over possible future weapons transfers to Russia.[817] They
would be wise to keep playing both sides, but the administration’s
accusatory stance pushed Chairman Xi Jinping to attempt to convince the
Saudis to allow China to buy their oil with yuan, rather than U.S. dollars.
[818]
 Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen worried in April 2023: “There is a risk
when we use financial sanctions that are linked to the role of the dollar that
over time it could undermine the hegemony of the dollar. Of course, it does
create a desire on the part of China, of Russia, of Iran to find an
alternative.” Our government is incentivizing other nations to do everything
they can to diversify their bonds to protect themselves from future financial
war by the United States.[819]
It seems Biden may have underestimated Russia’s willingness to suffer
the consequences over Ukraine. In June 2021, after a meeting with Putin in
Geneva, Biden had confidently told the media: “I think that the last thing he
wants now is a Cold War.” He began to ask a rhetorical question: “You got a
multi-thousand-mile border with China. China is . . . seeking to be the most
powerful economy in the world and the largest and the most powerful
military.” He continued, “You’re in a situation where your economy is
struggling, you need to move it in a more aggressive way, in terms of
growing it. And you—I don’t think he’s looking for a Cold War with the
United States.”
This analysis may have been too shallow. Biden evidently once learned
that there is a potential for Sino-Russian conflict over resource-rich Siberia.
He then apparently got it stuck in his head that this issue would somehow
always be paramount in Russian considerations. Perhaps William Burns is
to blame. He is an expert on that narrative.[820] Biden calculated wrong.
Putin decided instead that if he was going to be kicked out of Europe, so be
it. He would just turn East. At least in economic terms, Russia and China
have not been this close in more than half a century.
 China’s trade with Russia increased to $240 billion in 2023, compared
to $147 billion in the year before the war. Turkey, Malaysia and the UAE
have also increased their trade with Russia.[821] It seems Obama,[822]
Trump[823] and Biden’s[824] support for UAE’s[825] genocidal war
against Yemen[826] from 2015 to 2022[827] bought them no loyalty from
their client kingdom.
Despite their intentions, the Biden team succeeded mostly at scoring
against themselves. They kicked Russia out of Europe, and gave them no
choice but to deepen their economic relationship with nations across Asia,
including India,[828] as well as their economic and political alliance with
China, all to America and Europe’s loss and their gain. American and
European automobile makers that made a big show of pulling their
companies out of Russia simply made room for China to fill the demand.
[829]
Foreign policy analyst and fortune teller John Dolan (a.k.a. Gary
Brecher) wrote back in 2014 that Moscow’s opening of the East Siberia-
Pacific Ocean (ESPO) pipeline to East Asia meant that “Russia no longer
need[ed] Europe as a customer. . . . With the pipeline to China and East Asia
running wide open, Russia wouldn’t even feel a sentimental twinge if the
EU somehow went insane and destroyed its own economy to ‘punish’
Russia.”[830] In 2018, Russia and China completed construction of a
second branch of their Mohe-Daqing oil pipeline, and in 2019 completed
the Power of Siberia natural gas pipeline and announced plans to add the
Russia-China Far East Gas Pipeline to their China-Russia Eastern Gas
Pipeline.[831] Dolan was right. Within four months of the start of the 2022–
war, the Times was already lamenting a windfall year for Russian oil profits,
saying they had made a record €93 billion in the first 100 days.[832]

Global South

The people hit hardest were the poor in the Global South. Russia and
Ukraine are both major exporters of wheat. But the great American
benefactors of humanity quite literally decided they did not give a damn.
The White House told the Post they were willing to “countenance even a
global recession and mounting hunger” as a means to bankrupt Russia.[833]
In March 2022, after bragging that he had convinced the allies to adopt
“the most significant . . . economic sanction regime ever, in order to cripple
Putin’s economy,” Biden acknowledged that “[w]ith regard to food
shortage, yes, we did talk about food shortages. And—and it’s going to be
real. The price of these sanctions is not just imposed upon Russia, it’s
imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well.” He said that would include
“European countries and our country as well.” But Biden insisted that if he
could get the other EU nations to maintain the sanctions “for the remainder
of this entire year. That’s what will stop [Putin].”[834]
The politicians, government employees, media stars and assorted
contractors living off this system somehow tell themselves that deliberately
starving uninvolved third parties to this conflict is completely different than
just machine-gunning them to death in a ditch in the style of the OUN-B.
They are evidently quite confident that no one else in the world must notice
their cynicism and cruelty either. There will be no blowback, no backdraft,
no consequences for them, they are sure.
Who’s Zoomin’ Who?

But instead of crashing, the ruble had a great year due to high fuel prices.
[835] The IMF says that the Russian economy only contracted by 2.2
percent in 2022,[836] far less than the “large” and “deep” 8.5 percent
contraction the international banking institution had predicted the year
before.[837] In 2023, Russia was the fastest growing economy in Europe by
GDP. With an external debt of just over $300 billion, and raw materials
exports thriving, they were in no economic trouble at all.[838] Former
diplomat Chas Freeman wrote that “[f]ar from isolating Russia or China,
America’s coercive diplomacy has helped both Moscow and Beijing to
enhance relationships in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that reduce U.S.
influence in favor of their own.”[839]
The Economist conceded that the 2022 recession was slight and that
inflation was low as the economy was growing. They added, “Russia’s
economy has been re-engineered. Oil exports bypass sanctions and are
shipped to the global south. . . . Sanctions, meanwhile, have been less
effective than hoped.” More than 80 percent of the world was simply
ignoring them.[840]
In response to their complete failure as Russia’s economy grew faster
than America’s in 2023, the Biden administration announced a new round
of sanctions.[841] The Post noted Biden’s utter inability to impose his will
on the Russian Federation. “Two years after President Biden spoke of
dealing the Russian economy ‘a crushing blow’ following the invasion of
Ukraine, Russia this year is expected to grow faster than the United States,
Germany, France or the United Kingdom.”[842]
 The EU avoids their own sanctions by exporting tens of billions in
finished goods to Central Asian nations first, “making up for about one-
quarter of what sanctions cost the Russian economy,” the Post said.[843]
The Western “price cap” scheme to limit Russian oil sales also failed.
After costing Russia more than €30 billion in 2022, they simply figured out
how to work around the restrictions.[844] According to a late 2023 study,
self-interest on the part of America’s allies required them to ignore Biden’s
exhortations to sacrifice their populations in the name of his policy. “The
G7 and the EU retain a stranglehold on Russia’s oil exports but have balked
at using it. In October 2023, 48 percent of Russian oil shipments were
carried on tankers owned or insured in G7 and EU countries.”[845]
India, America’s supposed strategic partner against China,[846] also
found it to be in their interest to ignore the West’s priorities, instead seeking
to increase trade with Russia. Thanks to them, “the Kremlin has never been
richer,” according to CNN. It seems India spent $37 billion on Russian oil
in 2023—more than 13 times the amount from the year before the war—
and reselling at least $1 billion worth to the United States.[847] The
perfidious British keep buying Russian oil too, from refiners in India.[848]
A Reuters piece from early 2024 had a point that much of Russia’s
GDP growth could be attributed to increased military spending, essentially
a net loss in real wealth for the economy, a bit of analysis they never seem
to apply to American military spending. They may see some benefit now,
but eventually the price will have to be paid in lost wealth and living
standards.[849] The Post ridiculed Russia for wasting so much money on
the war, calling their apparent GDP boost an illusion of “military
Keynesianism.”[850] However, when the administration invokes military
spending as not only beneficial for the American economy, but even one of
the main reasons to continue the war, the Post responds with enthusiastic
support.[851]
The U.S. and its allies promised that sanctions against Russia’s
business elite would cause them to turn on Putin. They have not done so.
[852] In an otherwise fanciful article about how surely doomed Putin and
the Russian system are, Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center fellow Tatiana
Stanovaya admitted that since the beginning of the war, “the percentage of
Russians who overtly admire Putin has grown from 8 to 19 percent, and 68
percent of Russians now say they want him to be reelected, a significant
jump from 48 percent of Russians before the war.” She added, “The war has
also increased support for all official institutions: the cabinet, regional
governors, parliament, and even the ruling party, United Russia.”[853]
Putin was easily reelected in 2024.[854]
And while American newspapers complained that the autocratic
president had excluded real competition from the vote, no one posed a
credible electoral threat anyway. The Wall Street Journal said that before he
died, Alexey Navalny was the greatest threat to Putin, proving that no one is
at all. Navalny had no popular support in the country.[855] His best
showing was a failed run for mayor of Moscow years ago.[856] All the
Western NGO money in the world could never change that.
In July 2024, the World Bank officially upgraded Russia from a
“medium” to “high income” country, amusingly counting aggregate demand
based on their massive new military spending,[857] the true expense of
which the people will pay later, at the very least in lost opportunity costs.
Ukraine’s economy, on the other hand, has been devastated. Their GDP
fell 30.4 percent in 2022, the worst since independence. Exports were down
35 percent compared to 2021.[858] They supposedly had 5 percent growth
in 2023 from their 2022 low, but that included billions in aid.[859]
Soaring energy prices across Europe have spread misery. Firewood
sold at a premium in Germany in the winter of 2022–2023 since people
could no longer afford gas.[860] European governments spent €800 billion
on energy subsidies for their populations in the winter of 2022–2023.[861]
The next winter they had enough supplies of natural gas, but were still
dependent on Russian gas piped across Ukraine.[862]

America’s Order Wrecked

Goldman Sachs warned in the spring of 2022 that the U.S. dollar was at risk
of losing its place as the reserve currency of the world.[863]
The attempted economic war against Russia, to “maximize the pain,”
backfired. Even neoconservative theoretician Francis Fukuyama admitted in
“The End of History and the Last Man” that eventually people are going to
shift back to Old World nationhood. Free markets and democracy, loosely
defined, may still be the way of the future, but there is no reason that should
be synonymous with a world government run out of Washington. Unipolar
moments cannot last forever. The fact is that the rest of the planet is getting
wealthier and more powerful relative to the United States, especially
compared to the early post-World War II, or even post-Cold War era.[864]
 As Walter Russell Mead wrote in the Journal, most countries in the
world preferred China’s approach to the war, not supporting it, but not
supporting American efforts against it either. “South African President Cyril
Ramaphosa blamed the war on NATO. Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro,
refused to condemn Russia. India and Vietnam . . . are closer to China than
the U.S. in their approach to the war.” Threats of sanctions get some
immediate results in forcing neutral states to go along with Western votes at
the UN, but he warned that “the lack of non-Western enthusiasm for
America’s approach to Mr. Putin’s war is a phenomenon that U.S. policy
makers ignore at their peril.” In their myopia, they were sowing the seeds of
the destruction of the American-led system.[865] By overplaying their great
power hand in the name of the supposedly selfless “rules-based
international order,” they have essentially put the final nail in the post-Cold
War era of American unilateral global hegemony.
The American foreign policy and business elite’s dream of overriding
all the world’s conflicts over ethnicity, religion, and nationality with their
so-called “liberal, rules-based order”—under American political and
military hegemony, dressed up in global institutions such as the UN, EU,
WTO and the rest—is already failing. Secession is breaking out
everywhere. The UK left the EU by popular demand,[866] Scotland wants
to break away from the UK,[867] Catalonia wants independence from
Spain,[868] eastern Ukraine wants to break away from the West and on it
goes. It was up to the global hegemon to be so “benevolent,” as Kristol and
Kagan put it, that the world would accept their rule in their unipolar
moment. Instead, all they got was decade after decade of wars, sanctions,
threats and economic crashes that destabilize the whole planet. For now, at
least, Russia is rejecting the hypocritical, unipolar world rule of the United
States and the West in favor of expanded relations with the nations of Asia.
[869]
At the beginning of the war, in a major indication that the U.S. would
not countenance real peace negotiations, the Biden administration
announced plans to keep the sanctions regime on Russia forever, even if
successful talks ended the fighting.[870]
The Russians kept selling gas and oil to Europe.[871] And they have
demanded the EU states pay them in rubles to do so, helping to prop up its
value. It seems as though this is one place the Russian government sure was
ready for the inevitable economic war, and it appears they have beaten the
U.S. at this part of the game every step of the way.
And they keep selling oil to the United States too—$700 million per
day, according to Natalie Jaresko.[872] America’s nuclear reactors continue
to run off Russian uranium imports as well,[873] although Putin threatened
to suspend sales in September 2024.[874]

The BRICS

Attempts to force third nations to join in their sanctions against Russia have
only pushed more of them away from the West and towards the Russians
instead. BRICS is an acronym for Brazil, Russia, India, China and South
Africa. Originally proposed and pushed by the Russian president,[875] the
project is an international financial and trading arrangement meant to unite
Eurasia and the Global South into a separate economic and political order
outside of American dominance. Along with the Commonwealth of
Independent States (CIS), Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and Shanghai
Cooperation Organization (SCO), BRICS is meant first and foremost to
provide a hedge against American dollar hegemony, which helps to export
our country’s terrible, inflation-generated boom-bust cycle[876] throughout
the rest of the world.[877] This also gives the U.S. government the ability to
sanction other nations and even destroy their economies when they refuse to
cooperate with American goals. While the rise of a multi-polar world is
inevitable, the Russians, Chinese and others are racing to build their
alternative systems as fast as possible as a consequence.[878]
When they had proposed a new global currency based on a “market
basket” of other national currencies in 2009,[879] the effort mostly went
nowhere, since all those governments have their own debt and debasement
problems to deal with. But in July 2023, BRICS officially announced they
would debut a new currency, backed by gold, to replace the U.S. dollar in
their international transactions.[880] They had been diversifying out of the
dollar anyway. For example, China and Brazil recently agreed to conduct all
of their financial transactions in their own currencies and forgo use of the
dollar.[881] Six more countries joined in 2023.[882] Their conference in
2024 was well-attended, showing that, if nothing else, the rest of the world
is refusing to shun Russia as the Biden administration had wanted, even if
there were no apparent major new deals to announce, just the standard
things about how Russia and China are closer again than any time since the
1960s, and pushing for a so-called “fair world order.”[883]

Putin’s Price Hike

The administration blamed all the price inflation from Trump and Biden’s
massive spending bills on Putin and the war. What actually happened was
that the U.S. government increased the amount of dollars in circulation by
30 percent.[884] Once the 2020 Covid restrictions were over and people
went back to work, all that new currency caused severe price inflation
across the board. At the same time, Biden was passing even more monetary
expansion in direct payments to citizens as well as his massive defense and
infrastructure appropriations and corresponding budget deficits. And so he
decided he would just blame the inflation, like the war, on the other guy.
[885]

Feb ’23: Failure

The Washington Post admitted in February 2023 that the Biden

administration’s attempt to rally the world against Russia had failed. While
other nations disapprove of Russia violating Ukraine’s sovereignty, they
also remember the last 20 years of aggressive U.S. wars in Serbia, Iraq and
Libya, among others, and so dismiss claims that Western support for
Ukraine is a matter of principle rather than great power advantage. They are
staying out of the sanctions regime and hypocritical morality play. The
White House had to go ahead without them, announcing a whole new round
of sanctions targeting Russia’s defense, energy and financial sectors.[886]
Russia’s trade with India was up 400 percent. Their foreign minister is
welcome all around the world, while the South African navy joined theirs
and China’s in exercises in the Indian Ocean. A majority of nations
condemned the invasion, but two-thirds of the population of the planet lives
in countries which did not. Only 33 followed America’s lead and issued
trade sanctions.[887]
Pushing Russia out of Europe and towards Asia completes the process
of turning the so-called “world island” away from American and allied
control. Presuming one buys into any of these strategic doctrines for the
sake of argument, the previous Trump-Kissinger wish to ally with Russia to
separate them from China made much more sense. Now, instead of “taking
out” Russia before pivoting to China, the Biden administration has made
them closer partners than any time since the 1960s.[888]
India and other mid-rank powers are siding with them through
membership in the BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO),
and by refusing to participate in America’s economic war against Russia
and China. It would seem the U.S. and its allies are the ones being isolated.
A year and a half into the war, it turned out Russia had spent far less
than the United States and its allies. The Economist found they had only
spent $67 billion by that point, roughly 3 percent of their GDP, what they
called “a puny amount” compared to their spending on previous wars.[889]
One might point out that the West has spent much more,[890] and suffered
much more in terms of opportunity costs, such as the higher price of energy
in Europe, and is still subsidizing Russia’s war on the other side.[891]

CH4

President Biden did get Chancellor Scholz to agree that if Russia invaded,
Germany would cancel the Nord Stream 2 pipeline on their end, and so they
did.[892] Nord Stream is a series of four pipelines from Russia to Germany
across the Baltic Sea that were finally completed in September 2021.[893]
A year later, in the middle of the war, someone blew up three of the
pipelines. A massive chorus of government employees and media stars had
ludicrously blamed this on the Russians,[894] who had everything to lose
from the pipeline’s destruction and who can, after all, simply turn it off
from their end, as Putin had already done in the case of Nord Stream 1 (two
of the four pipes) in retaliation for a new Western price cap on Russian gas
only weeks before.[895]
Secretary Blinken did not attempt to hide his satisfaction at the
pipelines’ destruction. He said it would “once and for all remove
[European] dependence on Russian energy and thus to take away from
Vladimir Putin the weaponization of energy as a means of advancing his
imperial designs,” and “offers tremendous strategic opportunity for the
years to come.”[896]
According to investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, the U.S. Navy was
behind it, on orders from President Biden.[897] Victoria Nuland, then
deputy secretary of state for political affairs, and Biden himself had both
already seemingly given their game away just before the invasion, with
Nuland declaring, “If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord
Stream 2 will not move forward.” On January 27, 2022, the State
Department threatened with the exact same language.[898] And on
February 7, Biden had declared at a press conference, “If Russia invades—
that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, then there
will no longer be a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it.” When asked
how, the president insisted, “I promise you we will be able to do it.”[899]
According to Hersh, and consistent with the means, motive and opportunity,
that is exactly what happened.
By December, the Russians began repairs and the Post[900] and
Times[901] both admitted there was no reason whatsoever to believe they
had blown up their own pipeline. But the experiment in getting every
mainstream liberal media conspiracy theorist to repeat the lie to each other
was another outstanding success.[902]
In February 2023, Fiona Hill claimed in a podcast to have heard tell
around town that it was a private team of Ukrainians who had done the
deed.[903] The New York Times,[904] London Times[905] and Die
Zeit[906] soon followed up with articles claiming the same, citing sources
but very few details. Der Spiegel then published photos of the sailboat
supposedly used in the caper.[907] Hersh followed up soon after, alleging
that “certain elements in the Central Intelligence Agency were asked to
prepare a cover story in collaboration with German intelligence that would
provide the American and German press with an alternative version for the
destruction of Nord Stream 2.” Hersh’s U.S. intelligence source told him
the yacht story was “a total fabrication by American intelligence that was
passed along to the Germans, and aimed at discrediting your story.”[908]
In April 2023, both the Washington Post and New York Times said that
the yacht story was a hoax. While completely ignoring Hersh’s reporting on
the matter, the Post instead quoted anonymous officials reasoning that it
must have been done with robots or submarines.[909] After raising, then
casting doubts on, suspicions against Poland and Ukraine—why would
either of those risk the support of the Germans now?—the Post underscored
what dishonest players the Western leaders are: “For all the intrigue around
who bombed the pipeline, some Western officials are not so eager to find
out. At gatherings of European and NATO policymakers, officials have
settled into a rhythm, said one senior European diplomat: ‘Don’t talk about
Nord Stream.’” Calling it “a corpse at a family gathering,” he said they did
not want to “deal with the possibility that Ukraine or allies were
involved. . . . It’s better not to know.”
The Times, also backed down on their previous pretended belief that
the small sailboat could have been the center of the story. Their experts, like
those who spoke to the Post, agreed that “[t]here are strategic reasons for
not revealing who did it. As long as they don’t come out with anything
substantial, then we are left in the dark on all this—as it should be,” said
Jens Wenzel Kristoffersen, a Danish naval commander and military expert
at the University of Copenhagen.[910]
Legendary intelligence beat journalist and author James Bamford later
published another credible alternative to Hersh’s story. He reasoned, based
on open sources, that Ukrainian and Polish intelligence must have done it,
as they seemed to have the capability—including U.S. military-grade
underwater drones.[911]
Then in June 2023, the Post said that the Discord leaks, which they had
in their possession for months by that point, showed the U.S. had been
made aware of an impending Ukrainian attack on the pipeline more than
three months before the mostly successful sabotage, and that they had
warned the Germans too.[912] The Wall Street Journal later said the CIA
had warned the Ukrainians not to do it.[913] If true, this would reveal a new
level of official dishonesty by our government and media in pushing the
cover story that the Russians had done it to themselves. Nobody pretends
they did it anymore. The Post later said that Roman Chervinsky, a colonel
in Ukraine’s special operations forces, did it on orders from Gen. Valerii
Zaluzhnyi.[914] The Swedish government investigated, but is keeping its
results sealed.[915] In early 2024, they simply closed their probe into the
pipeline bombing, arguing they did not have jurisdiction, and said it would
be better left to the Germans to solve.[916] Russian demands that the UN
Security Council launch an official investigation were refused by the U.S.
and its allies.
But in August 2024, the Germans issued an arrest warrant and
extradition request for a Ukrainian they said was involved in the attack,
which the Poles ignored.[917] The Journal then claimed to confirm that
yes, it was Ukrainians who did it, using that same sailboat, though the
Zelensky government still denied it. The Germans claimed to have
“obtained evidence including email, mobile and satellite phones
communications, as well as fingerprints and DNA samples from the alleged
sabotage team” to prove the case. The most convincing part was when a
German official noted, “An attack of this scale is a sufficient reason to
trigger the collective defense clause of NATO, but our critical infrastructure
was blown up by a country that we support with massive weapons
shipments and billions in cash.”[918]
Regardless of whether Biden or Zelensky’s forces did it, it was an
attack on our ally Germany as much as it was on Russia and their potential
economic integration. But the American War Party sees ties between Russia
and Germany not as a potential guarantor of peace, but only as a tool of
Putin’s new empire to blackmail and intimidate Europe and to exclude
American power from dominating the continent.
In the aftermath, Nuland gloated to Sen. Ted Cruz, “I think the
administration is very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you
like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.” The end of the Nord
Stream pipeline has been a boon to Texan, Norwegian and Polish energy
firms. In 2022, U.S. companies increased exports to Europe by nearly 140
percent to nearly $40 billion.[919] The Europeans noticed their American
friends profiting at their expense too.[920]
Speaking of methane gas, Bret Stephens, the famous former editor of
the Jerusalem Post,[921] unrepentant supporter of the W. Bush-era war in
Iraq[922] and the Obama-era dirty war in Syria,[923] speculated in the
Times that Putin was not interested in defending Russian interests at all, he
was just lying and stealing Ukraine’s natural gas resources, which all
happen to be in the Donbas.[924] But the RAND Corporation pointed out
that Ukraine had only 3 percent of the natural gas reserves that Russia
already possessed,[925] virtually all of which remains undeveloped,[926]
and that Ukraine’s shale could not be easily developed without American
technology, which U.S. companies were already banned from sharing with
Russia.[927] In the end, they may well take it all. But Stephens was clueless
about the causes of the war.

Terrorizing Europe
Russia in Germany

In April 2023, the Washington Post and U.S. government accused Russia of
orchestrating a left-right alliance against German intervention in the war.
[928] It was just more Russiagate hoax-type nonsense. Documents provided
to the Post by a European intelligence agency allegedly showed that
Russian officials thought it would be nice if Germans opposed the war. That
is all they had. “The documents do not contain any material that records
communications between the Russian strategists and any allies in
Germany,” they admitted. Still, they claimed interviews showed that “at
least one person close” to popular antiwar parliamentarian Sahra
Wagenknecht and members of the right-wing Alternative für Deutschland
(AfD) party “were in contact with Russian officials at the time the plans
were being drawn up.” The Russians also supposedly wrote a manifesto for
AfD. Too bad for those pushing the hoax that even the Post had to concede:
“It is unclear from the documents if the manifesto ever reached anyone in
the AfD.” They also worked on slogans that were to be spraypainted “on
walls across Germany,” the Post warned. However, they conceded, “It is
unclear whether any of this graffiti appeared.” In other words, they had no
evidence of anything. It was just a smear of Wagenknecht, from Germany’s
leftist Die Linke party, who credibly insisted she had no ties to Russia or
AfD. Though the story included enough caveats to refute its own claims,
[929] it was enough for a few headlines in the U.S. and Germany.[930]

Spanish Letter Bombs

In November 2022, some random kook in Spain sent six letter bombs to
various government offices, including the U.S. Embassy, slightly wounding
an employee at the Ukrainian Embassy.[931] Washington claimed Russian
military intelligence was behind it, with one official telling the New York
Times that the “apparent aim of the action was to signal that Russia and its
proxies could carry out terrorist strikes across Europe, including in the
capitals of member states of NATO.” Former W. Bush-, Obama- and
Trump-era official Fiona Hill told them that “[m]ost of these kinds of
organizations are of course linked to Russian intelligence, either the GRU
or the FSB,” calling them “front groups” for the Kremlin. Trump’s State
Department counterterrorism coordinator Nathan Sales added, “This seems
like a warning shot. It’s Russia sending a signal that it’s prepared to use
terrorist proxies to attack in the West’s rear areas.”[932]
That was all false. The perpetrator was a lonely 74-year-old man, not a
group of mythical GRU-backed white supremacists. The judge in the case
said there was “no indication that the person under investigation belongs to
or collaborates with any terrorist gang or organized group,” much less the
Russian or any other foreign government.[933]
The government and media just dropped it. No one had to resign for
lying to the Times that Putin’s regime had launched a new anti-European
terrorism campaign, just as no one at the paper had to resign for printing
those lies. Neither Hill nor Sales apologized for pushing such a
controversial claim, for which they had no evidence, in the most important
newspaper in the country.

Weaponized by Russia
Bernard of the Moon of Alabama blog, a thoughtful observer of U.S.
foreign policy, put together an exhaustive, and exhausting, list of 111
ordinary things that major media headlines have claimed Russia has
“weaponized” against the West in recent years, including whales, giant
squid, American racism, the Ebola virus, wheat, laughter, of course “the
First Amendment,” and, really, “cuddly puppies.”[934]
Of course, in the current political climate any statement that contains
anything better than the most simplistic, “other side”-bashing is spun as
“pro-Russian,” while dissenters face endless accusation they are secretly
controlled and paid by Russia. They are mostly just trying to intimidate
people into silence. No major or minor political faction in America sides
with Russia in this war or even has reason to care specifically about Russia
at all. The argument is simply that our politicians provoked the war, should
not have, and should withdraw from the conflict immediately, or at least
seek an immediate ceasefire and peace talks instead of the horrible, failed
and extremely dangerous policy of continuing the war to “bleed Russia.”

Ukrainian Democracy

Two Wolves and a Sheep

America’s motive in all this also surely cannot be about siding with the
forces of democracy against autocracy, as Biden claims. America is close
allies with Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq,
Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Bahrain, Egypt, Algeria, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, India
and Vietnam.
 Also, Ukraine is still one of the most corrupt countries in the world and
is backsliding on democratic norms: barring opposition parties,[935]
nationalizing industry,[936] banning the use of the Russian language,[937]
arresting citizens with antiwar or pro-Russian opinions,[938] shutting down
private media[939] and severely censoring its state news agencies.[940]
Zelensky has continued the religious war begun by his predecessor, raiding
Ukrainian Orthodox churches[941]—despite the fact that they have broken
ties with Moscow and condemned the invasion unequivocally—and even
putting Orthodox Metropolitan Pavlo under house arrest.[942] Professor
Nicolai N. Petro has warned about the virtually certain cultural
consequences of these choices, from violence against designated enemies
now to the delegitimizing of the current regime in the future.[943] The
government has also banned Russian-language books and media and
implemented severe censorship of war reporting.[944] More than 600
people have been charged with treason by Zelensky’s government.[945]
Then there is all the torture, kidnappings and disappearances in the
dirty war in the east over the last decade,[946] as well as Zelensky’s “anti-
corruption” crackdowns[947]—including against his old benefactor Igor
Kolomoysky, whom he had arrested,[948] and regional governors and top
cabinet officials. Though reportedly insisted upon by the United States for
public relations reasons,[949] these look in practice much more like ruthless
consolidations of power.[950]

Elections Delayed
In late June 2023, Zelensky was asked by the BBC whether there would be
elections in 2024. He replied that “elections must take place in peacetime,
when there is no war, according to the law.”[951] It was humorous to see all
the fact-checkers race to confirm that, yes, he did say that, but you have to
understand this democracy is under martial law by decree of the president
and so is barred from holding elections.[952] In March 2024, Zelensky let
the last deadline pass for naming a date for the next election and announced
that all Ukrainian elections would be canceled pending the lifting of martial
law. The Rada had previously voted to extend it, ruling out their own
elections as well.[953] Kiev Mayor Vitali Klitschko, who had been
instrumental in the overthrow of the government in 2014, denounced
Zelensky as an autocrat. “At some point we will no longer be any different
from Russia, where everything depends on the whim of one man.”[954]

Killing Kiryeyev

Just after the war began, Ukrainian intelligence agents, suspecting banker
Denys Kiryeyev of treason, shot him in the head at point-blank range and
left his body in the street[955]—just like Eddie Adams’s iconic “Saigon
Execution” photo, which did so much to undermine support for the Vietnam
War.[956] But unlike the Vietcong spy who apparently had been credibly
alleged to have murdered a cop and his entire family,[957] it turned out the
victim in this case should have been considered a hero by Kiev. According
to their military intelligence agency, information passed on through
Kiryeyev was used to help defend the Hostomel airport near Kiev from
Russian forces, thwarting their plan to take the capital city on the first day
of the invasion. Then, at the request of General Kyrylo Budanov, the head
of Ukraine’s military intelligence, he had joined those representing the
government in talks with Russia in Minsk to try to arrange a ceasefire just
four days later. But on his way to a second set of talks on March 3, he was
arrested by the SBU and murdered. He was buried a hero next to Ukraine’s
first foreign minister.[958] Mistakes like this happen in third-world
authoritarian police states that murder their citizens first and ask questions
later.

‘Peacemaker’

Myrotvorets, or “Peacemaker,” a website founded by a former Ukrainian

legislator, features a blacklist of more than 100,000 enemies of the
Ukrainian state and supposed collaborators with Russia, naming thousands
of celebrities, reporters, writers and politicians, domestic and foreign. Those
include Americans such as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, journalists
Max Blumenthal and his wife Anya Parampil, comedian and YouTube host
Jimmy Dore, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Ron Paul’s son
Senator Rand Paul and Canadian journalist Aaron Maté. Their website quite
literally lists Langley, Virginia, where the CIA is based, next to Warsaw,
Poland at the top of the homepage.[959] The London Times reports that
Ukrainian police rely on the list at internal checkpoints, “supplanting
official databases.”
“Several murders have occurred within days of the victims appearing
on Myrotvorets,” they reported. “Two pro-Russian figures, the publicist
Oles Buzina and legislator Oleg Kalashnikov, were shot dead in Kiev in
April 2015 shortly after Myrotvorets published their personal information,
including home addresses.” Yulia Gorbunova, a senior Ukraine researcher at
Human Rights Watch, condemned the list for its “serious implications for
press freedom.”[960] The NED-supported NGO Chesno, which participated
in the Maidan coup of 2014, now has its own hitlist.[961]
In June 2024, U.S.-backed NGO Texty released a report that was not
quite an enemies list, but was certainly a catalog of American dissenters
against the current policy. It included the author, the Libertarian Institute
and Antiwar.com, as well as colleagues Kyle Anzalone and Dave DeCamp,
and other journalists and activists from across the political spectrum.[962]

Gonzalo Lira

Chilean-American war commentator Gonzalo Lira, who was living in

eastern Ukraine, was arrested for speech crimes in May 2023.[963] He was
released after three months, claiming to have been tortured. After trying to
make it to the border, he was rearrested and later died in prison like Alexey
Navalny, in Lira’s case of untreated pneumonia. But no one on the Biden
team said Zelensky murdered him. In fact, unlike Navalny, no one in the
Biden administration had said a word to their Ukrainian clients about the
rights of this American citizen in their custody for the crime of
unappreciated commentary, despite weeks of pleas from his father before
his death.[964] Vedant Patel, principal deputy spokesman for the State
Department, made it clear that the U.S. government had a policy of official
disinterest and indifference to Lira’s fate at the hands of their client,
obviously lying that he personally was not even aware of Lira’s case at all.
[965]

Sectarian Split Worsened

After the 2022 invasion began, things got much worse between the state and
the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Anatol Lieven found that Kiev’s St. Sophia
Cathedral “contained a set of displays on Ukrainian history intended to
show Ukraine as both the true heir of early medieval Rus and permanently
and innately European,” while at the same time, “Russians are portrayed as
innately and permanently cruel Asiatic savages.” However, as he noted,
there were many ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in Ukraine, and not
just in the east. In Zaporizhzhia he found that people were against the
Russian state and its invasion, but “in private are not at all happy with
portrayals of Russians as a whole as racially inferior savages, nor with
Ukrainian state attempts to obliterate Russian language and culture.” And as
Lieven noted, this approach made future compromise much more difficult,
particularly when that was supposed to entail the return of Kiev’s control to
the most ethnically Russian areas.[966]
The Rada went ahead and outlawed the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in
the summer of 2024. Zelensky announced, “Today, I want to note the work
of the Verkhovna Rada. A law on our spiritual independence has been
adopted.”[967]

Blatant Corruption
In a classic case of “disaster capitalism,” BlackRock, the wealthiest asset
management firm in the world, has already signed up to be the middleman
when Americans taxpayers are forced to cover the cost of rebuilding
Ukraine, worth $349 billion, according to estimates from the World Bank
and European Commission.[968] Fortune magazine called it a “trillion-
dollar opportunity.”[969] The powerful Wall Street bank JPMorgan Chase
was quick to get in on the action too.[970] “The profound human tragedy is
unavoidably also a huge economic opportunity,” the New York Times said.
The Ukrainian Chamber of Commerce advertises it as “the world’s largest
construction site!”[971] The American people opposed getting involved in
this conflict from the beginning[972] and were studiously ignored by our
country’s top government employees. We must pay anyway.
In September 2023, President Biden hired Penny Pritzker—Ukrainian-
American billionaire heiress of the Hyatt hotel fortune,[973] sister of the
Illinois governor, longtime Barack Obama and Democratic Party supporter,
[974] former secretary of commerce and bank bailout recipient[975]—as
“U.S. special representative for Ukraine’s economic recovery.”[976]
Engaged in this most obvious profiteering, they act like they are heroes
rebuilding what they helped destroy. Bloomberg news reported, “The
former commerce secretary . . . said she sees opportunities for sectors
including agriculture, steel and energy. At a speech in Chicago on
Wednesday, she touted the work of Cargill Inc. and Archer-Daniels-Midland
Co. in helping Ukrainian farmers, and rising output from steel factories in
recent months.”[977]
 When Senators Lindsey Graham and Richard Blumenthal went to
Ukraine in August 2024, the two thought it very important to mention in
their official statement about the trip that “President Zelensky was excited
about and was committed to obtaining a strategic agreement with the U.S.
regarding the more than a trillion dollars-worth of rare earth minerals
owned by Ukraine, and expressed a commitment to create a working group
with the U.S. to make this happen.” They said this was important because
“[e]xpanding economic cooperation with Ukraine makes America stronger
and accelerates Ukraine’s economic recovery. Ukraine is blessed with
significant lithium, titanium, and other rare earth minerals that are needed
by the American economy.”[978] David Petraeus had once tried to sell the
Afghan war in the same way[979]—though in Ukraine’s case, where
mining and transportation are at least possible, such considerations may
play a far greater role in the true motivations of the War Party, which has
gone to great lengths to see the Donbas reclaimed, or at least set out such a
policy back in 2014, and again in 2022.
Frank Ledwidge is a retired British naval intelligence officer and
Bosnia and 2000s Afghan war veteran who spent months in Ukraine after
the 2022– war began. He reported legendary corruption, such as
generalships in the army for sale for $50,000. Of course, anyone who made
such an investment, he said, “had to get that money back.” Even as military
units were forced to rent artillery pieces to each other, Ledwidge noted huge
numbers of brand-new high-end SUVs on the streets of Kiev, obviously all
paid for with embezzled foreign aid, while the guys out at the front were
having to raise money to buy their own gear.[980] Zelensky was forced to
fire and reshuffle several of his top cabinet officials one year into the war,
[981] including his defense minister.[982] Deputy Minister of Infrastructure
Vasyl Lozynsky was released from his post and had been arrested after
receiving a $400,000 bribe. Deputy defense minister Viacheslav
Shapovalov was overpaying contractors for food, and was forced out. Three
other ministers, as well as seven other officials, including five regional
chiefs of prosecutors’ offices, were also ousted for corruption.[983]
A Pentagon inspector general report showed that of the $23 billion in
military equipment the U.S. had sent by October 2022, much of it was
simply being stolen by criminals.[984] “[T]he DoD was unable to provide
end-use monitoring (EUM) in accordance with DoD policy because of
limited U.S. presence in Ukraine,” they said, adding that in June 2022, the
SBU had broken up multiple organized crime groups who had stolen
weapons, including a fake humanitarian agency that had stolen and sold
body armor meant for the troops.[985]
The Pentagon Inspector General’s office says it cannot account for at
least $1 billion worth of military aid.[986] After the last defense minister
was fired over how bad his corruption looked, the new one said he
identified $250 million worth of graft in his first four months on the job.
[987] In one case, officials stole $40 million that U.S. tax victims were
assured was going to buy artillery for the men at the front.[988]
In September 2023, Zelensky fired Defense Minister Reznikov over
allegations of massive graft and corruption inside the Defense Ministry. The
New York Times wrote, “Official corruption was a topic that had been
mostly taboo throughout the first year of the war.”[989]
 Time’s Simon Shuster, a reporter with long experience in the country,
wrote that “[a]mid all the pressure to root out corruption, I assumed,
perhaps naively, that officials in Ukraine would think twice before taking a
bribe or pocketing state funds.” But then, “when I made this point to a top
presidential adviser in early October, he asked me to turn off my audio
recorder so he could speak more freely. ‘Simon, you’re mistaken,’ he says.
‘People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.’”[990]
That was the American people’s pottage they were talking about.

A Big Israel

President Zelensky is on the record saying that post-war Ukraine will

resemble a “big Israel” and will never be “liberal, like Europe.” Even
George Soros’s Freedom House ranks Ukraine as only “partly free,”[991]
the same rank as the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte and Tunisia under
President Kaïs Saïed.[992] When it comes to democracy, they are ranked as
a “transitional or hybrid regime.”[993]

Bribing Your Congressman

Ben Freeman, the director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative

at the Center for International Policy, reported that Ukraine spends more
money lobbying American congressmen, senators, media and think tanks
than any other nation in the world, leaving Israel and Saudi Arabia far
behind (though they each have much greater long-term institutional power
and mutual interests with the U.S. national security state). Their
representatives also contacted members of Congress 8,000 times in 2021,
and made more than 2,000 calls to media outlets. The country we are
supposed to be ready to sacrifice everything to defend just happens to be the
same one that’s been bribing our leaders more than any other country in
recent years. Seems worth noting.[994] As Freeman explained, Washington
think tanks pretend to be a bridge between academics and the national
security professionals in responsible positions in government, when they
are really just public relations content creators for weapons manufacturers
and foreign governments. The American people do not have a say in their
discussions.[995]

Imperial Hubris

Breaking Up Russia

On December 23, 2021, Putin complained to the press about Russia’s

relationship with the U.S.-led West. He cited history’s greatest villain, U.S.
President Woodrow Wilson,[996] who he said had threatened to break
Russia into five separate states, and in a little-known misadventure
attempted to invade the country and overthrow the Communists between
1918 and 1920.[997]
Putin continued, “In 1991 we divided ourselves into 15, but it seems
even this was not enough for our partners. They believe that Russia is still
too big, even after the Soviet Union collapsed, and we were left with just
146 million people. I believe this is the only way to explain their
unrelenting pressure.”[998]
 Russia itself is still a vast nation, built like most others on a mixed
history of conquest and assimilation. There are many regions still within
Russia where some people, possibly even majorities, would like to be
independent. That the West would further intervene to exploit these
divisions to break up the country itself is naturally a major concern for
Moscow. Whether they would really go that far is unclear, but Foreign
Policy magazine’s Anchal Vohra described a suicidal hubris in Washington
perhaps unmatched in all history. She talked to experts and analysts who
were certain that the “disintegration” of Russia was only a matter of time,
“and that the West must not only prepare to manage any possible spillover
of any ensuing civil wars but also to benefit from the fracture by luring
resource-rich successor nations into its ambit.” It was time to go for broke:
“They argue that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the West was
blindsided and failed to fully capitalize on the momentous
opportunity.”[999]
The experts had no new information, just long theoretical syllogisms
about how all the other actors in Russia must also see the current situation
as their opportunity to revolt if only the West would help them. And look,
there have been protests and discontent here and there. Surely these people
are all ready to commit to an American program of high treason to
completely destroy their nation. Right? At least she also quoted the old ex-
Yukos oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who warned against such dangerous
fantasies.[1000]
The Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe—also known
as the U.S. Helsinki Commission, a U.S. government agency made up of
lawmakers and staff from the Defense, State and Commerce Departments—
held a public symposium and openly declared that “decolonizing Russia”
was America’s “moral and strategic objective.”[1001] Their introduction
makes the agenda quite plain. It was now time to have a new look at
“Russia’s interior empire, given Moscow’s dominion over many indigenous
non-Russian nations, and the brutal extent to which the Kremlin has taken
to suppress their national self-expression and self-determination.” They
continued, “Serious and controversial discussions are now underway about
reckoning with Russia’s fundamental imperialism and the need to
‘decolonize’ Russia for it to become a viable stakeholder in European
security and stability.”[1002]
Panelists ranted about America’s “failure” to support independence for
any and all ethnic or cultural groups inside the Russian Federation who
might want U.S. help against Moscow. Just like in Putin’s talking points,
[1003] the Americans openly declare their intent to smash the Russian
Federation to pieces. Casey Michel, from the Human Rights Foundation,
writing in the Atlantic, agreed, and mysteriously with the exact same
slogan: “Decolonize Russia.” Washington’s only mistake in 1991, he
insisted, was that they did not immediately give security guarantees to
every single post-Soviet state and set to work breaking up what was left of
the Russian Federation. Michel went on to argue that the U.S. should have
given support to Karelia, Komi, Sakha, Bashkortostan, Chuvashia,
Kalmykia, Udmurtia, Tatarstan “and many more” regions deep inside
Russian territory that attempted to declare independence during the fall of
the USSR. Michel was certain there was only one solution: “Until
Moscow’s empire is toppled, though, the region—and the world—will not
be safe.”[1004]
Not to be outdone, neoconservative think tanker Michael Rubin[1005]
said America should declare that the “Gulf of Finland islands, the Karelian
Isthmus and Ladoga Karelia” were once again Finnish. Kaliningrad too, he
said, should be called Königsberg and go back to Prussia, which has not
existed in more than 100 years. “The Soviet occupation of the Karafuto
Prefecture (South Sakhalin) is likewise invalid. . . . Certainly, there should
be no dispute over the Kuril Islands; they are legal Japanese territory.”
Rubin continued, “Washington might go further, however. Between 1921
and 1944, Tannu Tuva existed as an independent country adjacent to Russia
and Mongolia before Russia forcibly reincorporated it.” And, “While the
United States never formally established diplomatic relations with Tuva, it
might recognize it as an occupied nation or raise questions about whether
Mongolia should be the rightful sovereign.” Why stop there? “Beyond
Tuva, Russia . . . incorporates nearly two dozen other ethnic republics from
the relatively tiny Republic of Adygea to the geographically huge Yakutia,
to the already independent-minded republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, and
increasingly Tatarstan.” Rubin said if Russia was going to annex parts of
Ukraine, the U.S. should recognize a “greater or equal amount of territory”
inside Russia as “illicitly occupied.”[1006] Neoconservatives are really just
ethno-nationalists, however they may pretend to champion global
liberalism.[1007]
On March 23, 2022, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now
deputy secretary of Russia’s Security Council, gave a speech accusing the
United States of seeking to overthrow and break Russia into pieces. “It
means Russia must be humiliated, limited, shattered, divided and
destroyed,” he said, warning that the dissolution of the Russian Federation
would leave multiple new nuclear weapons states run by “freaks, fanatics
and radicals.” Not only does the U.S. government reveal their intent to see
the Kremlin overthrown, if not the shattering of their country into smaller
warring statelets armed with 6,000 loose nukes, but this is the point of view
of the Russian government: deep fear, bordering on paranoia, about the
most severe consequences if these threats were brought to fruition. Even as
they make these threats, American government officials refuse to see from
the eyes of their adversaries. To them, Russia’s war is all aggression and
self-aggrandizement, and any stated fears and concerns are just thin
rationalizations. This sort of narrow-minded thinking could easily get us all
killed.
In late 2022, Zelensky considered a petition[1008] to officially rename
Russia “Moscow” to accentuate the idea that Eastern Slavic society
originated in Kiev and “diminish” Russia’s claim to be its main
representative and protector. Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria
Zakharova denounced the idea as “another . . . attempt to create ‘anti-
Russia’ from Ukraine.”[1009]
Beginning in May 2022, Yahoo News started reprinting stories[1010]
and editorials straight from Ukrainska Pravda, including one by Oleksiy
Danilov, secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine
(NSDC), calling for the complete destruction of the Russian Federation.
“Only after the full cycle of first external and then internal decolonization is
completed, and a number of independent territorial entities are formed,
Russia will cease to be a threat to humanity.” He went on to insist that
Chechnya, Ichkeria, Tatarstan, the Tannu Tuva People’s Republic, the Ural
Mountains, Siberia, the Far East and more should be stripped from Moscow
as soon as possible. Do not worry about nuclear war. We will have to—
somehow—“pull Russia’s nuclear teeth,” so that will not be a problem.
[1011]
The “Forum Free Nation of Post-Russia” organization is also pushing
to completely dismantle the Russian Federation. Gunther Fehlinger—
chairman of the Austrian NGO Montenegro Goes EUrope, Association for
EU membership of Montenegro and the chair of Austrian Committee for
NATO Enlargement for Kosovo, Ukraine and Bosnia-Herzegovina—
publicly boasted, “Some say the West has no plan what to do with Russia
once Putin falls in 2024 and so [Biden] is not giving enough weapons to
Ukraine to save Putin—that is sooo wrong. Here is the plan. Dismantle
Russia and integrate the 41 new states in [the Council of Europe] and OSCE
asap.”[1012] Their website features a map of “Northern Eurasia 2023,”
a.k.a. “Map of the Free States of Postrussia,”[1013] featuring the caption:
“After the final dismantling of the Moscow Empire through the complete
decolonization of the so-called ‘Russian Federation’ and the reconstruction
of independent and free states of the post-Russian space.”[1014]
If the U.S. government had not created such a conflict of interest for
us, we might cheer on this sentiment about secession from empires new and
old, toward smaller and weaker governing units in the interest of freedom.
This is the libertarian way.[1015] But America is the world empire and this
is an evil plot to destroy another nation for daring to remain independent
from U.S. dictates. So we must not. Opposing our government is our
business, opposing theirs is theirs.[1016]
There was at least some pushback against this talk. Former Defense
Secretary Robert Gates told the Post, echoing the consensus of the Bush Sr.
years, that “[t]he last thing we need is Russia fragmenting and the fate of all
those nuclear weapons being uncertain. We need a coherent Russian state,
and we need a strong government in Moscow.”[1017]
For his part, Putin knows good and well that the Americans and their
allies talk this way and that at least some factions would very much like to
see Russia broken up, and of course dominated by the West.[1018]

Killer MIC

As referenced above, President Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower warned in

his farewell speech that the people must beware of “the disastrous rise of
misplaced power” in the hands of what he called the “military-industrial
complex.”[1019] He was referring to the perverse economic and political
incentives involved with maintaining a massive military force in the name
of staving off the Soviet Union in the first Cold War.[1020] But we have
never had that reckoning. When the USSR fell apart, America expanded its
Middle Eastern footprint, culminating in the 20-year terror wars and pivots
to Eastern Europe and East Asia. And the complex expanded theirs, into
academia, think tanks, media and Silicon Valley.[1021]
Companies like Lockheed and Boeing not only contribute large
amounts to the lawmakers supposedly regulating them,[1022] but also make
sure to spread out their manufacturing into small pieces across the country,
for political, not economic efficiency. The purpose is to make as many
congressmen as possible dependent on the good will of job holders in their
districts: blackmail to keep their captive market in place.[1023]
It is not the case that the ideology of American empire springs from
this sort of rent-seeking. Yankees are busybodies.[1024] Southerners like to
fight.[1025] TV news anchors like attention.[1026] Think tankers like not
having to do actual work for a living.[1027] Evangelicals think backing
Israel will force Jesus to bring on the Apocalypse sooner.[1028]
Liberals[1029]—and Reason magazine writers[1030]—like proving they
are not anti-American leftists by patriotically backing any given war. They
are all terrified of being seen as scared or weak or accused of caring more
about alleged foreign enemies than their own country. And nearly every
time, enough of them can be convinced that the U.S. government can and
should export the universal values of liberty and democracy its leaders do
not believe in to the rest of the world to prove just how righteous they are.
[1031]
And then there is the money. All totaled up, including the VA and the
nukes, it all costs $1.7 trillion per year.[1032] Those receiving that money,
inside and outside of government, have a massive conflict of interest to
keep it all going.
In the case of Ukraine, they could not help but see the conflict as a
great opportunity. And they could not help themselves but to boast about
that publicly. As previously mentioned, after news of Russia’s initial seizure
of Crimea in March 2014, attendees at a breakfast meeting among not pro-
Russians, but professional American militarists, was “borderline euphoric”
when they heard.[1033]
Throughout the 2022– war, other than helping to lay the groundwork,
financial interests or actors were not the primary movers of Western policy.
The interagency consensus never had a greater champion than President
Biden. As a senator and vice president he always was interested in
European issues, taking the lead in pushing intervention in almost every
situation. He had maintained a deliberately adversarial relationship with
Putin for at least a decade before becoming president. And one thing about
Biden is, he carried utmost certainty about his every opinion, especially on
issues where he considered himself an expert. In this case, he seemed to be
certain that the appropriate metaphor for the situation is Putin as Hitler
fighting to build a new order of tyranny and darkness, with himself in the
role of FDR, bravely leading the forces of freedom and democracy. By his
repeated false claims, it appears Biden truly believed that Putin had
threatened to attack Poland and the Baltics next and that he was fighting not
for the Donbas, but the entire free world.[1034] But that was going to be
very expensive.
In September 2024, the U.S. and its allies held a meeting at NATO
headquarters in Brussels where they discussed how all of their governments
could work to ramp up arms and ammunition production, in what the New
York Times said was a “sign that the United States and its allies believe that
the fighting in Ukraine will last years.”[1035] They decided on the modest
goal of a “10-year plan to rebuild the Ukrainian defense industry.” A senior
NATO official told the press, “We will be looking at defense planning
requirements to get Ukraine fully interoperable with NATO. It’s about
shifting away from Soviet equipment . . . to NATO-compatible Western
equipment.”[1036] And so the war was a gold rush for the merchants of
death. Raytheon, Lockheed and General Dynamics all reported massive
profits within the first year.[1037] And the outlook for the future was good.
[1038]
Raytheon CEO Greg Hayes explained, “[W]e are seeing, I would say,
opportunities for international sales. . . . [T]he tensions in Eastern Europe,
the tensions in the South China Sea, all of those things are putting pressure
on some of the defense spending over there. So I fully expect we’re going
to see some benefit from it.”[1039] Separately, he said, “So I make no
apology for that. I think again recognizing we are there to defend
democracy and the fact is eventually we will see some benefit in the
business over time.” He noted that everything Ukraine was getting was
coming from old stocks, but, “Eventually we’ll have to replenish it.”[1040]
After a year of war, journalist Eli Clifton reported that the American
arms industry was the stock market bet of 2022. “Shares in Lockheed
Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics
appreciated in value 12.78 percent on average in the one-year span since the
day before the Russian February 24 invasion.” He continued that “the top
weapons stocks, on average, outperformed the S&P 500 by 17.82 percent,
the NASDAQ composite index by 23.88 percent, and the Dow Jones
Industrial Average by 12.71 percent.” Lockheed made so much money they
started doing stock buybacks and writing dividend checks—direct welfare
payments to the wealthiest people in society on the backs of taxpayers who
have to actually work for a living, and whose investments, if they have any,
have suffered so war profiteers can have their money instead.[1041]
Members of the legislature sure noticed. At least 50 congressmen and
senators invest in weapons stocks, worth at least $10 million.[1042]
Clifton also teamed up with the great investigator Ben Freeman to
expose how many of the Washington lobbying firms supporting Ukraine,
supposedly for free, were virtually all also clients of major arms companies
who have business with the Pentagon.[1043]
U.S. Air Force General James Hecker warned in July 2023: “[W]e’re
giving a lot of munitions away to the Ukrainians—which I think is exactly
what we need to do—but now we’re getting dangerously low,” adding, “We
need to get industry on board to help us out so we can get this going.” He
went on to explain that “[NATO is] dreadfully below where we need to be.
And it’s probably not going to get better . . . in the short term, but we’ve got
to make sure in the long term we have the industrial base that can increase
what we have.”[1044] His fellow Air Force General Charles Q. Brown Jr.,
Biden’s then-nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a
congressional hearing in July 2023, “For all the services in this year’s
budget submission, we asked for multi-year procurement.” He said this
“was designed to help increase our stocks, but it also . . . help[s] provide
predictability to the Defense Industrial Base, to their supply chains, and to
their workforce.”[1045] Many firms got on board to use Ukraine as a
testing ground for their new products, especially air and naval drones,
networking software and electronic warfare devices.[1046]
 Due to that iron triangle of defense firms, think tanks and the media,
American TV viewers tend to get all their information and opinions from
former government officials-turned military contractors and lobbyists.
[1047] Various experts with huge salaries on the line, like the Obama
administration and Lockheed’s Jeh Johnson;[1048] the Clinton and Obama
administration and Beacon Global Strategies’ Leon Panetta;[1049] retired
admiral and the Carlyle Group’s James Stavridis;[1050] retired general,
Clinton official and Defense Solutions’ Barry McCaffrey;[1051] retired
general, Obama government and KKR’s David Petraeus;[1052] the Clinton,
Obama, WestExec Advisors and Booz Allen Hamilton’s Michèle Flournoy;
[1053] Obama and Beacon Global Strategies’ Jeremy Bash[1054] and many
others. All have made themselves ubiquitous moonlighting as experts on
cable news, pushing the policy with virtually no acknowledgment of their
own financial stake as one might think they would have to for credibility’s
sake.
Alexander Vindman, the Ukrainian-American self-appointed star of the
Ukrainegate impeachment scandal, turns out to be as corrupt a grifter as
anyone in Washington. Seeing so many others get rich off the destruction of
his country may have filled Vindman with envy because he pitched an
obvious scam to the Ukrainians, offering a contract for his and his brother
Yevgeny’s company, Trident Support, to provide “improved logistics” to
men fighting where the Vindman brothers should have been themselves. He
was only asking for $12 million, barely enough to retire in these conditions,
[1055] and boasted about it when called out, too, tweeting, “Thanks for the
advert. I’m trying to get logistics in place to help Ukraine win the war and
secure America. Looking for philanthropic contributions to get it going.
Reach out if you support the cause of democracy and U.S. National
Security.”[1056] “This may become a viable business with government
support,” the very safe Vindman boasted to Politico.[1057] Yevgeny
“Eugene” Vindman ran and won for Congress in Virginia in 2024.[1058] He
refused to answer questions from the New York Post about making
hundreds of thousands of dollars from Trident after taking 14 taxpayer-
funded trips to Ukraine. Alexander—the former mid-ranking army staff
officer—bought a property in Florida for almost $2 million.[1059]

Peace Proposals

A December 2022 Századvég Foundation survey found that more than 70

percent of Europeans—including supermajorities in every country on the
continent besides two of the Baltics, up to 80 percent in most cases—
favored negotiations and a ceasefire. Even then, Latvia came in at 64
percent, and Estonia a solid 58 percent.[1060] But democracy would just
have to wait, for democracy’s sake.
The Mexicans, Brazilians and others have proposed peace talks. Biden
officials claimed they were interested in Brazil’s effort, but never followed
up. Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador proposed “a
commission for dialogue and peace.”[1061] He was ignored.
In late 2022, more than 500 Christian leaders signed a letter calling for
a Christmas truce, inspired by the 1914 truce between British, French and
German soldiers during the First World War.[1062] Russia said they would
abide by it.[1063] Kiev rejected it.[1064] Neither side stopped fighting.
[1065] But it was an important reminder that the consensus on TV remains
just that: a media creation. Out in the real world, real people are concerned
about the state of their nations and their souls.
When the Chinese proposed a peace agreement on February 24,
2023[1066]—one year into the war—the Ukrainian government said they
“saw merit” in the plan.[1067] Biden,[1068] Blinken[1069] and
Stoltenberg, however, immediately dismissed it.[1070] A few weeks later,
the day before Chairman Xi Jinping met Putin in Moscow, NSC spokesman
John Kirby preemptively denounced any attempt at a truce. “[I]f coming out
of this meeting, there’s some sort of call for a ceasefire, well, that’s just
going to be unacceptable because all that’s going to do . . . is ratify Russia’s
conquest to date.”[1071]
The administration was sticking with their narrative. Nothing short of
total victory would be acceptable. The Times explained in early March
2023, “President Biden and his aides say their goal for now is to keep
giving Ukraine military aid to repel Russia and take back Ukrainian
territory, and that any peace talks, an idea that China and a few other
nations are pushing, are a distraction.”[1072]
Blinken said, “A ceasefire now without a durable solution would allow
President Putin to rest and refit his troops and then restart the war at a time
more advantageous to Russia.” He insisted the U.S. would not be “fooled”
by any Chinese attempt to gain a ceasefire upon any condition other than
total Russian withdrawal back to 2013 lines.[1073]
In April 2023, the Ukrainians made clear that the Biden administration
had won. They would not negotiate on terms that could leave Russia on any
Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, a deliberate poison pill to sabotage
talks.[1074]
Of course, when the U.S. government continuously announced that the
Cold War with China was their real goal, they only incentivized the other
regime to build up its military, including nuclear forces, in response.[1075]
While covering Xi’s trip to Moscow, the Times reported as fact that
“China and Russia both oppose a global order dominated by the United
States and its allies.”[1076] As a narrative attempting to describe our
modern world, that would make much more sense than the argument that
the battle here is between the “rules-based order” and lawless
authoritarianism. The Americans have made it clear, the “rules” they refer
to are not found in the Geneva Conventions, UN Charter or rulings of its
Security Council, but are instead the arbitrary decisions of the U.S. National
Security Council and its president.

The 2023 Offensive

The End of Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama—who is so certain of his own capability to understand

the world that he once declared “the end of history” and demanded America
invade Iraq to remake the Middle East,[1077] which he later blamed on his
friends for making him think the wrong thing[1078]—insisted that “Ukraine
will win” the war with Russia. Lamenting that anyone was foolish enough
to think Kiev should have negotiated already, Fukuyama argued that “if
Ukraine can regain military momentum before the end of 2022, it will be
much easier for leaders of Western democracies to argue that their people
should tighten their belts over the coming winter.”[1079] Granted, he
published that on September 8, 2022, just days before Ukraine had their
best week in Luhansk and Kherson, but the prospect they could actually
“regain military momentum” was never believable. “It is possible that the
Russian position there will collapse catastrophically and that Moscow will
lose a good part of its remaining army,” Fukuyama daydreamed. Ukraine’s
situation has gotten worse ever since. Just like with the war in Iraq, the
profound theorist of grand strategy had no idea what he was talking about.
Meanwhile, Fukuyama—who makes approximately $300,000 per year
plus benefits[1080] miseducating young students at Stanford University and
associating with various neo-Nazis[1081]—has not rescinded his demand
that Americans “tighten their belts,” even as prices at the grocery store are
up by one-third or more in just five years due to monetary and price
inflation,[1082] and 41 million Americans are already on federal food
assistance.[1083]

Discord Leaks

President Biden’s staff wrote an article in his name in May 2022 that said
his administration’s goal was “a democratic, independent, sovereign and
prosperous Ukraine with the means to deter and defend itself against further
aggression.”[1084] As the mantra later had it, “for as long as it takes.”
Throughout late 2022, it was repeatedly reported that Ukraine was
preparing for a massive winter offensive as soon as the ground was frozen
solid, rendering mud on the steppe a non-issue.[1085] But it was a mild
winter and the ground never did freeze deeply enough to allow the
operation to commence, so the offensive was then pushed into the spring,
[1086] and eventually the summer of 2023,[1087] when the ground finally
dried out after the spring rains.[1088]
But in the spring of 2023, the Discord leaks revealed that the
administration had been lying about Ukraine’s progress in the war. Like
Vietnam[1089] and Afghanistan,[1090] they knew they could not win, so
they just lied rather than stop. The Ukrainians were running out of
ammunition, artillery shells, rockets and especially anti-aircraft missiles,
[1091] while Russia had plenty of resources to continue for at least another
year.[1092] The military and CIA privately believed Ukraine would not
have the strength to launch an effective spring offensive, saying Kiev was
sure to fall “well short” of their goals.[1093] Official intelligence
assessments in the documents were “a marked departure from the Biden
administration’s public statements about the vitality of Ukraine’s military,”
as the Washington Post very politely put it.[1094] The Post also
characterized the leaker, Jack Teixeira, as “a conspiracy theorist who
thought the government was hiding true information about the war and
other security concerns from the public.” Sure, he personally had proven
that was an undeniable fact beyond any shadow of a doubt by publishing
top secret government documents admitting the truth, but he was still a
kook for thinking that.[1095]
In another story the Post seemed to blame Teixeira’s leak for the failed
offensive, since the files “provided a sharp contrast to Washington’s
messaging about the war” and revealed their doubts about the operation.
[1096]
In March, the New York Times reported that the U.S. was again holding
tabletop exercises with the Ukrainians in Germany, planning various
options for the spring to later-summer offensive against Russian forces as
reserve troops trained.[1097] But Politico reported that some in the Biden
administration thought they would have to call the whole thing off, at least
temporarily, after the offensive. “There has been discussion, per aides, of
framing it to the Ukrainians as a ceasefire and not as permanent peace talks,
leaving the door open for Ukraine to regain more of its territory at a future
date.” Richard Haass told Politico, “If Ukraine can’t gain dramatically on
the battlefield, the question inevitably arises as to whether it is time for a
negotiated stop to the fighting.”
Of course, the Republicans, in this case in the form of former Trump
special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker, could only attack Biden for not
providing enough support. “If the counteroffensive does not go well, the
administration has only itself to blame for withholding certain types of arms
and aid at the time when it was most needed,” he told the paper.[1098]

Eurocrats

In early 2023, Britain, France and Germany began pressuring Zelensky to

talk with Russia due to “deepening private doubts” about a Ukrainian
victory, according to the Wall Street Journal. “We keep repeating that
Russia mustn’t win, but what does that mean? If the war goes on for long
enough with this intensity, Ukraine’s losses will become unbearable,” a
senior French official said. “And no one believes they will be able to
retrieve Crimea.”
The French said they wished to see one last Ukrainian offensive to
improve their position before beginning negotiations. In exchange for
Kiev’s willingness to compromise, the British, French and Germans offered
to build Ukraine a massive new military, including a modern air force,
though they would still deny NATO membership and its Article 5
protections.[1099]

It’s On!

Soon after the battle of Bakhmut was lost in late May, Ukraine turned
around and launched their big attack on Russian forces in the southeast to
try to sever their “land bridge” between the southern Donbas and Crimean
Peninsula. The first step would be to liberate the city of Melitopol in
Zaporizhzhia. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan,[1100] the Senate’s
Lindsey Graham,[1101] NATO’s Stoltenberg,[1102] the Iraq, Afghan and
Libyan war defeats’ David Petraeus,[1103] Robert’s brother and Iraq and
Afghan “surge” booster Fred Kagan,[1104] the whole crew at CNN[1105]
and Times economist Paul Krugman—all of them said the assault would be
a success.[1106]
But the great Afghan war whistleblower Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis (ret.)
[1107] knew better. He warned a month before they launched the offensive
that they should not even try it. Their forces were too divided, and with no
air support, while the Russians were dug in too deeply to be dislodged.
“The military task facing the Ukraine Armed Forces is as daunting as can be
imagined. The most likely outcome of Ukraine’s offensive will be an
inconclusive stalemate,” he wrote.[1108] Davis specifically warned about
the Russians’ deep fields of landmines.[1109] The Journal also showed
massive Russian fortifications, ditches, trenches, dragon’s teeth and mines
before the fight began. Officials told them it would be fine.[1110]
To inaugurate the surge, Secretary Blinken gave a speech in new
NATO member Finland on June 2, declaring diplomacy was off the table
and that the only way forward now was to increase support. “Precisely
because we have no illusions about Putin’s aspirations, we believe the
prerequisite for meaningful diplomacy and real peace is a stronger
Ukraine.”
He went on to denounce calls for ceasefire since, “[a]fter all, who
doesn’t want warring parties to lay down their arms? Who doesn’t want the
killing to stop?” Blinken then answered that he did not want that, because a
ceasefire would “freeze current lines in place and enable Putin to
consolidate control over the territory he’s seized.”[1111]
Of course that much was true, though as has been shown, the war
started back in 2014 when Kiev attacked the Donbas, and the Ukrainians do
not have the capability to remove Russian forces from the east, much less
the Crimean Peninsula. At other times Blinken himself has acknowledged
that fact.[1112] So Ukrainians are currently being killed for nothing in a
war they have already lost. Perhaps they should have just implemented
Minsk II when they had the chance.
Instead, Blinken insisted diplomacy could begin only after the
Russians lost the war, withdrew from all formerly Ukrainian territory, paid
reparations, found themselves guilty of war crimes and sent themselves to
prison. He ironically invoked Israel’s colonization of Palestine, and put
himself in Yassir Arafat’s position before 1988,[1113] saying the U.S.
rejects any “land for peace” deals and demanded the return all of historic
eastern Ukraine (dating back to the Communist revolution anyway).[1114]

Failure

Despite vast quantities of hopeful hype in Western media at the start of the
summer 2023 offensive, Ukrainian forces, attacking across a more than
600-mile front,[1115] failed to break through the outer circles of Russian
defensive lines, only retaking a handful of small villages[1116] far from any
important cities under Russian control.[1117] When the Ukrainians attacked
on June 7, the Russians were ready for them. They had months to lay fields
of mines.[1118] The first armored column was torn to shreds.[1119] Then
the second and the third.[1120] They could not break through Russian
defenses.
The divisions spearheading the assault were simply destroyed. Lt. Col.
Davis summarized the disaster. The Ukrainians leading the attack had the
most NATO training and equipment, including German Leopard 2 tanks and
U.S. Bradley Fighting Vehicles. Torn to shreds by Russian mines and
artillery, “[t]hese two brigades suffered crushing defeats right from the
beginning,[1121] failing to advance more than a few kilometers, losing a
large number of their modern armored vehicles in the first four days.” He
added, “In the first two weeks, Ukraine overall lost a staggering 20 percent
of the Western armor it had amassed for the offensive and over 30
percent[1122] of its striking force.”[1123] Officials told CNN on June 23
that due to Russia’s vast ground defenses in east Ukraine, the offensive was
“not meeting expectations on any front.”[1124] It took Ukrainian forces 82
days to seize the small village of Robotyne, their Day 1 objective.[1125]

Minefields

Enlisted-level soldiers talked to the Kyiv Post in July, telling them that the
Russians knew they were coming. They were rapidly losing sappers over
ground littered with a carpet of mines. They added that booby traps,
artillery, tank shells and drones were tearing their guys up. “In one month,
we have only advanced one kilometer and a half . . . We move forward by
inches, but I don’t think it’s worth all the human resources and materiel that
we have spent,” a medic told them. An infantryman added, “As soon as
there is an attack, Russian artillery starts to work on us with everything it
has. Every hundred meters of land we gain means four to five infantrymen
who have left the ranks—this is the average loss.”[1126]
A source in the general staff told The Economist in mid-August 2023,
“We simply don’t have the resources to do the frontal attacks that the West
is imploring us to do.”[1127] Zelensky complained about the American
pressure to commit more men to the already failed effort, saying he would
have lost “thousands” more with nothing to show for it.[1128]
Interviews with civilians and support staff behind the lines, even in
sanitized state organs such as the Washington Post, describe individual and
general horrors Americans have not had to live with on our own shores in
160 years.[1129] “Even when Ukrainian forces manage to clear a minefield
and advance,” Politico reported, “Russia will use artillery and helicopters to
drop more mines behind them, trying to trap units between
minefields.”[1130]
As Davis told the author on July 11, 2023, “They don’t want to admit
failure, but the consequence to not admitting failure is to continue to . . .
reinforce negative outcomes and just sending their troops into slaughter.
And that is unconscionable to me.” Further, he said that with Ukraine
unprepared for the inevitable Russian counter-assault, Kiev, by staying in
the war in the hopes of gaining an illusory position of power, is only risking
the loss of Kharkiv and Odesa before having to give in and deal anyway.
[1131] By early 2024, things were headed that way.[1132]
A dissenting intelligence official ranted to Seymour Hersh, “More
people are going to die in this war, and what for? . . . The Ukrainian army
has not gotten past the first of three Russian defense lines. Every mine the
Ukrainians dig up is replenished at night by the Russians.” He added, “The
reality is that the balance of power in the war is settled. Putin has what he
wants: [The four eastern provinces]. Ukraine does not have them and
cannot get them back.”[1133]
America’s least competent general since George McClellan, David
Petraeus[1134] later told the Post, “I don’t think anyone . . . really realized
or appreciated the depths of the minefields, that Russia did get the defensive
piece of this very much right, the multiple lines of defenses and so
forth.”[1135]
The Ukrainians knew it could not work, hoping only for divine
intervention to make the difference. “If you have more resources, you more
actively attack,” a senior Ukrainian military official told the Post. “If you
have fewer resources, you defend more. We’re going to defend. That’s why
if you ask me personally, I don’t believe in a big counteroffensive for us.”
He explained, “I’d like to believe in it, but I’m looking at the resources and
asking, ‘With what?’ Maybe we’ll have some localized breakthroughs.” He
tried to tell them, “We don’t have the people or weapons. And you know the
ratio: When you’re on the offensive, you lose twice or three times as many
people.” But international politics demanded they try it anyway.[1136]
Since the attempt to pierce Russian lines had already failed, with
Ukrainian forces gaining no more than 5 of the 60 miles they had intended
to take,[1137] despite insistence from the Americans that they proceed,
[1138] soldiers were ordered to leave their armored vehicles—easy targets
for Russian air power—to try to infiltrate behind enemy lines and clear
trenches with boots and rifles instead.[1139]
The Biden administration was furious that the Ukrainian army had
abandoned their already-proven useless maneuver and combined arms
warfare they had been trained on all these months by U.S. troops in
Germany and Poland. The Times said that senior American officials were
“frustrated” that Ukrainian officers, “exasperated at the slow pace of the
initial assault and fearing increased casualties among their ranks,” had
scrapped U.S. doctrine and reverted to the old artillery war.[1140]
This was their attitude, even though as officials told the Journal, before
the counteroffensive they “knew Kyiv didn’t have all the training or
weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge Russian
forces.” That was because “Western military doctrine holds that to attack a
dug-in adversary, an attacking force should be at least three times the
enemy’s size and use a well-coordinated combination of air and land
forces.” The Journal said Washington “hoped Ukrainian courage and
resourcefulness would carry the day. They haven’t.”[1141] John Nagl, a
retired Army lieutenant colonel,[1142] explained that the U.S. would never
send its ground forces after hardened defenses without control of the air.
“It’s impossible to overstate how important air superiority is for fighting a
ground fight at a reasonable cost in casualties.”[1143]
Gen. Zaluzhnyi said, “First I thought there was something wrong with
our commanders, so I changed some of them. Then I thought maybe our
soldiers are not fit for purpose, so I moved soldiers in some brigades.” Then
he dug up an old book from World War I and found himself in a similar
situation. His men could not get an advantage because they did not have
one. Both sides have men, tanks, trenches, mines and drones. Without some
form of technical breakthrough, it is a war of attrition and “sooner or later
we are going to find that we simply don’t have enough people to
fight.”[1144]
The U.S. insisted the Ukrainians launch a massive offensive they knew
was destined to fail, all essentially for a public relations stunt. They had to
try to prove they still had some fight in them to get more weapons for next
time, if there is one.[1145] The stated goal had been to sever the “land
bridge” by marching across western Donetsk to the Azov coast. Even had
that worked, they would have created a temporary salient, surrounded by
the enemy, and eventually been overrun anyway.
 Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a former marine and Iraq War II and Afghan
war veteran writing for the Times, described the Ukrainian army’s situation
on the front lines of the war, waging brutal trench, artillery and drone
battles. They were fighting hard as hell, but were up against a better-armed
and better-manned force they could not dislodge.[1146]
In late July, the Ukrainian army launched another major offensive in
Zaporizhzhia, which again barely pierced the Russians’ outermost ring of
defenses.[1147] By mid-August, intelligence officials concluded that the
offensive would fail in its goal of reaching Melitopol.[1148]
With remarkable cynicism, officials reiterated to the Times[1149] and
Post that everything would have worked out if only the Ukrainians had
done what they had been told and sucked up higher casualty rates. As the
Post put it, the American generals “anticipated such losses but envisioned
Kyiv accepting the casualties as the cost of piercing through Russia’s main
defensive line.” But the Ukrainians “chose to stem the losses on the
battlefield and switch to a tactic of relying on smaller units to push forward
across different areas of the front yielding only ‘incremental gains.’”[1150]
After noting the Ukrainians had already lost more men than America
had in Vietnam, and that “the wounded and dead are left on the battlefield,
because medics are unable to reach them,” the Times wrote, “American
officials say they fear that Ukraine has become casualty averse, one reason
it has been cautious about pressing ahead with the counteroffensive. Almost
any big push against dug-in Russian defenders protected by minefields
would result in huge numbers of losses.”[1151]
 In August, one State Department or White House official admitted,
“We may have missed a window to push for earlier talks. Milley had a
point.” Another asked, “If we acknowledge we’re not going to do this
forever, then what are we going to do?”[1152] On the other hand, Dale
Buckner, a former Army colonel and chief executive of Global Guardian, a
Pentagon contractor, boasted to the Times, “At the end of the day, make no
mistake: Even those generals who might be frustrated with Ukraine are at
the same time looking at the Russian casualties reports and equipment
losses and they’re smiling.”[1153]
But Ukrainian officials made it clear to CIA Director Burns at the end
of June 2023 that they knew their best-case scenario would be to advance
through Kherson to more easily threaten Russian forces in Crimea, and use
that position of strength to begin negotiations. In other words, losing most
of the Donbas to Russia was taken for granted by Zelensky’s government.
According to the Post, they only hoped they could get Russia to acquiesce
to any new security guarantees they seek from the West.[1154]
At the end of the campaign, Ukraine had only taken 143 square miles,
while the Russians had taken 331, for a net Ukrainian loss of 188.[1155]
One worse-case scenario would be the permanent “frozen conflict”
officials described to Politico, one they predict will “last many years—
perhaps decades.” They compared it to Korea and the Indian-Pakistani
standoff over Kashmir, at least until 2022 widely considered to be the two
conflicts most likely to end in nuclear war. “The options discussed within
the Biden administration for a long-term freeze include where to set
potential lines that Ukraine and Russia would agree not to cross, but which
would not have to be official borders,” they wrote. “A frozen conflict—in
which fighting pauses but neither side is declared the victor nor do they
agree that the war is officially over—also could be a politically palatable
long-term result for the United States and other countries backing
Ukraine.”[1156]
The other choice was to keep the war going into the indefinite future,
or the end of the world, whichever came first. Comparing the Ukrainians to
the heroes of the American Revolution, David Ignatius wrote that the
Washington consensus remained the same. Invoking future credibility as the
excuse to continue the fighting, he said, “rather than look for a quick
diplomatic exit ramp, most senior U.S. officials appear more convinced
than ever of the need to stand fast with Kyiv. The United States, in their
view, cannot be seen to abandon its ally.” Despite all the violence and
trauma, “U.S. officials believe strategic patience remains the best weapon
against Russian President Vladimir Putin, who still thinks he can outlast
Ukraine and the West,” he wrote.[1157]
So far, all Ukraine has to show for their stalemate-at-best that
Washington has gotten them into is the distinction of having most deployed
landmines in the world, at least on the territory they have left.[1158]

You and Him Fight

In the aftermath of the 2023 offensive, the Post told the story of what a
disaster it had been. After the Americans refused to stop pushing the
Ukrainians to simply throw away their troops into the minefields in ever-
increasing numbers, Gen. Zaluzhnyi declined to even take calls from Gen.
Christopher Cavoli, head of the U.S. European Command, for weeks.
Know-it-all American officers, fresh from humiliating defeats at the
hands of local insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, had no idea what they
were talking about. One Ukrainian soldier complained, “The presence of a
huge number of drones, fortifications, minefields and so on were not taken
into account” in Gen. Milley’s war games and training. “Ukrainian soldiers
brought their own drones to help hone their skills, he said, but trainers
initially rebuffed the request to integrate them because the training
programs were predetermined,” the paper explained. But newly developed
mini drones were “the biggest factor” on the battlefield, even if U.S.
tabletop exercises had not anticipated that fact. The lumbering American
army then blamed the Ukrainians’ “post-Soviet legacy military” for their
failure on the battlefield.
Despite some significant successes against Russian naval forces,[1159]
the political winds in Washington had shifted severely by the end of the
failed offensive, in September 2023. This was before Hamas kicked off the
latest war in Israel-Palestine just weeks later. Zelensky spoke at the UN, to
mostly disinterested audiences. President Biden refused to hold a joint press
conference with him, while House Speaker Kevin McCarthy denied him the
opportunity to address Congress again. In November, Ukrainian troops
were pulled from Zaporizhzhia altogether and sent to reinforce the fight for
the Donetsk city of Avdiivka, which itself was lost by the beginning of
2024.[1160]
 Meanwhile the Ukrainian high command was sending their newly
reconstituted marine units on what the men called “a suicide mission” to try
to cross the Dnieper River in Kherson. After two months, they had gotten
nowhere, finding themselves unable to even dig in, simply being shelled to
pieces instead. One marine said the waste of men was far worse than at
Bakhmut. They even caught up with Yevhen Karas, the now deputy
commander of the 14th Separate Regiment there (get it, 14?). At least he
puts his boots where his mouth would indicate they belong.[1161]
Perhaps everything is going to turn out fine after all. President Biden
declared with certainty in July 2023, just as tens of thousands of these men
were being killed for one small village and a few square miles,[1162] that
Russia had “already lost the war. Putin has a real problem. There is no
possibility of him winning the war in Ukraine.”[1163]

Zaluzhnyi Fired

Kiev’s own military leadership knew that was not true. At times they had
acknowledged severe disadvantages on the battlefield and beyond.[1164] In
early February 2024, in what was apparently the last straw for President
Zelensky, Gen. Zaluzhnyi wrote an op-ed for CNN declaring that “[w]e
must contend with a reduction in military support from key allies, grappling
with their own political tensions.” He added, “Our partners’ stocks of
missiles, air defense interceptors and ammunition for artillery is becoming
exhausted,” and hinted at further mass conscription, “unpopular measures”
to “improve manpower” in the short term due to Russia’s “significant
advantage” in that area. Hope lies in the drones; that was the only prayer he
could muster for his side’s future.[1165]
Zelensky fired Zaluzhnyi and his entire top staff soon after,[1166] and
his replacement, Oleksandr Syrsky—known to his men as “the butcher” for
his carelessness with their lives, not success against the Russians[1167]—
has not performed well either. Instead, Zaluzhnyi’s earlier conclusion that
the war was at best a stalemate, and that “there will mostly likely be no
deep and beautiful breakthrough,”[1168] has been vindicated.
The declassified version of the February 2024 “Annual Threat
Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Committee” from the office of the
Director of National Intelligence admitted that “momentum is shifting”
more and more in “Moscow’s favor.” Recruitment is up, helping them to
increase their reserves, and they are “significantly ramping up production of
a panoply of long-range strike weapons, artillery munitions and other
capabilities.”[1169]
In other words, the 2023 offensive, despite immense Western support,
did virtually nothing to tip the balance in Kiev’s favor, and Moscow
remained in as strong a position as ever. The Biden administration has not
achieved the “strategic defeat” of Russia at all. Hundreds of thousands of
people have been killed. Hundreds of billions of dollars in confiscated
wealth has been destroyed, just for President Biden and the empire’s
blatantly idiotic and failed scheme.

Are You Threatening Me?

In a remarkable interview about the failed summer offensive, Zelensky
appeared to threaten terrorism against European states if they refused
further aid to his military. While self-righteous liberals mocked Republicans
for heightened rhetoric about “sleeper cells,”[1170] how else are we
supposed to interpret this statement? “Curtailing aid to Ukraine . . . would
create risks for the West in its own backyard. There is no way of predicting
how the millions of Ukrainian refugees in European countries would react
to their country being abandoned.” Come again? “Ukrainians have
generally ‘behaved well’ and are ‘very grateful’ to those who sheltered
them. They will not forget that generosity. But it would not be a ‘good
story’ for Europe if it were to ‘drive these people into a corner.’”[1171]
Perhaps he was referring to the presence of Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups
like the Azov movement’s Centuria—the renamed “National Militia”[1172]
—spreading through Europe, including six cities in Germany.[1173]
In the same interview, Zelensky stipulated that in his view, “If you are
not with Ukraine, you are with Russia. . . . And if partners do not help us, it
means they will help Russia to win. That is it.”[1174]

Haass Backchannel

In July 2023, NBC News reported that outgoing Council on Foreign

Relations president Richard Haass (apparently having cooled off a bit since
2022) had worked with former NSC officials Charles Kupchan and Thomas
Graham to open backchannel talks with prominent Russians, including
Foreign Minister Lavrov.[1175] Haass and Kupchan had recently written a
piece for Foreign Affairs arguing that it was time to start looking for “a
durable truce.”[1176]
The Biden administration denied authorizing the talks, reiterating the
formula that kept the U.S. in Afghanistan for 20 years:[1177] “nothing
about Ukraine without Ukraine.”[1178] Haass seemed to confirm the
account, though he emphasized “these are conversations, not
negotiations.”[1179]
A separate story in the Moscow Times confirmed the talks, saying they
had been taking place at least twice per month and represented “an effort to
lay the groundwork for negotiations to end the war in Ukraine.” After a year
and a half of war, one of the officials told them Washington was willing to
back down and address Russian security concerns because, after all, “the
U.S. needs, and will continue to need, a strong enough Russia to create
stability along its periphery. . . . We in the U.S. have to recognize that total
victory in Europe could harm our interests in other areas of the world. . . .
Russian power is not necessarily a bad thing.”[1180]
In the same article, one of the officials in charge of these
groundbreaking discussions felt it would be perfectly appropriate to
publicly muse that the U.S. might still try to overthrow Putin at their first
opportunity anyway since he would not talk to them. He said the
administration should “begin reaching out to the anti-war Russian elite and
begin making progress with them.” If a compliant dissident could be found,
“ousting Putin would not be impossible.”[1181]
In May 2024, after Sullivan started promoting the idea of a 2025
offensive,[1182] Haass warned against it, urging Biden and Zelensky to
accept that they simply could not remove Russia from the eastern regions or
Crimea. “The math is unavoidable,” he wrote, while still demanding
increased U.S. support and permission for Ukraine to use American
weapons to strike economic (i.e., civilian) targets inside Russia, and also
suggesting at least a temporary ceasefire along the Korean model.[1183]

Mutiny

Speaking of mutual betrayals, in June 2023, the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny

Prigozhin was put in a bind by Russia’s military leadership, his rivals
Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu and the chief of the general staff of the
Russian armed forces, Gen. Valery Gerasimov. When the army was able to
stave off the Ukrainians’ early summer offensive without help from Wagner,
the generals decided they had had enough of Prigozhin’s antics and
demanded that his men either join the army or go home.[1184] Prigozhin
then launched a short-lived mutiny, clearly hoping Putin would take his side
and sack the generals. Despite the American War Party’s wild speculation
about a Russian civil war and impending regime change against Putin,
[1185] the whole thing was over in a matter of hours, as Prigozhin backed
down after negotiations mediated by Belarusian President Alexander
Lukashenko. His forces would either join the Russian army or go to
Belarus.[1186]
Prigozhin’s plane later exploded and fell out of the sky in what was
presumed to be a hit ordered by the Kremlin,[1187] though perhaps his
complaints were taken to heart. In May 2024, Putin began a major purge of
the Defense Ministry leadership, moving Shoigu to the Security Council
and firing nine top generals and replacing them with technocrats.[1188]
On the surface, this seemed to be an intra-Russian controversy with the
Americans playing the role of naïve cheerleaders hoping for anyone, even a
blood-soaked corporate oligarch leader of a mercenary force made up of
violent felons sprung from prison to kill Ukrainians, to take the reins from
Putin.[1189] However, soon after, CIA Director Burns declared in a speech
in England that the Agency was hiring: “Disaffection with the war will
continue to gnaw away at the Russian leadership. . . . That disaffection
creates a once-in-a-generation opportunity for us at CIA—at our core a
human intelligence service. We’re not letting it go to waste.”[1190]
Of course, Russian counterintelligence must assume that anyway and
devote resources to the issue accordingly, but why be so blatant about
potential covert intervention in their country now? It could raise the risk of
war against the American people just as easily as helping accomplish the
administration’s goals.

Attacking Russia

Commander Farkas

Evelyn N. Farkas, former Obama administration deputy secretary of

defense for Russia, Ukraine and Eurasia, and current executive director of
the McCain Institute, demanded early in the conflict that “[t]he U.S. must
prepare for war against Russia over Ukraine.” Though she conceded the
existence of Putin’s thermonuclear arsenal, Farkas insisted “the United
States must do more than issue ultimatums about sanctions and economic
penalties. U.S. leaders should be marshalling an international coalition of
the willing, readying military forces to deter Putin and, if necessary, prepare
for war.”
According to her, it is the Americans’ unwillingness to fight Russia
over their negative reactions to our Ukraine policy that threatens to plunge
the world into the darkness of nuclear catastrophe. She predictably argued
that Putin was attempting to expand Russia’s borders to encompass the
entire old USSR and said the U.S. absolutely could not give in or it would
“spell the beginning of the end of the international order.” She then
extrapolated out her worst fears that were sure to come true over Kiev’s
potential loss of sovereignty over Dnipropetrovsk: “the rules-based
international order will collapse. The United Nations will go the way of the
League of Nations. We will revert to spheres of global influence, unbridled
military and economic competition, and ultimately, world war.”
In order to prevent this outcome, Farkas called on the alliance to “issue
an ultimatum” that Russia must withdraw from South Ossetia, Abkhazia
and Ukraine “by a certain date,” and “organize coalition forces willing to
take action to enforce it.” She concluded, “The horrible possibility exists
that Americans, with our European allies, must use our military to roll back
Russians—even at the risk of direct combat.”[1191] She also told the Times,
“I think the gloves should come off,”[1192] though later backed down a bit
from Armageddon to a more reasonable ask of massive transfers of
conventional weapons.[1193]

Drone Wars
After multiple drone strikes inside Russia[1194] in December 2022, the
London Times reported that the Pentagon had approved attacks on three
Russian military bases, including the Engels airfield nearly 400 miles inside
Russian territory. One need not be an alarmist to see how things like this
could escalate to a major war very quickly. U.S. officials were brave and
getting braver. A Defense Department source told them, “The calculus of
war has changed as a result of the suffering and brutality the Ukrainians are
being subjected to by the Russians.” They were no longer worried Russia
might respond by hitting NATO nations or deploying nuclear weapons.
Invoking a preposterous denial and diffusion of responsibility, a
Pentagon official told the Times, “We’re not saying to Kyiv, ‘Don’t strike
the Russians [inside Russia or Crimea].’ We can’t tell them what to do. It’s
up to them how they use their weapons.”
The Economist reported in August 2023 that Ukraine had vastly
expanded its drone capability, achieving successful strikes deep inside
Crimea and mainland Russia, even destroying a heavy bomber at its base,
often aided by intelligence “from Western partners.”[1195] The infamous
neoconservative apparatchik Eric Edelman[1196] said it was imperative that
Americans forget their fears of an “escalatory spiral,” and continue
supplying Ukraine with ever more lethal rockets and drones.[1197]
Officials told the Post they had “signaled displeasure at cross-border
attacks” and “urged Ukraine not to use U.S.-provided weapons to attack
Russia on its own soil, fearing an escalation.”[1198] Evidently, the
Ukrainians mostly abided by these restrictions, instead manufacturing their
own drones for use against weapons storage depots and the like deep behind
Russian lines.[1199]
The degree to which America has compromised on this question was
not lost on Zelensky. He told the Post’s David Ignatius that if the U.S. did
not come up with long-range missiles and artillery shells, he would be
forced to hit more civilian targets in Russia. Ironically, he then rationalized
why Biden was hesitant to do so: “I think he’s cautious about nuclear attack
from Russia.”[1200]

Targeting Putin

Kiev’s forces attacked the Kremlin with a drone strike in May 2023, risking
a whole other level of escalation.[1201] There was no strategic reason for it.
It was an ineffectual stunt that was clearly meant as an insult to Putin and
perhaps a morale boost for Ukrainians. That may suit Zelensky and the
regime in Kiev, but it is not in the national interest of the United States.
In another amazing experiment in the false groupthink of the American
mainstream media and Twitter swarm, virtually all acceptable opinion, led
by Fred and Kimberly Kagan at the Institute for the Study of War,[1202]
immediately agreed this must have been a Russian false-flag attack on their
own president’s office to justify an upcoming escalation,[1203] as though
they needed a new excuse. This obvious lie was later dropped after the
Times reported that U.S. intelligence had concluded the Ukrainians had
done it, while clearing themselves of any involvement.[1204]
The Times said Kiev had launched the attack because the
administration was now “shrugging off” strikes inside Russia. As long as
they did not provoke a nuclear response or an attack on another NATO
country, such as Poland, the administration figured, what could be the
harm?[1205]

Sabotage

Even worse, Jack Murphy, a Special Forces veteran-turned-journalist who

has done exceptional reporting on both the Syrian[1206] and Afghan wars,
[1207] wrote in December 2022 that the CIA Special Activities Center was
coordinating a NATO ally’s covert sabotage program inside Russia.[1208]
There have been many reports of train derailments,[1209] ammunitions
storage facility explosions,[1210] mysterious fires,[1211] as well as a dirty
assassination campaign revealed by the U.S. government’s own Radio
Liberty.[1212] The Times reported that “partisans killed the Russian-
appointed deputy head of the occupied Luhansk region, Oleg Popov, in a
car bombing,” while “other agents operating in Moscow shot and killed a
former Ukrainian lawmaker who defected to Russia, Illya Kyva.”[1213]
A Ukrainian special forces unit known as the Shaman Battalion told
the London Times they had been running sabotage missions inside Russia
for more than a year and were now moving on to assassinating senior
military officers. “Sometimes other groups may claim our kills,” one
sergeant said. “The kill teams that work best are six-man squads deployed
by helicopter . . . a U.S. Black Hawk fitted with a pair of M-240
machineguns.” The reporter recounted, “In December, explosions rocked
the Engels-2 and Dyagilevo airbases, home to the Tupolev Tu-22 and Tu-95
strategic bombers used to strike Ukraine,” continuing, “Engels-2 is in
Saratov, 450 miles east of Ukraine, and Dyagilevo is barely 150 miles from
Moscow. Several Russian airbases in Crimea have also been
targeted.”[1214]

Energy Infrastructure

Kiev has repeatedly attacked energy infrastructure inside Russia. In practice

this has had little effect beyond provoking similar strikes by Russian forces
in response.[1215] The administration had Vice President Harris tell the
Ukrainians to abandon the tactic, but they simply ignored her and doubled
down.[1216] And so did the Russians.[1217] And so did the hawks. “It
sounds to me that the Biden administration doesn’t want gas prices to go up
in an election year,” Bill Kristol protégé[1218] Sen. Tom Cotton told
Defense Secretary Austin at a hearing. It was just another way of admitting
the American people and everyone else on Earth are subsidizing both
Russia and Ukraine’s war effort through increased energy prices.[1219]

Shipping

In August 2023, the Ukrainian government openly declared war on all

Russian shipping in the Black Sea, including oil tankers,[1220] after
Moscow left a deal[1221] that allowed Ukrainian grain exports.[1222] The
Russians said this was retaliation for European sanctions that had made
their own fertilizer and grain shipments impossible.[1223] Soon after, a
massive fire broke out at a port facility in the Russian city of Novorossiysk
on the Black Sea. Though Russian state media made no mention of
sabotage, the possibility that it was an act of war by Ukraine was an
obvious one.[1224]
This disruption in the global food supply chain may seem like a small
side issue in this horrible conflict, but price fluctuations for simple grains
can be absolutely deadly to desperately poor or war-weakened civilian
populations.[1225] In Yemen—which is just coming out of a near-decade-
long war and blockade by the U.S., UAE and Saudi Arabia, and where
hundreds of thousands of people, mostly young children, have already been
deprived to death[1226]—the disruption in Ukrainian grain hit hard.[1227]
Perhaps the most shameful statement on this issue was uttered by UN
Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield who claimed on April 14, 2022, that
it was not the U.S.A., UK, Saudi Arabia, UAE and their al Qaeda allies that
had plunged the poor nation of Yemen into famine after years of aggressive
war.[1228] All that has gone away now. It is Putin’s fault, she claimed.
“This is just another grim example of the ripple effect Russia’s unprovoked,
unjust, unconscionable war is having on the world’s most vulnerable.” But
then she gave away the game to anyone paying attention. “Tragically,”
Greenfield said, “the World Food Program has already had to reduce rations
for some of the 8 million Yemenis who are food insecure.”[1229] Millions
were already starving from America’s war.[1230] Russia’s war in Ukraine
and the West’s sanctions regime were making the famine worse.

Putin to Butler

Nearly a year into the war, Sen. Lindsey Graham said that the only way it
could end would be if someone would go ahead and assassinate Putin.
“Anything short of that, the war is going to continue.” The moral case
against Russia regaining control of the Donbas was all that mattered. “So
we’re in it to win it,” Graham said. “And the only way you’re going to win
it is to break the Russian military, and have somebody in Russia take Putin
out to give the Russian people a new lease on life.”[1231]
Nicholas Kristof, one of the resident liberal humanitarian war hawks at
the Times, admitted there were “legitimate concerns that if Putin is backed
into a corner, he could lash out at NATO territory or use tactical nuclear
weapons.” However, he assured us, “most analysts think it is
unlikely.”[1232] That is probably right. But how much more likely is it now
compared to before? And what would Putin’s successor do if he were to be
assassinated as Graham has demanded?

Kerch Bridge, Reaction

On October 8, 2022, the Ukrainians detonated a truck bomb on the Kerch

Bridge linking Crimea with mainland Russia.[1233] This led to massive
missile strikes on civilian targets across Ukraine in retaliation.[1234] They
did it again in July 2023, killing a civilian couple and wounding their
daughter, and leading to a major Russian missile salvo against the port city
of Odesa.[1235]

Russian Nazis

Sometimes the War Party likes to point out that there are Russian Nazis too.
[1236] This is true. However, some of them are now fighting for Ukraine.
On multiple occasions, Ukrainian-backed Russian Nazi units, at least some
of whom had trained in Britain, such as the Russian Volunteer Corps
(RDK), have launched cross-border raids into Russia’s Kursk and Belgorod
regions[1237] armed with Western weapons, armored personnel carriers and
fatigues.[1238] The Russians accused the CIA of controlling them.[1239]
According to a classified Defense Department document revealed by
the Discord leak, “Ukraine provides comprehensive support to Russian
volunteers ready to liberate Russian territories from President Putin’s
tyranny by armed means.” It added, “Such detachments are equipped with
various qualitative types of Nato weapons,” and said the personnel “passed
respective training for usage of such weapons and has successful combat
experience from various parts of the front line in Ukraine.” The document
cited intelligence saying the groups hoped to “seize territory” in “Bryansk,
Kursk and Belgorod Oblasts . . . and declare newly created states,” and
described Ukrainian plans for “a larger military component based on
volunteers to create a civil war front in Russia.”[1240] Reuters also
confirmed Kiev’s backing for the Nazi groups in question.[1241]
It turns out RDK leader Denis Kapustin (a.k.a. Nikitin, a.k.a. “White
Rex”) has “ties to neo-Nazis and white nationalists across the western
world,” according to the Financial Times. In 2019, he earned a 10-year ban
from the “Schengen zone”—which allows paperless travel throughout
Europe and includes most EU states—for organizing white supremacist
fight clubs.[1242] He worked with Olena Semenyaka on the Azov
movement’s international outreach for years,[1243] and taught at the neo-
Nazi Sigurd Culture Camp in Wales in the summer of 2014. Declassified
UK reported that Kapustin had moved to Ukraine in 2017 at the invitation
of Russia’s National Socialist Society’s founder Sergei Korotkikh.[1244]
They said that other prominent Russian neo-Nazis were also traveling
to Ukraine to join the RDK, including Aleksey Levkin, leader of the band
Hitler’s Hammer,[1245] who had organized a Nazi black metal concert in
Kiev and helps run a prominent Nazi Telegram channel. A few weeks after
Russia invaded, Levkin posted a photo of a British-made NLAW rocket
launcher with the caption “mastering NLAW,” suggesting he was learning
to use the UK-supplied anti-tank weapon.[1246]
British Sky News said, “When [Kapustin] asked if he minded being
labelled a Nazi, he didn’t ‘think it’s an insult.’” As far as the American-
backed war spreading into Russia, and by such unsavory individuals, State
Department spokesman Matthew Miller cited the diffusion of responsibility:
“As a more general principle . . . we do not encourage or enable strikes
inside of Russia and we’ve made that clear. But as we’ve also said, it’s up to
Ukraine to decide how to conduct this war.”[1247]
After his militia killed a group of civilians, including a young boy,
Kapustin mocked the child’s death and family since he was half-Tajik and
Muslim. He posted photoshopped swastikas over the heads of the family
members like halos and wrote, “Russia will be Aryan or lifeless.”[1248] At
least 100 fellow Russian Nazis joined the war on the Ukrainian side.[1249]
In May 2023, Kapustin’s men—“some of whom have endorsed neo-
Nazi ideologies,” NBC both fretted and minimized—attacked Russian
troops inside Belgorod across the border in a two-day raid, where they
drove American-supplied Humvees and MRAP armored personnel carriers
into battle.[1250] “The so-called red lines, or what the United States has
seen as escalatory, have been moving. It puts us in a little bit of a dangerous
position where I don’t think either side really knows [what] the red line of
the other is,” Andrea Kendall-Taylor, former CIA analyst and Russia
director on Biden’s NSC, admitted to Foreign Policy.[1251] The Times
conceded Kapustin and his men were Nazis and that they claimed to have
“definitely got a lot of encouragement” from Kiev for the attack. The Times
also admitted the Russian Nazis have been welcomed by the “new
Ukraine.” They went on to acknowledge what a center-right, non-Hitlerian
conservative President Putin is, noting that “[s]ome on the far right in
Russia long ago soured on Mr. Putin, particularly for his jailing of so many
nationalists, but also for his policies on immigration and for what they
perceive as granting too much power to minorities like ethnic Chechens,”
adding, “Since the 2014 Maidan revolution and the onset of war between
Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in the eastern Donbas region, many
of them have made a home in Ukraine and are now fighting on the side of
their adopted country.”[1252]
A year later, Politico gave Kapustin a favorable profile. It begins with
his quote, “We’re the bad guys but fighting really evil guys.” Well, German
authorities say he’s “one of the most influential neo-Nazi activists” in all of
Europe and banned from their country—but that is only a problem because
Kapustin’s Nazism is “a godsend to Russian propagandists, who are seeking
to whitewash their murderous invasion of Ukraine as an attempt to ‘de-
Nazify’ Kyiv.” As long as he is willing to attack inside Russia, “Kyiv sees
Kapustin as an ally against President Vladimir Putin.” The magazine hid
behind the old “far-right extremist parties have near negligible support in
national representative politics” trope, as though the Rada had not included
Nazis for years, including the longtime speaker of the parliament, Andriy
Parubiy, and as though the only measure of their power is how many seats
they hold in the Rada without including regional and city governments or
the heavily armed militias fighting in the war. They also invoked the “Nazis
fight on Russia’s side too” argument, as though that has any relevance to the
question of the American people being forced to support extremists fighting
for Ukraine.
Working on Kiev’s behalf, the Russian Nazis launched “their biggest
cross-border raids of the war around Kursk and Belgorod, remaining on
Russian soil and fighting for more than two weeks” in March 2024, and that
is all that matters. Dettmer reported, “The whole enterprise is a pet project
of Kyrylo Budanov, the head of HUR [Ukrainian military intelligence]. As
the cross-border raids unfolded last month, Budanov praised the Russian
paramilitaries as ‘good warriors’ on a national newscast.”[1253]

Assassinating Tatarsky

An ethnic Russian veteran and war blogger from Donbas, Vladlen Tatarsky,
was assassinated with a bomb on April 2, 2023, in St. Petersburg. The
young woman who brought the bomb admitted it, saying she had been
deceived by a Ukrainian contact into believing it contained a hidden
microphone rather than a bomb.[1254] Though U.S. government-backed
propagandists at Bellingcat tried to spin the restaurant where the victim was
killed as some sort of “gathering point” for Russian “cyber warriors,”
reporter Alexander Rubenstein showed those claims were false. It was just a
normal restaurant and the killing a crime and terrorist attack.[1255]
Azov movement Nazis invoked their murder of Tatarsky while
threatening the author to “stop being a fascist,” of all things.[1256] Then
they cashed another U.S. government check.

Threatening Crimea

Soon after, the White House told the Times they were considering
greenlighting Ukrainian attacks on Crimea, “even if such a move increases
the risk of escalation,” and even though “the Biden administration does not
think that Ukraine can take Crimea militarily.” National Security Council
spokeswoman Adrienne Watson insisted that “[w]e have said throughout the
war that Crimea is Ukraine, and Ukraine has the right to defend themselves
and their sovereign territory in their internationally recognized borders.”
Officials told the Times this put Kiev in a position of strength before future
talks with Russia. “In addition,” they added, “fears that the Kremlin would
retaliate using a tactical nuclear weapon have dimmed.”[1257] Secretary
Blinken warned Ukraine against attempting to retake the peninsula, saying
it was a “red line,”[1258] but two days later Victoria Nuland said the U.S.
still supported Ukraine hitting targets there.[1259]
Ukrainian officials continue to threaten to take back Crimea.[1260]
Though there is a real threat that would lead to a major escalation of the
war, the reality is that their military does not have the capability to do so,
only to launch missile strikes from afar.
ATACMS

For a time, President Biden rightfully held back on providing long-range

Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) rocket artillery, apparently
keeping in mind Russian warnings that to do so would be “crossing a red
line, and [the U.S.] will become a direct party to the conflict.”[1261] Early
in the war, Sullivan said that Biden had decided not to provide missiles with
a range of 300 miles “to ensure that we do not end up in a circumstance
where we are heading down the road towards a third world war.”[1262]
When Biden secretly supplied the missiles anyway in March 2024, the
Ukrainians immediately used them to attack Russian targets in Zaporizhzhia
and Crimea.[1263] They later massacred civilians on a Crimean beach, and
justified it by claiming the people had no right to leisure while the war was
still going on.[1264] According to the Discord leak, Zelensky already
planned on using the new rockets against targets inside Russia at his first
opportunity.[1265] Sullivan and Blinken both then reiterated they had U.S.
approval, saying it was just “common sense” that they can use these
American weapons to hit Russian forces they say are preparing to reinforce
the invaders anywhere inside Russia.[1266]
It might seem absurd that the United States would tell Ukraine they are
forbidden to strike at the nation that invaded them, except for the fact that
America and its allies are implicated in every bit of this fight and could well
be held responsible for our client state’s rash decisions. Yet over time those
restrictions were dropped, and Kiev has attacked inside Russia with neo-
Nazi militia units, as well as drones and long-range rocket artillery—and
ultimately with regular combat forces.[1267] In this sense it is a relief the
Russians do not seem to be going anywhere. Escalation or not from Kiev’s
side, their position in Ukraine does not appear to be threatened. Were that to
change, the risk of a worse Russian reaction would increase. While
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley’s rule number two for
engagement in this conflict was “Contain war inside the geographical
boundaries of Ukraine,”[1268] those days are over. The question is how far
will it spread.

Cluster Bombs

In July 2023, the Biden administration announced they would go ahead and
send cluster bombs to Ukraine,[1269] even though just a year and a half
before, spokeswoman Jen Psaki said it would “potentially be a war crime”
if Russia used them.[1270] More than 100 countries have banned cluster
bombs by treaty, though neither the U.S., Ukraine nor Russia are signatories
to it.[1271] In fact, NATO member state Turkey had begun supplying
“U.S.-designed, artillery-fired cluster bombs” to Ukraine at the end of 2022.
[1272]
It is an inescapable fact that for the indefinite future, farmers and small
Ukrainian children will accidentally pick up unexploded bomblets, or
“bombies,” and be torn to shreds. The American and Ukrainian
governments know it too.[1273] Other civilians attempting to farm, build or
otherwise disturb the dirt will also be killed. This will continue for years,
and if Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia are any indication, decades.[1274]
Perhaps that is why the leaders of the latter two nations, as well as the
Hmong-American community, begged President Biden not to send them to
Ukraine.[1275]
Lawyer Bruce Fein told journalist James Carden that there is no
question that under international law, the United States of America is a co-
belligerent in this war due to massive breach of neutrality by material
support for Ukraine, and is therefore legally “vulnerable” to reprisals by
Russia. Though Congress had not voted to declare war, they appropriated
more than $175 billion for the effort. Fein warned that the U.S. had
“employed the concept of co-belligerency to target for extermination any
group or individual who provides material support to al-Qaeda or ISIS.” By
American standards, our leaders could be in real trouble.[1276]

Restrictions Lifted

In May 2024, Biden officially lifted the restrictions on Ukraine’s use of

American munitions against targets inside Russia,[1277] despite the fact
that the administration “had been reluctant to take the step, worried about
provoking Russia into an escalation that could drag in NATO,” according to
the Times. They also said, “Britain, Canada, the Czech Republic, Estonia,
Finland, France, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Sweden and
Poland” had already approved such strikes.[1278] In June, just a few days
after receiving permission from the Biden administration to use them
against targets “anywhere” in Russia,[1279] the Ukrainians used their
HIMARS rocket artillery systems to hit sites near Belgorod.[1280] Weeks
later, their mayor claimed that more than 200 civilians had been killed in
the attacks.[1281]
 One might take Russian warnings as irresponsible threats. But from
another point of view, they can seem like sober, adult responses to reckless
Western actions. As Putin said in May 2024: “This constant escalation can
lead to serious consequences. If these serious consequences occur in
Europe, how will the U.S. behave, bearing in mind our parity in the field of
strategic weapons? Hard to say. Do they want global conflict?”[1282]
Foreign Minister Lavrov similarly warned that Western promises to provide
nuclear-capable F-16s to Ukraine marked a “signal action . . . in the nuclear
sphere,” stressing that any further “nuclear escalation” between our
countries could have “catastrophic consequences.”[1283]

OceanofPDF.com
 Hotter than the Sun

The 800-Megaton Gorilla

In October 2022, President Biden warned that the world was closer to
“nuclear Armageddon” than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
[1284] That this was due to policies he personally pursued at the top of his
agenda for the last 30 years seemed completely lost on the man.[1285]
He was right about the danger.[1286] Hydrogen bombs, otherwise
known as thermonuclear fusion bombs or “strategic” nuclear weapons,
[1287] in the high kiloton or low megaton range can kill an entire city in a
single shot.[1288] For context, plutonium fission atom bombs, like the one
President Harry Truman used against the civilian population of Nagasaki,
Japan on August 9, 1945, are used, essentially, as the percussion cap on
modern thermonuclear weapons to create a state literally hotter than the
center of our sun.[1289] Such extreme heat allows for the fusion of
hydrogen isotopes, causing explosions thousands of times more powerful
than the ones the U.S. used against Japan in World War II.[1290] Bombs
equivalent in strength to Fat Man and Little Boy are now considered
battlefield or tactical nuclear weapons, compared to the strategic H-bombs.
The biggest ever detonated was the Soviets’ Tsar Bomba, at 50 megatons,
though it was only detonated at half-strength.[1291] Both sides still have
around 1,500–2,000 nuclear and thermonuclear bombs deployed, with
approximately another 3,000–4,000 each in reserve. Russia’s stockpile is
said to be the slightly larger of the two.[1292]
Ain’t Nuked Us Yet

From the very beginning of the war, President Biden and his government
knew exactly what kind of fire they were playing with. The day the
Russians rolled into Donetsk, Foreign Policy reported that some White
House officials were “expressing caution that arming Ukrainian resistance
could make the United States legally a co-combatant to a wider war with
Russia and escalate tensions between the two nuclear powers.”[1293]
The Times later reported that the U.S. and Ukraine began planning for
a potential Russian nuclear strike at the beginning of the war, stationing
radiation detectors across Europe and training Ukrainian doctors on
radiation exposure. They set up a group of officials to dig up all the old
preparedness plans from the last Cold War.[1294]
Retired Gen. Wesley Clark, the same guy who almost got us into a war
with Russia over Serbia in 1999,[1295] said bring it on. He is not scared of
nuclear weapons and neither should you be. “What I’m hearing from some
people in the administration is, ‘Oh my gosh, I hope [Putin] doesn’t use a
tactical nuclear weapon! That would change everything.’ But the truth is . . .
it’s just another way to kill people.” Clark added, “We’ve got to work
through that. We can’t allow ourselves to be self-deterred because he’s
going to fire four or five tactical nuclear weapons.” He complained that
Russia’s strategic deterrent was preventing the Biden administration from
simply dictating what they must do. “[W]e haven’t followed through
because we can’t quite get this tactical nuclear weapons issue resolved.
We’re the big dog in international affairs. We’re the most powerful nation in
the world, and we have a strong nuclear deterrent.” So enough with the
defeatist attitude. “[W]e can’t simply say, ‘Well, he might fire a couple of
tactical nuclear weapons, and ohh, and that would change international
relations.’ Yes it would, but it would change it against Russia, not against
us.” Again, the people of Ukraine are simply extras in this morality play.
“The only thing that will change it [to being] against us is if we jump back
in fear if he uses such a weapon,” Clark concluded. “The best way to
prevent him from using that weapon is to convince him that it won’t
help.”[1296]
Do not worry. The professionals have this all gamed out.

Russian Threats

The Russians certainly do bear their own responsibility for heightening

nuclear tensions as well. Since the beginning of the war, officials of the
Russian government have warned against direct intervention by the United
States or other major powers, at least usually indirectly threatening them
with nuclear war. This includes President Putin himself, who raised the
nuclear alert level at the start of the war.[1297]
In December 2022, Putin said he was considering whether to abandon
Russia’s no-first-strike doctrine in favor of “disarming” preemptive strikes,
stating, “If Russia does not use nuclear weapons first, it won’t use them
second, either.”[1298] He said he believed the United States is attempting to
move toward a “disarming strike” option against Russia to go with its
preexisting first-strike doctrine. As far as any changes to Russian policy,
Putin said, “[I]f a potential adversary believes it is possible to use the
preventive strike theory, while we do not, this still makes us think about the
threat that such ideas in the sphere of other countries’ defense pose to us.
That is all I have to say about that.”[1299]
In June 2024, he warned, “If somebody’s actions threaten our
sovereignty and territorial integrity, we consider it possible to use all means
at our disposal. For some reason, they believe in the West that Russia will
never use it,” before going on to boast about the power of their modern
weapons.[1300]
The Pentagon says that the Russians have increased the presence of
their nuclear submarine fleet in the Atlantic.[1301] In June 2023, Putin
announced he was moving nuclear weapons into Belarus, the first time
Russia has deployed atom bombs in a foreign nation since the fall of the
USSR. As Reuters noted, “Putin has repeatedly raised the issue of U.S. B61
tactical nuclear warheads deployed at bases in Belgium, the Netherlands,
Germany, Italy and Turkey. Moscow is also unhappy about a reported
upgrade of the B61.”[1302]
In November 2023, Putin announced Russia’s withdrawal from the
Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that the U.S. had signed but never ratified, but that
both sides had essentially abided by for decades anyway. He said he simply
wanted to “mirror” the U.S. position on the issue,[1303] and that they
would only resume testing if the Americans did first.[1304] Robert O’Brien,
who was Trump’s national security adviser, proposed a renewal of testing in
an important Foreign Affairs piece.[1305] Biden, to his credit, had been
opposed, not that he had done anything to get the treaty ratified during his
time in office.[1306]
 In September 2024, the Russian president announced a new, looser
nuclear weapons doctrine in response to Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk and
threats that the U.S. and UK would allow Kiev’s forces to use longer-range
missiles against targets inside Russia.[1307]

Western Threats

Officials told the Times that after Ukraine’s successes in Kherson and
Kharkiv in the fall of 2022, they were so convinced the Russians were
considering using nuclear weapons that they sent many private and public
warnings and enlisted the help of other nations to do the same.[1308] This
was when President Biden spoke of the danger of “Armageddon.” He has
also said he would not put ground forces into Ukraine due to the risk of
nuclear conflict, saying it would mean “World War III.” Biden insisted, “We
have a sacred obligation on NATO territory . . . Article 5,” but went on to
add that “we will not fight the Third World War in Ukraine.”[1309] Again
he was admitting, in effect, that Ukraine would not be worth fighting over
at any point in the future, and that his government should have dropped the
idea that they would ever become a treaty ally a long time ago.
The U.S. and EU then threatened that if Russia used nuclear weapons
in Ukraine, their army would be annihilated.[1310] Former Army
General[1311] and CIA Director David Petraeus,[1312] likely speaking for
the Biden administration,[1313] said that if Russia used nukes in Ukraine,
the U.S. would “take out every Russian conventional force that we can see
and identify on the battlefield in Ukraine and also in Crimea and every ship
in the Black Sea.”[1314] The Financial Times later said that the U.S., UK
and France all gave the same warning to the Russians privately.[1315] So
after Putin has already gone psycho or desperate enough to break out the A-
bombs, the U.S. promises to go to full-scale conventional war with the
avowed goal of destroying Russia’s entire army in Ukraine. They can only
imagine the mad dictator they consider Putin to be would then see reason,
become calm and wisely back down before American might. The fact he did
not use nukes in that circumstance, whether or not he ever intended to,
probably reinforced the idea for American officials that their escalatory
threats were what convinced him to back down, making it more likely they
will adopt this thinking when dealing with the broader situation or the next
nuclear threat.

Ukrainian Tough Talk

President Zelensky and his advisers have demanded the U.S. threaten
nuclear strikes on Russia. As journalist Joshua Yaffa wrote, “In Kyiv, the
prospect of a Russian nuclear attack is both horrifying and a nonfactor.”
They had made the decision to fight for their 2013 borders, as one Zelensky
adviser told him: “even if there exists the possibility of strikes with
weapons of mass destruction.” He said President Biden should “[s]end a
message to Putin now, not after he strikes—‘Look, any missile of yours will
lead to six of ours flying in your direction.’”[1316]
When the U.S. was urging Ukraine not to use rockets they provided
against targets in Crimea, then-Gen. Zaluzhnyi told the Post, “To save my
people, why do I have to ask someone for permission what to do on enemy
territory? . . . Because Putin will . . . use nuclear weapons? The kids who
are dying don’t care.” If he was sending tens or hundreds of thousands of
Ukrainians to destruction in a war they have already lost, why indeed
should he not place billions more lives on the altar of their useless sacrifice?
Zaluzhnyi had vowed to reclaim Crimea as soon as he had the means,
telling the Post, “I’ll do something. I don’t give a damn—nobody will stop
me.”[1317]
The good news is that Ukraine cannot threaten Crimea or any of the
previously Ukrainian territory the Russians have seized, rendering the threat
of Russia reaching for nukes in desperation less likely. Putin played down
the prospect at a public forum in June 2024.[1318]
The day before, an NSC official announced in a speech that the Biden
administration was prepared to scrap the entire doctrine of arms control and
limiting nuclear weapons stockpiles and turn to not only modernizing, but
expanding the arsenal as well.[1319]

Future Primitive

In spring 2023, the Russians suspended their participation in the New

START treaty, the last major deal between our nations limiting nuclear
weapons stockpiles and deployments,[1320] withdrew from the
Conventional Forces Europe Treaty, announced the imminent stationing of
nuclear weapons in Belarus for the first time in nearly 30 years[1321] and
the training of their forces on mid-range Iskander missiles.[1322] New
START will expire in February 2026.[1323]
A little more than a year later, the United States said they would again
deploy mid-range nuclear missiles in Germany for the first time since 1987,
including a complement of SM-6 anti-ballistic missiles, but also Tomahawk
cruise missiles and “developmental hypersonic weapons.”[1324] After
Trump accused Russia of violating the INF in order to withdraw from it
himself, Putin had ordered a halt to production of the missiles in question,
apparently in a trust-building measure to attempt to save the treaty. But after
the Biden White House announced plans to station their own missiles in
Germany, Putin ordered an end to Russia’s moratorium and threatened to
deploy them,[1325] warning of the potential for a 1962-type missile crisis.
“The flight time to targets on our territory of such [hypersonic] missiles,
which in the future may be equipped with nuclear warheads, will be about
10 minutes,” the Russian president said, adding, “We will take mirror
measures to deploy, taking into account the actions of the United States, its
satellites in Europe and in other regions of the world.”[1326] Incidentally,
the Russian navy began increasing their visits to Cuba, including the day
Putin made his threat to “mirror” U.S. actions, at the end of July 2024, in an
obvious warning.[1327]

Doomed

Losing Avdiivka

The loss of the Donetsk city of Avdiivka in February 2024[1328] was a

disaster for Ukraine. Gen. Zaluzhnyi’s advice to abandon the town was one
of the main reasons that President Zelensky fired him and the rest of his
staff. He promoted General Syrsky to replace him since he pledged to stay
in the fight, but the battle was already lost. When “White Leader” Andriy
Biletsky’s 3rd Separate Assault Brigade (a.k.a. the Azov Regiment) arrived,
they saw it was too late and withdrew. But instead of Zaluzhnyi’s planned
retreat, it was a rout. Hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers, if not more, were
taken captive.[1329] But it was the “depletion” of Russia’s army, by the
tens of thousands, Zelensky claimed, that made it all worth it,
embellishing[1330] a seven-to-one advantage in fatal casualties.[1331]
One innovation which had helped to tip the scales towards the
Russians was the FAB-1500 warheads or “glide bombs.” These are similar
to American Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kits, with
wings being retrofitted on to old, dumb Soviet-era bombs, most of them
2,000 lbs., some of them more than 3,000 lbs. This allows Russian jets
flying in their own airspace to accurately bomb Ukrainian targets from
standoff ranges, and at a rate of more than 100 per day. While they
reportedly can be shot down by missile interceptors, those can be
overwhelmed, and the cost differential involved makes it a losing battle.
[1332] These are far more devastating for ground troops than ground-fired
artillery shells, and helped the Russians to seize both Bakhmut and
Avdiivka.[1333]

Stab in the Back

After taking the latter city in early 2024, Russian forces “maintained their
momentum,” moving into more surrounding territory as well.[1334]
Meanwhile, Zelensky continued to insist his goals were nothing less than
total victory when his forces should have been digging in for a stronger
defense.[1335] The basis for their future fascist stab-in-the-back theory is
obvious: the West promised everything, but then started to run out of shells
and money and the rest.
Alexey Arestovich, the former Zelensky adviser who predicted, even
called for the war to advance Ukraine’s accession to NATO,[1336] later
gave this theory a test. He said it was wrong for Zelensky to split the blame
between Boris Johnson and Gen. Zaluzhnyi. “The real responsibility,” he
said, “lies with those who promised us, Ukraine, real support for a real,
large-scale war and did not provide it. Essentially, they betrayed us.” He
said that they won their war against the initial Russian invasion and they
could have had peace with the Istanbul agreements, “and then several
hundred thousand people would still be alive.” But then on April 26, 2022,
they were brought to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and promised the
weapons required to continue the war. The first major shipments did not
arrive until June, and, he said, “[W]e could not win this other war without
aircraft and long-range missiles and five times more supplies for the ground
forces. None of this happened. We paid a huge price for this.”[1337]
He did have a point about Biden’s big promises. The fact remains that
the West simply does not produce enough shells for both Ukraine and their
own needs. It was a cruel thing to do to them. What it would have taken to
truly win the war is another question, though Biden was at least right to fear
what might happen to us if he helped Ukraine achieve their stated goals.

It Appears to Be Jammed

Another problem for Ukraine is that air-dropped Joint Direct Attack

Munitions (JDAMs), Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB),
[1338] HIMARS and ATACMS rocket artillery, and Excalibur Howitzer-
fired artillery rounds have already been rendered obsolete by Russian
electronic counter-measures.[1339] Expensive American-supplied Patriot
defensive missiles have also been repeatedly overwhelmed by counterfire,
including by new Russian hypersonic missiles.[1340]

Body Counts

Assessments of Ukrainian and Russian casualties have been suspect all

along. Both sides rush to exaggerate the other side’s losses and minimize
their own. The author prefers conservative estimates.
In September 2024, the Journal said that a secret Ukrainian report
from earlier in the year estimated Ukrainian troop losses at 80,000 dead and
400,000 wounded. They also said that “Western intelligence estimates of
Russian casualties vary, with some putting the number of dead as high as
nearly 200,000 and wounded at around 400,000.”[1341]
The following month, the UN said at least 11,743 civilians had been
killed, and another almost-25,000 wounded in the war, mostly but not
entirely by Russian forces.[1342] This is surely a catastrophe, but at least
the civilian population has been able to flee most of the fighting, causing
the total to be far fewer than it could be otherwise. Another 6.3 million
Ukrainians have fled the country, 3.7 million more have been internally
displaced.[1343]
Despite the unbelievable ratios claimed by the Zelensky government, a
source close to the Ukrainian general staff told Frank Ledwidge that their
casualty numbers were about the same as those of the Russians.[1344]
Yuriy Lutsenko, the former prosecutor general and head of the Ministry of
Internal Affairs of Ukraine, who fought on the front lines in the war, also
said in January 2024 that Ukraine had half a million casualties, dead and
wounded. “I think that they should name the number of dead Ukrainians. I
know that they don’t want this. . . . Yes, it will be a shock,” he said.[1345]
By 2024, Ukraine was also releasing criminal prisoners to fight on the front
lines.[1346]
Our leaders could negotiate. But they said the plan was to keep the war
going for years.[1347]

It’s Just Not Enough, Is It?

Gen. Zaluzhnyi told Secretary Austin that to “achieve the president’s

objective of liberating the entire territory of Ukraine will require $350–400
billion worth of assets and personnel.” That and 17 million rounds of
ammunition.[1348] Yulia Tymoshenko apparently had enough. In December
2023, she wrote that Zelensky should “propose a way out of this difficult,
tragic situation. Show leadership.”[1349] But over at Foreign Policy
magazine, the experts found the “pathway to victory.” Echoing Gen.
Zaluzhnyi, they said all Ukraine needs is:

Air superiority, the ability to breach mine obstacles, better

counter-battery capability, and more assets for electronic
warfare. . . . First, armed UAVs that use real-time
reconnaissance to coordinate attacks with artillery . . .
Second, armed UAVs to suppress enemy air defenses, as well
 as medium-range surface-to-air missile simulators to deter
Russian pilots. And third, unmanned vehicles to breach and
clear mines. . . . [Also] armed UAVs carrying Maverick and
Hellfire missiles, loitering munitions, precision-guided
artillery shells, and extended-range standoff missiles fired by
aircraft. These systems would be coordinated in an
electromagnetic environment shaped by Ukrainian operators
to dominate the local airspace, saturate the battlefield with
munitions, and clear mines to open the way for a ground
assault.[1350]

Once we get the electromagnetic environment shaped—and hand over

every last weapon in the U.S. arsenal—this thing will be a cakewalk.
Meanwhile, Zelensky’s aide admitted that even if the U.S. gave them
everything they promised, “we don’t have the men to use them.”[1351]
But in early 2024, Emily Harding—a former U.S. intelligence analyst
who had advocated arming Ukraine on the 1980s Afghan model before the
war[1352]—complained that America had not done nearly enough to
transfer heavier weapons to the fight. “We’ve been fiddling while Rome
burns. We’ve been debating amongst ourselves, like, exactly what tiny
weapons system is going to push us over the top or not now for two years,”
she said at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies. “If we had not been dithering early on, if we had actually provided
the things that we should have provided, we would have been much better
off now.”[1353] But she had no explanation for how the much larger and
wealthier Russian Federation could ever be forced out of Ukraine, or why
escalations by Ukraine would not simply be matched by the Russians as
they have been already. Harding also could not explain how this assault on
cities and “oblasts” Americans have never heard of on the farthest fringes of
the empire amounted to the sacking and burning of Washington, D.C., the
capital city of our country, 5,000 miles west of where this was all taking
place. Perhaps she was referring to the looting of the U.S. Treasury.
Between the beginning of Russia’s invasion in February 2022 and the
end of 2023, the United States had given Ukraine almost $50 billion in
weapons, including more than 3 million 155mm artillery shells.[1354] They
consume these rounds at three times the rate the U.S. can produce them.
[1355] American and allied weapons stocks have been vastly depleted,
[1356] yet Ukraine is still destined to lose. Russia produces better than three
times more artillery shells than the U.S. and Europe combined,
approximately 250,000 shells per month, or about 3 million a year,
according to NATO officials. They’ve imported hundreds of thousands,
maybe millions more, from Iran[1357] and North Korea.[1358] Russian
forces in Ukraine fire them at a rate of 10,000 per day, compared to only
2,000 by Ukraine’s side.[1359] The U.S. has shipped Ukraine 6 F-16s, 76
tanks, 3,600 armored vehicles, 39 HIMARS rocket launchers, and more
than 400 million bullets and grenades.[1360] What are we supposed to do,
give them navy destroyers and B-52 heavy bombers?
Harding went on to cry that it is “self-centered” for Americans to
worry about provoking Russia into a wider war—which they still have the
ability to do—because “that just hasn’t happened,” even though she herself
stipulated that the U.S. was not handing over all the weapons she
demanded, which could very well be the reason why not. “Russia’s a bully.
They respond to strength,” she confidently asserted with all the depth of a
16-year-old student council secretary. These are our CIA analysts. Harding
helped run the Iraq desk when the Islamic State Caliphate was busy taking
over the entire west of the country in 2014, if that’s any indication of her
measure of dangers and how to deal with them.[1361]
Harding then deployed the War Party’s best new talking point.[1362]
The crazy conspiracy theory that the war is meant to make money for the
arms merchants who finance the Center for Strategic and International
Studies—like BAE Systems, Boeing, Booz Allen, General Atomics,
General Dynamics, General Electric, Lockheed Martin, Northrop
Grumman, Raytheon and SAIC,[1363]—is real, and it is spectacular. “The
money that we spend on Ukraine doesn’t leave the U.S. It goes to the U.S.
defense industry. It goes to U.S. companies that send aid to Ukraine. The
vast majority of it stays here,” she proudly proclaimed from atop a modest
pile of 2024 dollars and human bones.[1364] President Biden[1365] and his
staff and allies Blinken,[1366] Nuland,[1367] Vindman[1368] and
McConnell[1369] have all boasted the same. The dangerous Military-
Industrial Complex (MIC) has been rebranded the “Defense Industrial
Base” (DIB), and is great for the economy.[1370] Any American family
living in their car in the WalMart parking lot could tell you that.[1371]

Russian Army Growing

In June 2024, objecting to a reporter’s question about the reality of a

“stalled” war with terrible casualties faced by the Ukrainians, President
Biden insisted the Russian military had been “freaking decimated,” then
changed the subject to his induction of Finland and Sweden to the alliance.
[1372]
But just a few months before, Gen. Cavoli, commander of European
Command, said the Russian army was actually now 15 percent larger than it
was at the start of the war, due to their decision to raise the maximum
conscription age from 27 to 30. “Over the past year, Russia increased its
front-line troop strength from 360,000 to 470,000. . . . In sum, Russia is on
track to command the largest military on the continent.” He explained that
the plan to strategically weaken the Russian Federation had simply failed.
“Regardless of the outcome of the war in Ukraine, Russia will be larger,
more lethal, and angrier with the West than when it invaded.”[1373] Deputy
Secretary of State Kurt Campbell added that Russia had “almost completely
reconstituted militarily.”[1374] That much had been clear at least a year
previously, according to Gen. Cavoli.[1375]
The Russians say they have increased their production of artillery
shells by 150 percent,[1376] and tanks by 100 percent.[1377] They were
scheduled to spend over $100 billion on their military budget in 2024.
[1378] “The longer the war lasts, the more addicted the economy will
become to military spending, raising the risk of stagnation or even outright
crisis once the conflict is over,” noted Vasily Astrov, an economist at the
Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies.[1379] So that is how
that works.

Khodorkovsky: Fight
Putin’s old nemesis, Mikhail Khodorkovsky of Yukos oil, who had helped
finance the Maidan revolution in 2014,[1380] warned at the 2023 Munich
conference that the U.S. could not back down in Ukraine or else China
would invade Taiwan.[1381] Every one of these nerds invokes the high
school bully analogy, fantasizing that now they can use American military
power to have their revenge. But it has been the U.S., acting under War
Party and foreign exile consensus, that has been the bully all along, and
despite being repeatedly punched in the nose, they never seem to figure it
out.

The Israel Model

In early summer 2023, U.S. officials began again to speak of what they
called the “Israel model” for Ukraine. Wisely erring against making war
guarantees their capital cities are not willing to cash, their great idea is
instead to simply flood the new, smaller Ukraine with entire new arsenals of
weapons, under the theory that if correctly “calibrated,” this will deter,
rather than provoke future conflict.[1382]
Some of them recognize the folly of further arming Ukraine after the
war, instead concluding they must be brought into the alliance instead. Gen.
Richard Barrons, former commander of the British military’s Joint Forces
Command, told the Post, “A properly rearmed Ukraine would be a strong
deterrent to Russia, but it would be possibly tempted to have its own
adventure.” Therefore, he concludes, “The best answer from a Ukrainian
perspective, if not necessarily from a Western perspective, is to have
Ukraine in NATO, because then the guarantees are clear and difficult to
dodge, and also Ukraine has to subscribe to NATO ambition and policy, so
the adventurism is less.”[1383]
But Samuel Charap argued that bringing Ukraine into NATO could
prolong the war since the Russians would have to assume that the U.S.
would then deploy forces there. “So even if there were consensus among
allies to offer Kyiv membership (and there is not), granting Ukraine a
security guarantee through NATO membership might well make peace so
unattractive to Russia that Putin would decide to keep fighting.”[1384]
Biden knew it too. Just after they announced Finland’s membership in
NATO in April 2023, he thankfully joined with the Germans and
Hungarians in agreeing not to offer Ukraine a “roadmap” to joining, as
Poland and the Baltic states had been pushing. Punting the question into the
indefinite future, a senior U.S. official told the press: “In order for us to get
to the question of when and how to get Ukraine into the alliance, we must,
as the secretary-general has noted, ‘ensure that Ukraine prevails as a
sovereign, independent nation.’”[1385]
Before heading off to Vilnius for the NATO summit, in July 2023,
Biden stuck with the script: Ukraine may not join the alliance since they are
at war with Russia, and “We’re at war with Russia, if that were the case.”
However, he still insisted that “we have to lay out a rational path for
Ukraine to be able to qualify to be able to get into NATO,” due to the
perpetual “open-door policy.”[1386]
At the summit, the member states unanimously voted for a resolution
stating that they “reaffirm the commitment we made at the 2008 Summit in
Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of NATO.” While they
would only promise this would happen “when Allies agree and conditions
are met,” they also agreed that Ukraine “has moved beyond the need for” a
Membership Action Plan to join. “Ukraine has become increasingly
interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance,” they noted. The
supposed Atlantic alliance also established a Ukraine-NATO Council for
coordinating their de facto membership status as much as possible. And
they created a permanent new bureaucracy to subsidize Ukraine’s military.
[1387]
Zelensky denounced NATO’s position. “It’s unprecedented and absurd
when [a] time frame is not set . . . for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s
membership. While at the same time vague wording about ‘conditions’ is
added even for inviting Ukraine.”[1388] Post reporters wrote that
“members of the U.S. delegation were furious with Zelensky’s
tweet.”[1389] They later added that it “almost backfired,” having “so roiled
the White House that U.S. officials involved with the process considered
scaling back the ‘invitation’ for Kyiv to join.”[1390]
Oleksiy Goncharenko, from Petro Poroshenko’s European Solidarity
party, said in December 2023, “In Washington, several sources confirmed to
me that Blinken told Europeans to stop talking to Ukraine about NATO.
There will be no NATO. The topic of NATO annoys the U.S. elite, and they
clearly sent a signal that Ukraine will not become a member of the alliance
immediately after the war.”[1391]
But then how cynical and dangerous has this entire exercise been?
Nearly half the reason for the war is that Joe Biden refused to negotiate a
treaty saying the United States will cease working toward bringing Ukraine
into NATO. They clearly realize the risk of war between Russia and the
alliance if they try it. They either wanted the war or were just too stubborn
—proud cannot be the right word for it—to climb down from their “open
door” nonsense.
President Biden admitted it, though his statement did not seem to be
signaling a change in their position, just conceding the reality of it. He told
CNN that talk of Ukraine’s membership in NATO was “premature.” This
did not seem to be a reference to his State and Defense Departments’
official statements in the autumn of 2021, in the lead-up to war, or his
adamant refusal to negotiate the made-up “open door” before the war. It
was only that “there’s other qualifications that need to be met, including
democratization and some of those issues.”
We cannot bring Ukraine into NATO because it would lead to war with
Russia, and besides, it is not like they are a Western democracy after all,
more of an eastern despotism. So, while Biden conceded Ukraine was a bad
fit for the Western alliance, he would go ahead and send them some cluster
bombs.[1392]
A couple of days later, NATO put out a communiqué promising that
“Ukraine’s future is in NATO,” pending “democratization and military
integration,”[1393] which could be extended indefinitely since the place is
nowhere near a democracy, their military has been mostly devastated by the
war, and Putin is certain to demand terms in the end much harsher than the
proposed deal of March and April 2022. Military integration with NATO
after the war will probably not be on the table. As NATO head Jens
Stoltenberg said, “[U]nless Ukraine prevails, there is no membership to be
discussed at all.”[1394]

Late 2023 Offers

In the fall and winter of 2023, Putin publicly[1395] and privately[1396]

offered a ceasefire that would have frozen the lines of contact, “far short” of
his supposed goal of taking all of Ukraine. The Biden administration
rejected the offers outright.[1397]
That is pretty messed up considering the administration had been
telling the Ukrainians that they were going to have to deal since they were
running out of men in a stalemated “war of inches.” These conversations
were said to include “what Ukraine might have to give up.”[1398]
Zelensky, on the other hand, publicly said he could not give in, presumably
until his or Putin’s army had been completely defeated. A ceasefire at that
stage “would mean leaving this wound open for future generations,” he
said. “Maybe it will calm some people down inside our country, and
outside, at least those who want to wrap things up at any price. But for me,
that’s a problem, because we are left with this explosive force. We only
delay its detonation.”[1399]
But they were talking. A “knowledgeable American official” told
Seymour Hersh in March 2024 that when Biden learned about new
negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in late 2023, he again moved to
cancel them for his own political needs, threatening Kiev that he would
suspend all non-military aid. In doing so he had sealed Kharkiv’s fate.
[1400]
 In an interview in mid-March 2024, Putin implied he was coming for
Odesa next: “Of course. Population density in these regions was always
high enough, climate wonderful.”[1401] He knew by then that time was on
his side. “We are for peace negotiations . . . but it is not because the enemy
is running out of ammunition,” he boasted.[1402]

Backing Down, Finally?

At the end of December 2023, Politico explained that not only did the
administration no longer intend to help Ukraine achieve victory, but said
that was never their plan. “That’s been our theory of the case throughout—
the only way this war ends ultimately is through negotiation. We want
Ukraine to have the strongest hand possible when that comes.” Of course,
“[s]uch a negotiation would likely mean giving up parts of Ukraine to
Russia,” an unidentified White House spokesman told them. But that is not
what they said before. The priority changed to simply staving off disaster
until after the November 2024 election, and they were not embarrassed to
admit it.[1403]
In the aftermath of the Avdiivka disaster, the New York Times reported
how the American and European foreign policy establishments knew that
Ukraine could not win the war, and the West could not afford to produce
enough weapons to keep them fighting. They published another the same
day about how the Ukrainian government and military knew it too.[1404]
Charles A. Kupchan, a former national security official in the Obama years
who had been working on the backchannel talks with Richard Haass, said it
was time to start negotiating. “Even if Russia can stay the course, I don’t
think Ukraine can. There is no foreseeable pathway toward a battlefield
victory for Ukraine,” he told them, dismissing the idea that more missiles or
even F-16 fighter-bombers would make any difference. Gen. Cavoli, the
supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, said that the war
was a “stalemate,” and the best they could hope for was to try to regroup
and launch another 2023-type offensive in 2025.[1405]
At the Munich Security Conference, President Zelensky told the
assembled leaders that if not rearmed by the West, Ukraine would be
destroyed by Russia. This was noticeably different messaging from before,
when negotiations represented unacceptable capitulation to and
appeasement of the aggressor,[1406] and when Ukraine was on the verge of
total victory over the evil Russian orcs and would take back all of Crimea
any day now too. The Post did not dismiss his comments as Russian
propaganda.[1407]
In March 2024, Sullivan traveled to Ukraine and announced that the
administration was climbing down from their stated war goals. Gone,
hopefully forever, were the ridiculous and impossible aims of expelling
Russia from all of the Donbas, much less the Crimean Peninsula. Now, for
Ukraine to “succeed” and “prevail,” according to Sullivan, simply means
that it “emerges from this war sovereign, independent, and free, able to
deter future aggression with a strong, vibrant democracy; with deep
democratic institutions; with an economy that’s growing.” In other words,
Russia gets to keep everything they have taken so far, and maybe more, and
the Democrats would pretend to believe Ukraine is a “sovereign,
independent democracy” so they can finally back out of this thing. “We
believe that Russia has already failed in this war,” he said.[1408] The Times
agreed. “Recovered territory is not the only measure of victory.”[1409]
Republican War Party stalwart Marco Rubio, never confused for a
Defend America First type,[1410] has also signaled that he no longer thinks
it is good politics to stick with this lie. He admitted it was a lie and that he
had been lying all along: though he knew Ukraine “could not achieve
victory . . . I tried not to talk about this publicly because I thought it
undermined the leverage that Ukraine had.”[1411] But his continued
support is exactly what cost them whatever leverage they did have back in
2022. As bad a person and senator as that makes Rubio, the point is that he
has admitted it now, possibly opening more room for the GOP leadership to
align with their voters[1412] on this issue.
In mid-October 2024, Der Spiegel revealed that Kiev was also finally
willing to redefine victory. “We believed that victory had to mean the
unconditional surrender of (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s Russia,”
but that was “a mistaken view of victory,” their source said, adding that
they recognized they would have to make concessions to win the war.
[1413]

Putin’s Peace Feelers

In April and May 2024, the Kremlin said they wanted a ceasefire and an end
to the war along then-current lines, suggesting the two sides use the
documents nearly agreed upon in Turkey in 2022, but also warned they
would continue fighting “for as long as it takes.”[1414] In other words, the
Russians assessed they had taken virtually all of the land they wanted—
though they did not control all of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia or Kherson—and
had largely achieved their goal of weakening the Ukrainian army. Russian
Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Antonov said, “Retreat or withdrawal of
the Russian Federation Armed Forces to hypothetical dividing lines is
excluded. Let us remind you: there is a Constitution of Russia. The borders
of our state, which include new federal subjects, are clearly marked
there.”[1415] Accepting his offer would indeed be a defeat for Kiev and the
West, but apparently not compared to a worse one if they put it off. In June,
obviously feeling confident, Putin told the Foreign Ministry that Russia was
prepared to negotiate if the Ukrainians were willing to withdraw from the
four provinces Moscow has officially annexed, adopt official neutrality and
continue to foreswear nuclear weapons.[1416]
Russian forces continued their slow, successful physical annexation of
Donetsk.[1417]

No, Fly Zone

Biden and the Pentagon were more reluctant, but pressure kept building for
them to “do something” like declare a “no-fly zone” over Ukraine. It came
up again in the summer of 2024.[1418] Just to make sure everyone
understands: even though TV makes it sound like a magic spell the
president can cast against his enemies with no consequences, a no-fly zone
would mean the U.S. military declaring full-scale air war against Russian
planes over Ukraine, as well as against anti-aircraft guns and missiles based
inside Russia which threaten them. Their pilots would be killed. So would
ours. It is a virtual certainty this policy would lead to general war between
the United States and Russia.[1419] Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or
a fool.

Electoral Needs First

Seeming to confirm the late Justin Raimondo’s theory of Libertarian

Realism,[1420] White House staffers were not even ashamed to admit to the
press how important the war was to President Biden’s ultimately aborted
reelection campaign in 2024. “White House anxiously watches Ukraine’s
counteroffensive, seeing the war and Biden’s reputation at stake,” Politico
wrote. “Senior U.S. officials are convinced that future support for the
Ukraine war—and President Joe Biden’s global reputation—hinges on”
Ukraine’s success in the war. Without that, he would not be able to run on
his “hoped-for triumphant return to the world stage.” Instead of a tax cut for
working people, the Biden team had decided he would run on Ukraine as
“another foreign policy win” in the campaign.[1421]
Politics is not everything. But it clearly played far too central a role in
the president and his war council’s thinking on the matter, with the fate of
mankind hanging in the balance. Ultimately, Biden was so old and confused
halfway into his last year in office, his own party forced him to drop out of
the race anyway.[1422] His designated successor, Vice President Kamala
Harris, emphasized the need to continue to support Ukraine, of course
threatening what Putin never has, that he would attack “the rest of Europe”
after taking over all of Ukraine if the U.S. ceased shipping them weapons
and money. But she did not dare to try to spin the war as an American or
Ukrainian victory.[1423]
Behind Enemy Lines

Attacks inside Russia by Ukraine have continued throughout the war,

enraging them and endangering us.[1424]
After Ukraine attacked downtown Belgorod with drones, killing 21,
including three children, in December 2023;[1425] killed another 25,
including five children, in January 2024;[1426] and struck again in mid-
February, killing seven more,[1427] NATO Secretary-General Jens
Stoltenberg announced that “of course” the alliance supported Ukraine’s
right to attack inside Russia: “Ukraine has the right to self-defense, and that
includes also striking legitimate military targets, Russian military targets,
outside Ukraine.”[1428] In October 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported
on Ukraine’s increased drone war inside Russia, including massive swarms
attacking “missile storage facilities, strategic fuel reservoirs, military
airfields and defense plants.” While they claimed to be helping to force
Russia to the negotiating table, it is doubtful such attacks are very effective
in any broader strategic sense. Then again, Secretary Austin promised
another $800 million for Kiev’s domestic drone industry. Even after
accounting for mass embezzlement, that could still be quite a bit.[1429]
Again, normally, if this was a two-nation war, and the Ukrainians were
simply the underdogs, who could blame them for hitting back? But this is
our government’s war too and even if these are not American drones, we are
still implicated by the actions of America’s client. It is exactly the kind of
situation that George Washington warned about.[1430]

Losing Kharkiv?
In May 2024, in response to Ukrainian attacks on Belgorod, the Russians
launched an offensive to create what Putin called a “sanitary zone” for
“counter-fire purposes”[1431] near the city of Kharkiv—in other words, to
put long-range Ukrainian artillery at a safe distance from Russian towns and
cities.[1432] Putin claimed no intent to take the city itself,[1433] though the
incursion did put his forces within artillery range.[1434] Initial
reconnaissance troops faced little resistance and rolled right in,[1435]
taking more than 290 square miles in a couple of days, more than Ukraine
grossed in the entire 2023 offensive,[1436] and forcing thousands to flee.
[1437] This compelled Kiev to devote some of their last reserves to the
area. However, as Frank Ledwidge noted, it is a massive city and would
require a major Russian effort to take it. The initial forces deployed seemed
to be oriented toward creating that enlarged buffer zone, rather than
conquering the city,[1438] though they did hit it with missiles and glide
bombs incessantly, in an apparent attempt to force the population to flee.
[1439]
Still, the status of Kharkiv remains at risk. This is in part due to the fact
that Ukraine remains one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Millions of dollars that were supposed to be used to fortify the city and the
land between it and the border were simply stolen; the trenches were never
dug and fortifications were never built.[1440]
Ledwidge also said the Russians were advancing town by town, slowly
taking control of all of Donetsk, and predicted that Kiev’s forces would
soon have to withdraw from the oblast entirely. He said British reporters in
the country knew this as well but that the “pro-Ukraine” political line of
their editors prevented them from telling the story in the kingdom’s
important newspapers.[1441]
In late July 2024, the Russians made major gains in Donetsk after
Ukraine was forced to divert resources to the defense of Kharkiv. Soldiers
complained about the lack of reinforcements as more and more men fled the
country rather than submit to the draft.[1442] “Morale is at its lowest ebb,”
reported the extremely pro-war Daily Beast.[1443]
At the same time, Ukrainian forces were getting hammered by the
Russians slowly taking the strategically important Donetsk town of Chasiv
Yar, which had also nearly been razed to the ground by artillery and glide
bombs.[1444]
As previously mentioned, Andriy Biletsky’s 3rd Separate Assault
Brigade helped lead the fighting at Kharkiv in the summer of 2024,[1445]
earning the “Courage and Bravery” award, and declaring one last time for
the fact-checkers in the back that the brigade “was founded by the first
commander of the Azov regiment, Andriy Biletsky, [and] was formed on the
same principles as the legendary Azov regiment and the entire Azov
movement.”[1446]

Kursk Assault

In a mirror image of Russia’s assault on Kharkiv, more than 10,000

Ukrainian army troops, with tanks and armored vehicles, launched a major
assault[1447] into Kursk[1448] and Belgorod[1449] on August 6, 2024. The
attack reached at least 20 miles into Russia, and saw the capture of
hundreds of prisoners, the shoot-down of at least three helicopters[1450]
and a drone attack on Russia’s Lipetsk Oblast, on the far side of Kursk.
[1451] The Ukrainian military said they relied on intelligence provided by
Western satellites and drones during the operation,[1452] also noting their
use of GBU-39 guided bombs and HIMARS systems to hit targets inside
Kursk.[1453] UK Defense Ministry sources said the Ukrainians were also
using British Challenger 2 tanks,[1454] while the Russians said the invaders
were driving American Bradleys.[1455] A Pentagon spokeswoman noted
Ukraine had full authorization from the Biden administration to do so.
When a reporter asked if they would support an attack on Moscow, she
replied: “I’m not going to put a specific range on it.”[1456]
President Zelensky said his goal was to force Russia to end the war.
[1457] Gen. Zaluzhnyi, by then ambassador to the UK, and Emil Ishkulov,
commander of Ukraine’s 80th Air Assault Brigade, warned him not to try it.
Ishkulov was apparently fired over his refusal.[1458]
Experts told the New York Times from the beginning they believed it
was a useless sacrifice, since it provided no real tactical advantage.[1459]
Ukrainian forces were still badly outmanned and outgunned in Donetsk and
much of the east. Kiev’s choice to pull experienced brigades from the front
to lead the invasion was a huge risk, leaving their other forces exposed,
such as those at Chasiv Yar, Pokrovsk, Toretsk and Niu-York.[1460]
The Russians had evidently been demining the area in preparation for
an offensive in the Sumy region, but did not yet have their troops in place
before Kiev launched this surprise attack.[1461] Some of Ukraine’s best-
equipped forces appeared to have made a trap for themselves and then
walked right into it. They had effectively been lured by derelict Russian
officers[1462]—Russian POWs reportedly said they had been warned but
did not believe it[1463]—into marching deep into enemy territory. They
seemed to have humiliated the Russian state, but did not weaken its military
forces, only undermining their own. The Russians sent reservists and
mercenaries to fight, while keeping their main forces on task in the Donbas.
[1464]
Meanwhile, back in Donetsk, poorly trained and equipped Ukrainian
conscripts were getting blasted to pieces. An officer complained that
“[s]ome people don’t want to shoot. They see the enemy in the firing
position in trenches but don’t open fire. . . . That is why our men are dying.
When they don’t use the weapon, they are ineffective.” Others, doubting
their leaders’ plans, simply walk off or flee from the battlefield. “The main
problem is the survival instinct of newcomers. Before, people could stand
until the last moment to hold the position. Now, even when there is light
shelling of firing positions, they are retreating,” another soldier said.[1465]
Officials in Kiev confirmed their goal had been to lure Russian forces
away from the front in Donetsk.[1466] By early September, critics were
already slamming Zelensky for taking such a big risk for no reward. Instead
of pressuring the Russians to divert offensive units, Ukraine had simply
hollowed out its own defensive capability and was on the verge of losing
the logistically important city of Pokrovsk. Russian troops had walked right
in to the nearby towns of Niu-York and Novohrodivka.[1467] Perhaps
surprisingly, Ukrainian forces continued to hold their symbolic gains in
Kursk into November,[1468] as Russian troops kept gaining ground in
Donetsk.[1469] Ukraine lost the strategically significant town of Vuhledar
in early October.[1470] The Post reported that Russian tactics were
improving and the front line was near a “breaking point.”[1471]
A military expert from the Finland-based Black Bird Group said that
Russia took 270 square miles of Donetsk in August and September,
approximately three times more than in June and July, while their
reinforcements were off on their public relations mission in Kursk. Echoing
the Russians when their side suffers high casualty rates, Ukrainian officials
insisted the war is all about attrition, not land, and that they were wearing
the Russians out by losing to them all the time. “This is the most important
thing—to exhaust the enemy,” President Zelensky told the nation in a TV
address.[1472]
But it was his own men who were exhausted and walking off the
battlefield.[1473] By the end of October, Russian forces had taken more
territory in 30 days than any time since the beginning of the war in 2022,
including the strategically important towns of Vuhledar and Selydove,
[1474] and at least half of the part of Kursk that Ukrainian forces had been
occupying since late August. A Pentagon official planning the war told The
Economist that “[a]t this point we are thinking more and more about how
Ukraine can survive,” rather than achieving victory of any kind.[1475]
Pokrovsk was still held by Kiev, but otherwise Russian forces were having
their way across Donetsk and the small part of Luhansk which had
remained outside of their control. The frontlines were mostly manned by
volunteer militias.[1476] In another story, The Economist reported that one
out of five soldiers had gone AWOL.[1477]
 As the Financial Times reported, the soldiers at the front knew they
would not be able to push the Russians back to Ukraine’s 1991–2013
borders, and only wanted to see talks begin. The same was true about
officials in Kiev. “Most players want de-escalation here,” a senior member
of the government told them. Their new foreign minister, Andrii Sybiha,
evidently floated proposals for compromise with U.S. officials after taking
office in September. The new slogan is “land for security guarantees”—a
“tacit” acceptance of Russian sovereignty over the land they have already
taken in exchange for NATO membership. But of course that is the Catch
22—any further move to bring Ukraine into the alliance would only force
the Kremlin to continue the war on until regime change in Kiev.[1478] The
Russians continue to insist on full recognition of their sovereignty over all
of the five oblasts, not just the areas they already control, as well as
neutrality and a total ban on future membership in the alliance.[1479]
Two-thirds of Ukrainians told pollsters in September that they
supported negotiations with Russia.[1480] However, “[t]he biggest
domestic problem for Zelenskyy might come from a nationalist minority
opposed to any compromise, some of whom are now armed and trained to
fight,” the Financial Times noted. Oleksandr Merezhko from Zelensky’s
Servant of the People party, who chaired the Rada’s foreign affairs
committee, told them, “There will always be a radical segment of Ukrainian
society that will call any negotiation capitulation. The far right in Ukraine is
growing. The right wing is a danger to democracy.”[1481]
In late September 2024, Putin announced Russia’s new, updated
nuclear weapons doctrine. It said, “Aggression against Russia by a non-
nuclear country, but with the participation or support of a nuclear country,
was proposed to be viewed as their joint attack on Russia.” He said their
launch-on-warning posture now included against apparent attacks by plane,
drone, cruise or hypersonic missile, and crucially that, not only existential
threats to the Russian state, but now a lower threshold, “critical threats to
Russian sovereignty with conventional weapons will be sufficient for a
nuclear response.”[1482] In late October, they ran a drill simulating
retaliatory nuclear strikes on the United States.[1483]
Meanwhile, U.S. officials were saying that maybe the incursion proved
it was okay to invade nuclear weapons states after all.[1484] Washington
has gone beyond reckless to mad, greatly increasing the risk of war between
the major powers over a lost cause our governments are rightly convinced is
not worth getting involved in directly.
The two nations had been making major progress toward a new
“partial ceasefire” limiting strikes on energy infrastructure, according to
diplomats involved who were disappointed since they thought the talks
might eventually end the war.[1485] The Russian Foreign Ministry
announced that negotiations would now be put on a “long-term pause.”
Progress toward peace talks had taken another shot in the gut.[1486]

Take Warning

When the U.S. and Britain began to seriously propose allowing Ukraine to
use longer-range cruise missiles against targets in Russia,[1487] Putin drew
a line, telling reporters, “This would in a significant way change the very
nature of the conflict. It would mean that NATO countries, the U.S.,
European countries, are at war with Russia. If that’s the case, then taking
into account the change of nature of the conflict, we will take the
appropriate decisions based on the threats that we will face.”[1488] As
shown above, a conversation among German officers, intercepted by the
Russians, confirmed that the British and French had forces on the ground
helping the Ukrainians operate their most sophisticated long-range missiles.
When Zelensky came to Washington in late September 2024 to debut
his plan for victory in the war, senior officials told the Journal they were
“unimpressed,” as it was just the same old request for more and longer-
range weapons, neither of which can account for their lack of manpower.
Perhaps this represented progress compared to the administration lying and
demanding we all pretend to believe along with them. It was President
Biden himself who was holding up permission for Ukraine to use long-
range missiles inside Russia.[1489] This was evidently based on CIA
assessments that Putin’s threats to expand the war were to be taken
seriously this time.[1490]
But Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski told the Journal that he
had been pressuring Blinken and Sullivan to authorize Ukraine’s use of the
long-range weapons, and dismissed the idea that Moscow would escalate in
response. He said Putin was “throwing . . . everything he has at
Ukraine,”[1491] when the concern, as the Times paraphrased the CIA, was
that “Russia is likely to retaliate with greater force against the United States
and its coalition partners,” presumably including Poland, “possibly with
lethal attacks,” if such permission were given.[1492]
 In mid-October Zelensky gave a speech to the Rada explaining his
victory plan: immediate entry into NATO, blanket permission to use allied
arms inside Russia, joint-air defense, invasions of Russian territory to create
“buffer zones,” a secret “deterrence plan” which was presented to the allies’
national governments and a deal to “protect” Ukraine’s natural resources.
NATO membership and joint-air defense would mean general war with
Russia, so that is a negative.[1493] They were already pushing their luck in
Kursk. The rest of it was fanciful, and none of it likely to help end the war
on Ukrainian terms.[1494]
The Times later said that Zelensky was even pushing for Tomahawk
cruise missiles with a range of more than 1,500 miles, almost surely meant
to be rejected. Why? “Military analysts and diplomats” told them that it
may well have been “to show Ukrainians that he has done all he can,
prepare them for the possibility that Ukraine might have to make a deal and
give Ukrainians a convenient scapegoat: the West.”[1495] Fair enough.

Negotiate Now

Major-General Vadym Skibitsky, the deputy head of Ukraine’s military

intelligence agency, HUR, said in May 2024 that he understood Russia
would soon complete their reconquest of Donetsk and correctly predicted a
push into Kharkiv. He also recognized that Ukrainian forces were simply
outmanned by the invaders and simply could not win the war.[1496]
In the summer of 2024, an incredible 94 percent of the American
people, and 88 percent of Europeans, said they wanted a negotiated
settlement.[1497] In February, 72 percent of Ukrainians had said the same.
[1498] The Biden administration cited “democracy” as their excuse for
every drop of blood they shed, every dollar they print and every American
internet post they censor. But they clearly did not care the slightest bit what
the people of the country think. The new Trump administration should send
someone capable to hammer out a deal if the secretary of state is not up to
it. Ukraine’s territorial integrity is a peripheral interest to America, while
it’s obviously central to Russia’s policy.
In September 2024, German Chancellor Scholz called for a new peace
conference to be held, and to include Russia this time after all three parties
in his coalition suffered defeats in regional elections against two parties that
opposed support for Ukraine in the war.[1499]

Population Collapse

The real tragedy is that, just as Professor Mearsheimer predicted, Ukraine

has been wrecked. The Russians have not only killed at least high tens of
thousands of soldiers and civilians, but they have also waged a devastating
war on Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure, especially electricity production
and distribution facilities.[1500]
By late July 2024, the United Nations High Commissioner for
Refugees (UNHCR) said that more than 6 million Ukrainians had fled into
Europe, including more than 1.2 million of them into Russia, and another
500,000 elsewhere throughout the world. They said it was the largest
civilian displacement crisis in Europe since the Second World War. The UN
said that another 3.7 million people were internally displaced.[1501]
 This means the war has displaced between 25 and 30 percent of the
entire Ukrainian population within and outside Ukraine. Many of them will
never come home. With birth rates already extremely low for Millennial
families,[1502] this could be devastating for the future of the country.
[1503] In September 2024, Ukrainska Pravda reported, based on CIA data,
that Ukraine had the highest mortality rate and lowest birth rate in the
world.[1504]

Russia’s Pyrrhic Victory

A Less-Russian Ukraine

One of the major ways Russia’s invasion has undermined their own
interests is by taking Russians out of Ukraine. When there are free and fair
elections in Ukraine, the guy with more support in the eastern, Russian-
leaning parts of the country tends to win, such as in 2004, 2010 and 2019.
That is what necessitated such heavy-handed intervention by the Americans
to cancel the results of those elections in the first place. So even if it had
been easy for Russia to take over the Donbas like it had in Crimea, the
policy still would create obvious problems for them. If the Russian
Federation’s annexation of those oblasts stands, they are removing
Ukraine’s pro-Russian population centers from civil society and
government, leaving a more nationalist substate behind, one they have
bombed to pieces, that has much less incentive to compromise in the future.
So if the Russian war is successful on its own terms, and they succeed
in absorbing such a large percentage of the Russian-speaking eastern
population, they will now be leaving behind a western-Ukraine dominated
government in Kiev for the duration, with little chance that a fair election
would install a pro-Russian government ever again. More likely they would
have a fanatically anti-Russian regime there instead, possibly one intent on
oppressing the ethnic Russians left inside Ukraine’s new borders.
By the flawed logic of government intervention, to prevent this, Russia
would have to take Kiev, or worse, march all the way to Romania and
Poland and push the Ukrainian-speaking populations out of the country
entirely, or at least enough to completely break their resistance, which
would mean a far more catastrophic conflict and diplomatic crisis. And it
would lead to another major problem: they would have started a war to keep
NATO off their border, then moved their border to NATO lines instead.
Otherwise, they would have a much more adversarial Ukrainian state on
their new border for the indefinite future.
And it has not been easy like Crimea. Putin’s goal of reabsorbing the
Donbas and Novorossiya without conquering the capital and truly
vanquishing his opposing army has left Ukraine with the ability to
continually replenish their forces with young men, and the allies to resupply
them with weapons they have used to resist for years, with no end in sight.

Ukraine’s Same Problem

Conversely, if the Ukrainians succeed in reabsorbing the Donbas, they

would be stuck with a pro-Russian population that they have treated as
foreign enemies for the past decade. That could pose a serious challenge to
Ukrainian nationalists at the ballot box, again giving Russia veto power
over their foreign policy, which was invoked as Ukraine’s reason to refuse
to implement the Minsk II deal.[1505] At this point, at least some
influential Ukrainians are saying they would be better off without the
Donbas anyway. “We need to amputate Donbas like a gangrenous limb,” a
former senior member of Zelensky’s cabinet said. “Nothing good will ever
come to Ukraine from Donbas.”[1506]

Militarizing Ukraine

Before his failed uprising and assassination, the Wagner Group’s Prigozhin
had complained that “as for demilitarization [of Ukraine] . . . they had, say,
500 tanks at the start of the special operation, now they have 5,000 tanks.
They had 20,000 people who could fight back then, now 400,000 can. In
what way have we demilitarized it? It turns out we did the opposite—we
fucking militarized it.”

Don’t Call It a Comeback

Putin’s war has not only played into the Western narrative of the defensive
nature of all their provocations, but has seemed to solidify the alliance
against Russia, especially in the east. Poland has been providing massive
assistance to Ukraine in the war, including bases for training, weapons
transfers and the rest. Their government now says they want the United
States to station nuclear weapons on their territory.[1507]
Then again, the war has revealed the weakness of the alliance in a few
ways as well. Just as the economic war has seemingly backfired, the
conflict has shown the limits of American and allied forces in Europe. Our
navy may have them overmatched, but in a tank and artillery war, Western
limitations are more obvious than ever. The U.S. and allied countries
complain that they are running out of shells[1508] and the more
sophisticated rocket artillery systems[1509] and have been reluctant to part
with their tanks,[1510] which were proven obsolete anyway. More than
$175 billion bought them less than a stalemate in Ukraine. It is becoming
less clear whether it is the West or the Russians who are being strategically
drained and defeated here.

Alliance Enlarged

The war in Ukraine has given NATO its reason to exist that they were
desperately searching for in vain just three years before, solidifying the
alliance. Despite Russian warnings,[1511] Finland and Sweden joined the
alliance in April 2023 and March 2024, respectively.[1512] As Biden said in
January 2023, when announcing the future delivery of U.S. Abrams tanks,
Putin “thought that he was going to . . . end up with the Finlandization of
Europe. Well, he’s got the NATOization of Finland. He’s gotten something
that he never intended.”[1513] As NATO head Stoltenberg boasted while
also admitting the truth about the motive for the war: “He went to war to
prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact
opposite.”[1514]
Russian Foreign Ministry official Sergei Belyayev said, “It is obvious
that [if] Finland and Sweden join NATO . . . there will be serious military
and political consequences,” adding that it would “require changing the
whole palette of relations with these countries and . . . retaliatory
measures.”[1515] Russia then moved anti-ship missiles close to their border
and threatened to deploy nuclear weapons to Kaliningrad. Putin said that “if
military contingents and military infrastructure were deployed in Finland or
neighboring states, we would be obliged to respond symmetrically and raise
the same threats for those territories where threats have arisen for
us.”[1516]
Once Finland and Sweden finally did join the Atlantic alliance, they
immediately participated in NATO’s Steadfast Defender exercises, and put
their, and our, and Russia’s population in far greater danger, not less.[1517]
Putin ridiculed their obvious folly in an interview with Russian state media,
calling it an “absolutely senseless step from the point of view of ensuring
their own national interests. . . . [W]e didn’t have troops [on the Finnish
border], now we will. There were no weapons systems there, now they will
appear.” He then said he would move troops to the border,[1518] along with
nuclear-capable[1519] Iskander-M missiles.[1520]
Professor Mearsheimer insists that in all his studies of great powers, he
has learned they are always fearful of losing that power, and that
deliberately making them feel surrounded, while it may be appealing to the
sensibilities of their antagonists, is instead a very wrongheaded policy
which could lead them to react in highly disproportionate ways. In this case,
adding more and more members to NATO in the middle of a war, and
promising that Ukraine may still join someday, only increases the risk of
escalation rather than making the bully back down, as the Western hawks
would have it.[1521] “This will certainly lead to tension. We can only regret
this,” said Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. “We had excellent relations
with Finland. No one threatened anyone, there were no problems or
complaints against each other. No one infringed on anyone’s interests, there
was mutual respect.”[1522]
In January–May 2024, NATO held its largest exercises since the last
Cold War in 1988, with more than 90,000 troops from all now 32 allied
countries participating, practicing for conflict with Russia. It must be for the
public relations, as any real conventional war with the Russian Federation
would turn nuclear in a day or two and they all know it.[1523]
In June, NATO announced that they had succeeded in putting together
a combined army of 500,000 men at “high readiness,” 300,000 of whom
they said were on standby for war with Russia.[1524] They also said they
had prepared five major land corridors they could use to rush troops to
Romania, Poland and Finland.[1525]
In July, the Finnish parliament ratified a Defence Cooperation
Agreement (DCA) allowing the U.S. Navy full access to 15 of its ports.
[1526] Russia promised to respond with “necessary measures,” including,
menacingly, “of a military-technical nature,” the same phrase they used to
describe the invasion of Ukraine.[1527]
Meanwhile, Secretary of State Blinken insisted that what is left of
Ukraine will join NATO someday, ongoing border dispute and all.[1528]
Hopefully he was just lying and they were telling the truth the other times
when they admitted the door was actually closed.
Perhaps not. In July 2024, NATO celebrated its 75th anniversary with a
big event in Washington, where they announced that “Ukraine’s future is in
NATO,” and that it was on an “irreversible path” to membership in the
alliance, while pledging €40 billion in further military and economic
support.[1529]
The fact that Ukraine was certain to lose the war just as it had already
lost so much of its territory seemed not to factor into Western thinking on
the matter, unless they were trying to keep the war going longer.
Many experts cited in this book signed an open letter warning against
any further moves to integrate Ukraine into the alliance, citing the obvious
fact, for one, that “[t]he closer NATO comes to promising that Ukraine will
join the alliance once the war ends, the greater the incentive for Russia to
keep fighting the war and killing Ukrainians so as to forestall Ukraine’s
integration.” The skeptics added, “Admitting Ukraine would reduce the
security of the United States and NATO Allies, at considerable risk to
all.”[1530]

Frozen Conflicts

The Arctic Melts

The U.S. has been preparing for great power conflict with Russia and China
over dominance of the resources of the Arctic, especially now that the
Northwest Passage above Canada has finally opened up travel between the
North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans.[1531] The problem, of course, is
that the Russians are already there, with 15,000 miles of coastline above the
circle, approximately 53 percent of the Arctic’s seaboard.[1532] In recent
years they have invested billions in public and private funds to develop
resources and reopened old Soviet naval bases there as well.[1533]
In June 2024, the Defense Department released their new Arctic
Strategy. They said that due in part to the “accession of Finland and Sweden
to the NATO Alliance . . . this increasingly accessible region is becoming a
venue for strategic competition” with Russia and China, and therefore
“directs the Department to enhance its Arctic capabilities, deepen
engagement with Allies and partners, and exercise our forces to build
readiness for operations at high latitudes.” They said the addition of the two
new nations to the alliance “strengthen[ed] the Western security architecture
in the region,” but acknowledged they were creating their own security
dilemma, saying that “an extended Alliance border with Russia in the Arctic
increases the need for DoD to manage risk in the region.”
The Russians and the Chinese have their own Northwest Passage
between Eastern Asia and Europe—the “polar silk road”—they would like
to develop. Interestingly, the document stresses this aspect rather than
Russia’s modest military buildup in the area, though they do not really
propose to do anything overt about it but expand their own forces and
operations in the region.[1534] The navy has spent hundreds of millions of
dollars building up the port at Nome, Alaska, with an eye toward turning it
into a coast guard and naval base. They have also transferred dozens of F-
35 fighters to Alaska, while the navy and special operations forces train.
[1535]
In July 2024, U.S. and Canadian fighters intercepted Russian and
Chinese bombers off the coast of Alaska,[1536] while Russian fighters
intercepted American bombers near the Finnish border.[1537]

Korea Scalds

Russia had mostly stayed out of the permanent standoff on the Korean
Peninsula since the end of the Cold War. But in gratitude for the Democratic
People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) supplying massive numbers of
artillery shells to Russia, during a trip to Pyongyang in June 2024, Putin
made a deal with the North promising mutual aid if either country were to
be attacked[1538] and raised the possibility of future weapons sales. South
Korean leaders then said they would reconsider American requests to
supply arms to Ukraine. The Russians, in turn, threatened: “As for the
supply of lethal weapons to the combat zone in Ukraine, it would be a very
big mistake, I hope it will not happen.” Putin continued, “If it does, then we
too will then make respective decisions, which South Korea’s current
leadership is unlikely to be pleased with.”[1539]
In October 2024, just as this book was going to press, the U.S. and
Ukraine claimed that North Korea had deployed a few thousand troops to
Russia, allegedly to fight the Ukrainians in Kursk.[1540] Putin’s
government officially denied it, though he seemed not to.[1541] This was
potentially a major change in the situation, not just on the tactical level on
the battlefield, but regarding South Korea’s and other reactions and counter-
reactions to having the far-flung, East Asian nation involved in Russia’s
fight so far from home. It also raises the danger of battlefield experience
gained on the part of the DPRK’s forces and who-knows-what.
 The Pentagon spokesman[1542] and the new NATO chief[1543] both
crowed that this surely showed desperation on the part of the Russian
government, even though DNI Haines reported at the beginning of the year
that their army was only growing,[1544] and Putin had already ordered a
new mobilization in mid-September.[1545]
These were unnecessarily heightened tensions at one of the most
dangerous potential flashpoints for nuclear war in the world[1546]—more
collateral damage from an unnecessary war, and another diplomatic
catastrophe for the Biden administration.

Transnistria Steams

In 2024, the locals, complaining about “economic coercion” from the

Moldovan government in the form of new trade taxes, asked for help from
Russia.[1547] And Putin thankfully ignored them.[1548] The U.S. assured
the Moldovans they were “watching” the situation closely and “firmly”
supported Moldova’s “internationally recognized border” that they have not
controlled in more than three decades.[1549] On cue, somebody attacked a
military base there with a drone strike on March 17, 2024, which local
authorities blamed on Ukraine,[1550] while the Moldovan government
called it a Russian provocation.[1551]
If Putin and his forces mean to take Transnistria, they will almost
certainly have to take Odesa and the rest of the Black Sea coast first. More
likely, they are just trying to stir up a bit of extra trouble for their Western
enemies as Moldova prepared to hold a vote on whether to join the EU.
[1552] It passed—barely.[1553]
Bosnia Simmers

Perhaps due to some level of Russian interference,[1554] or simply the

unsustainable nature of Bill Clinton’s violently imposed agreements, in
2023 and 2024 things started heating back up between the Muslim-
dominated government in Sarajevo and the Republika Srpska in Bosnia, as
well as between the Serbian government and that of the Kosovo NATO
protectorate. In Bosnia, Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik had
raised the idea of declaring independence from Sarajevo over complaints
that they were essentially trying to override the Dayton agreement and
assert more sovereignty over the Bosnian Serbs.[1555] Though he seems to
have backed down, the problem is certainly not solved.[1556] Dodik,
perhaps sensing a color revolution coming, also passed a new law requiring
NGOs who receive foreign funding to register and label their papers with
markings that stipulate such, prompting the Council of Europe to officially
complain.[1557] They went ahead and passed it anyway.[1558]
In January 2024, Biden ordered F-16 fighter-bombers to fly over
Bosnia to “underline U.S. support for its territorial integrity” against
“secessionist activity” by the Republika Srpska.[1559]

Kosovo Boils Over

In May 2023, 90 NATO peacekeepers and 50 protesters were injured in a

riot that began after Serbian Kosovars objected to a claimed victory by
ethnic Albanians in local elections, which the Serbs had boycotted and
whose turnout was only 3.5 percent.[1560] Secretary Blinken condemned
them for disobeying his advice and escalating the situation, and issued a
joint statement with France, Germany, Italy and Britain rebuking them too.
[1561] The U.S. then kicked Kosovo out of the Defender Europe NATO
exercises as punishment for their overly violent reaction to the protest and
sent 700 more peacekeeping troops to join the occupation.[1562] Despite
U.S. meddling and pressure, the governments in Belgrade still refuse to
recognize Kosovo’s independence or join the sanctions regime against
Russia.[1563]
According to Biden administration officials, in September 2023, the
Serbs began amassing troops at the new international border, implicitly
threatening to invade. After the Americans spread the word among their
European allies, threats started being issued and the Serbs backed down.
[1564] In early 2024, Kosovar authorities banned the Serbian currency,
which was widely used among the few Serbs left there after the Kosovo
Liberation Army’s ethnic cleansing campaign following the 1999 war. This
led to a contentious fight at the UN, where Serbia accused the Kosovars of
an attempt to make the quality of life for the Serb minority so bad that they
would give up and leave for Serbia. Even the U.S. ambassador, Linda
Thomas-Greenfield, said the U.S. opposed the action, as well as recent so-
called “law enforcement operations” targeting the Serb minority.[1565]
These conflicts may very well be heating up due to Putin’s
interference, as the American government claims. Not that they have proved
it, but it would make sense for them to move Serbian pieces on the
chessboard to distract and entangle Western governments in another
simmering conflict, or at least threaten to, in the middle of the proxy war in
Ukraine. Then again, even Blinken admits the Albanians started it this time.

Georgia Liquefies

In March 2023, the government of Georgia worked to pass a Foreign

Agents Registration Act, like we have in the United States. “The bill’s
authors said it would make clear when the work of entities is financed by
representatives of foreign states, and it was modeled on the U.S. Foreign
Agents Registration Act of 1938,” the AP reported.[1566]
It said that any civic groups that received more than 20 percent of their
funding from abroad had to declare themselves foreign agents. U.S.-
supported President Salome Zourabichvili[1567] swore to veto it from
America, where she was on an official visit.[1568] Fistfights broke out in
the parliament over the new law on its first read.[1569]
In an action reminiscent of recent color-coded revolutions, groups
backed by the NED and American NGOs[1570] poured into the streets to
denounce this “authoritarianism” and alleged turn away from Europe, in
some cases throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at police.[1571] The
protesters also attempted to storm parliament again,[1572] as they did
during the Rose Revolution coup of 2003.[1573]
Georgia is a very poor country. When the NED comes in throwing
around more than a million dollars per year[1574] for “activists” to toe their
line, it is no problem at all to create massive mobs on demand.[1575]
Western media immediately fell in line with the narrative that this was
a “Russian-style law.” The New York Times called it “one of the most
heavy-handed tools of Putinism”—even though its sponsors cited the
American FARA law of 1938 as its model. The Times provided many
claims, but in 2,000 words no evidence or even a reason to believe the
Russians had anything to do with it.[1576] By claiming this law—not
banning but merely identifying NGOs and media outlets as foreign agents
—would hurt pro-Western forces in the country far more than Russian ones,
they gave away the game. This is not what “the Georgian people” want. It is
what Washington wants from them. Those who go along get paid with U.S.
tax dollars. Those who do not are smeared as agents of the Kremlin.
In a perfect reflection of the hubris and lack of self-awareness of the
Western imperial class, the BBC wrote that “[h]istorically, the term ‘agent’
in Russia and Georgia has the meaning of ‘spy’ and ‘traitor,’ giving a
negative connotation to the work done by civil society,” adding, “It suggests
they are acting in the interest of foreign forces rather than doing good for
the country and society.”[1577]
Of course, the efforts of the West are completely selfless and
benevolent. Any misunderstanding is due to a language barrier between our
side and our new eastern wards. Someone just needs to explain it to them
slowly. The U.S. Embassy in Tbilisi issued a statement calling their
parliament’s vote a “dark day for Georgia’s democracy.” They went on to
explain what was at stake, saying the new law was “incompatible with the
people of Georgia’s clear desire for European integration and its democratic
development.” They said that “these laws will damage Georgia’s relations
with its strategic partners and . . . raise real questions about the ruling
party’s commitment to Euro-Atlantic integration.”[1578]
 State Department spokesman Ned Price added that the U.S. was very
concerned the new law “would strike at some of the very rights that are
central to the aspirations of the people of Georgia.”[1579] Assistant
Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs James O’Brien
threatened sanctions against lawmakers from the Georgian Dream party
who supported it,[1580] while White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-
Pierre said passage of the law would “compel us to fundamentally reassess
our relationship with Georgia.”[1581] New USAID director Samantha
Power, having learned nothing about unintended consequences of foreign
interventionism from the catastrophic results of the Libyan war she
championed in the Obama years,[1582] declared that the new Georgian
FARA law “gravely threatens Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic future and the ability
of Georgians to fulfill their own economic, social, and other aspirations. I
call upon the Georgian Parliament to drop these proposed laws.”[1583]
George Soros’s Open Society Georgia Foundation hilariously declared:
“This bill aims to leave defenseless the abused children and women; people
with disabilities, minorities, scientists, workers . . . socially vulnerable
families, farmers, miners, internally displaced [and] homeless.” But then
they got to the real point: “Adopting this bill will . . . also damage our
aspirations of Euro-Atlantic development. This law will obstruct our path to
membership in the EU as this law was found illegal in the EU.”[1584]
The Western powers and their sock puppets won. The parliament
dropped their attempt to limit foreign intervention in their country in the
face of massive foreign intervention in their country.[1585]
 However, against warnings from the EU[1586] and U.S. State
Department,[1587] the Georgian foreign agents law again passed the
parliament in May 2024, leading to massive protests.[1588] Perhaps that is
because there are more than 10,000 foreign-backed NGOs operating in
Georgia, signing even more paychecks.[1589] “The NGO sector is the
largest and most important lift into the upper middle class,” an activist
explained to The Nation. “They want to protect their rents.”[1590] The
movement amounted to what analyst Brad Pearce called an “organized
labor protest by the foreign influence industry.”[1591] Imagine a group
called “Transparency International” fretting that they will have to disclose
their foreign donors.[1592]
The foreign ministers of the Baltic states and Iceland joined the
protesters in the streets.[1593] President Zourabichvili vetoed the law,
[1594] but the ruling Georgian Dream party had the votes to override it.
[1595] While opponents claim Georgian Dream is a pro-Kremlin party
since its founder, Bidzina Ivanishvili, made his fortune in Russia, the
party’s record is one of embracing the EU and shunning the Russians’ EEU.
[1596]
Opposition parliamentarian Tako Charkviani threatened after the law
was passed: “Believe me, there will be a color revolution in Georgia.”
A few months later, Georgian Dream won the parliamentary elections
of October 2024. President Zourabichvili, the same lady brought in from
France to be the puppet foreign minister after the Rose Revolution of 2003,
[1597] along with various so-called “election observers”—of course backed
by America’s International Republican Institute (IRI) and National
Democratic Institute (NDI)[1598]—and a mission from the EU,[1599]
denounced the results, saying they represented Russia’s “takeover” of the
country.[1600] Tens of thousands of protesters turned out to demand the
election results be “annulled.” While explaining why this was so important
to the West, the AP stopped to remind readers that Georgia is a tiny little
country “between Russia and Turkey,” that they could otherwise not find on
a map to save their own lives, where the regime had been growing “more
authoritarian” recently. Heydar Aliyev in Azerbaijan next door must have
thought that was pretty funny. The protesters, they said, had already
foresworn negotiations and compromises with the ruling party, and had
promised to fight “until victory.” They did also note that Zourabichvili “did
not provide specific details or present evidence of Russia’s involvement in
vote theft.”[1601] She told protesters, “I spoke to six presidents, including
the presidents of EU member states. I spoke to foreign ministers,” and that
all but Hungary’s Victor Orban rejected the results. Politico reported, “The
opposition wants Western nations to help overturn the results of the vote,”
and “vowed to seek international support to overturn” the election. They
falsely claimed that observers disputing the results were “independent,”
unless they were strictly referring to their relationship with Georgia’s
national government. They also said crowds were smaller than those
opposing the anti-registration act in the spring, and that momentum did not
seem to be with them.[1602]
The Biden administration also claimed the election must have been
rigged,[1603] threatening sanctions and other undefined “consequences” for
their misbehavior,[1604] and demanded an investigation and the repeal of
the foreign agent law.[1605]
“We’re going to watch very carefully as events unfold in the next few
days,” a senior U.S. government official ominously warned. “Obviously,
Georgian citizens have a right to freedom of assembly, freedom of speech,
and it’s going to be critical that the government fully respect [the] rule of
law and fundamental freedoms.” This was reminiscent of Victoria Nuland’s
threats to Viktor Yanukovych in December 2013 that he had no right to
clear public spaces or government buildings that had been seized by those
seeking to overthrow him, and that if he did, it would be the pretext for the
next stage in escalation by the United States.[1606]

Armenia Sublimates

One consequence of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s

subservience to the United States, is that he lost the weight of Russia’s
protection,[1607] and lost the ethnic Armenian enclave of Artsakh or
Nagorno-Karabakh to Azerbaijan in a swift ethnic cleansing campaign in
September 2023.[1608] This was a result of the devastating autumn 2020
Second Nagorno-Karabakh war. At the end of that conflict, Russian troops
replaced Armenian ones in the enclave.[1609] During the 2023 cleansing
campaign, they stood by and watched as 120,000 people were expelled.
[1610] Azeri President Ilham Aliyev then threatened to cut a corridor across
Armenia to the Azeri enclave of Nakhchivan on the Armenian-Turkish
border.[1611] After Aliyev demanded sovereignty over formerly Azeri
villages inside Armenia,[1612] they had no choice but to give in.[1613]
This was all fine with the liberal, rules-based international order because
the hereditary, aggressive military dictator of Azerbaijan is their guy.[1614]
After the loss of Artsakh, Pashinyan froze participation in the
Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) and threatened to leave.
[1615] Russia warned them not to.[1616]

The Baltics Bubble

There is no real reason to fear that Russia would invade the Baltic states.
They do not have much to fight about, and they do have that war guarantee
from NATO. Then again, two of the three have fairly large ethnic Russian
minorities, and territory long-considered Russian, such as the Estonian city
of Narva,[1617] and the alliance is engaging in the kind of forward
deterrence that could just as easily provoke another avoidable conflict. For
example, Germany is now set to permanently station troops in Lithuania, at
a base right near the Russian border with Belarus.[1618] Like American
forces in South Korea, they are meant to be a tripwire that the enemy dare
not cross because the worst consequences await—but if he does anyway,
then where does that leave Europe, and the rest of the world? All other
things being equal, sometimes a tough defensive stance may be appropriate
in circumstances like these. But the West does not have a very good track
record lately when it comes to correctly calibrating their deterrence–
provocation dial.

The Real Enemy

Bigger Fish to Fry

It is a fact. Al Qaeda-tied jihadists are still fighting Russia in Ukraine. NPR

even ran a piece attempting to rehabilitate them as simply a bunch of great
guys helping Ukraine defend themselves, emphasizing that Chechen
soldiers are fighting in the Russian army there too.[1619]
The Polish magazine Dziennik Polski interviewed a Chechen fighter in
Ukraine who was a veteran of the early-2000s war in the Russian republic,
as well as the U.S.- and allied-backed jihadist invasion of Syria. The
headline reads, “Abdul Hakim: Don’t think of us as terrorists,” but the man
then goes on to explain that this is exactly what he and his friends are:
“mujahideen” holy warriors out to kill Russians wherever they can find
them. He said they had signed an agreement with the Ukrainian government
and planned to recruit 1,000 men to join the fight.[1620] Ukraine’s military
intelligence agency posted a video online showing Hakim and confirming
his and the Chechen Division’s role in the International Legion fighting
Russia in Bakhmut.[1621]
As Haid Haid of the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London
pointed out,[1622] many jihadists moved on to join their friends fighting in
Ukraine after being kicked out of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s mini al Qaeda
state in Syria’s Idlib Province in 2021.[1623]

It’s Not Over Yet

By necessity, the U.S. and Russia still share at least limited amounts of
information about the threat of al Qaeda and ISIS terrorism, with the U.S.
helping Russia to thwart attacks on its soil at least twice during Trump’s
first term[1624] and even during the Biden administration. One day after
Russian police killed a group of terrorists plotting to attack a Moscow
synagogue, in February 2024, the U.S. Embassy warned them of another
impending attack in which Americans were said to be in danger.[1625] But
on March 22, Tajik ISIS-K terrorists attacked a theater in Moscow, killing
144 and wounding more than 180.[1626] ISIS claimed credit for the
massacre[1627] and posted bodycam video to prove it.[1628]
American officials for some reason admitted (boasted?) to the New
York Times that they refused to “share any information about the plot
beyond what was necessary” before the attack.[1629]
ISIS-K (for Khorasan, an old name for the northeastern Persian Empire
in modern-day Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan), as
the U.S. calls it, began its life as an Afghan government-backed group of
Pakistani terrorists who turned on their masters.[1630] There is no reason to
believe they are working for the U.S. or other Western intelligence agencies
now. The U.S. specializes in making, not controlling, Frankenstein
monsters. Putin and his security forces are responsible for their own
negligence, but his skepticism toward American intentions with recent
warnings are in part a result of the U.S. government taking their eye off the
real danger and instead targeting Russia, our would-be partner in the terror
wars.[1631] Not that al Qaeda or ISIS could destroy our countries. They are
just the only enemy on the planet truly motivated to kill us, and Russians
and the others, mostly for what our governments have done to them.[1632]
 It would be nice to think that the terror wars are over, but, nurtured on
and off over the years by the U.S. and its allies, these groups continue to
blow back against the people of both our nations. It was al Qaeda, not
Russia, who slaughtered nearly 3,000 of our people on September 11, 2001,
[1633] not to mention their shoe,[1634] underpants,[1635] printer cartridge,
[1636] Fort Hood,[1637] Pensacola[1638] and Corpus Christie[1639] plots,
some of which were successfully carried out. It was ISIS-K who
slaughtered 170 Afghan civilians, 11 U.S. marines, a soldier and a navy
corpsman at the Kabul airport during the withdrawal of August–September
2021.[1640] They also attacked the Russian Embassy in Kabul, killing six,
in 2022.[1641] America’s wars against the bin Ladenites’ other enemies,
including Russia[1642]—and for that matter Iran[1643] and their Iraqi,
[1644] Syrian,[1645] Lebanese[1646] and Yemeni[1647] friends in the
Middle East, or their Taliban rivals in Afghanistan[1648]—are truly
benefitting only the worst enemies of the American people.[1649]
Not that we should ally with those countries in offensive attacks—our
government has proven it cannot be trusted with such a mandate[1650]—
but undermining other nations’ fights against al Qaeda, ISIS (al Qaeda in
Iraq and Syria) and ISIS-K amounts to treason against the public in the
name of a poorly conceived grand strategy.
But the American foreign policy establishment cannot break out of
their anti-Russia fever. Just like when dealing with Iran and their so-called
Shi’ite “axis of resistance” in the Middle East, Washington’s resentment
against al Qaeda for their kamikaze attack on the Pentagon evaporates. In
one example, after the Islamic State killed 224 people in the October 2015
bombing of Russian Metrojet flight 9268 out of Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt,
U.S. officials “delighted” in its destruction. “U.S. spies root for ISIS-Russia
war,” Nancy Yousef and Shane Harris reported in the Daily Beast.[1651]
For the 2024 Moscow attack, Putin himself blamed Ukraine. Russian
authorities say they followed the four surviving shooters for 230 miles
southwest until it was clear they were headed to Ukraine. Though it is
within the realm of possibility due to the presence of some bin Ladenites
among Ukraine’s volunteer forces, the author knows of no information to
substantiate the claim. It can be very hard to prove for certain who put some
low-level terrorist gunmen up to their acts ultimately.
Echoing Bill Clinton’s self-professed innocence after Bosnia, Kosovo
and September 11,[1652] Putin wondered aloud, “Are radical and even
terrorist Islamic organizations really interested in striking Russia, which
today stands for a fair solution to the escalating Middle East conflict?”
Favoring some Muslims in some places is never going to be enough for the
bin Ladenites as long as our governments occupy and intervene against
others.
On June 24, 2024, terrorists in Dagestan attacked a synagogue, two
Orthodox churches and a police station, killing 20. They cut the throat of
Rev. Nikolai Kotelnikov, a Russian Orthodox priest, before burning his
church to the ground.[1653]
That same month, former FBI agent Ali Soufan, citing the recent arrest
of eight suspicious illegal aliens from Tajikistan in New York, Los Angeles
and Philadelphia after sneaking into the country at the Mexican border,
paraphrased the CIA’s ignored warning from August 2001,[1654] saying,
“Islamic State Khorasan Determined to Attack in U.S.”[1655] This is no
idle threat. The federal government has alternatively groomed and provoked
these bin Ladenite madmen by the thousands over the last 40 years, while
continuing every policy that motivated their betrayal in the first place.
[1656] From Eastern Europe to the Caucasus to the Balkans and the Middle
East, America’s security forces continue to put our people in grave danger.

Taylor Swift

In July 2024, the CIA claimed to have helped national police thwart an ISIS
plot to attack a stadium in Vienna, Austria during a concert by pop star
Taylor Swift.[1657] They said “tens of thousands” could have been killed,
which makes sense if there was, in fact, a credible plan to bomb the
columns and collapse a stadium full of young children and their parents.
This does not at all appear to be another case of the FBI entrapping an idiot
into agreeing to some farfetched plot,[1658] but the real kind. Bin Ladenite
terrorism remains the greatest threat to the people of the United States and
the West. Just imagine that it had happened and react to that accordingly.
In 1993, some Egyptian Islamic Jihad terrorists almost succeeded in
collapsing one World Trade Center tower into the other mid-day.[1659]
Only six people were killed, and the ATF killed six more at the Branch
Davidians’ house in Waco, Texas two days later, kicking off that tragic 51-
day siege,[1660] so people mostly just forgot about it.
This was a catastrophic failure of imagination. Instead of the American
public and political establishment getting serious about the dangers of
jobless Arab-Afghan fighters wandering the West, looking for targets,
[1661] after such a potentially disastrous near-miss, they continued playing
the same game all through the 1990s, until they hit the two towers again on
September 11. That woke up even the most cynical covert operators to the
danger—that is, until the so-called “redirection” of 2006.[1662] The U.S.
has mostly returned to the bin Ladenites’ side since then, while still
continuing the policies that radicalize them against the civilian population
of this country, especially support for Israel’s brutality against the
Palestinians and Lebanese.[1663]
The U.S. government continues to put Austrian and American children
at risk along with them.

Partners

Oil, Gas, Satellites

So what is it all about?

Well, it isn’t the threat of Soviet Communism, dead and gone more
than 30 years now. Putin was correct when he consistently referred to
America as Russia’s “partner” for all those years. In 2021, the U.S.
imported somewhere around 20 million barrels of Russian oil and gas per
month.[1664]
On February 19, 2022, just three days before the war began, the U.S.,
Russia and Ukraine successfully launched a rocket and satellite into orbit
together.[1665] In July, the two major powers announced a new deal to
continue to fly each other’s astronauts to the International Space Station.
[1666] In October 2022—in the middle of this horrible proxy war—the
American SpaceX corporation launched a rocket carrying a Russian
cosmonaut to the station.[1667] Cooperation continues. In September 2024
a Russian rocket launched with 2 cosmonauts and an astronaut aboard to
deliver them to the international space station where our guys also get along
just fine.[1668]

Trudging Forward

Despite everything, Putin has been pretty good at compartmentalizing

different issues and, at least in the recent past, has no problem working on
many things with the U.S. while disagreeing on others.
What choice does he really have? The global order went from a bipolar
world to a unipolar one, centered in Washington, D.C., three decades ago.
Only in the past decade has American influence begun to slowly recede.
The U.S., as its foreign policy establishment loves to remind us, is the
world’s only remaining “superpower.” The old ideological conflict over the
Soviet Union’s communism is long gone. A politically correct crusade
against Russia’s 2000s-era-style conservatism is a poor substitute.
It may be true that American power is waning in the world, but that is
mostly due to W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden’s $10
trillion project destroying the Middle East for the last two decades. The
“unipolar moment” could only ever be temporary anyway. Of course
Russia, China and India would become wealthier and more influential. It is
one of the side effects of helping bring them out of communism.[1669] That
is not their fault, but to their credit. So the BRICS rise[1670] and the
Americans panic. But as Thomas Graham wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Even a
defeated Russia would still retain vast territory in the heart of Eurasia, the
richest endowment of natural resources in the world, a colossal nuclear
arsenal, and a permanent veto-wielding seat on the UN Security Council,
among other assets.” Therefore, “[l]ike it or not, the United States must find
a way to live with Russia.”[1671]
He went on to write that if we can re-normalize relations with Russia,
we could use them to balance against China.
Or perhaps we could normalize relations with everyone and not worry
so much about the Old World’s alliances. Marxism is over. The only global
ideological contest now is between America’s “rules-based” world empire
and those who resist it.

Now What?

A Trillion More

British and Ukrainian military experts told the London Times that in these
inflationary times, they are going to need at least another $300–800 billion
in weapons to attempt to match the Russians.[1672]
Once the war is finally over, the World Bank estimates that the
financial cost of reconstruction of Ukraine, sure to be picked up by regular
Americans, will be more than $400 billion.[1673] One could safely estimate
it will be a few hundred billion more than that by the time they are done. Of
course, the people who decide the policy do not have to pay any of that
themselves. They just conscript us to work for it instead.[1674]
Trump Closes a Deal

In April 2024, it was the then-presumed Republican Party presidential

nominee Donald J. Trump who broke the stalemate in the House when he
declared his support for a “loan” of $60 billion to Ukraine instead of a
straight transfer.[1675] They do not have to pay it back. We do.
A Daily Beast reporter seemed surprised to find that civilians on the
Kiev side were dismayed by the news. Due to the country’s extraordinary
corruption, they reasoned, it would be enough to prolong the war, but not do
any good in the fight.[1676] Officials told the press they hoped it would
simply be enough to help Kiev hold the lines; any hope of regaining
territory was long gone.[1677]

Russiagate ’24

During the election season of 2024, the intelligence agencies again created
narratives of Russian sabotage and interference in an apparent attempt to
solidify support behind Biden’s Ukraine policy, if not the outgoing
president himself. They put a piece in the New York Times alleging a
“probable” Russian troll farm was falsely claiming a Ukrainian troll farm
was targeting the 2024 election. The only notable thing about it was the
story itself, with U.S. intelligence agencies again choosing to push a
narrative about Russian preferences for former President Trump on the
American people. The Times even cited Clint Watts, the former FBI agent
who had blatantly admitted his “Hamilton-68 dashboard,” which
supposedly tracked Russian bots and trolls, was an utter fraud.[1678] As
long as Watts spins in the right direction it is good enough for the
newspaper of record.[1679]
Another story, reminiscent of the false Russian connection to the
Spanish mail bombing campaign of 2023, claimed the Russians were
waging a “low-level sabotage” campaign across Europe that made little
sense, including supposed attacks on a paint factory in Poland and an Ikea
store in Lithuania. American and European officials told the Times that
these “arsons and attempted arsons . . . are part of a concerted effort by
Russia to slow arms transfers to Kyiv and create the appearance of growing
European opposition to support for Ukraine.” While admitting that these
targets have nothing to do with the war effort, they simply argued that
“Russia is trying to sow fear and force European nations to add security
throughout the weapons supply chain” by setting a furniture store on fire.
They accused the Russian GU, but demonstrated nothing.[1680]
In July 2024, CNN and NBC put out another evidenceless story
claiming the Russians were using “information warfare” against the
American people, again, supposedly in support of Trump’s candidacy. The
DNI’s office told NBC, “We have not observed a shift in Russia’s
preferences for the presidential race from past elections, given the role the
U.S. is playing with regard to Ukraine and broader policy toward Russia.”
But we already know for a fact that John Brennan and James Clapper lied
about that back in 2016. Brennan “hand-picked” Hillary Clinton supporters
like Andrea Kendall-Taylor[1681] to claim in their also-evidence-free 2017
Intelligence Community Assessment that the Russians preferred Trump.
House staff who later reviewed their source materials said that the Russians
considered Trump to be “mercurial,” “unreliable” and “not steady,” but
Mrs. Clinton to be “manageable and reflecting continuity.” They saw no
evidence the Russians wanted Trump to win back then.[1682] Brennan, a
former Communist[1683] and CIA director during Obama’s support for
Jabhat al Nusra in Syria, is also a disgraceful liar. Now the spies cite his lies
from eight years ago to tell us that nothing has changed. Indeed.
As for the terrifying new Russia “AI-enhanced” troll farm,[1684] the
Justice Department “did not detail whether the bot network had been
particularly successful in its messaging efforts.”[1685] CNN noted that
“ODNI officials did not reveal many specific examples of what they see as
Russian election influence activity, but they said it has included familiar
tactics such as amplifying influential U.S. voices online to promote the
Kremlin’s agenda.”[1686] The deadly and terrifying foreign retweets of
Americans who oppose U.S. Russia policy. What will these deadly enemies
do to us next?
In September 2024, two months before the election, the intelligence
agencies said they assessed that the Kremlin favored Trump again. The only
danger they could articulate to the Times was that Russian media and
websites were “spread[ing] propaganda and disinformation about Ukraine.”
They did not attempt to explain just how much influence those efforts might
have had on Americans. They said U.S. authorities had seized fake news
sites that were made to look like the Washington Post and USA Today, but
cited no evidence that anyone saw these alleged fake sites or were swayed
by them in any way.[1687] They also claimed Russian-spread videos had
been viewed 16 million times without telling readers that YouTube and
TikTok each average about 41.6 million views per hour all day long—more
than Netflix.[1688] Nor did they mention that the videos in question were
standard pro-Trump fare, no different than the individuals in question would
have put out anyway.
The Justice Department then indicted two RT employees for secretly
financing a conservative media organization while accusing RT itself of
promoting Trump.[1689] This was more obvious interference by the U.S.
government. As the indictment itself acknowledges, RT was kicked off
cable TV and YouTube years ago. Their reach in America is nonexistent.
The conservatives who were part of this alleged Russian-backed podcast
network were already well-established writers and podcasters with their
own opinions—including Tim Pool and Benny Johnson—and the Justice
Department said they were deceived into believing the company was owned
by Americans.[1690] Despite all the headlines, they were not accused of
spreading “disinformation.”[1691] More abstract discord-sowing
—“amplifying U.S. domestic divisions”—was all, even though the alleged
targets of the operation were some of the most prominent figures in
conservative alternative media, who may have made money, but would
have seen no major change in their audience sizes.[1692] In other words, if
one were to take the claims in the indictment at face value, it would amount
to not much more than some contractors fleecing RT, with no effect on the
American public at all. Judging by the indictment, the investigation had
been ongoing for months at least. The timing of the announcement and the
subsequent media storm suggest another plan by the Justice Department to
tip the electoral scales against the challenger since the targets were all major
pro-Trump boosters and the indictments came just two months before
election day.
It is true that since the late W. Bush years, Russian-backed media has
taken every opportunity to embarrass the U.S. government. As the silly ICA
of 2017 complained, they covered America’s wars, the Occupy Wall Street
movement, fracking controversies and whatever else they could in a mildly
sensationalistic way. The author was an unpaid guest on RT a handful of
times in 2010[1693] before deciding to no longer appear, since my agenda
is purely parochial,[1694] meant to expose the government for the benefit
of our country, no one else’s.[1695] But the reality is that while some
alternative media figures got some practice being on television, RT and
Sputnik’s reach was always very limited, and the Americans they featured
were saying and doing what they thought was right anyway. Anything that
casts doubt on the government’s false narratives is deemed by the liars
themselves to be “dis-, mis- or mal-information,”[1696] because of course
it is.
These indictments were just the feds jerking the American people’s
chain again, trying to make them feel afraid of something that cannot hurt
or affect them in any way. But compare the allegation that Russia overpaid
a handful of already-hugely successful podcasters to put out a few more
shows each month—which had no effect at all on their overall output,
viewership or perspective—to America’s intervention in Serbia, Belarus,
Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan and the rest. Bush and Soros’s Orange
Revolution this was not.
 In late October, the New York Times cited undefined “intelligence
assessments” saying that “Russia . . . aims to bolster the candidacy of
former President Donald J. Trump, while Iran favors his opponent, Vice
President Kamala Harris.” They cited random accounts on Telegram and
Gab, sites that have absolutely negligible reach in the United States, along
with zero-traffic alleged fake news sites and Facebook accounts, without
giving reason to believe any of it, if true, would amount to anything. The
American people should take these claims as nothing but lies by our own
intelligence agencies, acting as secret police, interfering in the presidential
election, again.[1697]

Tilting at Windmills

In late 2023, the Republican Party started to block some aid to Ukraine, for
some members out of principle, but for others simply as a way to hurt
Biden’s standing and try to get more money for immigration enforcement.
Sen. Chris Murphy, who stood on stage with the Social Nationalists and
took credit for the regime change of 2014,[1698] threatened that Putin
would “[march] into a NATO country” next because of their opposition.
[1699]
President Biden again claimed in his 2024 State of the Union address
that Russia—directly comparable to Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich in World
War II—was determined to spread the war, thus U.S. military support for
Ukraine, and presumably his repeated sabotage of peace talks, were
defensive moves meant to protect the whole world. “If anybody in this
room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not.” Biden
went on to assert that “Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and
provide the weapons it needs to defend itself.” He incoherently conflated
Putin’s claim to the far-eastern and southeastern regions of Ukraine, based
on history, shared ethnicity and religion, with a desire to “reestablish the
Soviet Union” and go back “to the days when there was NATO and there
was that other outfit that Poland, everybody belonged to.” By that he meant
the Warsaw Pact, which is an obvious non sequitur to anyone familiar with
a map of Europe and the history of the 20th century. When asked whether
the United States was on a path to war with Russia, the president mumbled,
“No, we’re on a slippery slope for war if we don’t do something about
Ukraine,” before drifting off. “It’s just not gonna . . . anyway.”[1700]
In response to this and similar statements, Putin started comparing
military spending figures. “In 2022, the U.S. defense spending amounted to
$811 billion, if memory serves, and Russia spent $72 billion. The difference
is more than ten-fold.” He added, “The United States’ defense spending
amounts to about 40 percent of the global figure . . . while Russia accounts
for 3.5 percent. Considering this difference, are we planning to fight
NATO? This is nonsense.” He reiterated what the war was about: “We are
defending the people who live in our historical territories,” obviously
meaning Russian, not Soviet, lands, then went off again about Russia’s
exclusion from post-Cold War European security structures, NATO
expansion and the deployment of Western forces in the East. “Did we move
towards the borders of the NATO bloc’s member countries? We did not
bother anyone. They were moving towards us.” He concluded, “What are
we doing? We are only defending our people on our historical territories. It
is therefore complete nonsense when people say that we intend to attack
Europe after Ukraine.”[1701]
Putin has blood on his hands, and it is not like he is perfectly sincere
here, but the fact remains his narrative simply makes far more sense than
the lies American politicians and media tell us all day, which do not add up
at all. In fact, the assessment released by the national intelligence director in
February 2024 conceded their claims were not true, stating that Russia
“almost certainly” does not seek war with the West. “President Vladimir
Putin probably believes that Russia has blunted Ukrainian efforts to retake
significant territory, that his approach to winning the war is paying off, and
that Western and U.S. support to Ukraine is finite.”[1702]
After all, Biden also admitted in so many words that Ukraine was not
worth defending anyway: “There are no American soldiers at war in
Ukraine, and I am determined to keep it that way,” he promised.[1703] His
administration was content to back an army he knew would eventually lose,
and was clearly not willing to do what it would take to help them win, since
it would not only cost the lives of American GIs, but their entry into the
conflict—and their deaths—could serve as obvious tripwires for general
war between NATO and the Russian Federation.
In July 2024, under heavy political pressure at home after a terrible
performance in a debate with former President Trump, Biden held a summit
in Washington celebrating the 75th anniversary of the creation of the NATO
alliance. He once again repeated that if Russia were to win the war they
would then move on to attack other European countries,[1704] even though
the director of national intelligence wrote in February 2024 that “Russia
almost certainly does not want a direct military conflict with U.S. and
NATO forces.”[1705] Regardless, Reuters reported NATO’s plan to create
up to 50 brigades of 3,000 to 7,000 troops each.[1706] The Times seemed to
imply the days of promises to help Ukraine regain control over their five
lost provinces was over. “While Ukrainian officials insist they are fighting
to get their land back, growing numbers of U.S. officials believe that the
war is instead primarily about Ukraine’s future in NATO and the European
Union.” They actually quoted Ukrainegate figure Eric Ciaramella, now an
expert at the Carnegie Endowment, observing that neither side seemed to
have the ability to make any major changes to the lines as the stalemate
continued. He urged Western leaders to bring Ukraine closer to the EU and
NATO as soon as possible to guarantee indefinite support for their war. To
their credit, the Times also acknowledged that such a move could
incentivize the Russians to expand their war goals to include the capital city
again if that is what it would take to keep them out of the alliance.[1707]
In what was perhaps an accidentally astonishing portrayal of the
elderly Biden’s staff manipulating his position, the Post reported the
president was wary about the promise to bring NATO into the alliance and
had even rejected the language about Ukraine’s “irreversible path” to
membership before being overridden by Sullivan and his other senior aides.
They pressured him into accepting language about Ukraine’s need to fight
corruption as a compromise. Even then, he tried to insist only on using the
term “Euro-Atlantic integration,” until under further pressure he accepted
the verbiage about NATO membership.[1708] Off-script, Biden had told
Time in May that the future relationship with Ukraine would only mean
arming them. “It does not mean NATO. I’m the guy who said I’m not
prepared to support the NATOization of Ukraine.”[1709]
Britain, Germany, France, Denmark, Belgium, Poland, Canada and
Italy have made a big show out of giving security guarantees to Ukraine.
[1710] In June 2024, the Biden administration released their own new
bilateral security agreement. It simply promised to continue supporting
Ukraine in the war and to keep giving them weapons and money.[1711]

Cut and Run

It took the American national security establishment 20 years to admit they

could not pacify the Pashtuns of Nangarhar and Kandahar, Afghanistan. If
the public is content to wait until they concede their errors, this could also
be a very long war. Remember, Plan A was to spend years backing an
Afghan-style insurgency against Russian forces after the Ukrainian army
was broken. Compared to initial forecasts,[1712] the Ukrainians have done
a remarkable job holding their military forces together. But then, even
assuming a major Russian breakthrough at some point and the dissolution
of Kiev’s army, if nobody stops them, they could just go right back to
supporting Nazi-led guerrillas like back in the old days.
Regardless, the longer this war continues, the worse the outcome will
clearly be for all sides. All politics aside, the American people must demand
an end to U.S. intervention in Ukraine.

OceanofPDF.com
Trump II

“Bwahahaha!”
—Justin Raimondo

OceanofPDF.com
 Nice Miss

Heroes in Error

The 2023–2024 election season included President Biden being forced out
of the race by leaders of his own party[1] after his advanced age and
possible dementia became too difficult to ignore,[2] his unchallenged
replacement on the ticket by his vice president, Kamala Harris,[3] and two
different apparent kooks trying to assassinate Donald Trump. The first, in
Butler, Pennsylvania, came within a hair’s breadth of succeeding,[4] and the
second—an avowed supporter of Ukraine[5] who had traveled to the
country to help organize volunteer fighters,[6] successfully recruiting at
least one Afghan commando[7]—was confronted just minutes before he
would have been in range of the former president with an SKS rifle on the
golf course at his country club in Palm Beach.[8]
The alleged shooter, Ryan Routh, had been brainwashed by the
Democratic Party and TV news into believing that the war in Ukraine was a
simple matter of good versus evil.[9] He must have thought he was being a
hero in trying to murder a man who said he wanted to end the war. Perhaps
he had also been convinced that Ukraine had the slightest chance of
regaining lost territory and that Trump could do anything but spare them
more losses by forcing a deal. “Ryan was very upset about the fact that
Trump was trying to negotiate a deal with Putin instead of trying to really
have Ukraine’s back,” a Frenchman whom Routh helped get a position in
the Ukrainian army told the Wall Street Journal. Multiple Americans,
including a former CIA officer, warned U.S. authorities about his threats
against Trump. Neither the FBI nor Secret Service followed up with any of
them.[10] The Secret Service’s negligence at the scene in Butler was as bad
as could be imagined.[11] At Trump’s club in Florida, an agent found the
shooter before he had a chance to fire at the former president, but, just as
negligently, they had failed to clear the entire course.[12]
As this book goes to press in the fall of 2024, results of any official
investigations have been kept secret, and the major journalistic institutions
seem to have lost interest in both assassination attempts, so details about the
shooters, their motives and associations remain a mystery. The two cases
revolve around plausible “lone nuts,” and perhaps the media deliberately
downplayed the stories to avoid inspiring copycat attacks, but both remain
too odd to dismiss without serious investigations and accountability.
But all the War Party’s lies[13] and threats[14]—and perhaps these
attempts on his life—evidently just made people like Trump more. He was
elected to a second term as president of the United States in a landslide in
November 2024.[15]
Numerous times during the Biden years, Trump had assured audiences
that the Russia-Ukraine war would never have happened if he had still been
president. Of course this was an unprovable counterfactual. But he has also
said he is determined to end it, writing on social media: “I, as your next
President of the United States, will bring peace to the world and end the war
that has cost so many lives and devastated countless innocent families.” He
added, “Both sides will be able to come together and negotiate a deal that
ends the violence and paves a path forward to prosperity.”[16]
 In his September debate with Harris, Trump refused to back down on
the question, saying he wanted to end the conflict, and reminded the
audience of the very real threat of nuclear war breaking out between the
major powers.[17]
Senator J.D. Vance, Trump’s new vice president, had also long-favored
a diplomatic solution and an end to our strategic posture of confrontation,
though he is very close to Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, whose
software is used to help plan the war,[18] and so carries a conflict of interest
against peace.
In September 2024, Trump told former George W. Bush spokesman
Marc Thiessen[19] that he stood by his previous statement[20] that he
would attempt to force Putin to negotiate by threatening to vastly expand
military aid to Ukraine. “I did say that, so I can say it to you. But I did say
that and nobody picked it up. They don’t because it makes so much sense.”
“There is an increasingly vocal isolationist faction in the Republican
Party that believes Trump is their ally,” Thiessen wrote, adopting the age-
old smear for anyone on the right with anything less than the Bushes’ taste
for blood, adding approvingly that “any fair examination of Trump’s first-
term record shows that he is no isolationist.” He cited Trump’s bombing of
ISIS, Wagner Group mercenaries and government forces in Syria, the
assassination of Iranian Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani in Iraq,
as well as the arming of Ukraine and threats against North Korea—but not
his attempt to make peace with it.[21] He also called antiwar Republicans
the “anti-Ukraine right,” and said they were motivated by “hostility toward
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky,” as though any significant
opposition to this war must be based on mindless animus against Ukraine or
its leader, rather than a fair assessment of morality and American national
interests.
We the People may not be able to expect much better than that when it
comes to Trump’s brand of America First foreign policy. Or perhaps the vile
torture apologist Thiessen is the one engaged in wishful thinking.

The Same World Order

Robert O’Brien, Trump’s last national security adviser in his first term and
possibly a high-level official in his second administration, has written up a
new take on the same old neoconservative doctrine of global hegemony in
the name of so-called “national conservatism.” Writing in Foreign Affairs,
O’Brien said that in order to take on the “new Beijing-Moscow-Tehran
axis,” Trump would launch another “maximum pressure” campaign against
Iran—which he blamed for all the Middle East’s problems—as well as the
containment of and complete economic “decoupling” from China. He also
came out in support of the deployment of more nuclear submarines and the
new B-21 long-range bomber, hypersonic missiles and a return to nuclear
weapons testing.
O’Brien complained that the Biden administration had “dragged its
feet” in sending enough munitions to Kiev, saying it was probably enough
to help them survive the war with Russia, “but not enough to enable it to
win.” He did say that Trump wanted to see a negotiated settlement, but also
that he would continue to send Ukraine weapons, bolster allied forces in
Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe and demand that Ukraine be admitted
to the EU without the usual red tape.
America First, nuthin’, O’Brien wrote, Donald J. Trump is the real
internationalist: “Although critics often depicted Trump as hostile to
traditional alliances, in reality, he enhanced most of them. Trump never
canceled or postponed a single deployment to NATO. His pressure on
NATO governments to spend more on defense made the alliance stronger.”
Bill Kristol or Joe Biden could easily have made the same pitch for the
empire: “Americans should not underestimate what their country has
achieved or downplay the success of the American experiment in lifting
people at home and abroad out of repression, poverty, and insecurity.”[22]

Transition

It remains uncertain whether Trump has learned from his experience as

president the last time around. Personnel is policy, as they say, and Trump
seems to be as reliant on hawks as ever. As this book goes to press,
President-elect Trump has announced that his former CIA director and
secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, will not be joining him in the new
administration, nor will his former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley,[23] nor
son-in-law Jared Kushner.[24] This is very good news. Unfortunately, he
also named the hawkish New York Congresswoman Elise Stefanik for UN
ambassador,[25] and the absolutely horrible Ukraine war supporter Rep.
Mike Waltz—who signed on with Liz Cheney to stop Trump from leaving
Afghanistan,[26] and supports conscripting young girls into the military[27]
—to be national security adviser.[28]
 In an absolute betrayal of his pretensions toward an America First
foreign policy, Trump named the avowedly interventionist Senator[29]
Marco Rubio[30] who has supported every single horrible thing that he
possibly could since joining the legislature,[31] to be his secretary of state.
[32] Trump’s enemy, the Russiagate theorist and avowed war hawk, former
Representative Adam Kinzinger, said he thought Rubio was a “good
choice.”[33]
Trump then named Fox News host Pete Hegseth—an Iraq and Afghan
war veteran who has supported the war in Ukraine in the past, claiming “the
future of America and the Western world” were on the line there[34]—as
his nominee for secretary of defense. On the bright side, Hegseth is an
avowed supporter of the Defend the Guard campaign, the most crucial part
of the American antiwar movement.[35] Led by great War on Terrorism-era
combat veterans at BringOurTroopsHome.us, the Defend the Guard
movement is pushing for 50 state laws forbidding the president from
nationalizing guard forces to use in violent overseas conflict without an
official declaration of war from the Congress.[36] To have a supporter in
the Defense Secretary’s office is a potentially huge advance for non-
interventionism, even if it just means he would withhold the generals the
Pentagon has sent out to the state legislatures to try to stop it over the
previous few years.
Trump also announced his nomination of former DNI John Ratcliff to
run the CIA. Ratcliff, a Trump loyalist who came from the House of
Representatives, revealed the “Clinton Plan Intelligence,” on the origins of
Russiagate, as Special Counsel John Durham labeled it, which upset so
many FBI investigators when they were finally told about it.[37] Career
agency officers told CNN they were pleased at the choice.[38]
The president-elect also named Tulsi Gabbard for director of national
intelligence,[39] which is very good news. She is clearly serious about
forging a new long-term peace with Russia and China,[40] and while a
hawk when it comes to the bin Ladenites, we know that she will certainly
never take their side.[41] And at least President Trump will have an honest
assessment of the truth, without simply being prisoner to the permanent
bureaucracy’s claims.
What these appointments reveal about Trump’s future foreign policy,
especially in Europe, is hard to predict. There were certainly credentialed
and credible America First non-interventionists who could have taken those
roles. One may wonder whether Trump has ever heard their names before,
or if they will have a chance to take important roles in his new
administration. The fate of our country may depend on it.
Shortly after the 2024 election, Trump’s staff began talking about
potential solutions to the war in Ukraine.[42] There had also been no word
yet on any plans Biden might have to bring up the dead-letter Logan Act to
threaten Trump with more lawfare for getting elected while refuting his
policy. Calling for a Christmas Truce could get him impeached again.[43]
Americans must loudly support efforts to end this war now. The War
Party must not get away with “reining him in” on Russia policy for a
second time.[44]

Rogue Statist?
Could Trump make peace? Anything is possible. He has a famously
personal negotiating style, having almost achieved a deal with the DPRK’s
Kim Jong-un based on mutual trust built up between the two.[45] To
Washington’s imperial court, the very possibility represents a threat to the
future of the war they wish to see continue—even though they all know
victory for Ukraine is impossible and that their leverage is decreasing with
each passing day.
With much luck, Trump will be resentful enough against his
establishment enemies to actually make an effort to keep them off his
National Security Council this time, and make peace.

OceanofPDF.com
Good Night and Good Luck

“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps,

the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and
develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of
armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and
armies, and debts, and taxes are the known
instruments for bringing the many under the
domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary
power of the Executive is extended; its influence in
dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is
multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds,
are added to those of subduing the force, of the
people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism
may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the
opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war,
and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals,
engendered by both. No nation could preserve its
freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
—James Madison
“Between government in the Republican meaning,
that is Constitutional, representative, limited,
government on the one hand, and Empire on the other
hand, there is mortal enmity. Either one must forbid
the other or one will destroy the other.”
—Garet Garrett

“War and militarism were the gravediggers of

classical liberalism; we must not allow the state to get
away with this ruse ever again.”
—Murray N. Rothbard

“If America has a service to perform in the world—

and I believe it has—it is in large part the service of
its own example. In our excessive involvement in the
affairs of other countries, we are not only living off
our assets and denying our own people the proper
enjoyment of their resources; we are also denying the
world the example of a free society enjoying its
freedom to the fullest.”
—J. William Fulbright
“We don’t have the strength for Empire; and we don’t
need it. Let it fall from our shoulders. It only weakens
us, exhausts us, and hastens our destruction.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“For what shall it profit a man if he shall gain the

whole world, and lose his own soul?”
—Matthew 16:26

“I thought it was unfortunate that Mr. Horton

repeated, in effect, pro-Putin talking points about
Ukraine.”
—Bill Kristol

“You do what you can.”

—Bill Hicks

OceanofPDF.com
 Fool’s Errand

Same Old Nonsense

The current fear campaign against Russia in the American media is no

different from the demonization of any of the U.S. government’s enemies
here and around the world: virtually the entire popular narrative is fake. But
the older generation is used to hating Russia and the young have been sold a
line about “Russian aggression” throughout Eastern Europe for years now.
There is also the harm done by the Russiagate hoax that claimed the
dastardly Putin inflicted President Donald Trump upon our land, which has
seemingly forever damaged the brains of America’s Democrats and made
peaceful coexistence for them unthinkable.
But the U.S.A., not Russia, is the world empire. And it should not be.
For the middle part of North America to attempt to maintain primacy in the
Old World never made sense. Our supposedly limited constitutional
republic should never have tried it.

Flat Broke

In the later months of 2024, America’s national debt was over $35 trillion.
[1] Former Federal Reserve Chair and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says
she expects the number to hit $50 trillion before the end of the decade.[2]
Currently the annual interest on the debt is more than $1 trillion—more
than the official defense budget.[3] Monetary and price inflation are
destroying Americans’ standard of living.[4] A major part of this expense is
military spending. While the government pretends to appropriate a mere
$849 billion per year on the national security state, expert Winslow
Wheeler, after adding up all the hidden costs of the current wars, Veterans
Affairs and nuclear weapons spending, found that the real total is $1.767
trillion per year.[5]
And while it is possible that economic catastrophe could end the era of
attempted predominance before a nuclear war does, the more responsible
course would be to recognize the self-destructive nature of our current
policy and call the whole thing off now while we are still ahead.

Kagan Concedes

In February 2022, even Robert Kagan, jumping the gun in anticipation of a

quick Russian victory in Ukraine, wrote in the Washington Post that the
“unipolar moment” was truly over. The former power disparity between the
U.S. and the two major independent powers of Russia and China has now
begun to shift back. “It is time to start imagining a world where Russia
effectively controls much of Eastern Europe and China controls much of
East Asia and the Western Pacific,” he said. “Americans and their
democratic allies in Europe and Asia will have to decide, again, whether
that world is tolerable.”[6]
Tolerable? Compared to what? Better dead than also-red, white and
blue? A few weeks later, Kagan admitted in Foreign Affairs that your author
is exactly right about everything:
 Although it is obscene to blame the United States for Putin’s
inhumane attack on Ukraine, to insist that the invasion was
entirely unprovoked is misleading. Just as Pearl Harbor was
the consequence of U.S. efforts to blunt Japanese expansion
on the Asian mainland, and just as the 9/11 attacks were
partly a response to the United States’ dominant presence in
the Middle East after the first Gulf War, so Russian decisions
have been a response to the expanding post-Cold War
hegemony of the United States and its allies in Europe. Putin
alone is to blame for his actions, but the invasion of Ukraine
is taking place in a historical and geopolitical context in
which the United States has played and still plays the
principal role, and Americans must grapple with this fact.

However, Kagan insisted that recent administrations had “played a strong

hand poorly” when they should have “wield[ed] U.S. influence more
consistently and effectively,” implying the United States should have
launched wars to help Kiev take control of Crimea and the Donbas back in
2014.[7] Kagan did not mention whether his own, his father, wife, brother
or sister-in-law’s advocacy for the last generation of intervention in the
Middle East and Central Asia from the most important think tanks,
newspapers, journals, the vice president’s office and State Department
might have distracted from the stronger Eastern European policy he now
wishes we had. Nor did he explain how those interventions demonstrated
the efficacy of U.S. military power in realigning Eurasian regions with
American goals. And, of course, he did not acknowledge that both Russian
policies he claims we should have already gone to war over were the direct
consequence of an illegal coup d’état engineered, in part, by his own
spouse.
By 2023, Kagan conceded in a panel discussion at the Brookings
Institution: “I have to admit, because if you think about it, there is no way
that Putin’s conquest of Ukraine has any immediate or even distant effect on
American Security.” This is Nuland’s husband. “You know, to say that
Putin’s acquisition of Ukraine is going to affect American Security and we
couldn’t tolerate it from a security point of view is kind of ludicrous when
you think that ‘Wait a minute, Moscow once controlled half of Europe and
we think those were good days now.’”[8] Yes, it does not matter to the
people of the United States who controls Ukraine. But who is this “we” that
thinks the era of Soviet totalitarianism in Russia and all of Eastern Europe
and Central Asia were the “good old days” other than the Kagans—the
absolute horror show their advice has helped to bring to the Middle East
notwithstanding? In a September 2024 interview, Nuland herself admitted
that Russia’s performance in the war “completely dispelled this myth of this
massive superpower military that could roll across Europe any time it felt
like it.”[9]
In 1996, Kagan quoted John Quincy Adams’s admonition that America
should not “go abroad in search of monsters to destroy,”[10] and asked,
“But why not?” The answer is that Kagan is the monster. His family has
made its fortunes off America’s wars and proxy wars for decades. And they
have helped to turn the United States into a corrupt, bankrupt empire rather
than setting anyone free. He declared then that to not dominate the planet
was “a policy of cowardice and dishonor.”[11] But what does the blood-
soaked Robert Kagan, co-author of Iraq War II and husband of the greatest
champion of Ukraine’s Nazi movement since Heinrich Himmler, know
about honor?

Strobe’s Second Thoughts

In 2018, Strobe Talbott conceded that NATO expansion had been

provocative, but argued in his own defense that “[i]f the leadership of a
country has any view but the following, it’s not going to be the leadership
of that county for very long. And that is: We do what we can in our own
interest.” Talbott then mused rhetorically, “Should we have had a higher,
wiser concept of our real interests that would require us to hold back on
what many people would say is our own current interest?”[12]
It is a simple matter of time preference. Should we worry more about
angering and provoking Russia, ruining our countries’ friendly relationship
and risking going back to the bad old days of the Cold War or worse 20
years from now? Or should we worry about collecting Polish votes and
Lockheed dollars for the Democrats today? To us, the answer is obvious. To
them it was too, but they got it wrong.
It never had to be this way. Putin and his men obviously are
responsible for the decisions they have made and the blood on their hands.
But the fact remains that the U.S.A. picked this fight so far from our shores.
That the likes of George Kennan and Brent Scowcroft warned against it
proves the decision could have simply gone the other way.
Rockefeller Men

Even establishment oracle and NATO expander Zbigniew Brzezinski was

finally convinced that America had overreached in the Bush and Obama
years and desperately needed to retrench, cooperate with Russia and China,
and deputize more of the imperial law enforcement to smaller allied nations
before the entire empire fell apart. The era of American predominance “is
now ending,” he wrote.[13]
Brzezinski’s counterpart, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger,
said it was time to negotiate before the Ukraine conflict escalated into a real
war between major powers. Essentially denouncing the administration’s
“weaken Russia” policy, he told Western leaders at the World Economic
Forum that “[n]egotiations need to begin . . . before it creates upheavals and
tensions that will not be easily overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should
be a return to the status quo ante.” He said, “Pursuing the war beyond that
point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against
Russia itself.”[14] Kissinger later added, “We are at the edge of war with
Russia and China on issues which we partly created, without any concept of
how this is going to end or what it’s supposed to lead to.” He said he
thought it made sense to bring nations like Poland “that have been part of
Western history” into NATO, but that Ukraine did not share that history, and
that “I was in favor of the full independence of Ukraine, but I thought its
best role was something like Finland”—before they had joined the alliance
too, he meant.[15] Kissinger also argued that a moderately powerful Russia
has been an important balance against other states “for half a millennia,”
and that we might regret taking them down too far.[16]
 In January 2021, the influential foreign policy theorist Walter Russell
Mead wrote in Foreign Affairs that the entire post-World War II, U.S.- and
UN-based international order was over. He identified Bush’s Iraq War II,
Obama’s war in Libya, the 2008 financial crisis and other examples of elite
Western incompetence which have undermined America’s influence at
home and in the rest of the world.[17]

Fiona’s Arc

In a speech in March 2023, the ubiquitous British-American policy adviser

Fiona Hill went even further, stating that much of the world had grown so
sick and tired of American hegemony that they were taking the opportunity
presented by the Russia-Ukraine war to find another way around U.S.
political and economic dominance. It was not just Russia and China
demanding their independence, but “[o]ther countries that have traditionally
been considered ‘middle powers’ or ‘swing states’—the so-called ‘rest’ of
the world—seek to cut the U.S. down to a different size in their
neighborhoods and exert more influence in global affairs.” She added,
“They want to decide, not be told what’s in their interest. In short, in 2023,
we hear a resounding no to U.S. domination and see a marked appetite for a
world without a hegemon.”[18] This may have been a felony level of self-
awareness for a resident of the nation’s capital. Good thing the UK is
reluctant to extradite due to third-world U.S. prison conditions.[19]

Empire of Dunces
It is the supreme irony of the world that at the turn of the third millennium,
after the end of the Soviet Union, when the unipolar American superpower
had achieved a greater sway over human affairs than any before it, its
stewards were the least competent imperial managers that could be
imagined. The Bushes, Clintons, Obama, McCain, Kerry and Biden have
been a disaster—and the rogue Trump was far short of ideal last time
around, and is personally hawkish enough on some countries, at times
including Russia, to give at least some reason to worry about his second
term.
But what right does Washington have to raise the risk of nuclear war
between major powers over territory which even they acknowledge is far
outside anything that could be considered America’s vital national interests?
When even Henry Kissinger says your foreign policy is too belligerent and
dangerous, then that must be because it is.
Vladimir Pozner, a man with a French-American-Russian background,
is host of an interview show in Russia. Back in 2018, in the midst of the
“low-level” fighting compared to the 2022– stage of the war, he warned in a
speech at Yale University that it is “an extremely dangerous moment today.”
He said the risk of apocalyptic confrontation is much worse now than it
ever was during the even worst times of the first Cold War, and that, like it
or not, much of the conflict was of the American government’s doing.
“Back then Russians were ‘anti-White House’ or ‘anti-Wall Street,’ but not
anti-American in their vast majority.” Now Russian society is anti-
American at “the grassroots level, and there’s a reason for it.”[20]
Yet at the same time, there is no good reason for it at all.
 Enough Already

Outlaw Enforcement

In his last State of the Union address in 1992, President George H.W. Bush
declared, “A world once divided into two armed camps now recognizes one
sole and pre-eminent power, the United States of America.” He said that
“they regard this with no dread. For the world trusts us with power, and the
world is right. They trust us to be fair, and restrained. They trust us to be on
the side of decency. They trust us to do what’s right.”[21]
It was not true. With this attitude, the U.S. government brought on the
terrorists’ war against this country and the so-far generation-long war to
suppress them—and still sometimes supports them. And it caused the
current crisis in Eastern Europe. Even if one, through ignorance, believed
Iraq War I was a great success, that was more than 30 years ago. The
administrations of Bush’s successors have laid bare the truth: the
selflessness of the American-imposed world order is but a thin public
relations exercise justifying imperialism. It is the same reason the U.S. had
to rename British and French “counter-revolutionary warfare” to “counter-
insurgency” in Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq[22]—Americans like to
believe their nation is on the side of the world’s poor and weak against their
tyrannical oppressors. But it is not.
This is a paradox lying at the core of modern American great power
politics: the project of global dominance is rife with conflicts of interest
while its leaders claim to be motivated only by universal principles of
liberty and peace and the rules-based order. The U.S. is merely enforcing
the law, you understand, but they will also launch an illegal regime-change
war whenever it suits them. They will overthrow elected governments for
access to oil fields and pipeline routes. The American CIA will even torture
prisoners at former Soviet KGB bases in Poland if they feel like it.[23]
But Washington’s claims regarding the benevolence of their hegemony
and intention to spread only security and fairness are not believable to
anyone except the members of the U.S. foreign policy establishment itself.
They evidently refuse to acknowledge to themselves, even in their darkest,
drunkest night, that their past dishonesty and violent interventions have
made it impossible for the rest of the world to accept their claims of benign
selflessness. Muslims, Chinese and Russians have every reason to presume
the most dishonest and self-serving intentions behind every American
policy and claim. How could they not?
The part of the “U.S.-led world order” that represents the ideals of
property rights, liberty and peace—for example, the official outlawing of
war by the UN Charter and the implicit understanding that modern violent
conflict simply bears too great a cost for innocent people—is wrecked,
sidelined, humiliated, discredited. Who in the world do the authors of the
wars in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Mali,
Syria, Yemen, Palestine and Ukraine think they are to tell anyone else to
obey the law?

Deterrence for Dummies

Western governments have repeatedly admitted they will not bring Ukraine
into the NATO alliance, and have already shown they do not, in fact,
consider Ukraine a vital enough interest to actually fight for it by sending
anything but small numbers of deniable American forces to assist them.
Even the hawkish Polish minister of foreign affairs, Radosław
Sikorski, knows that America’s vow to defend even Poland in the event of a
real conflict with the Russians is little more than a bluff, though of course
he does not perceive the moral hazard in it. He says he has pushed so hard
for the expansion of U.S. military bases there—which he admitted was in
violation of President Clinton’s vows in the 1997 Founding Act—precisely
in an attempt to trap America into a deeper military commitment. He
acknowledged the Washington Treaty which created NATO does not
necessarily do so itself. America’s so-called “security umbrella” is nothing
but a tripwire for conflicts that the empire may not truly be willing to fight.
[24] Ironically, barring the outbreak of a major power war due to a
miscalculation and spiraling violence out of Ukraine, it is clear that Russia
is no threat to the United States or our Western European allies, and
probably not even to Poland or the Baltics either. There is no question that it
has been Western, especially American, provocations which have caused
them to remilitarize.

Leaving the Past

For the Biden administration to have negotiated fairly, they would have had
to admit the truth of their responsibility for the crisis, and the reality of its
scope. They would apparently rather die.
But that is why the political climate must change. America’s
relationship with Russia is the single most important matter facing
humanity. We all deserve policies that will bring an end to the current
system which requires a perpetual nuclear sword hanging over all of our
necks while tragic proxy conflicts are waged against innocent people. The
threat of a real war breaking out is higher than at any time since the early
1980s, if not the early 1960s—and all over a conflict that we have every
reason to believe would never have happened if our government had not
taken such provocative steps so far away from their jurisdiction.
This essential issue is one where libertarians, realists and America First
conservatives—and progressives too—can lead by telling the truth and
demanding an end to this insane game of militarism and global hegemony,
and immediate ceasefire negotiations toward a permanent peace deal. After
a generation of disastrous Middle Eastern wars, America’s patriotic right no
longer believes in our country’s supposedly divine mission to dominate the
rest of planet Earth. The liberal hawks and their neoconservative
compatriots have long lost Middle America, and even the enlisted military
forces themselves.[25]
The old Casper Weinberger-Colin Powell Doctrine[26] insisted the
American people must be united behind any violent foreign intervention.
George W. Bush was willing to settle for only the right. But as Presidents
Obama and Trump both found during their times in office, American
conservatives can no longer be counted on to support these policies. As
Rachel Bovard of the American Conservative magazine told NBC in March
2022, “America First foreign policy has made a lot of inroads.”
Establishment Republicans, she told them, are “speaking to a generation of
us that watched them fail [in Iraq and Afghanistan],” and now “they’re
making the same argument about Ukraine to a highly skeptical
audience.”[27]
The Republican Party leadership disagrees, of course. They attacked
President Biden only for his supposed weakness, rather than his
recklessness which they have shared in. Rebuking some recalcitrant
younger members of the House in March 2022, Senate Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell attempted to minimize the antiwar right, insisting, “There
may be a few lonely voices off to the side. I wouldn’t pay much attention to
them.”[28] They have kept that same narrative going up to the present day,
though there has been notable dissent by some of the more-populist
“MAGA Republicans” who came to power with Trump and are less loyal to
the older GOP establishment.[29] After Trump’s reelection in 2024, the
outgoing Republican Senate leader announced that he would set up a
showdown with the new president and his allies for the new year, to put up
a “roadblock . . . over Ukraine and other foreign policy matters” and thwart
his supposed “isolationism.” The hawks will not go out without a fight.[30]
The gulf between the people and the government of this country is
growing ever wider, with the all-important issue of war and peace between
the U.S. and Russia at the center of it. But military recruitment numbers tell
the truth: the people do not believe in the wars anymore.[31]
The United States Constitution describes a limited republic, whose
government exists to protect the liberty and safety of the people of our
country, not to attempt to decide the fate of all Eurasia forevermore.
America fights a 19th-century, European-style battle for imperial
dominance dressed up in pieties of 20th-century global universalism. The
American political establishment is foolish to see the world in such terms. It
is an avowedly good thing for Germany and Russia to forge a closer
relationship, even if it is at the minor financial expense of some American
firms in the short term. To cause a war, and one that increases the risk of the
annihilation of our world, over such temporal, narrow and parochial
concerns is the lowest of human folly.
Is it not fair to ask: What the hell does Paul Wolfowitz know? Is he not
tied for wrongest man of the modern era? Why should the United States of
America be bound to the doctrines in some dumb Pentagon memorandum
he and his men wrote 30 years ago demanding we few in the northern half
of the New World, way over here between the planet’s greatest oceans, must
remain the dominant political and military force over the rest of the world
forever? How could any American expect other populations and
governments to accept this? How could they think we could ever afford it?

Call This a Govment?

The Financial Times’s Henry Foy says Russia is so dangerous because the
Kremlin’s operating principle, as he put it, was that “the stability of the state
supersedes the freedom of the individual, and entails fake opposition
parties, rigid control of the media and impossible barriers to entry for
political figures not approved by the regime, offset by the illusion of the
traditional trappings of a true democracy.”[32]
But his description could just as easily apply to the United States, not
due to traditional Russian paranoia of being invaded, but traditional
American paranoia that they will not let us overthrow their government and
dominate them. Look how our national security state and political
establishment behave when they fear for a moment that Donald Trump
knows what America First means or that he might be serious about it. The
Russiagate scam of 2016, the Ukrainegate and laptop suppression hoaxes of
2020, and the kangaroo courts’ attempts to bankrupt or imprison him in the
run-up to the 2024 election, along with new evidenceless Russiagate
narratives by the usual suspects,[33] show what happens when the
American people elect anyone not preselected by the establishment elites—
even a New York billionaire.
The FBI and CIA ran a piece in Politico in February 2024, based on
interviews with 18 “former officials and analysts . . . including political
appointees from both parties and career intelligence officers,” discussing
how “on edge” they are that the American people could elect a person who
might consider reorganizing their agencies. They dare call it treason when
in fact even their talking to the press that way represents their own
illegitimate interference in our electoral process. Maybe Americans prefer
that a president do something government employees do not agree with.
That is the democracy they pretend to be fighting for when clearly all they
care about is protecting their own power, privileges and extraordinarily high
salaries.[34]
Virtually every state in the union makes it as difficult as possible to
create new political parties or keep them on the ballot, solely over the threat
that they could possibly split the vote against the major parties, much less
have a chance of replacing their duopoly—and everybody knows it.[35]
Remember when Julian Assange revealed that some vice president at
Citigroup had picked President Barack Obama’s cabinet for him?[36] But
we are supposed to keep fighting wars and backing extremist groups all
over the planet in the name of spreading self-government to the world no
matter the consequence, even when we Americans clearly do not have it
ourselves, and by large majorities no longer approve.[37] When Trump
threatens NATO, read the fine print. He is just playing hardball by
demanding that the allies pay their fair share for their own defense, at least
2 percent of GDP, as they have agreed to do. The important point, though, is
that his voters and increasing numbers of Americans agree. We cannot
afford for the whole world to be our responsibility, especially when our
government keeps causing the problems in the name of preventing them.
[38]
A recent op-ed in the Times castigated “Black America Firsters,” who
opposed the Democrats in the 2024 election because they “cannot reconcile
spending billions of tax dollars in the Middle East and Ukraine while Black
communities in this country struggle with longstanding
underinvestment.”[39] Is that truly so unreasonable? Many Israelis have a
higher standard of living than many Americans,[40] who are forced to
subsidize their socialist healthcare and education. Government employees
in Kiev are driving Lamborghinis[41] while Americans get evicted.[42]
The national government has also hollowed out the American economy
with their massive subsidies for war industries at everyone else’s expense.
Even during supposedly good economic times, there are millions of
homeless. The cost of living increases every day. Meanwhile, American
bridges and dams collapse regularly, killing people and causing incalculable
damage, as a result of those in charge always looking outward and
neglecting the people they are sworn to protect.
Just in late September and early October 2024, two important stories
showed how they do not even try to live up to their responsibilities at home.
The first was Hurricane Helene, which caused massive flooding, mudslides
and casualties in Appalachia. More than 200 people were killed. This was at
a time the administration was sending massive aid and equipment to
Ukraine and Israel, including U.S. military reinforcements to the Middle
East in case Israel’s war against the Palestinians spread into a regional
conflict with Iran and their Shi’ite allies. While people drowned and were
stranded behind destroyed roads, no one from the many military bases
nearby came for them. Those resources are for global hegemony, not
protecting the American people, even when they are dying within line-of-
sight of their supposed defenders. The government deployed far fewer
resources than they eventually did for Hurricane Katrina’s victims in New
Orleans back in 2005. Denizens of Washington were completely indifferent
to their plight.[43]
Even better: within a week of Biden announcing another $8 billion for
Ukraine’s war,[44] accurate reporting on Department of Homeland Security
chief Alejandro Mayorkas’s statement that “FEMA does not have the funds
to make it through the [hurricane] season”[45] was deemed wild online
“disinformation” in the major media.[46] Candidate Trump said FEMA was
giving people $750. Many prominent publications then misquoted him,
adding the word “only,” which he did not say, and called him a liar for it.
[47] All criticism of the administration’s disaster response then became evil,
Twitter-fueled “conspiracy theory” and “misinformation.”[48] Democrats
demanded social media companies employ another vast round of censorship
of the American people[49] since reality was making them look so bad.[50]
There is also the should-be absolutely shocking fact that on his way
out, in the autumn of 2024, the president of the United States of America
announced a new plan saying they hoped to replace all lead drinking water
pipes by 2035.[51] Our government has spent more than $17 trillion[52] on
militarism since the end of the first Cold War, much more if one were to
include the cost of nuclear weapons production and storage, the civilian
intelligence agencies’ black budgets[53] or Veterans Administration
healthcare and pension costs.[54] They have not won a fight since Bush
Sr.’s surprise attack on Panama in 1989.[55] President Biden voted for,
cheered for and led the way on this all along—while Americans are still
drinking government water out of poisonous pipes.[56]
As columnist and author Garet Garrett wrote generations ago, “A . . .
mark by which you may unmistakably distinguish Empire is: ‘Domestic
policy becomes subordinate to foreign policy.’”[57] The people of the
country must always defer to the grand strategies of global planners we
would not trust to run our home counties. In the name of self-government
and free markets, Washington has built a world empire, one that has helped
to undermine self-government and free markets here at home, while helping
to destroy other nations entirely. They have made a mockery of the
principles of the Declaration of Independence and helped to discredit them
in the eyes of billions, and right at a time when, if our leaders had the vision
to match their power, much of the world was listening and ready to follow
our lead.
By launching aggressive wars, torturing, murdering and holding people
in prison indefinitely without trial, as well as spying on Americans and
framing the innocent on terrorism or treason charges—including a
frontrunner for president—they have also subverted the principle that our
government is supposed to be bound by the same laws it enforces.
U.S. government employees are great at forgetting all the terrible
things they have done. In this case it makes sense to take advantage of that
fact and urge the new administration to allow Ukraine to negotiate peace
and quickly seek to normalize relations with Russia, with an emphasis on
persuading Putin to rejoin New START and to jointly return to the INF,
Open Skies, Test Ban and ABM treaties as soon as possible. Our
government’s reckless, confrontational posture against Russia must end.
Conservatives and Constitutionalists have long argued against
American participation in NATO. The decision of the previous generation
to embrace the expansion, rather than a retrenchment of American forces,
has led to nothing but trouble. But Europe’s economy is equal to that of the
United States;[58] they can build up their armies or negotiate agreements as
they see fit to defend their own countries. If they had kicked the U.S. out
and created their own EU army, it is highly doubtful they would have taken
the aggressive posture toward Russia that the last six American presidents
have. The current refugee crisis from the wars they helped the U.S. fight in
Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen would also be much less likely, as
would the catastrophe on their eastern frontier in Ukraine. NATO may be a
security “umbrella,” as they call it, but it also causes distortions in defense
priorities and lays possible tripwires for war far outside of any legitimate
interpretation of America’s national interests. And so what if Germany and
Russia get closer? It is not the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. What are they
going to do, destroy the EU and prevent America from trading with Poland
or the Baltics? Of course not.
The War Party smears people who think the U.S. government’s job is
to protect the lives and liberty of Americans as dreaded isolationists, but as
the great Ron Paul[59] pointed out, “The real isolationists are those who
impose sanctions and embargoes on countries and peoples across the globe
because they disagree with the internal and foreign policies of their leaders.
The real isolationists are those who choose to use force overseas to promote
democracy, rather than seek change through diplomacy, engagement and by
setting a positive example.”[60]
Virtually no faction anywhere in America truly favors actual
isolationism and autarky as a foreign and economic policy. Of course we
can have relationships of every kind with the rest of the world without
constantly extending war guarantees and intervening where we have no
business. The founders called it “independence.”[61]
Defend America First means exactly that. Let us now finally abandon
our empire to save our country. Let us ignore the interventionists and truly
embrace the concept so well-articulated by Thomas Jefferson more than 200
years ago as one of the “essential principles” of the United States
government: “peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations,
entangling alliances with none.”[62] It was George Washington who
warned us against “passionate attachments” to, and “entangling alliances”
with even England and France. “It is our true policy to steer clear of
permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world,” he advised in
his farewell address.[63] It is long past time for the American public to
insist that our government follow this advice and stay within the proper
bounds of the limited republic they helped to create, so that we can truly
live in peace and prosperity together and with the rest of mankind.

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Appendix: Maps

Europe (CC BY-SA-3.0)

Eastern Europe (CC BY-SA-3.0)
NATO members (CC BY-SA-3.0)
The Balkans/Former Yugoslavia (CC BY-SA-3.0)
The Caucasus (Andrew Zehnder)

Ukraine (CC BY-SA-3.0)

OceanofPDF.com
 About the Author
Scott Horton is director of the Libertarian Institute, editorial director of
Antiwar.com, host of Antiwar Radio on Pacifica, 90.7 FM KPFK in Los
Angeles, California and podcasts the Scott Horton Show from
ScottHorton.org. He is the author of Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in
Afghanistan (2017), Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism
(2021), and editor of The Great Ron Paul: The Scott Horton Show
Interviews 2004–2019 (2019) and Hotter Than the Sun: Time to Abolish
Nuclear Weapons (2022). He has conducted more than 6,000 interviews
since 2003. Scott lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife, Larisa Alexandrovna
Horton.

Scott’s articles have appeared at Antiwar.com, The American Conservative

magazine, the Orange County Register, The Future of Freedom, The
National Interest and the Christian Science Monitor. He was featured in the
2019 documentary An Endless War: Getting Out of Afghanistan and
contributed a chapter to the 2019 book The Impact of War.

To listen to Antiwar Radio, tune in to KPFK 90.7 FM, Pacifica, in the Los
Angeles area at 2:30 pm Pacific Time on Thursdays, or visit kpfk.org. You
can also subscribe to the podcast feed for the radio show on
ScottHorton.org, on iTunes at apple.co/2u66y3E, or listen on Spotify at
open.spotify.com/show/5L5rQLP5sIQJ2Z1s0Xcb29 or you can hear it on
Stitcher at stitcher.com/podcast/the-scott-horton-show.
OceanofPDF.com
 Acknowledgments
Thanks to Eric Garris, Gareth Porter, Grant F. Smith, Anne Frost, Mike
Dworski, Andrew Zehnder, Jim Bovard, Tom Woods, Robert P. Murphy,
Adam McDonald, Ed Huff, Connor Freeman, Connor O’Keefe, Harley
Abbott, Rick Banks, Noah Pugsley, Matthew Hampton, Robert Blumen,
Aaron Vaughn, Tim Frey, Mike Swanson, Michael Heise, Rick McGinnis,
Steve Woskow, Zooey Greif, Jeremy Diehl, Monty Ellis, Clint Russell,
Adam and Jennifer Haman, Rebecca Berthold, Shauna Lynch, Mike
Marion, August Wagele, Dan McKnight, Diego Rivera, Justin Zelinsky,
Fergus MacDonald, Eric Keisler, Elissa Kao, Bowman and Jamie
McMahon (RIP), Dom Yarnell, Evan Lyle, Derek Smith, Carl Liggio, Greg
Lilley, Andrew Cleveland, Johnny Peters, Jacob Pfister, Wayne Harley,
Thomas Seltz, my wife Larisa Alexandrovna Horton, and all my great
guests, listeners, advertisers, volunteers and supporters of my show and the
Institute over the years.

Special thanks to Will Porter, Ben Parker, Hunter DeRensis, Jared Wall,
Nebojsa Malic, Kym Robinson and John Weeks for their invaluable
research and editing assistance.

Special thanks of course also to the staff of the Libertarian Institute:

Sheldon Richman, Kyle Anzalone, Keith Knight, Jim Bovard, Laurie
Calhoun, Ted Galen Carpenter, Tom Woods, Hunter DeRensis, Connor
Freeman, Will Porter, Tommy Salmons, Patrick Macfarlane, William Van
Wagenen, Ted Snider, Richard Booth, Kym Robinson, Bill Buppert, Jeremy
R. Hammond, Dan Sanchez, John Weeks, Tom Eddlem, Joe Solis-Mullen,
C.J. Killmer, Harley Abbot, Steve Woskow, Rachael Nelson and Daniel
Gill.

And Antiwar.com: Eric Garris, Malcolm Garris, Justin Raimondo (RIP),

Jason Ditz, Dave DeCamp, Angela Keaton, Tom Knapp, Margaret Griffis,
Michael Austin, Alexia Gilmore, Colin Hunter, Brandon J. Snider and Juliet
Annerino.

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 Nuclear War
To get a free e-book of Provoked’s excised chapter, “Nuclear War,” just sign
up for the email list at ScottHorton.org or LibertarianInstitute.org.

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 The Scott Horton Show and The
Libertarian Institute
Listen to Antiwar Radio every Thursday afternoon on 90.7 FM KPFK in
Los Angeles, sign up for Scott’s daily email and the Scott Horton Show
podcast feed, and check out the full interview archive, more than 6,000 of
them going back to 2003, at ScottHorton.org. To interview Scott, email
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Also, check out The Libertarian Institute at LibertarianInstitute.org. It’s

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Check out all of our other great Libertarian Institute books at
LibertarianInstitute.org/books and keep a look out for more in 2025:

Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan by Scott Horton

Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism by Scott Horton
The Great Ron Paul: The Scott Horton Show Interviews 2004–2019 by
Scott Horton
Hotter than the Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons by Scott Horton
No Quarter: The Ravings of William Norman Grigg edited by Tom
Eddlem
Coming to Palestine by Sheldon Richman
What Social Animals Owe to Each Other by Sheldon Richman
The Voluntaryist Handbook by Keith Knight
Domestic Imperialism: Nine Reasons I Left Progressivism by Keith
Knight
Questioning The COVID Company Line: Critical Thinking in Hysterical
Times by Laurie Calhoun
The Fake China Threat and Its Very Real Danger by Joseph Solis-
Mullen
Diary of a Psychosis: How Public Health Disgraced Itself During
COVID Mania by Tom Woods
Last Rights: The Death of American Liberty by James Bovard
Israel, Winner of the 2003 Iraq Oil War: Undue Influence, Deceptions,
and the Neocon Energy Agenda by Gary Vogler
Origins of the Dirty War on Syria Revisited: How US Planners Launched
an al-Qaeda Led Regime Change War Masked as Popular Protest
and Revolution by William Van Wagenen

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 Selected praise for Scott Horton’s previous book
Fool’s Errand

“Scott Horton’s Fool’s Errand is a deeply insightful and well-

informed book on America’s longest war, explaining why it
remains as unwinnable as it ever was.”
—Patrick Cockburn, correspondent for the Independent, auth
The Age of Jihad: Islamic State and the Great War for the Middle

“Scott Horton’s Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in

Afghanistan is a definitive, authoritative and exceptionally well-
resourced accounting of America’s disastrous war in Afghanistan
since 2001.”
—Capt. Matthew Hoh, USMC (ret.), former s
State Department official, Zabul Province, Afghan

“Scott Horton’s Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in

Afghanistan is a brilliant achievement and a great read. I
recommended it to the faculty at the Army Command and
General Staff College to be part of the course work. It’s that
important.”
—Col. Douglas Macgregor, U.S. Army (ret.), auth
Warrior’s Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73 Ea

Learn more at FoolsErrand.us.

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 Selected praise for Scott Horton’s previous book
Enough Already

“If you only read one book this year on America’s unending
‘War on Terror,’ it should be this persuasive and devastatingly
damning account of how the United States created the original al
Qaeda terrorism threat by its own actions and then increased that
threat by orders of magnitude.”
—Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, auth
The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Pla

“Nothing has fueled the abuse of government power in the last

20 years like the ‘War on Terrorism.’ Scott Horton’s essential
new book, Enough Already, is the key to understanding why it’s
not too late to end the wars and save our country.”
—Ron Paul, M.D., former congressman, auth
Swords into Plowshares: A Life in Wa
and a Future of Peace and Prosp

“Scott Horton is one of the best informed and hardest hitting

critics of the War on Terror. His new book is a gold mine for
anyone seeking to learn about the frauds and failures of U.S.
foreign policy.”
—Jim Bovard, columnist at the New York Post, auth
Last Rights: The Death of American Li

Learn more at EnoughAlreadyBook.net.

OceanofPDF.com
Endnotes
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 Chapter 1: George H.W. Bush

[1] This book contains more than 6,600 footnotes and 7,800 citations. For
active hyperlinks, please see the Kindle or EPUB versions, or the PDF file
of the notes at scotthorton.org/provoked. For the audio version, subscribe to
the podcast at scotthortonshow.substack.com. To get the complete excised
chapter, “Nuclear War,” free, just sign up for the Institute or Scott Horton
Show email list at libertarianinstitute.org/newsletter or
scotthorton.org/subscribe.

[2] James E. Goodby, “The Odd Couple and the End of an Era,” The
Foreign Service Journal, December 2021, https://afsa.org/odd-couple-and-
end-era.

[3] Lesley Kennedy, “How Gorbachev and Reagan’s Friendship Helped

Thaw the Cold War,” History.com, October 24, 2019,
https://history.com/news/gorbachev-reagan-cold-war; Jimmy Orr, “Reagan
and Gorbachev agreed to fight UFOs,” Christian Science Monitor, April 24,
2009, https://csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/The-Vote/2009/0424/reagan-and-
gorbachev-agreed-to-fight-ufos.

[4] “US-Soviet Relations, 1981–1991,” Milestones in the History of US

Foreign Relations US State Department Office of the Historian, accessed
March 23, 2022, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1981-1988/u.s.-soviet-
relations; Mikhail Gorbachev, “Speech to 43rd UN General Assembly,” AP,
December 7, 1988,
https://apnews.com/article/1abea48aacda1a9dd520c380a8bc6be6.

[5] Imre Karacs, “Hungary Allows Thousands Of East Germans To Flee To

West,” Washington Post, September 11, 1989,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/09/11/hungary-allows-
thousands-of-east-germans-to-flee-to-west/cb43fd73-f65f-4100-8ba9-
a80f84a6ace1.

[6] Claude Adams, “Berlin Wall Falls,” CBC News, November 9, 1989,
https://cbc.ca/archives/berlin-wall-fall-1989-cbc-archives-1.5334293.

[7] Boris Egorov, “How the USSR pulled its troops from Eastern Europe,”
Russia Beyond, April 20, 2020, https://rbth.com/history/332046-how-ussr-
pulled-its-troops; For a fascinating and comprehensive account of the
unraveling of the Soviet Union from 1988–1991, see Jonathan Steele,
Eternal Russia: Yeltsin, Gorbachev and the Mirage of Democracy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

[8] B.J. Rowlett, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Neoconservatism: The Intellectual

Evolution of a Liberal (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas, 2014),
https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/2114; Justin Vaïsse, Neoconservatism:
The Biography of a Movement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2010), 49, 184–85; Jacob Heilbrunn, They Knew They Were Right: The Rise
of the Neocons (Toronto: Anchor Books, 2008), 31, 114, 158; Jeane
Kirkpatrick, “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” Commentary, November
1979, https://commentary.org/articles/jeane-kirkpatrick/dictatorships-
double-standards.

[9] Jeane Kirkpatrick, “A Normal Country in a Normal Time,” The National

Interest, Fall 1990, https://archive.is/jOrRd.

[10] William F. Buckley, “The Party and the Deep Blue Sea,”
Commonweal, January 25, 1952, https://archive.is/1hwV9; Many American
liberal, conservative and libertarian scholars and politicians also believed
America’s role in the first Cold War unnecessary and unwise, but our story
begins where that one ends. See Garet Garrett, The People’s Pottage
(Caldwell: Caxton Printers, 1952), 117–74, and Murray N. Rothbard, For a
New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises
Institute, 1978), 343–46, 353–61, 365–69.

[11] John M. Broder, “Battles Erupt Over How to Spend the Peace
Dividend,” Los Angeles Times, December 9, 1991,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-12-09-mn-141-story.html.

[12] Jim Lobe, “American Neoconservatives: a History and Overview,”

National Press Club, July 25, 2016, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=Tioed5gpY_c; Vaïsse, 145–47, 274; Heilbrunn, 150, 272.

[13] Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs,

January 1, 1990, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/1990-01-01/unipolar-
moment.
[14] Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “Toward A Neo-Reaganite Foreign
Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/1996-07-01/toward-neo-reaganite-
foreign-policy.

[15] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and

Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997),
https://cia.gov/library/abbottabad-
compound/36/36669B7894E857AC4F3445EA646BFFE1_Zbigniew_Brzez
inski_-_The_Grand_ChessBoard.doc.pdf; John Steinbrunner, “Problems of
Predominance: Implications of the US military advantage,” Brookings
Institution, September 1, 1996, https://brookings.edu/articles/problems-of-
predominance-implications-of-the-u-s-military-advantage.

[16] Michèle Flournoy, et al., “Report of the Quadrennial Defense Review,”

Office of the Secretary of Defense, May 1997,
https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/quadrennial/QDR1997.pd
f.

[17] Russell Kirk, “Political Errors at the End of the 20th Century,”
Heritage Foundation, February 27, 1991, https://heritage.org/political-
process/report/political-errors-the-end-the-20th-century.

[18] Robert Shogan, “Buchanan Starts ‘America First’ Bid for President,”
Los Angeles Times, December 11, 1991, https://latimes.com/archives/la-
xpm-1991-12-11-mn-149-story.html.
[19] Charles Krauthammer, “Universal Dominion: Toward a Unipolar
World,” The National Interest, Winter 1989/90,
https://jstor.org/stable/i40110730.

[20] Charles Krauthammer, “Bless Our Pax Americana,” Washington Post,

March 22, 1991,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/03/22/bless-our-pax-
americana/9986eb79-4f4b-4f0a-847d-f36db98fb755.

[21] Staff, “What Is the Liberal World Order?” Council on Foreign

Relations, October 26, 2020, https://education.cfr.org/learn/video/what-
liberal-world-order.

[22] Scott Horton, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism
(Austin: Libertarian Institute, 2021), https://amazon.com/dp/1733647341.

[23] Edward Lozansky, “How to Turn a Friend into an Enemy: a Brief

History of US-Russia Relations,” Kontinent USA, September 25, 2022,
https://newkontinent.org/how-to-turn-a-friend-into-an-enemy-a-brief-
history-of-us-russia-relations.

[24] Richard Sakwa, “Russia’s 1989 plea for a new world order was
rejected, and so Putinism was born,” Guardian, March 31, 2017,
https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/31/putinism-russia-1989-
world-order-rejected.

[25] Ron Paul, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce and Honest
Friendship (Lake Jackson: Foundation for a Rational Economic Education,
2007); Ron Paul archive, Antiwar.com, https://antiwar.com/paul; The
author’s position as well.

[26] Paul Wolfowitz, et al., “Defense Planning Guidance 1994–1999,”

Office of the Secretary of Defense, February 29, 1992,
https://archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-doc18.pdf.

[27] James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet
(New York: Penguin, 2004), 211.

[28] Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, et al., “Defense Strategy for the
1990s: The Regional Defense Strategy,” Office of the Secretary of Defense,
January 1993, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb245/doc15.pdf.

[29] James Mann, “The True Rationale? It’s a Decade Old,” Washington
Post, March 6, 2004,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/03/07/the-true-rationale-
its-a-decade-old/81f7247b-bc7b-4750-94c6-e9896dabdaa5; Mann, 208–15.

[30] Mann, 214.

[31] Paul Wolfowitz, “Remembering the Future,” The National Interest,

March 1, 2000, https://nationalinterest.org/article/remembering-the-future-
855.

[32] Patrick E. Tyler, “US Strategy Plan Calls For Insuring No Rivals
Develop,” New York Times, March 8, 1992,
https://nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-
no-rivals-develop.html; Staff, “Excerpts From Pentagon’s Plan: ‘Prevent the
Re-Emergence of a New Rival,’” New York Times, March 8, 1992,
https://nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/excerpts-from-pentagon-s-plan-
prevent-the-re-emergence-of-a-new-rival.html.

[33] Barton Gellman, “Keeping the US First,” Washington Post, March 10,
1992, https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/03/11/keeping-the-
us-first/31a774aa-fcd9-45be-8526-ceafc933b938.

[34] Paul Wolfowitz, et al., “Defense Planning Guidance 1994–1999,

Second Draft,” Office of the Secretary of Defense, April 16, 1992,
https://archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2008-003-docs1-12.pdf.

[35] William Burr, “Prevent the Reemergence of a New Rival,” George

Washington University National Security Archive, February 26, 2008,
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb245/index.htm.

[36] Thomas Donnelly, et al., “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy,

Forces and Resources For a New Century,” Project for a New American
Century, September 2000, https://scotthorton.org/pnac/rebuilding-americas-
defenses.

[37] Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “Toward A Neo-Reaganite Foreign

Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/1996-07-01/toward-neo-reaganite-
foreign-policy.
[38] Brzezinski, 198–99, 215. Author Jacob Heilbrunn reported that
Brzezinski and the neoconservatives “hated” and “despised” each other
since the former supported a two-state solution for Palestine (Heilbrunn,
150). And they probably did not like it when he said Obama should shoot
down Israeli jets if they tried to attack Iran (Eric Fingerhut, “Brzezinski: It
could be a ‘Liberty in reverse,’” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, September 21,
2009, https://jta.org/2009/09/21/culture/brzezinski-it-could-be-a-liberty-in-
reverse). But they did sometimes work together, as will be shown below.

[39] Francis Fukuyama, et al., “Letter to President George W. Bush,”

Project for a New American Century, September 20, 2001,
https://scotthorton.org/pnac/letter-to-president-bush-on-the-war-on-
terrorism.

[40] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, No.
16 (Summer 1989), http://jstor.org/stable/24027184; Francis Fukuyama,
The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

[41] Lt. Col. S.B. Eremenko, “On the issue of the losses of the opposing
parties on the Soviet-German front in the years of the Great Patriotic War:
the truth and fiction,” Russian Ministry of Defense, October 21, 2018,
https://archive.is/EIjzb.

[42] “NATO’s Future Political Track of the Strategy Review: Questions to

Ask Ourselves,” US State Department, October 22, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16140-document-26-u-s-department-
state-european.
[43] Harry McGee, “State papers: Thatcher opposed German reunification
after collapse of Berlin Wall,” Irish Times, December 28, 2019,
https://irishtimes.com/news/politics/state-papers-thatcher-opposed-german-
reunification-after-collapse-of-berlin-wall-1.4119052.

[44] Doyle McManus, “Thatcher and Kohl Clash Over German

Reunification,” Los Angeles Times, December 5, 1989,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-12-05-mn-192-story.html; John
Kornblum, “How George H.W. Bush made modern Europe,” Politico
Europe, December 1, 2018, https://politico.eu/article/george-hw-bush-
made-modern-europe-cold-war.

[45] Jonathan Masters, “Why NATO Has Become a Flash Point With
Russia in Ukraine,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 20, 2022,
https://cfr.org/backgrounder/why-nato-has-become-flash-point-russia-
ukraine; James Goldgeier, “Promises Made, Promises Broken? What Yeltsin
Was Told About NATO in 1993 and Why It Matters,” War on the Rocks,
July 12, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/07/promises-made-
promises-broken-what-yeltsin-was-told-about-nato-in-1993-and-why-it-
matters.

[46] Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “NATO Expansion: What

Gorbachev Heard,” National Security Archive, December 12, 2017,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-
expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early; Svetlana
Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “NATO Expansion: What Yeltsin Heard,”
National Security Archive, March 16, 2018,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2018-03-16/nato-
expansion-what-yeltsin-heard.

[47] Stephen Cohen, “The US ‘Betrayed’ Russia, but It Is Not ‘News That’s
Fit to Print,’” The Nation, January 10, 2018,
https://thenation.com/article/archive/the-us-betrayed-russia-but-it-is-not-
news-thats-fit-to-print.

[48] Peter Baker, “In Ukraine Conflict, Putin Relies on a Promise That
Ultimately Wasn’t,” New York Times, January 9, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/01/09/us/politics/russia-ukraine-james-
baker.html.

[49] Staff, “Russia’s top five myths about NATO,” NATO, February 2018,
https://nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2021/10/pdf/2110-russia-top5-
myths-en.pdf.

[50] William Burr and Leopoldo Nuti, “The Jupiter Missiles and the
Endgame of the Cuban Missile Crisis: A Matter of ‘Great Secrecy,’” Wilson
Center, February 16, 2023, https://wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/jupiter-
missiles-and-endgame-cuban-missile-crisis-matter-great-secrecy.

[51] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the

Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International
Security, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2016), 7–44,
https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00236.
[52] David Morris, “The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall,” Library of
Congress, November 1, 2019, https://blogs.loc.gov/international-
collections/2019/11/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-berlin-wall.

[53] Marc Trachtenberg, “The United States and the NATO Non-extension
Assurances of 1990: New Light on an Old Problem?” UCLA Political
Science Department, November 25, 2020,
https://web.archive.org/web/20210126134122/http://sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/
faculty/trachtenberg/cv/1990.pdf.

[54] Staff, “The Berlin Airlift, 1948–1949,” US State Department,

https://history.state.gov/milestones/1945-1952/berlin-airlift; Staff, “The
Berlin Crisis, 1958–1961,” US State Department,
https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-1960/berlin-crises.

[55] Jack F. Matlock Jr., “I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine
crisis,” Responsible Statecraft, February 15, 2022,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/02/15/the-origins-of-the-ukraine-
crisis-and-how-conflict-can-be-avoided.

[56] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the

Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International
Security, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2016), 7–44,
https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00236.

[57] George H.W. Bush, “Remarks at the Welcoming Ceremony for Prime
Minister Giulio Andreotti of Italy,” George Bush Presidential Library,
March 6, 1990, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/public-papers/1619.

[58] Jack F. Matlock Jr., “I was there: NATO and the origins of the Ukraine
crisis,” Responsible Statecraft, February 15, 2022,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/02/15/the-origins-of-the-ukraine-
crisis-and-how-conflict-can-be-avoided.

[59] Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “NATO Expansion: What

Gorbachev Heard,” National Security Archive, December 12, 2017,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-
expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early.

[60] Jim Anderson, “German reunification creates allied unease,” UPI,

February 2, 1990, https://upi.com/Archives/1990/02/02/German-
reunification-creates-allied-unease/7915633934800; “Baker, Genscher
Discuss Full Range of Issues,” February 2, 1990,
http://sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/19900205.pdf.

[61] “Baker, Genscher Discuss Full Range of Issues,” February 2, 1990,

http://sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/19900205.pdf.

[62] “Baker/Genscher Meeting February 2,” State Department document

NOD814, US State Department, February 9, 1990,
https://sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/19900203seitz.pdf.

[63] Uwe Klußmann, et al., “Did the West Break Its Promise to Moscow?”
Der Spiegel, November 26, 2009,
https://spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-
west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html.

[64] “Mr. Hurd to Sir C. Mallaby (Bonn) Telegraphic N. 85: Secretary of

State’s Call on Herr Genscher: German Unification,” February 6, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16113-document-02-mr-hurd-sir-c-
mallaby-bonn.

[65] Mary Elise Sarotte, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of
the Post-Cold War Stalemate (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021),
51.

[66] Mary Elise Sarotte, “Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl,
Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO
Enlargement,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 34, No. 1 (January 2010), 119–40,
https://jstor.org/stable/24916036.

[67] George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed: The

Collapse of the Soviet Empire, The Unification of Germany, Tiananmen
Square, The Gulf War (New York: Knopf, 1998), 239.

[68] “Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James

Baker in Moscow,” US State Department, February 9, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16116-document-05-memorandum-
conversation-between; Blake Fleetwood, “‘Not One Inch Eastward:’ How
the War in Ukraine Could Have Been Prevented Decades Ago,” ScheerPost,
February 24, 2022, https://scheerpost.com/2022/02/24/not-one-inch-
eastward-how-the-war-in-ukraine-could-have-been-prevented-decades-ago.

[69] Mary Elise Sarotte, “Enlarging NATO, Expanding Confusion,” New

York Times, November 29, 2009,
https://nytimes.com/2009/11/30/opinion/30sarotte.html.

[70] Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “NATO Expansion: What

Gorbachev Heard,” National Security Archive, December 12, 2017,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-
expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early; Robert M. Gates,
From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and
How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 490.

[71] “Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James

Baker in Moscow,” US State Department, February 9, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16116-document-05-memorandum-
conversation-between.

[72] Press Release, “Press Conference of James Baker III Following US-
USSR Ministerial Meetings, Moscow, USSR, February 9, 1990,” US State
Department, PR No. 14, February 16, 1990, Folder 20, Box 161, Baker
Papers, SMML, cited in Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal?”

[73] Marc Trachtenberg, “The United States and the NATO Non-extension
Assurances of 1990: New Light on an Old Problem?” UCLA Political
Science Department, November 25, 2020,
https://web.archive.org/web/20210126134122/http://sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/
faculty/trachtenberg/cv/1990.pdf.

[74] “Letter from James Baker to Helmut Kohl,” February 10, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16119-document-08-letter-james-
baker-helmut-kohl.

[75] Peter Baker, “In Ukraine Conflict, Putin Relies on a Promise That
Ultimately Wasn’t,” New York Times, January 9, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/01/09/us/politics/russia-ukraine-james-
baker.html.

[76] Mary Elise Sarotte, “Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl,
Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO
Enlargement,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 34, No. 1 (January 2010), 119–40,
https://jstor.org/stable/24916036.

[77] “Memorandum of conversation between Robert Gates and Vladimir

Kryuchkov in Moscow,” George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, February
9, 2023, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16118-document-07-
memorandum-conversation-between.

[78] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the

Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International
Security, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2016), 7–44,
https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00236.
[79] Peter Baker, “In Ukraine Conflict, Putin Relies on a Promise That
Ultimately Wasn’t,” New York Times, January 9, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/01/09/us/politics/russia-ukraine-james-
baker.html.

[80] Rodric Braithwaite, “NATO enlargement: Assurances and

misunderstandings,” European Council on Foreign Relations, July 7, 2016,
https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_nato_enlargement_assurances_and_misu
nderstandings; “Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev
and Helmut Kohl,” February 10, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16120-document-09-memorandum-
conversation-between.

[81] Sarotte, 58.

[82] Mary Elise Sarotte, “Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl,
Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO
Enlargement,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 34, No. 1 (January 2010), 119–40,
https://jstor.org/stable/24916036.

[83] Secretary of State, “Briefing on US-Soviet Ministerial,” US State

Department, February 13, 1990, https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/briefing-on-
us-soviet-ministerial.

[84] Bush and Scowcroft, 240.

[85] “Teimuraz Stepanov-Mamaladze notes from Conference on Open

Skies, Ottawa, Canada,” Hoover Institution Archive, Stepanov-Mamaladze
Collection, February 12, 1990, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16121-
document-10-01-teimuraz-stepanov-mamaladze-notes.

[86] “Two Plus Four Statement Made during the Open Skies Conference,
Ottawa, 14 February 1990,” in Adam Daniel Rotfeld and Walther Stützle
(eds.), Germany and Europe in Transition (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), 168.

[87] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the

Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International
Security, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2016), 7–44,
https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00236.

[88] “Archive Find Confirms Russian View of NATO’s Eastward

Expansion,” Welt, February 18, 2022, https://www-welt-
de.translate.goog/politik/ausland/article236986765/Nato-Osterweiterung-
Archivfund-bestaetigt-Sicht-der-Russen.html.

[89] Klaus Wiegrefe, “New find of files from 1991 supports Russian
accusation,” Der Spiegel, February 18, 2022,
https://spiegel.de/ausland/nato-osterweiterung-aktenfund-stuetzt-russische-
version-a-1613d467-bd72-4f02-8e16-2cd6d3285295.

[90] Uwe Klußmann, et al., “Did the West Break Its Promise to Moscow?”
Der Spiegel, November 26, 2009,
https://spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-
west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html.
[91] Sarotte, 69.

[92] Bush and Scowcroft, 253.

[93] Mary Elise Sarotte, “A Broken Promise?” Foreign Affairs,

September/October 2014, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-
fsu/2014-08-11/broken-promise.

[94] Mary Elise Sarotte, “Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl,
Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment toward NATO
Enlargement,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 34, No. 1 (January 2010), 119–40,
https://jstor.org/stable/24916036.

[95] Robert W. Merry, “How Bill Clinton Made America More Ambitious –
and Dangerous,” The National Interest, August 17, 2016,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-bill-clinton-made-america-more-
ambitious%E2%80%94-dangerous-17387.

[96] “Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany,” September

12, 1990, https://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/2plusfour8994e.htm.

[97] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the

Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International
Security, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2016), 7–44,
https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00236.

[98] See Chapter Two.

[99] For a thorough debunking of the various arguments various politicians,
appointees and scholars have put forward in their attempts to refute these
facts, see Marc Trachtenberg, “The United States and the NATO Non-
extension Assurances of 1990: New Light on an Old Problem?” UCLA
Political Science Department, November 25, 2020,
https://web.archive.org/web/20210126134122/http://sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/
faculty/trachtenberg/cv/1990.pdf.

[100] Ted Snider, “Was ‘No NATO Expansion East’ More Than a
Promise?” Libertarian Institute, July 17, 2023,
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/was-no-nato-expansion-east-more-
than-a-promise.

[101] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the

Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International
Security, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2016), 7–44,
https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00236.

[102] Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “NATO Expansion: What

Gorbachev Heard,” National Security Archive, December 12, 2017,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-
expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early.

[103] Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “NATO Expansion: What

Gorbachev Heard,” National Security Archive, December 12, 2017,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-
expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early; Dave Majumdar,
“Newly Declassified Documents: Gorbachev Told NATO Wouldn’t Move
Past East German Border,” The National Interest, December 12, 2017,
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/newly-declassified-documents-
gorbachev-told-nato-wouldnt-23629.

[104] “Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite diary,” National Security Archive,

March 5, 1991, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16142-document-28-
ambassador-rodric-braithwaite-diary.

[105] “History of the EU: Timeline,” European Union, https://european-

union.europa.eu/principles-countries-history/history-eu_en.

[106] Rodric Braithwaite, “NATO enlargement: Assurances and

misunderstandings,” European Council on Foreign Relations, July 7, 2016,
https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_nato_enlargement_assurances_and_misu
nderstandings.

[107] Rodric Braithwaite, “NATO enlargement: Assurances and

misunderstandings,” European Council on Foreign Relations, July 7, 2016,
https://ecfr.eu/article/commentary_nato_enlargement_assurances_and_misu
nderstandings.

[108] Sir R. Braithwaite, “Telegraphic N. 667: ‘Secretary of State’s Meeting

with President Gorbachev,’” UK Foreign Ministry, April 11, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16129-document-15-sir-r-braithwaite-
moscow-telegraphic.
[109] Secretary-General Manfred Wörner, “The Atlantic Alliance and
European Security in the 1990s,” Address to the Bremer Tabaks Collegium,
May 17, 1990, https://nato.int/docu/speech/1990/s900517a_e.htm.

[110] Richard Sakwa, “The March of Folly Resumed,” Public Reading

Rooms, March 10, 2022, https://prruk.org/the-march-of-folly-resumed-
russia-ukraine-and-the-west.

[111] Evgeny Primakov, Vstrechi na Perekrestkakh (Meetings at the

Crossroads), Moscow 2015, 209–12; “Excerpt from Evgeny Primakov
Memoir on NATO Expansion,” https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16394-
document-22-excerpt-evgeny-primakov-memoir.

[112] “Memorandum of conversation between George Bush and Eduard

Shevardnadze in Washington,” George H.W. Bush Presidential Library,
Memcons and Telcons, April 6, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16128-document-14-memorandum-
conversation-between.

[113] James A. Baker III, “Memorandum for the President, ‘My meeting
with Shevardnadze,’” US State Department, May 4, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16131-document-17-james-baker-iii-
memorandum.

[114] “Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James

Baker in Moscow,” Gorbachev Foundation, May 18, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16132-document-18-record-
conversation-between.

[115] “Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James

Baker in Moscow,” Gorbachev Foundation, May 18, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16132-document-18-record-
conversation-between.

[116] “Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James

Baker in Moscow,” Gorbachev Foundation, May 18, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16132-document-18-record-
conversation-between.

[117] Frank T. Csongos, “Baker sees trans-Atlantic community with former

Soviet bloc,” UPI, June 18, 1991,
https://upi.com/Archives/1991/06/18/Baker-sees-trans-Atlantic-community-
with-former-Soviet-bloc/7164677217600.

[118] Bush and Scowcroft, 300–01.

[119] “Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James

Baker in Moscow,” Gorbachev Foundation, May 18, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16132-document-18-record-
conversation-between.

[120] Bush and Scowcroft, 274.

[121] “Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and George
Bush. White House, Washington D.C.,” Gorbachev Foundation, May 31,
1990, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16135-document-21-record-
conversation-between.

[122] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the

Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International
Security, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2016), 7–44,
https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00236.

[123] “Letter from Mr. Powell (N. 10) to Mr. Wall: Thatcher-Gorbachev
memorandum of conversation,” June 8, 1990, Documents on British Policy
Overseas, series III, volume VII: German Unification, 1989–1990, edited
by Patrick Salmon, Keith Hamilton, and Stephen Twigge (Oxford and New
York: Routledge, 2010), 411–17,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16136-document-22-letter-mr-powell-
n-10-mr.

[124] “Memorandum of Telephone Conversation between Mikhail

Gorbachev and George Bush,” George H.W. Bush Presidential Library,
Memcons and Telcons, July 17, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16138-document-24-memorandum-
telephone-conversation.

[125] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the

Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International
Security, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2016), 7–44,
https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00236.

[126] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the

Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International
Security, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2016), 7–44,
https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00236.

[127] David Gompert to Reginald Bartholomew et al., “Agenda for the

Meeting of the European Strategy Steering Group on Monday, October 29,
3:00–5:00 PM,” October 26, 1990, folder, “File 148, NATO Strategy
Review #2 [3],” box CF01468, Zelikow Files, GBPL. Cited in Shifrinson.

[128] “Memorandum to Boris Yeltsin from Russian Supreme Soviet

delegation to NATO HQs,” State Archive of the Russian Federation
(GARF), Fond 10026, Opis 1, July 1, 1991,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16144-document-30-memorandum-
boris-yeltsin.

[129] William Tuohy and Norman Kempster, “Russia Hopes to Join

NATO,” Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1991,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-12-21-mn-604-story.html.

[130] Kimberly Marten, “Reconsidering NATO expansion: a counterfactual

analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s,” European Journal of
International Security, November 1, 2017,
https://cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/356448EA9D5C63C53BE1EC6B33FE470A/S20575637
17000165a.pdf.

[131] Sarotte, 133.

[132] Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the

Cold War and the US Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International
Security, Vol. 40, No. 4 (2016), 7–44,
https://doi.org/10.1162/ISEC_a_00236.

[133] Staff, “The Warsaw Treaty Organization, 1955,” US State

Department, May 9, 2017, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1953-
1960/warsaw-treaty.

[134] “Helsinki Final Act,” OSCE, August 1, 1975,

https://osce.org/files/f/documents/5/c/39501.pdf.

[135] James F. Dobbins, “Revised NATO Strategy Paper for Discussion at

Sub-Ungroup Meeting,” US State Department European Bureau, October
22, 1990, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16140-document-26-u-s-
department-state-european.

[136] Sarotte, 108.

[137] “Memorandum of conversation between Robert Gates and Vladimir

Kryuchkov in Moscow,” George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, February
9, 2023, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16118-document-07-
memorandum-conversation-between.
[138] Interview with author, Jack F. Matlock Jr., Scott Horton Show radio
archive, March 26, 2021, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/3-26-21-jack-
matlock-on-americas-unnecessarily-hostile-relationship-with-russia.

[139] “George Bush’s Remarks at the Supreme Soviet Building, Chicken

Kiev Speech,” August 1, 1991, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=hgEB1GB8qAM.

[140] William Safire, “Ukraine Marches Out,” New York Times, November
18, 1991, https://nytimes.com/1991/11/18/opinion/essay-ukraine-marches-
out.html.

[141] Adrian Monck and Mike Hanley, “The secrets of chicken Kiev,” New
Statesman, December 6, 2004,
https://newstatesman.com/uncategorized/2004/12/the-secrets-of-chicken-
kiev.

[142] Staff, “After the Summit; Excerpts From Bush’s Ukraine Speech:
Working ‘for the Good of Both of Us,’” New York Times, August 2, 1991,
https://nytimes.com/1991/08/02/world/after-summit-excerpts-bush-s-
ukraine-speech-working-for-good-both-us.html.

[143] Steele, 59–79; Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What
It Felt Like to Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,”
BBC, October 13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0.

[144] “Declaration of Independence of Ukraine,” Rada, August 24, 1991,

https://static.rada.gov.ua/site/postanova_eng/Rres_Declaration_Independen
ce_rev12.htm.

[145] Steele, 215.

[146] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like to
Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC, October
13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0.

[147] See Chapter Three.

[148] John-Thor Dahlburg and Tyler Marshall, “Independence for Baltic

States,” Los Angeles Times, September 7, 1991,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-09-07-mn-1530-story.html.

[149] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like to
Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC, October
13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0.

[150] Alexander Vatlin, Agents of Terror: Ordinary Men and Extraordinary

Violence in Stalin’s Secret Police (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2018); Stéphane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes,
Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1–456;
Lynne Viola, Stalinist Perpetrators on Trial: Scenes from the Great Terror
in Soviet Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Alexander
Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in
Literary Investigation (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973); Darryl Cooper, “The
Anti-Humans,” Martyr Made, May 30, 2021,
https://martyrmade.com/podcast-parts/19-the-anti-humans.
[151] “Mikhail Gorbachev’s Resignation and Dissolution of the Soviet
Union,” ABC Nightline, December 25, 1991, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=zlieWAng4w8.

[152] Frederick Kempe, “Brent Scowcroft on the Fall of the Berlin Wall,”
New Atlanticist, November 2, 2009, https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-
atlanticist/brent-scowcroft-on-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall.

[153] Sarotte, 124.

[154] Bush and Scowcroft, 556.

[155] Sarotte, 243.

[156] Bush and Scowcroft, 550–51.

[157] Jack F. Matlock Jr., “Is the Ukraine Crisis Just Another US Charade,”
Asia Times, February 15, 2022, https://asiatimes.com/2022/02/is-the-
ukraine-crisis-just-another-us-charade.

[158] Steele, 61.

[159] Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton, “US Policy to

Gorbachev: ‘We Support the Center and You Personally,’” National
Security Archive, December 21, 2021, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-
book/russia-programs/2021-12-21/end-soviet-union-1991.

[160] George H.W. Bush, “The other 9/11: George H.W. Bush’s 1990 New
World Order speech,” Dallas Morning News, September 8, 2017,
https://dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2017/09/08/the-other-9-11-
george-h-w-bush-s-1990-new-world-order-speech.

[161] Horton, Enough Already, 21–32.

[162] Andrew Glass, “Bush and Gorbachev sign nuclear arms pact, July 31,
1991,” Politico, July 31, 2018, https://politico.com/story/2018/07/31/bush-
and-gorbachev-sign-nuclear-arms-pact-july-31-1991-743837.

[163] Paul H. Nitze, “Start II: A Startling Success,” Washington Post,

February 9, 1996,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1996/02/09/start-ii-a-startling-
success/ac9ddb03-7968-4f8b-8f5d-57e7d86a996b; Strategic Arms
Reduction Treaty II (1993), Atomic Archive,
https://atomicarchive.com/resources/treaties/start-II.html.

[164] Daryl Kimball, “The Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE)

Treaty and the Adapted CFE Treaty at a Glance,” Arms Control
Association, August 2017, https://armscontrol.org/factsheet/cfe.

[165] Daryl Kimball and Kingston Reif, “US-Russian Nuclear Arms

Control Agreements at a Glance,” Arms Control Association, April 2020,
https://armscontrol.org/factsheets/USRussiaNuclearAgreements.

[166] Sarotte, 123–24.

[167] “The Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program,” Arms

Control Center, March 29, 2022, https://armscontrolcenter.org/wp-
content/uploads/2022/03/Nunn-Lugar-CTR.pdf.

[168] Presidents George H.W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin, “Treaty Between the
United States of America and the Russian Federation on Further Reduction
and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START II),” January 3, 1993,
https://2009-2017.state.gov/t/avc/trty/102887.htm.

[169] “CWC Timeline,” Chemical Weapons Convention Archive, July 21,

2013, https://cwc.fas.org/about-the-cwc/cwc-timeline.

[170] Stephen S. Rosenfeld, “NATO’s Last Chance,” Washington Post, July

2, 1993, https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1993/07/02/natos-
last-chance/22054ea7-5958-44b0-9e6a-212ee1da51de.

[171] William Tuohy, “NATO After the Cold War: It’s ‘Out of Area or Out
of Business,’” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1993,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-08-13-mn-23409-story.html.

[172] Dick Lugar, “NATO: Out of Area or Out of Business; A Call for US
Leadership to Revive and Redefine the Alliance,” Speech to the Overseas
Writers’ Club, The Richard G. Lugar Senatorial Papers, June 24, 1993,
https://collections.libraries.indiana.edu/lugar/items/show/342.

[173] James F. Dobbins, “Revised NATO Strategy Paper for Discussion at

Sub-Ungroup Meeting,” State Department European Bureau, October 22,
1990, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16140-document-26-u-s-
department-state-european.
[174] Marc Rogers, “NATO Seeks Significance in Post-War Climate,”
Jane’s Defense Weekly, May 16, 1992,
https://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/sites/dgibbs.faculty.arizona.edu/files/2022
02041318.pdf.

[175] William Tuohy, “NATO After the Cold War: It’s ‘Out of Area or Out
of Business,’” Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1993,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-08-13-mn-23409-story.html.

[176] “The North Atlantic Treaty,” NATO, April 4, 1949,

https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm.

[177] Senator Joe Biden, “Speech on NATO Enlargement to the Atlantic

Council,” C-SPAN, June 20, 1996, https://c-span.org/video/?c5073373/user-
clip-joe-biden-russias-response-nato-expansion-baltics.

[178] Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The Dismantling of

Yugoslavia (Part I),” Monthly Review, October 1, 2007,
https://monthlyreview.org/2007/10/01/the-dismantling-of-yugoslavia.

[179] David Gibbs, First Do No Harm: Humanitarian Intervention and the

Destruction of Yugoslavia (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2009),
13.

[180] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.
[181] Interview with author, David Gibbs, Scott Horton Show radio archive,
July 7, 2015, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/7715-david-gibbs.

[182] Stella Alexander, “The national and religious background of

Yugoslavia,” Religion in Communist Lands, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1982), 215–17,
https://doi.org/10.1080/09637498208431025.

[183] Nebojsa Malic, “Introduction: The Balkans Babylon,” Antiwar.com,

October 19, 2000, https://antiwar.com/malic/m101900.html.

[184] Ambassador James Bissett, “History of Western Interference in the

Balkans,” Balkan Future, 1999, https://deltax.net/bissett/history.pdf; Gibbs,
55–60, 69; George Szamuely, Bombs for Peace: NATO’s Humanitarian War
on Yugoslavia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 43–47.

[185] Gibbs, 117.

[186] Barney Petrovic and Ian Traynor, “Serbian communists buck poll
trends,” Guardian, December 11, 1990,
https://theguardian.com/world/1990/dec/11/warcrimes.iantraynor1.

[187] Szamuely, 50.

[188] Gibbs, 60–66; Szamuely, 64.

[189] Warren Zimmermann, Origins of a Catastrophe: Yugoslavia and Its

Destroyers – America’s Last Ambassador Tells What Happened and Why
(New York: Times Books, 1996), 94–99.
[190] Gibbs, 77–82, 102–04.

[191] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[192] Ambassador James Bissett, “History of Western Interference in the

Balkans,” Balkan Future, 1999, https://deltax.net/bissett/history.pdf.

[193] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[194] Warren Zimmermann, “The Last Ambassador – A Memoir of the

Collapse of Yugoslavia,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 1995,
https://foreignaffairs.com/europe/last-ambassador-memoir-collapse-
yugoslavia.

[195] Zimmermann, 62.

[196] David Halberstam, War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the
Generals (New York: Scribner, 2002), 29–30.

[197] Zimmermann, 93–95.

[198] Zimmermann, 96–97.

[199] Zimmermann, 73.

[200] Carol J. Williams, “Slovenia, Croatia Declare Freedom From

Yugoslavia,” Los Angeles Times, June 26, 1991,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-06-26-mn-1188-story.html.

[201] Warren Zimmermann, “The Last Ambassador – A Memoir of the

Collapse of Yugoslavia,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 1995,
https://foreignaffairs.com/europe/last-ambassador-memoir-collapse-
yugoslavia.

[202] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY; Ana S. Trbovich, et al., “A
Legal Geography of Yugoslavia’s Disintegration,” Fletcher Forum of World
Affairs, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2008), https://dl.tufts.edu/concern/pdfs/qb98mr49j.

[203] Zimmermann, 62, 71.

[204] William Drozdiak, “EC Envoys Agree on Recognition of Croatia,

Slovenia Next Month,” Washington Post, December 17, 1991,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/12/17/ec-envoys-agree-
on-recognition-of-croatia-slovenia-next-month/e01d4094-489e-448b-94a2-
f7920638445e; President George H.W. Bush, “Statement on United States
Recognition of the Former Yugoslav Republics,” White House, April 7,
1992, https://presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-united-states-
recognition-the-former-yugoslav-republics.

[205] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[206] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.
[207] David Hackworth’s Soldiers for the Truth website, as of late April
2005. https://web.archive.org/web/20050427080448/http://sftt.org.

[208] David H. Hackworth, “The Blockade is a Joke,” Newsweek, October

12, 1992, cited in David E. Mosca, “Bosnia-Herzegovina: The Continuing
Crisis,” Naval War College, May 17, 1993,
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA266738.pdf.

[209] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[210] Ambassador James Bissett, “History of Western Interference in the

Balkans,” Balkan Future, 1999, https://deltax.net/bissett/history.pdf.

[211] Peter Jennings, “Yugoslavia and the Ten-Day War,” CBS News, July
2, 1991, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ITEARp8Ww3M; “Slovenia Wins
Independence in 10-Day War,” Ljubljana Life, June 27, 2017, https://local-
life.com/ljubljana/articles/ten-day-war.

[212] Szamuely, 72–79.

[213] Zimmermann, 152.

[214] “Chronology for Serbs in Croatia,” Minorities at Risk Project, 2004,

https://refworld.org/docid/469f387dc.html.

[215] Srdja Trifkovic, “The Real Genocide in Yugoslavia: ‘Independent’

Croatia of 1941 Revisited,” Chronicles,
https://web.archive.org/web/20000816031842/https://chroniclesmagazine.or
g/NewsST042100.htm; Tomic Yves, “Massacres in Dismembered
Yugoslavia, 1941–1945,” Mass Violence and Resistance Research Network,
June 7, 2010, https://sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-
resistance/en/document/massacres-dismembered-yugoslavia-1941-
1945.html.

[216] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[217] Steve Coll, “Franjo Tudjman, at War with History,” Washington Post,
February 28, 1993,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1993/03/01/franjo-tudjman-at-
war-with-history/8e0ba15a-961b-473c-baca-61d8163f169e.

[218] David Plotz, “Croatian President Franjo Tudjman,” Slate, December

10, 1999, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1999/12/croatian-president-
franjo-tudjman.html.

[219] Zimmermann, 25, 61, 76–77.

[220] Zimmermann, 160.

[221] Chris Hedges, “Croatian’s Confession Describes Torture and Killing

on Vast Scale,” New York Times, September 5, 1997,
https://nytimes.com/1997/09/05/world/croatian-s-confession-describes-
torture-and-killing-on-vast-scale.html.

[222] Gibbs, 67.

[223] Staff, “Bloody Path to a ‘Greater Serbia,’” Independent, August 6,
1991, (Cited in Gibbs, 88); Stephen Engelberg, “Yugoslav Ethnic Hatreds
Raise Fears of a War Without an End,” New York Times, December 23,
1991, https://nytimes.com/1991/12/23/world/brutal-impasse-yugoslav-war-
special-report-yugoslav-ethnic-hatreds-raise-fears.html.

[224] Blaine Harden, “3-Month Ordeal End for Battered Vukovar,”

Washington Post, November 18, 1991,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/11/19/3-month-ordeal-
ends-for-battered-vukovar/709e0372-8e76-480a-b081-9ceefbca93da.

[225] “The Vance Plan,” Peace Agreements Database, December 1, 1991,

https://peaceagreements.org/view/1173.

[226] Zimmermann, 160.

[227] Szamuely, 102–11.

[228] Peter Radan, “Post-secession international borders: a critical analysis

of the opinions of the Badinter Arbitration Commission,” Melbourne
University Law Review, Vol. 24, No. 1 (2000), 50–76.

[229] Gibbs, 98.

[230] Rick Atkinson and Ann Devroy, “Bush: Iraq Won’t Decide Timing of
Ground War,” Washington Post, February 2, 1991,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/02/02/bush-iraq-wont-
decide-timing-of-ground-war/23c6b07b-7970-4568-8fbe-295562533549;
James Gerstenzang, “A Defiant but Upbeat Bush Goes on Road: President:
Hussein Will Learn That ‘What We Say Goes,’ The Chief Executive Tells
Cheering Crowds at Three Military Bases,” Los Angeles Times, February 2,
1991, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-02-02-mn-369-story.html.

[231] Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The Dismantling of

Yugoslavia (Part I),” Monthly Review, October 1, 2007,
https://monthlyreview.org/2007/10/01/the-dismantling-of-yugoslavia.

[232] Szamuely, 94–95.

[233] Zimmermann, 41–42.

[234] Zimmermann, 92–93.

[235] Zimmermann, 116, 135–36, 172.

[236] Zimmermann, 172–73, 177.

[237] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[238] Szamuely, 82–86.

[239] David Binder, “US Recognizes 3 Yugoslav Republics as

Independent,” New York Times, April 8, 1992,
https://nytimes.com/1992/04/08/world/us-recognizes-3-yugoslav-republics-
as-independent.html.
[240] Szamuely, 82–86.

[241] See below.

[242] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY; Charles G. Boyd, “Making
Peace with the Guilty,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 1995,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/1995-09-01/making-peace-guilty.

[243] Zimmermann, 196.

[244] Zimmermann, 116–17.

[245] Laura Silber, “Bosnians Hold Independence Referendum,”

Washington Post, February 29, 1992,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/03/01/bosnians-hold-
independence-referendum/9aade8bb-a390-4b3e-82ce-50dee3822ccc.

[246] Gibbs, 116–19.

[247] Zimmermann, 181–82.

[248] Gibbs, 119.

[249] Gibbs, 151.

[250] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,” Part 1, Chapter 12,
Section 3, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April 10, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140508142039/http://publications.niod.knaw
.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf.

[251] Gibbs, 152.

[252] Gibbs, 155.

[253] Zimmermann, 178.

[254] Zimmermann, 214.

[255] Zimmermann, 134.

[256] Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, “America and Bosnia,”

The National Interest, September 1, 1993,
https://nationalinterest.org/article/america-and-bosnia-849.

[257] Szamuely, 101, 112; Gibbs, 107–08.

[258] Zimmermann, 178.

[259] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[260] Ambassador James Bissett, “History of Western Interference in the

Balkans,” Balkan Future, 1999, https://deltax.net/bissett/history.pdf.

[261] “The Future of the Balkans: An Interview with David Owen,”

Foreign Affairs, March 1, 1993, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/1993-03-
01/interview-david-owen-balkans.
[262] “Statement of Principles for New Constitutional Arrangements for
Bosnia and Herzegovina (Carrington-Cutiliero [sic] Plan of March 1992),”
Peace Agreements Database, March 18, 1992,
https://peaceagreements.org/view/547; “Srebrenica Reconstruction,
background, consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,”
Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, April 10, 2002,
http://publications.niod.knaw.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf.

[263] Zimmermann, 173.

[264] “Bosniaks ‘Could Have Stopped Years of Bloodshed,’” Balkan

Transitional Justice, February 22, 2013,
https://balkaninsight.com/2013/02/22/karadzic-calls-former-peace-mediator.

[265] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[266] James Bissett, “Western Interference,” Balkan Future,

http://deltax.net/bissett/western/bosnia.htm.

[267] Damjan Krnjevic-Miskovic, “Obituary: Alija Izetbegovic, 1925–

2003,” The National Interest, October 22, 2003,
https://nationalinterest.org/article/obituary-alija-izetbegovic-1925-2003-
2458.

[268] Damjan Krnjevic-Miskovic, “Obituary: Alija Izetbegovic, 1925–

2003,” The National Interest, October 22, 2003,
https://nationalinterest.org/article/obituary-alija-izetbegovic-1925-2003-
2458.

[269] Zimmermann, 190.

[270] David Binder, “US Policymakers on Bosnia Admit Errors in

Opposing Partition in 1992,” New York Times, August 29, 1993,
https://nytimes.com/1993/08/29/world/us-policymakers-on-bosnia-admit-
errors-in-opposing-partition-in-1992.html.

[271] Paul Lewis, “Two Leaders Propose Dividing Bosnia Into Three
Areas,” New York Times, June 17, 1993,
https://nytimes.com/1993/06/17/world/2-leaders-propose-dividing-bosnia-
into-three-areas.html.

[272] Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, “America and Bosnia,”

The National Interest, September 1, 1993,
https://nationalinterest.org/article/america-and-bosnia-849.

[273] Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson, “America and Bosnia,”

The National Interest, September 1, 1993,
https://nationalinterest.org/article/america-and-bosnia-849.

[274] Szamuely, 116–17.

[275] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.
[276] David Binder, “Thoughts on United States policy toward Yugoslavia,”
South Slav Journal, 16, nos. 61–62, 1995, quoted in Gibbs, 107–08.

[277] Zimmermann, 191–92.

[278] Zimmermann, 192.

[279] Roger Cohen, “Balkan Moral Order Upset As Victim Becomes

Victor,” New York Times, November 6, 1994,
https://nytimes.com/1994/11/06/weekinreview/the-world-balkan-moral-
order-upset-as-victim-becomes-victor.html.

[280] Szamuely, 151–58; Gibbs, 120–22.

[281] David Binder, “US Policymakers on Bosnia Admit Errors in

Opposing Partition in 1992,” New York Times, August 29, 1993,
https://nytimes.com/1993/08/29/world/us-policymakers-on-bosnia-admit-
errors-in-opposing-partition-in-1992.html; See Chapter Two.

[282] Vladislav Zubok, “The post-Soviet roots of the war in Ukraine,” The
Spectator, February 26, 2022, https://spectator.co.uk/article/the-post-soviet-
roots-of-the-war-in-ukraine.

[283] “The North Atlantic Treaty,” NATO, April 4, 1949,

https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm.

[284] Harry Truman, “Statement by the President on the Situation in

Korea,” White House, June 27, 1950,
https://trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/173/statement-president-
situation-korea.

[285] Sen. Robert A. Taft, “Speech on the North Atlantic Treaty,” US

Senate, July 26, 1949,
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/speech-on-the-north-atlantic-
treaty.

[286] David Beito, “Robert Taft and the Case Against NATO,” Historians
Against the War, October 11, 2008,
https://web.archive.org/web/20081026211928/http://historiansagainstwar.or
g/blog/2008/10/robert-taft-and-case-against-nato.html.

[287] President Harry Truman, “Inaugural Address,” Truman Library,

January 20, 1949, https://trumanlibraryinstitute.org/historic-speeches-
trumans-inaugural-address; George Kennan, “Long Telegram,” US State
Department, February 22, 1946,
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm; “X”
(George F. Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” Foreign Affairs,
July 1, 1947, https://foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/george-kennan-
sources-soviet-conduct; Paul Nitze, et al., NSC 68, April 14, 1950,
https://info.publicintelligence.net/US-NSC-68.pdf; William F. Buckley,
“The Party and the Deep Blue Sea,” Commonweal, January 25, 1952,
https://archive.is/1hwV9.

[288] Melvyn B. Krauss, “Do We Need New Allies? No, It’s Just Welfare
for Europe,” Wall Street Journal, March 12, 1998,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB889653261535750000.

[289] Frederick Kempe, “Brent Scowcroft on the Fall of the Berlin Wall,”
New Atlanticist, November 2, 2009, https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-
atlanticist/brent-scowcroft-on-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall.

[290] Paul Pillar, “NATO Expansion and the Road to Simferopol,” The
National Interest, April 5, 2014, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-
pillar/nato-expansion-the-road-simferopol-10200.

[291] Staff, “Sam Nunn,” Nuclear Threat Initiative,

https://nti.org/about/people/sam-nunn.

[292] “Memorandum for the President from Anthony Lake, ‘European

Security/NATO Enlargement Progress Report,’” White House, July 17,
1995, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32230-document-7-
memorandum-president-anthony-lake-european-securitynato-enlargement.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter 2: Bill Clinton

[1] Michael R. Gordon, “Russia Remains Uneasy Over NATO’s

Expansion,” New York Times, March 14, 1999,
https://nytimes.com/1999/03/14/world/russia-remains-uneasy-over-nato-s-
expansion.html; Matt Frost, “NATO: Russia Not Happy About Expansion,”
RFERL, March 9, 1999, https://rferl.org/a/1090795.html.

[2] Thomas W. Lippman, “NATO Embraces 3 From Warsaw Pact,”

Washington Post, March 13, 1999, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/world/daily/april99/nato0313.htm.

[3] Stuart D. Goldman, “Russian Conventional Armed Forces: On the Verge

of Collapse?” Congressional Research Service, September 4, 1997,
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/97-820.pdf.

[4] Madeleine Albright, Madam Secretary: A Memoir (New York: Miramax,

2003), 167.

[5] Strobe Talbott, “Talbott Speech On NATO Enlargement At Atlantic

Council,” May 20, 1997,
https://web.archive.org/web/19970617062028/https://mtholyoke.edu/acad/i
ntrel/strbnato.htm.

[6] Kimberly Marten, “Reconsidering NATO expansion: a counterfactual

analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s,” European Journal of
International Security, November 1, 2017,
https://cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/356448EA9D5C63C53BE1EC6B33FE470A/S20575637
17000165a.pdf.

[7] Strobe Talbott, The Russia Hand: A Memoir of Presidential Diplomacy

(New York: Random House, 2002), 96.

[8] “Retranslation of Yeltsin letter on NATO expansion,” National Security

Archive, September 15, 1993, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16376-
document-04-retranslation-yeltsin-letter.

[9] Ronald Asmus, Opening NATO’s Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself
for a New Era (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2004), 47.

[10] Sarotte, 168.

[11] Elaine Sciolino, “US to Back Yeltsin if He Suspends Congress,” New

York Times, March 13, 1993, https://nytimes.com/1993/03/13/world/us-to-
back-yeltsin-if-he-suspends-congress.html.

[12] Jonathan Steele and David Hearst, “Yeltsin Crushes Revolt,”

Guardian, October 5, 1993,
https://theguardian.com/world/1993/oct/05/russia.davidhearst; See below.

[13] Warren Christopher, “A New Generation of Russian Democrats,”

Speech Vault, October 23, 1993, http://speeches-
usa.com/Transcripts/warren_christopher-russian.html.
[14] Warren Christopher, “A New Generation of Russian Democrats,”
Speech Vault, October 23, 1993, http://speeches-
usa.com/Transcripts/warren_christopher-russian.html.

[15] Albright, 168.

[16] Asmus, 50.

[17] John Podesta/Todd Stern to the President, “NSC Memos for Meeting
with Secretary Christopher,” Attached: Anthony Lake to the President: “The
NATO Summit and Europe’s East,” White House, October 19, 1993,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32225-document-2-john-podestatodd-
stern-president-nsc-memos-meeting-secretary-christopher.

[18] “Secretary Christopher’s Meeting with President Yeltsin,” National

Security Archive, October 22, 1993,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16380-document-08-secretary-
christopher-s-meeting.

[19] James Goldgeier, “Promises Made, Promises Broken? What Yeltsin

Was Told About NATO in 1993 and Why It Matters,” War on the Rocks,
July 12, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/07/promises-made-
promises-broken-what-yeltsin-was-told-about-nato-in-1993-and-why-it-
matters.

[20] “Secretary Christopher’s Meeting with President Yeltsin,” National

Security Archive, October 22, 1993,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16380-document-08-secretary-
christopher-s-meeting.

[21] James Goldgeier, “Promises Made, Promises Broken? What Yeltsin

Was Told About NATO in 1993 and Why It Matters,” War on the Rocks,
July 12, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/07/promises-made-
promises-broken-what-yeltsin-was-told-about-nato-in-1993-and-why-it-
matters; “Secretary Christopher’s Meeting with President Yeltsin,” National
Security Archive, October 22, 1993,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16380-document-08-secretary-
christopher-s-meeting.

[22] Talbott, 101.

[23] “Secretary Christopher’s meeting with Foreign Minister Kozyrev:

NATO, Elections, Regional Issues,” US State Department, October 25,
1993, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16379-document-07-secretary-
christopher-s-meeting.

[24] Goldgeier, 85.

[25] Asmus, 61–62; Kimberly Marten, “Reconsidering NATO expansion: a

counterfactual analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s,” European
Journal of International Security, November 1, 2017,
https://cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/356448EA9D5C63C53BE1EC6B33FE470A/S20575637
17000165a.pdf.
[26] James Goldgeier, “Promises Made, Promises Broken? What Yeltsin
Was Told About NATO in 1993 and Why It Matters,” War on the Rocks,
July 12, 2016, https://warontherocks.com/2016/07/promises-made-
promises-broken-what-yeltsin-was-told-about-nato-in-1993-and-why-it-
matters.

[27] “The President’s Meeting with Czech Leaders,” US State Department,

January 11, 1994, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16383-document-11-
president-s-meeting-czech.

[28] President Bill Clinton, “The President’s News Conference With

Visegrad Leaders in Prague,” White House, January 12, 1994,
https://govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-1994-01-17/pdf/WCPD-1994-01-
17-Pg41.pdf.

[29] Cable from US Embassy Moscow to State Department, “President’s

Dinner with President Yeltsin,” January 14, 1994,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/30920-document-8-cable-us-embassy-
moscow-state-department-presidents-dinner-president.

[30] Sarotte, 188.

[31] Sarotte, 226–27.

[32] Steven Erlanger, “Russia Warns NATO on Expanding West,” New York
Times, November 26, 1993, https://nytimes.com/1993/11/26/world/russia-
warns-nato-on-expanding-east.html.
[33] Suzanne Crow, “Russian Views on an Eastward Expansion of NATO,”
RFE/RL Research Report, Vol. 2, No. 41 (October 1993), 21–24.

[34] Steven Erlanger, “Russia Warns NATO on Expanding West,” New York
Times, November 26, 1993, https://nytimes.com/1993/11/26/world/russia-
warns-nato-on-expanding-east.html.

[35] “Ambassador Pickering Cable to Secretary of State: Russia and

NATO,” December 6, 1994, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/media/27164/ocr.

[36] Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “NATO Expansion – The

Budapest Blow Up 1994,” National Security Archive, November 24, 2021,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2021-11-24/nato-
expansion-budapest-blow-1994.

[37] Sarotte, 182, 194–95; Kimberly Marten, “Reconsidering NATO

expansion: a counterfactual analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s,”
European Journal of International Security, November 1, 2017,
https://cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/356448EA9D5C63C53BE1EC6B33FE470A/S20575637
17000165a.pdf.

[38] Sarotte, 191.

[39] Sarotte, 195.

[40] “Anthony Lake to the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, UN

Ambassador, and Joint Chiefs Chairman, ‘NSC Staff Paper on NATO
Expansion,’” White House, October 14, 1994,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32226-document-3-anthony-lake-
secretary-state-secretary-defense-un-ambassador-and-joint.

[41] Douglas Waller, “How Clinton Decided on NATO Expansion,” Time,

July 14, 1997, https://time.com/archive/6731121/how-clinton-decided-on-
nato-expansion.

[42] President Bill Clinton, “Remarks to Future Leaders of Europe in

Brussels,” January 9, 1994, https://presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-
future-leaders-europe-brussels.

[43] President Bill Clinton, “The President’s News Conference With

Visegrad Leaders in Prague,” White House, January 12, 1994,
https://govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-1994-01-17/pdf/WCPD-1994-01-
17-Pg41.pdf.

[44] Henry Kissinger, “Be Realistic About Russia,” Washington Post,

January 24, 1994,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1994/01/25/be-realistic-about-
russia/21592703-ac0c-4d4c-9a88-64391b853976.

[45] Staff, “Zbigniew Brzezinski,” New York Times, December 17, 1976,
https://nytimes.com/1976/12/17/archives/zbigniew-brzezinski.html.

[46] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Plan for Europe – How to Expand NATO,”

Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/1995-01-01/plan-europe.
[47] Brzezinski, 59.

[48] Brzezinski, 71.

[49] Sarotte, 191.

[50] Press Release, “CSCE becomes OSCE,” OSCE Secretariat, January 3,

1995, https://osce.org/secretariat/52527.

[51] Strobe Talbott, “Memorandum for Anthony Lake: Kozyrev’s

‘European Security Plan,’” January 12, 1994,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/30915-document-3-memorandum-
anthony-lake-strobe-talbott-subject-kozyrevs-european-security.

[52] Sarotte, 217.

[53] Sarotte, 163.

[54] Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “What Yeltsin Heard: From
Cold War to, ‘Cold Peace,’” National Security Archive, November 24,
2021, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2021-11-
24/nato-expansion-budapest-blow-1994.

[55] Talbott, 136.

[56] “Communiqué NATO M-NAC-2(94)116 Issued at the Ministerial

Meeting of the North Atlantic Council NATO Headquarters, Brussels,”
NATO, December 1, 1994, https://nato.int/docu/comm/49-
95/c941201a.htm.
[57] Sarotte, 201.

[58] President Bill Clinton, “Remarks to the Conference on Security and

Cooperation in Europe in Budapest, Hungary,” December 5, 1994,
https://govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PPP-1994-book2/pdf/PPP-1994-book2-
doc-pg2144.pdf.

[59] See Chapter Four.

[60] Norman Kempster and Dean E. Murphy, “Broader NATO May Bring
‘Cold Peace,’ Yeltsin Warns,” Los Angeles Times, December 6, 1994,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-12-06-mn-5629-story.html.

[61] “‘Gore Debrief on One-on-One w/ Yeltsin,’ Notes on Vice President

Gore’s Meeting with President Yeltsin, Moscow,” December 16, 1994,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32227-document-4-gore-debrief-one-
one-w-yeltsin-notes-vice-president-gores-meeting.

[62] Elaine Sciolino, “Yeltsin Says NATO is Trying to Split Continent

Again,” New York Times, December 6, 1994,
https://nytimes.com/1994/12/06/world/yeltsin-says-nato-is-trying-to-split-
continent-again.html.

[63] Andrei Kozyrev, The Firebird: The Elusive Fate of Russian Democracy
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 283.

[64] “‘Gore Debrief on One-on-One w/ Yeltsin,’ Notes on Vice President

Gore’s Meeting with President Yeltsin, Moscow,” December 16, 1994,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32227-document-4-gore-debrief-one-
one-w-yeltsin-notes-vice-president-gores-meeting.

[65] President Bill Clinton, “Remarks in Cleveland, Ohio, at the White

House Conference on Trade and Investment in Central and Eastern
Europe,” Administration of William J. Clinton, January 13, 1995,
https://govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PPP-1995-book1/pdf/PPP-1995-book1-
doc-pg41.pdf.

[66] Sarotte, 208–09.

[67] Burns, 91.

[68] Burns, 92–93, 108.

[69] Burns, 107.

[70] Italics removed from original.

[71] Strobe Talbott, “Memorandum to the President: The Moment of

Truth,” US State Department, April 15, 1995,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/27170-doc-16-strobe-talbott-
memorandum-president-moment-truth.

[72] “Summary report on One-on-One meeting between Presidents Clinton

and Yeltsin,” Kremlin, May 10, 1995,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16391-document-19-summary-report-
one-one-meeting.
[73] Burns, 109; Asmus, 100.

[74] Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “What Yeltsin Heard: From
Cold War to, ‘Cold Peace,’” National Security Archive, November 24,
2021, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2021-11-
24/nato-expansion-budapest-blow-1994.

[75] Burns, 110–11.

[76] Burns, 107–08.

[77] Alexey Pushkov, “Don’t Isolate Us: A Russian View of NATO

Expansion,” The National Interest, March 1, 1997,
https://nationalinterest.org/article/dont-isolate-us-a-russian-view-of-nato-
expansion-722.

[78] “Memorandum for the President from Anthony Lake, ‘European

Security/NATO Enlargement Progress Report,’” White House, July 17,
1995, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32230-document-7-
memorandum-president-anthony-lake-european-securitynato-enlargement.

[79] Dan Hebditch, “Allies and Lies,” BBC, June 22, 2001,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/correspondent/1390536.stm.

[80] “Eurocorps Overview,” EU Parliament, 2019,

https://europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/documents/sede/dv/sede26
0215overvieweurocorps_/sede260215overvieweurocorps_en.pdf.
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https://cvce.eu/obj/franco_british_st_malo_declaration_4_december_1998-
en-f3cd16fb-fc37-4d52-936f-c8e9bc80f24f.html.

[82] Michael White, “Thatcher decries European army,” Guardian,

December 7, 1999, https://theguardian.com/world/1999/dec/08/eu.politics.

[83] Julius W. Friend, “US Policy Toward Franco-German Cooperation,” in

Patrick McCarthy ed., France-Germany, 1983–1993: The Struggle to
Cooperate (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), 172–73.

[84] Edward Mortimer, “Europe’s teetering pillar,” Financial Times, May 1,

1991, (Cited in Gibbs, 29).

[85] Lawrence Kaplan, NATO and the United States: The Enduring Alliance
(New York: Twayne, 1994), 175.

[86] William T. Johnsen and Thomas-Durell Young, “France’s Evolving

Policy Toward NATO,” Strategic Review, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Summer 1995),
1–20, https://archive.is/O8IY3.

[87] Staff, “Eurocorps, A Force for the European Union and NATO,” 2019,
https://europarl.europa.eu/meetdocs/2014_2019/documents/sede/dv/sede26
0215overvieweurocorps_/sede260215overvieweurocorps_en.pdf.

[88] Ted Galen Carpenter, Beyond Nato: Staying Out of Europe’s Wars
(Washington: Cato, 1994), 45.
[89] Pat Buchanan, A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America’s
Destiny (New York: Regnery, 1999), 17–18, 22.

[90] Samuel Charap and Timothy J. Colton, Everyone Loses: The Ukraine
Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia (London: Center for
Strategic and International Studies, 2017), 41.

[91] George Kennan, “Long Telegram,” US State Department, February 22,

1946, https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/coldwar/documents/episode-
1/kennan.htm; “X” (George F. Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,”
Foreign Affairs, July 1, 1947, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-
federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-conduct.

[92] James A. Warren, “The Man Who Knew Russia Best: George Kennan’s
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https://thedailybeast.com/the-man-who-knew-russia-best-george-kennans-
revealing-diaries.

[93] Talbott, 220.

[94] George F. Kennan, “A Fateful Error,” New York Times, February 5,

1997, https://nytimes.com/1997/02/05/opinion/a-fateful-error.html.

[95] James A. Warren, “The Man Who Knew Russia Best: George Kennan’s
Revealing Diaries,” Daily Beast, March 10, 2014,
https://thedailybeast.com/the-man-who-knew-russia-best-george-kennans-
revealing-diaries.
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York Times, May 2, 1998, https://nytimes.com/1998/05/02/opinion/foreign-
affairs-now-a-word-from-x.html.

[97] “Friedman unit,” Urban Dictionary,

https://urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=friedman%20unit.

[98] Thomas L. Friedman, “The Big Bang,” New York Times, November 27,
1996, https://nytimes.com/1996/11/27/opinion/the-big-bang.html.

[99] Stephan Kieninger, “The Strobe Talbott Papers at the State

Department’s Virtual Reading Room,” Woodrow Wilson Center, February
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[100] Strobe Talbott, “The Birth of the Global Nation,” Time, July 20, 1992,
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[101] Keith Gessen, “The Quiet Americans Behind the US-Russia

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us-russia-imbroglio.html.

[102] Asmus, 74–76.

[103] Strobe Talbott, “Why NATO Should Grow,” New York Review of
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nato-should-grow.
[104] Talbott, 231–32.

[105] “Draft Letter from Strobe Talbott to George Kennan,” White House,
February 9, 1997, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32234-document-
11-draft-letter-strobe-talbott-george-kennan.

[106] Sam Nunn and Brent Scowcroft, “NATO: A Debate Recast,” New
York Times, February 4, 1998,
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[107] John J. Mearsheimer, “Getting Ukraine wrong,” New York Times,

March 13, 2014, https://nytimes.com/2014/03/14/opinion/getting-ukraine-
wrong.html.

[108] Julian Borger, “Russian hostility ‘partly caused by west’, claims

former US defence head,” Guardian, March 9, 2016,
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[109] John J. Mearsheimer, “Getting Ukraine wrong,” New York Times,

March 13, 2014, https://nytimes.com/2014/03/14/opinion/getting-ukraine-
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[110] George F. Kennan, “A Fateful Error,” New York Times, February 5,

1997, https://nytimes.com/1997/02/05/opinion/a-fateful-error.html.

[111] R.W. Apple Jr., “Road to Approval Is Rocky, And the Gamble Is
Perilous,” New York Times, May 15, 1997,
https://nytimes.com/1997/05/15/world/road-to-approval-is-rocky-and-the-
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[112] Paul Nitze, et al., NSC 68, April 14, 1950,

https://info.publicintelligence.net/US-NSC-68.pdf.

[113] Stanley Resor, et al., “Opposition to NATO Expansion,” Arms

Control Association, June 26, 1997, https://armscontrol.org/act/1997-
06/arms-control-today/opposition-nato-expansion.

[114] Stanley Resor, et al., “Opposition to NATO Expansion,” Arms

Control Association, June 26, 1997, https://armscontrol.org/act/1997-
06/arms-control-today/opposition-nato-expansion.

[115] Ted Galen Carpenter, “Many predicted Nato expansion would lead to
war. Those warnings were ignored,” Guardian, February 28, 2022,
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[116] Jack F. Matlock Jr., “I was there: NATO and the origins of the
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https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/02/15/the-origins-of-the-ukraine-
crisis-and-how-conflict-can-be-avoided.

[117] Eric Schmitt, “‘Iron Ring’ Around Russia? Comment Provokes

Outburst,” New York Times, March 20, 1998,
https://nytimes.com/1998/03/20/world/iron-ring-around-russia-comment-
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be-sold-on-need-for-larger-nato/be877ada-3aa9-4bdf-bd28-2a6650963f91.

[119] Michael Dobbs, “Nunn Breaks Ranks On NATO Expansion,”

Washington Post, June 23, 1995,
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[120] “Bill Bradley on Russia and NATO,” Carnegie Council for Ethics in
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[121] “NATO Enlargement and Russia,” EveryCRSReport.com, April 14,

1998, https://everycrsreport.com/reports/97-477.html.

[122] Edward N. Luttwak, “A Look At . . . Expanding NATO,” Washington

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[124] Kimberly Marten, “Reconsidering NATO expansion: a counterfactual

analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s,” European Journal of
International Security, November 1, 2017,
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[125] “The Debate on NATO Enlargement,” Hearings before the Committee

on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, One Hundred Fifth Congress,
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[126] Tyler Marshall, “In Letter, Experts Decry NATO Expansion,” Los
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[127] Stanley Resor, et al., “Opposition to NATO Expansion,” Arms

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[129] Keith Gessen, “The Quiet Americans Behind the US-Russia

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[130] Editorial Board, “Don’t Rush to Expand NATO,” New York Times,
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[131] “Dennis Ross Memorandum to Strobe Talbott,” US State Department,

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[132] Kimberly Marten, “Reconsidering NATO expansion: a counterfactual

analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s,” European Journal of
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[133] Greg Weiner, “Moynihan and the Neocons,” National Affairs, Winter
2016, https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/moynihan-and-the-
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Outburst,” New York Times, March 20, 1998,
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[135] Senator Joe Biden, “Speech on NATO Enlargement to the Atlantic

Council,” C-SPAN, June 18, 1997, https://c-span.org/video/?c5073373/user-
clip-joe-biden-russias-response-nato-expansion-baltics; Gerrard Kaonga,
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[136] “NATO Enlargement and Russia,” EveryCRSReport.com, April 14,

1998, https://everycrsreport.com/reports/97-477.html.

[137] Carla Anne Robbins, “How Little-Debated Expansion Plan Will Alter
the Structure of NATO,” Wall Street Journal, March 12, 1998,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB889655079880546500.

[138] William J. Clinton, “Commencement Address at the United States

Military Academy in West Point, New York,” The American Presidency
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[140] Henry Kissinger, “Atlantic Alliance,” Los Angeles Times, June 8,

1997, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-06-08-op-1228-story.html.

[141] Brzezinski, 102.

[142] Ted Galen Carpenter and Barbara Conry, NATO Enlargement:

Illusions and Reality (Washington, D.C.: Cato, 1998), 205.

[143] Eugene J. Carroll Jr., “NATO Expansion Would Be an Epic ‘Fateful

Error,’” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1997, https://latimes.com/archives/la-
xpm-1997-jul-07-me-10464-story.html.

[144] Jonathan Dean, “Losing Russia or Keeping NATO: Must We

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[145] Richard T. Davies, “Should NATO Grow? A Dissent,” New York

Review of Books, September 21, 1995,
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[146] “Testimony of Jonathan Dean, Senior Arms Control Adviser from the
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[147] Declassified Memo, “Lake Meeting with President Jacques Chirac of

France,” White House, November 1, 1996,
https://archives.gov/files/declassification/iscap/pdf/2016-140-doc13.pdf.

[148] Max Jakobsen, “Remaking NATO: A Useful Pause for a Do-or-Die

Study,” International Herald Tribune, January 14, 1995,
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[149] Matthew Dal Santo, “Is Putin Right Wing? Not by Russian
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[150] Michael MccGwire, “NATO Expansion: ‘A Policy Error of Historic

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[151] Charles A. Kupchan, “Expand NATO – And Split Europe,” New York
Times, November 27, 1994,
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[152] “The Debate on NATO Enlargement,” Hearings before the Committee

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[154] Michael Mandelbaum, “Preserving the New Peace,” Foreign Affairs,

May/June 1995, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/1995-05-
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[155] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “A Plan for Europe – How to Expand NATO,”

Foreign Affairs, January/February 1995,
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[156] Brzezinski, 102.

[157] President Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on the United

Efforts of the Free World to Support the People of Ukraine,” White House,
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[158] Julian Borger, “Russian hostility ‘partly caused by west’, claims

former US defence head,” Guardian, March 9, 2016,
https://theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/09/russian-hostility-to-west-partly-
caused-by-west.

[159] Perry, 128, 129.

[160] Kimberly Marten, “Reconsidering NATO expansion: a counterfactual

analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s,” European Journal of
International Security, November 1, 2017,
https://cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/356448EA9D5C63C53BE1EC6B33FE470A/S20575637
17000165a.pdf.

[161] William J. Perry, “How the US Lost Russia – and How We Can
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[162] Albright, 167.

[163] William J. Clinton, “Exchange With Reporters Prior to Discussions

With Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers of The Netherlands,” Public Papers of
the Presidents of the United States, William J. Clinton 1994, Book I,
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[164] Douglas Brinkley, “Democratic Enlargement: The Clinton Doctrine,”

Foreign Policy, 106 (Spring 1997), 110–27, https://jstor.org/stable/1149177.

[165] Albright, 254.

[166] Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, (Foreword by George

Kennan) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 11–12.

[167] Robert Higgs, “Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the US

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[168] Richard Cummings, “US: Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking

Barrels,” Playboy, January 16, 2007, https://archive.is/zN4Dz.

[169] Richard Cummings, “US: Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking

Barrels,” Playboy, January 16, 2007, https://archive.is/zN4Dz.

[170] Jeff Gerth and Tim Weiner, “Arms Makers See Bonanza In Selling
NATO Expansion,” New York Times, June 29, 1997,
https://nytimes.com/1997/06/29/world/arms-makers-see-bonanza-in-selling-
nato-expansion.html.

[171] Richard Cummings, “US: Lockheed Stock and Two Smoking

Barrels,” Playboy, January 16, 2007, https://archive.is/zN4Dz.

[172] Andrzej Stylinski, “Poland to Buy Lockheed Jets,” Washington Post,

December 28, 2002,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/business/2002/12/28/poland-to-buy-
lockheed-jets/ce4c5eb8-d570-41a4-91da-e2160159d241.

[173] Lidia Kelly, “Poland signs $4.75 billion deal for US Patriot missile
system facing Russia,” Reuters, March 28, 2018,
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[174] Jeff Gerth and Tim Weiner, “Arms Makers See Bonanza In Selling
NATO Expansion,” New York Times, June 29, 1997,
https://nytimes.com/1997/06/29/world/arms-makers-see-bonanza-in-selling-
nato-expansion.html; Staff, “US Armsmakers See Huge Dollars in NATO
Expansion,” Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1998,
https://chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1998-03-30-9803300158-
story.html.

[175] Interview with author, Jim Hale, Scott Horton Show radio archive,
July 6, 2016, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/7616-jim-hale.

[176] Mary Jacoby, “Lobbyists’ NATO Goldmine,” Wall Street Journal,

June 2, 2007, https://wsj.com/articles/SB118066857163421159.

[177] Thomas Fuller, “American lobbyist swayed Eastern Europe’s Iraq

response,” New York Times, February 20, 2003,
https://nytimes.com/2003/02/20/news/american-lobbyist-swayed-eastern-
europes-iraq-response.html.

[178] Staff, “Iraq study estimates war-related deaths at 461,000,” BBC,

October 16, 2013, https://bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-24547256; Ben
Taub, “Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge,” The New Yorker, December
17, 2018, https://newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/24/iraqs-post-isis-
campaign-of-revenge.

[179] Tim Smart, “Count Corporate America Among NATO’s Staunchest

Allies,” Washington Post, April 13, 1999,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1999/04/13/count-corporate-
america-among-natos-staunchest-allies/e6436e9e-5dbe-4afc-bfa7-
1372bb40d592.

[180] “President Dwight Eisenhower Farewell Address,” C-SPAN, January

17, 1961, https://c-span.org/video/?15026-1/president-dwight-eisenhower-
farewell-address.

[181] Ben Freeman, “Foreign Funding of Think Tanks in America,” Center

for International Policy, January 2020,
https://static.wixstatic.com/ugd/3ba8a1_4f06e99f35d4485b801f8dbfe33b6a
3f.pdf.

[182] Gareth Porter, “How the ‘self licking ice cream cone,’ prolonged the
20-year war,” Responsible Statecraft, October 4, 2021,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/10/04/how-the-self-licking-ice-cream-
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[183] Jim Garamone, “Joint Vision 2020 Emphasizes Full Spectrum

Dominance,” American Forces Press Service, June 2, 2000,
https://resdal.org/Archivo/d00000cf.htm.

[184] Ludwig von Mises, Bureaucracy (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1944), https://cdn.mises.org/Bureaucracy_3.pdf.

[185] Mark Perry, “The US Army’s War Over Russia,” Politico Magazine,
May 12, 2016, https://politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/army-internal-
fight-russia-defense-budget-213885.
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analysis of Russia and the West in the 1990s,” European Journal of
International Security, November 1, 2017,
https://cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-
core/content/view/356448EA9D5C63C53BE1EC6B33FE470A/S20575637
17000165a.pdf.

[187] Jack F. Matlock Jr. interview with the Middlebury Institute of

International Studies, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=HWTIj-R-uZg.

[188] Jonathan Guyer, “How America’s NATO expansion obsession plays

into the Ukraine crisis,” Vox.com, January 27, 2022,
https://vox.com/platform/amp/22900113/nato-ukraine-russia-crisis-clinton-
expansion.

[189] James M. Goldgeier, Not Whether but When: The US Decision to

Enlarge NATO (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1999), 20–21.

[190] Michael Cox, US Foreign Policy After the Cold War: Superpower
Without a Mission? (London: Cassell, 1996), 67.

[191] Rep. Jimmy Hayes, et al., “H.R.7 – National Security Revitalization

Act,” US House of Representatives, March 21, 1995,
https://congress.gov/bill/104th-congress/house-bill/7.

[192] Warren Christopher, “Memorandum for the President,” 2016-179 doc

1, November 1994, https://archives.gov/declassification/iscap/pdf/2016-
179-doc-1.
[193] Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright Interview on NBC-TV The
Today Show with Matt Lauer, Columbus, Ohio, February 19, 1998, As
released by the Office of the Spokesman US State Department,
https://1997-2001.state.gov/statements/1998/980219a.html.

[194] Osama Bin Laden, “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, World Islamic
Front Statement,” February 23, 1998,
https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/980223-fatwa.htm.

[195] Horton, Enough Already, 33–49.

[196] Steven Pifer, “Did NATO Promise Not to Enlarge? Gorbachev Says
‘No,’” Brookings Institution, November 6, 2014,
https://brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2014/11/06/did-nato-promise-not-to-
enlarge-gorbachev-says-no.

[197] Maxim Kórshunov, “Mikhail Gorbachev: I Am Against All Walls,”

RBTH, October 16, 2014,
https://rbth.com/international/2014/10/16/mikhail_gorbachev_i_am_against
_all_walls_40673.html.

[198] Adrian Blomfield and Mike Smith, “Gorbachev: US Could Start New
Cold War,” Telegraph, May 6, 2008,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1933223/Gorbachev-
US-could-start-new-Cold-War.html.

[199] Uwe Klußmann, et al., “Did the West Break Its Promise to Moscow?”
Der Spiegel, November 26, 2009,
https://spiegel.de/international/world/nato-s-eastward-expansion-did-the-
west-break-its-promise-to-moscow-a-663315.html.

[200] “Russia – Gorbachev Comments on NATO Expansion,” AP, April 16,

1997, https://youtube.com/watch?v=3wB9uL2lKaw.

[201] Carey Schofield, “Russian ‘Betrayed’ Over Expansion of NATO,”

Telegraph, May 20, 1997.

[202] Carla Anne Robbins, “How Little-Debated Expansion Plan Will Alter
the Structure of NATO,” Wall Street Journal, March 12, 1998,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB889655079880546500.

[203] Samuel Charap, “Nato honesty on Ukraine could avert conflict with
Russia,” Financial Times, January 13, 2022,
https://ft.com/content/74089d46-abb8-4daa-9ee4-e9e9e4c45ab1.

[204] Hereafter, “Radio Liberty” in the text, “RFERL” in citations.

[205] Don Hill, “Russia: Foreign Minister Opposes NATO Expansion

Eastward,” RFERL, August 9, 1996, https://rferl.org/a/1081224.html.

[206] See Chapter One.

[207] Lord David Owen, Balkan Odyssey: An Uncompromising Personal

Account of the International Peace Efforts Following the Breakup of the
Former Yugoslavia (Orlando: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1995), 65, 94–95.

[208] Owen, 103.

[209] Owen, 110–11.

[210] Owen, 392.

[211] See Chapter One.

[212] Zimmermann, 222.

[213] Owen, 103.

[214] Paul Lewis, “Bosnia Peace Talks Yield No Progress,” New York
Times, February 8, 1993, https://nytimes.com/1993/02/08/world/bosnia-
peace-talks-yield-no-progress.html.

[215] Owen, 111.

[216] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,” Part 1, Chapter 9,
Section 6, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April 10, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140508142039/http://publications.niod.knaw
.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf.

[217] John M. Goshko and Julia Preston, “US Officials Resist Pressure to
Endorse Bosnia Peace Plan,” Washington Post, February 4, 1993,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/02/04/us-officials-resist-
pressure-to-endorse-bosnia-peace-plan/4f96459c-0c29-46d9-a647-
4cf2b6109f39.
[218] Anthony Lewis, “Abroad at Home; Beware of Munich,” New York
Times, January 8, 1993, https://nytimes.com/1993/01/08/opinion/abroad-at-
home-beware-of-munich.html.

[219] Owen, 96–97.

[220] Gibbs, 144.

[221] Bernard Gwertzman, “Vance and Brzezinski: Feuding Chapter by

Chapter,” New York Times, May 26, 1983,
https://nytimes.com/1983/05/26/us/vance-and-brzezinski-feuding-chapter-
by-chapter.html; Christopher Wallis, “The Thinker, The Doer and The
Decider: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Cyrus Vance and the Bureaucratic Wars of
the Carter Administration,” Northumbria University, 2018,
https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/37648/1/Wallis,%20Christopher%20
phd.pdf.

[222] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Bombs and Blather: The Strategy Deficit,”

Washington Post, January 17, 1993,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1993/01/17/bombs-and-
blather-the-strategy-deficit/08c80d1f-66b0-4528-a9ff-f66cb70e5c5a.

[223] David Binder, “Criticized as Appeaser, Vance Defends His Role in

Balkans,” New York Times, January 19, 1993,
https://nytimes.com/1993/01/19/world/criticized-as-appeaser-vance-
defends-his-role-in-balkans.html.
[224] Elaine Sciolino, “US Declines to Back Peace Plan As the Balkan
Talks Shift to UN,” New York Times, February 2, 1993,
https://nytimes.com/1993/02/02/world/us-declines-to-back-peace-plan-as-
the-balkan-talks-shift-to-un.html; R.W. Apple Jr., “Mediator is Upset at US
Reluctance Over Bosnia Talks,” New York Times, February 3, 1993,
https://nytimes.com/1993/02/03/world/mediator-is-upset-at-us-reluctance-
over-bosnia-talks.html; Thomas L. Friedman, “US Will Not Push Muslims
to Accept Bosnia Peace Plan,” New York Times, February 4, 1993,
https://nytimes.com/1993/02/04/world/us-will-not-push-muslims-to-accept-
bosnia-peace-plan.html.

[225] Owen, 108.

[226] Owen, 118–19.

[227] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[228] Owen, 129.

[229] Robert Kaiser, “Negotiator Christopher Has Been Carter’s Favorite

‘Secret Weapon,’” Washington Post, January 19, 1981,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1981/01/20/negotiator-
christopher-has-been-carters-favorite-secret-weapon/cc44fb7d-9453-4c54-
aa37-9f0e71e3b3c4.

[230] Norman Kempster, “US Won’t Back Efforts to Revive Bosnia Plan,”
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1993-02-02-mn-954-story.html.

[231] Owen, 153.

[232] Elaine Sciolino, “US and Russia Agree on Strategy Accepting Serbian
Gains for Now,” New York Times, May 21, 1993,
https://nytimes.com/1993/05/21/world/us-and-russia-agree-on-strategy-
accepting-serbian-gains-for-now.html.

[233] Owen, 181.

[234] Staff, “Biden: Allies are bigots for not joining forces with US,”
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joining-forces-with-u-s.

[235] Owen, 196–97.

[236] Owen, 272–73.

[237] “Agreement relating to Bosnia and Herzegovina (Owen-Stoltenberg

Peace Plan, or ‘Invincible plan’),” Peace Agreements Database, September
16, 1993, https://peaceagreements.org/view/472.

[238] Owen, 203–04.

[239] Owen, 228–29.

[240] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,
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[241] Szamuely, 192.

[242] Ola Flyum and David Hebditch, Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed, 2011,
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[243] Owen, 228–29.

[244] Szamuely, 208–13.

[245] Zimmermann, 231; Szamuely, 214–15.

[246] Charles G. Boyd, “Making Peace with the Guilty,” Foreign Affairs,
September/October 1995, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/1995-
09-01/making-peace-guilty.

[247] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[248] Szamuely, 228–29.

[249] Gibbs, 155, 162.

[250] Derek Chollet, Road to the Dayton Accords: A Study of American

Statecraft (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 185.

[251] Horton, Enough Already, 21–29.

[252] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,
consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area, Appendix II:
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and Security Services,” Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April
10, 2002,
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.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf.

[253] James Bissett, “Western Interference,” Balkan Future,

http://deltax.net/bissett/western/bosnia.htm.

[254] Lisa Beyer, “The Most Wanted Man In The World,” Time, September
24, 2001,
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1000871,00.html.

[255] Horton, Fool’s Errand, 26–30; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret
History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to
September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); George Crile,
Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert
Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003); Ethan
Rosen, The Bear, The Dragon, and the AK-47: How China, the United
States, and radical Islamists conspired to defeat the Soviet Union in
Afghanistan (Independently published, 2017); Michael M. Phillips,
“Launching the Missile That Made History,” Wall Street Journal, October 1,
2011,
http://wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405297020413820457659885110944678
0; Sylvester Stallone, David Morrell and Sheldon Lettich, Rambo III,
directed by Peter MacDonald (Vancouver: Lions Gate, 1988),
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[256] Staff, “Bosnia, Intelligence and the Clinton Presidency,” CIA/William

J. Clinton Presidential Library, October 1, 2013,
https://cia.gov/static/Bosnia-Intelligence-and-the-Clinton-Presidency.pdf.

[257] Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on
Terrorism (Washington: Brassey’s, 2004), xviii.

[258] Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam
(London: Serpent’s Tail, 2010), 207; James Risen and Doyle McManus,
“US Didn’t Anticipate Wider Iran Bosnia Role,” Los Angeles Times, April
23, 1996, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-23-mn-61733-
story.html.

[259] Evan Kohlmann, Al-Qa’ida’s Jihad in Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian

Network (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2004), xii.

[260] John Sray, “Selling the Bosnian Myth,” US Army Foreign Military
Studies Office, October 1995,
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Bring Islamic Fervor To the Balkans,” New York Times, September 23,
1996, https://nytimes.com/1996/09/23/world/outsiders-bring-islamic-fervor-
to-the-balkans.html.

[261] Tim Weiner, “Blowback From the Afghan Battlefield,” New York
Times, March 13, 1994,
https://nytimes.com/1994/03/13/magazine/blowback-from-the-afghan-
battlefield.html.

[262] John Shindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al-Qai’da, and the Rise of the
Global Jihad (Minneapolis: Zenith, 2007), 118–19; Kohlmann, 18–23, 28–
29.

[263] Abdel Bari Atwan, The Secret History of Al Qaeda (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2006), 253, 255.

[264] Shindler, 8, 121.

[265] Atwan, 255.

[266] Shindler, 123.

[267] Shindler, 128–31, 147–50, 178–81.

[268] Curtis, 209–15.

[269] John Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and International

Terrorism (New York: Pluto, 2000), 152.

[270] Kohlmann, 53–64, 84–86.

[271] Ali Soufan, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War
Against al-Qaeda (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 69.

[272] Blaine Harden, “Middle Eastern Muslims Helping Bosnian Defenders

Against Serb Forces,” Washington Post, August 27, 1992,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/08/27/middle-eastern-
muslims-helping-bosnian-defenders-against-serb-forces/21d7d4c4-0916-
409f-9fa0-b99014be985f.

[273] William Drozdiak and David B. Ottaway, “US Helps Bosnian Army
Get Arms, Europeans Say,” Washington Post, July 28, 1995,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/07/28/us-helps-bosnian-
army-get-arms-europeans-say/d6d15d34-e379-4a07-8377-d4514a332a13.

[274] Michael Dobbs, “Saudis Funded Weapons For Bosnia, Officials Say,”
Washington Post, February 2, 1996,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/02/02/saudis-funded-
weapons-for-bosnia-official-says/1a163310-2064-49f6-bd11-
84bc67092ce2.

[275] John Pomfret, “Bosnian Officials Involved in Arms Trade Tied to

Radical States,” Washington Post, September 22, 1996,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/09/22/bosnian-officials-
involved-in-arms-trade-tied-to-radical-states/522c8276-6f73-4201-b0b7-
6d9abbe7448b.

[276] Peter Bergen, Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin
Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 176.

[277] Osama bin Laden, “Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans

Occupying the Land of the Two Holiest Sites,” August 23, 1996,
https://ctc.westpoint.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Declaration-of-Jihad-
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[278] John Pomfret, “How Bosnia’s Muslims Dodged Arms Embargo,”

Washington Post, September 22, 1996,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/09/22/how-bosnias-
muslims-dodged-arms-embargo/b2d78043-3e34-46d9-babc-c4c335236aeb;
Christopher M. Davidson, Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the
Middle East (London: One World, 2016), 145.

[279] Dana Priest, “Foreign Muslims Fighting in Bosnia Considered Threat

to US Troops,” Washington Post, November 30, 1995,
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[280] Chris Deliso, The Coming Balkan Caliphate: The Threat of Radical
Islam to Europe and the West (Westport: Praeger, 2007), 6.

[281] Brendan O’Neill, “How We Trained al-Qaeda,” The Spectator,

September 13, 2003, http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/13th-september-
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[282] Interview with author, Brendan O’Neill, Scott Horton Show radio
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[283] Kohlmann, xii.

[284] Richard Holbrooke, Introduction to Chollet, Road to the Dayton
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[285] Craig Pyes, et al., “Bosnia Seen as Hospitable Base and Sanctuary for
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[286] James Risen, “Ex-Envoy Says Iran-Bosnia Link Was Worth Risk,”
Los Angeles Times, May 22, 1996, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-
1996-05-22-mn-7049-story.html.

[287] Shindler, 130–31.

[288] Damjan Krnjevic-Miskovic, “Obituary: Alija Izetbegovic, 1925–

2003,” The National Interest, October 22, 2003,
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[289] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,” Appendix II, Chapter
4, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April 10, 2002,
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[290] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,” Appendix II, Chapter
4, Section 5, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April 10, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140508142039/http://publications.niod.knaw
.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf.

[291] Richard J. Aldrich, “America used Islamists to arm the Bosnian

Muslims,” Guardian, April 21, 2002,
https://theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/22/warcrimes.comment.

[292] Craig Pyes, et al., “Bosnia Seen as Hospitable Base and Sanctuary for
Terrorists,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2001,
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[293] Marcia Christoff Kurop, “Al Qaeda’s Balkan Links,” Wall Street
Journal, November 1, 2001,
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[294] Staff, “Bin Laden Was Granted Bosnian Passport,” AFP, September
24, 1999, https://archive.is/Iqkkn; Marcia Christoff Kurop, “Al Qaeda’s
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[295] Shindler, 124, cites Der Spiegel, September 15, 2001.

[296] Erich Follath and Gunther Latsch, “The Prince and the Terrorist
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[297] Eve-Ann Prentice, Testimony, International Criminal Tribunal for the

Former Yugoslavia, February 3, 2006,
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[298] Kohlmann, 207–09.

[299] Brendan O’Neill, “The Bosnian Connection,” New Statesman, August

2, 2004,
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[300] Philip Zelikow, The 9/11 Commission Report, 155, https://9-

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[301] Deliso, 6; Terry McDermott, Perfect Soldiers: The 9/11 Hijackers:

Who They Were, Why They Did It (New York: Harper, 2005), xi.

[302] Deliso, 13–14.

[303] Atwan, 256; Neil MacFarquhar, “Terrorist Who Left a Trail of

Bloodshed Is Reportedly Killed,” New York Times, June 19, 2004,
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[304] “Capture from Video Commemorating ‘Abd al-‘Aziz al-Muqrin,’”

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[305] Karl Vick, “Al-Qaeda Group Claims Responsibility for Paris Terror
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[306] Michael Meacher, “Britain now faces its own blowback,” Guardian,
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[307] Diaa Hadid and Abdul Sattar, “Pakistan Court Orders Release Of Man
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28, 2021, https://npr.org/2021/01/28/961485215/pakistans-top-court-orders-
release-for-killer-of-wall-street-journal-reporter; Barbara Feinman Todd and
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[308] Michael Meacher, “Britain now faces its own blowback,” Guardian,
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[309] Scott Horton, “LA Times Series on Iranian Arms to Bosnia (12
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[310] “Security Council resolution 713 (1991) [imposing a general and

complete embargo on all deliveries of weapons and military equipment to
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[311] John Pomfret, “Iran Ships Explosives to Bosnian Muslims,”

Washington Post, May 13, 1994,
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explosives-to-bosnian-muslims/0988537a-3dd6-47f4-9e94-dcfb457b846c;
William Drozdiak and David B. Ottaway, “US Helps Bosnian Army Get
Arms, Europeans Say,” Washington Post, July 28, 1995,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/07/28/us-helps-bosnian-
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[312] Shindler, 131.

[313] Staff, “US Looked Other Way as Bosnia Got Weapons,” Chicago
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[314] “Investigation Into Iranian Arms Shipments to Bosnia,” US House of

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Officials Say,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1996,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-05-mn-55275-story.html;
James Risen and Doyle McManus, “US Didn’t Anticipate Wider Iran
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[315] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,” Appendix II, Chapter
4, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April 10, 2002,
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.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf.

[316] “Final Report of the Select Subcommittee to Investigate the United

States Role in Iranian Arms Transfers to Croatia and Bosnia,” US House of
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[317] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,” Appendix II, Chapter
4, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April 10, 2002,
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Covert Arms to Bosnia,” Washington Post, May 12, 1996,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/05/12/us-allies-fed-
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[319] “Investigation Into Iranian Arms Shipments to Bosnia,” US House of

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[320] James Risen and Doyle McManus, “US Had Options to Let Bosnia
Get Arms, Avoid Iran,” Los Angeles Times, July 14, 1996,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-07-14-mn-24196-story.html;
Galbraith later made tens of millions of dollars cashing in on the Kurdish
oil business in Iraq War II, Steve LeVine, “An anti-corruption crusader’s
$55 million haul,” Foreign Policy, October 7, 2010,
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[321] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,” Appendix II, Chapter
4, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April 10, 2002,
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Covert Arms to Bosnia,” Washington Post, May 12, 1996,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/05/13/iran-ships-
explosives-to-bosnian-muslims/0988537a-3dd6-47f4-9e94-dcfb457b846c;
Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,
consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,” Appendix II, Chapter
4, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April 10, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140508142039/http://publications.niod.knaw
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[323] Dan Hebditch, “Allies and Lies,” BBC, June 22, 2001,
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[324] Christopher Cox, “Clinton Vetoed Congress’ Bills to Help Bosnia

While Encouraging Iran to Do So, Instead Giving Iran a Foothold in
Europe,” House Republican Policy Committee Policy Perspective, April 26,
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[325] Henry Hyde, et al. Final Report of the Select Subcommittee to

Investigate the United States Role in Iranian Arms Transfers to Croatia and
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[326] Michael Dobbs, “Saudis Funded Weapons For Bosnia, Officials Say,”
Washington Post, February 2, 1996,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1996/02/02/saudis-funded-
weapons-for-bosnia-official-says/1a163310-2064-49f6-bd11-
84bc67092ce2.
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[328] James Risen, “Iran Gave Bosnia Leader $500,000, CIA Alleges,” Los
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1996-12-31-mn-14139-story.html.

[329] Ed Vulliamy in Moscow and Stacy Sullivan, “Bloody handiwork of

Arkan,” Guardian, January 15, 2000,
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[330] Szamuely, 141.

[331] Julien Sauvaget and Emma James, “Bosnian War: Looking back at
the long siege of Sarajevo, 30 years on,” France 24, March 6, 2022,
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[332] Ian Traynor, “At play in siege city,” Guardian, February 27, 1993,
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sarajevo-ian-traynor-maggie-okane-1993.

[333] Julien Sauvaget and Emma James, “Bosnian War: Looking back at
the long siege of Sarajevo, 30 years on,” France 24, March 6, 2022,
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[334] Jeanne Jakle, “Wiglesworth lauded as S.A. radio original,” San

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[335] Raimondo, 48; Unfortunately their websites were hosted on AOL.com

and are lost to the world. Previously linked at: “Bosnia Resources on the
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[336] Stephen W. Walker, “NATO’s Capitulation,” Washington Post,

January 10, 1994,
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[337] “Proposed National Program,” Action Council for Peace in the

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[338] Shindler, 86–106.

[339] Szamuely, 130–31.

[340] Stephen A. Hart, “Partisans: War in the Balkans 1941–1945,” BBC,

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[341] “Serbs Rescued 500 American Pilots in World War II,” Tesla
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[342] Gibbs, 127–29.

[343] Szamuely, 126–27.

[344] Szamuely, 130–31.

[345] Szamuely, 139.

[346] Charles G. Boyd, “Making Peace with the Guilty,” Foreign Affairs,
September/October 1995, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/1995-
09-01/making-peace-guilty.

[347] Charles G. Boyd, “Making Peace with the Guilty,” Foreign Affairs,
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09-01/making-peace-guilty.

[348] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,” Appendix II, Chapter
2, Section 5, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April 10, 2002,
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[349] Szamuely, 132–33.

[350] Owen, 63, 89–90, 264.

[351] Nick B. Williams Jr., “Kuwait Story of Babies Removed From

Incubators Refuses to Die,” Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1992,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-03-06-mn-3337-story.html; Staff,
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[352] John Sray, “Selling the Bosnian Myth,” US Army Foreign Military
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https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA305349.pdf.

[353] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[354] Charles G. Boyd, “Making Peace with the Guilty,” Foreign Affairs,
September/October 1995, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/1995-
09-01/making-peace-guilty.

[355] Richard Behar and Jon Friedman, “A Pattern Of Rape,” Newsweek,

January 3, 1993, https://newsweek.com/pattern-rape-192142.

[356] Szamuely, 136.

[357] “Rape and abuse of women in the areas of armed conflict in the
former Yugoslavia,” UN General Assembly, January 5, 1994,
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ln=en; “Resolution Adopted by the General Assembly,” UN Security
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[358] Thomas J. Ward and William D. Lay, “The Origins and

Implementation of the Comfort Women System,” E-International Relations,
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[359] Maggie O’Kane, “Fighting talk,” Guardian, April 5, 1993,

https://theguardian.com/world/1993/apr/05/warcrimes.maggieokane.

[360] Leslie Wayne, “America’s For-Profit Secret Army,” New York Times,
October 13, 2002, https://nytimes.com/2002/10/13/business/america-s-for-
profit-secret-army.html; Robert Capps, “Outside the law,” Salon.com, June
26, 2002, https://salon.com/2002/06/26/bosnia_4; Robert Capps, “Sex-slave
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[361] Kit Klarenberg and Tom Secker, “Declassified Intelligence Files

Expose Inconvenient Truths of Bosnian War,” Grayzone, December 30,
2022, https://thegrayzone.com/2022/12/30/declassified-intelligence-files-
bosnian-war; “Canadian Intelligence Documents Trove,” Grayzone,
https://thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/1F-Copy.pdf.
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2004, https://grayfalcon.blogspot.com/2004/11/bosnia-death-toll-
revealed.html.

[363] Shindler, 84–86; Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, “The

Dismantling of Yugoslavia (Part II),” Monthly Review, October 1, 2007,
https://monthlyreview.org/2007/10/01/the-dismantling-of-yugoslavia-part-
ii.

[364] George Kenney, “The Bosnian Calculation,” New York Times

Magazine, April 23, 1995, https://nytimes.com/1995/04/23/magazine/the-
bosnian-calculation.html.

[365] Ewa Tabeau and Jakub Bijak, “War-Related Deaths in the 1992-1995
Armed Conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Critique of Previous
Estimates and Recent Results,” European Journal of Population, Vol. 21,
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[366] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[367] Kjell Arild Nilsen, “102,000 killed in Bosnia,” NTB, November 14,
2004, https://grayfalcon.blogspot.com/2004/11/bosnia-death-toll-
revealed.html.

[368] Roy Gutman, “The Death Camps of Bosnia,” Newsday, August 2,

1992, https://nieman.harvard.edu/articles/nina-bernstein-nf-84; Roy
Gutman, “Serbs Have Slain Over 1,000 in 2 Bosnia Camps, Ex-Prisoners
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xpm-1992-08-02-mn-5646-story.html; Roy Gutman, “Like Auschwitz,”
Newsday, July 21, 1992, https://scribd.com/document/349323319/Roy-
Gutman-a-witnes-to-genocide-pdf.

[369] Peter Brock, Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting: Journalism and

Tragedy in Yugoslavia (Los Angeles: GM Books, 2005), 85–116; George
Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[370] David Binder, “US Finds No Proof of Mass Killing at Serb Camps,”
New York Times, August 13, 1992,
https://nytimes.com/1992/08/23/world/us-finds-no-proof-of-mass-killing-at-
serb-camps.html.

[371] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[372] Bernard Kouchner, Guerriers de la Paix (Paris: Grasset, 2004), 374–

75, https://search.worldcat.org/title/417594196; Translation in Gibbs, 125.

[373] Jacques Merlino, Verites Yougoslaves, 126–29; Cited in Gibbs, 127–

28.

[374] David Plotz, “Croatian President Franjo Tudjman,” Slate, December

10, 1999, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/1999/12/croatian-president-
franjo-tudjman.html.
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February 25, 1994,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/02/26/us-prevails-on-
croatia/1d15406a-7756-45fe-8359-a8298b28a232.

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Agreement,” US Institute of Peace, March 18, 1994,
https://usip.org/sites/default/files/file/resources/collections/peace_agreemen
ts/washagree_03011994.pdf.

[377] Owen, 327, 347–48.

[378] Staff, “Ratko Mladic jailed for life over Bosnia war genocide,” BBC,
November 22, 2017, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-42080090;
“Facts About Srebrenica,” International Criminal Tribunal for the Former
Yugoslavia (ICTY),
https://icty.org/x/file/Outreach/view_from_hague/jit_srebrenica_en.pdf.

[379] Gideon Greif, et al., “Concluding Report of the Commission of

Inquiry on Sufferings of All People in the Srebrenica Region Between 1992
and 1995,” 2020, https://incomfis-srebrenica.org/wp-
content/uploads/2021/07/Srebrenica%20Commission%20report%20-
%20English%20lan.pdf.

[380] Gideon Greif, et al., “Concluding Report of the Commission of

Inquiry on Sufferings of All People in the Srebrenica Region Between 1992
and 1995,” 2020, https://incomfis-srebrenica.org/wp-
content/uploads/2021/07/Srebrenica%20Commission%20report%20-
%20English%20lan.pdf.

[381] Seymour Hersh, “Overwhelming Force,” The New Yorker, May 14,
2000, https://newyorker.com/magazine/2000/05/22/overwhelming-force-2.
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[383] Maud S. Beelman, “Red Cross Says 8,000 People from Fallen Safe
Area Are Missing,” AP, September 14, 1995,
https://apnews.com/article/e819fee986982e076194b1b9b71524a8.

[384] John Pomfret, “Bosnian Soldiers Evade Serbs in Trudge to Safety,”

Washington Post, July 18, 1995,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/07/18/bosnian-soldiers-
evade-serbs-in-trudge-to-safety/4c0d6c5f-5fc8-45d2-ba4e-aeb34546e02e;
Michael Evans and Michael Kallenbach, “‘Missing’ Enclave Troops
Found,” London Times, August 2, 1995,
https://hansdevreij.com/2015/07/12/srebrenica-1995-missing-enclave-
troops-found.

[385] Staff, “Bosnia’s Srebrenica massacre 25 years on – in pictures,” BBC,

July 11, 2020, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-53346759.

[386] Staff, “Scenes from hell: 1995 Srebrenica genocide in photos,” AP,
July 10, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/massacres-ap-top-news-
international-news-europe-photography-
ec01765d17e8c27ead9c3f3ea6e6ca36.

[387] Toby Sterling, et al., “Ex-Bosnian Serb commander Mladic convicted

of genocide, gets life in prison,” Reuters, November 21, 2017,
https://reuters.com/article/us-warcrimes-mladic/ex-bosnian-serb-
commander-mladic-convicted-of-genocide-gets-life-in-prison-
idUSKBN1DL2WK.

[388] Anisa Sućeska, et al., “Srebrenica: Timeline of a Genocide,”

International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMTC), July 5,
2022, https://irmct.org/specials/srebrenica/timeline/en.

[389] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[390] Staff, “US Knew About Srebrenica Weeks in Advance,” De

Gelderlander, October 13, 1995, Cited in Wiebes; Staff, “Karremans’
Alarm for the Enclave Was Ignored,” De Volkskrant, July 12, 2000. Cited in
Wiebes.

[391] Florence Hartmann and Ed Vulliamy, “How Britain and the US

decided to abandon Srebrenica to its fate,” Guardian, July 4, 2015,
https://theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/04/how-britain-and-us-abandoned-
srebrenica-massacre-1995.

[392] Mark Danner, “Bosnia: The Great Betrayal,” New York Review of
Books, March 26, 1998, https://nybooks.com/articles/1998/03/26/bosnia-
the-great-betrayal.

[393] Ola Flyum and David Hebditch, Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed, 2011,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FvqHWS_4AuM.
[394] Carl Bildt, Peace Journey: The Struggle for Peace in Bosnia
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolsom, 1998), 57.

[395] Staff, “Memorial service for 158 Serbs, of whom were murdered on
Christmas day in 1993,” The Srpska Times, January 6, 2016,
https://thesrpskatimes.com/memorial-service-for-158-serbs-of-whom-were-
murdered-on-christmas-day-in-1993; Bill Schiller, “Fearsome Muslim
warlord eludes Bosnian Serb forces,” Toronto Star, July 16, 1995,
http://emperors-clothes.com/analysis/oric.htm; John Pomfret, “Weapons,
Cash and Chaos Lend Clout to Srebrenica’s Tough Guy,” Washington Post,
February 16, 1994,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/02/16/weapons-cash-and-
chaos-lend-clout-to-srebrenicas-tough-guy/f15d65af-356b-423b-a6cd-
9ef36cb5b557; Ola Flyum and David Hebditch, Srebrenica: A Town
Betrayed, 2011, https://youtube.com/watch?v=FvqHWS_4AuM; Cees
Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background, consequences and
analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,” Part 1, Chapter 5, Section 5,
Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April 10, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140508142039/http://publications.niod.knaw
.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf; Kohlmann, 136; Stephen
Kinzer, “Bosnian Muslim Troops Evade U.N. Force to Raid Serb Village,”
New York Times, June 27, 1995,
https://nytimes.com/1995/06/27/world/bosnian-muslim-troops-evade-un-
force-to-raid-serb-village.html.

[396] Szamuely, 305–10.

[397] Szamuely, 309.

[398] Ola Flyum and David Hebditch, Srebrenica: A Town Betrayed, 2011,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FvqHWS_4AuM.

[399] James Risen and Doyle McManus, “US OKd Iranian Arms for
Bosnia, Officials Say,” Los Angeles Times, April 5, 1996,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-04-05-mn-55275-story.html; See
below.

[400] Haris Silajdzic, Mate Granic, et al., “Framework Agreement for the
Federation (Washington Agreement or Contact Group Plan),” Peace
Agreements Database, March 1, 1994,
https://peaceagreements.org/view/608.

[401] Staff, “Croatia: Impunity for abuses committed during ‘Operation

storm,’ And the denial of the right of refugees to return to the Krajina,”
Human Rights Watch, August 1996,
https://hrw.org/reports/1996/Croatia.htm; Peter Beaumont and Ed Vulliamy,
“Guns secret set to haunt US,” Guardian, July 7, 2001,
https://theguardian.com/world/2001/jul/08/warcrimes.balkans1.

[402] Sven Milekic, “The Contested History of Croatia’s Operation Flash,”

Balkan Transitional Justice, May 1, 2015,
https://balkaninsight.com/2015/05/01/operation-flash-two-sides-of-medal.

[403] Szamuely, 246–47; Owen, 338–43.

[404] Roger Cohen, “Rebel Serbs Shell Croatian Capital,” New York Times,
May 3, 1995, https://nytimes.com/1995/05/03/world/rebel-serbs-shell-
croatian-capital.html.

[405] Zimmermann, x, xii.

[406] Roger Cohen, “Rebel Serbs Shell Croatian Capital,” New York Times,
May 3, 1995, https://nytimes.com/1995/05/03/world/rebel-serbs-shell-
croatian-capital.html.

[407] Chris Hedges, “Fog of War – Coping With the Truth About Friend
and Foe; Victims Not Quite Innocent,” New York Times, March 28, 1999,
https://nytimes.com/1999/03/28/weekinreview/world-fog-war-coping-with-
truth-about-friend-foe-victims-not-quite-innocent.html.

[408] Richard Holbrooke, To End a War: The Conflict in Yugoslavia (New

York: Modern Library, 1999), 73.

[409] William D. Montalbano, “Croats Claim Big Advances; Serbs Deny

It,” Los Angeles Times, August 5, 1995, https://latimes.com/archives/la-
xpm-1995-08-05-mn-31691-story.html.

[410] Bill Clinton, My Life (New York: Knopf, 2004), 667.

[411] James Rupert, “Croatia Launches Invasion of Region Held by Serb

Rebels,” Washington Post, August 5, 1995,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/08/05/croatia-launches-
invasion-of-region-held-by-serb-rebels/b19eb52c-64fd-4325-9dd8-
81fff9db8f18.

[412] Raymond Bonner, “In Broad Attack, Croatia Trying to Dislodge

Serbs,” New York Times, August 5, 1995,
https://nytimes.com/1995/08/05/world/conflict-balkans-overview-broad-
attack-croatia-trying-dislodge-serbs.html.

[413] Szamuely, 123.

[414] Anja Vladisavljevic and Milica Stojanovic, “Court Records Reveal

Croatian Units’ Role in Operation Storm Killings,” Balkan Transitional
Justice, August 5, 2020, https://balkaninsight.com/2020/08/05/court-
records-reveal-croatian-units-role-in-operation-storm-killings.

[415] Nemanja Rujevic, “The crimes of others,” DW, March 8, 2015,

https://dw.com/en/anniversary-of-operation-storm-the-crimes-others-
committed/a-18624692.

[416] Staff, “A shadow on Croatia’s future: Continuing impunity for war

crimes and crimes against humanity,” Amnesty International, December 13,
2004, https://amnesty.org/en/wp-
content/uploads/2021/09/eur640052004en.pdf.

[417] Gibbs, 163; Steven Burg and Paul Shoup, War in Bosnia-Herzegovina
(London: Routledge, 2000), 331–33.
[418] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,
consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area,” Appendix II, Chapter
8, Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April 10, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140508142039/http://publications.niod.knaw
.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf.

[419] Ken Silverstein, Private Warriors (London: Verso, 2000), 172.

[420] Leslie Wayne, “America’s For-Profit Secret Army,” New York Times,
October 13, 2002, https://nytimes.com/2002/10/13/business/america-s-for-
profit-secret-army.html.

[421] Ivo Pukanic, “Thrilled with Operation Flash, President Clinton gave
the go ahead for Operation Storm,” Nacional, May 24, 2005,
https://cryptome.org/us-op-storm.htm.

[422] Dan Hebditch, “Allies and Lies,” BBC, June 22, 2001,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/correspondent/1390536.stm.

[423] James Rupert, “Croatia Launches Invasion of Region Held by Serb

Rebels,” Washington Post, August 5, 1995,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/08/05/croatia-launches-
invasion-of-region-held-by-serb-rebels/b19eb52c-64fd-4325-9dd8-
81fff9db8f18; Szamuely, 268; George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The
Avoidable War, 1999, https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[424] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.
[425] Roger Cohen, “US Cooling Ties to Croatia After Winking at Its
Buildup,” New York Times, October 28, 1995,
https://nytimes.com/1995/10/28/world/us-cooling-ties-to-croatia-after-
winking-at-its-buildup.html.

[426] Szamuely, 270–71.

[427] Raymond Bonner, “War Crimes Panel Finds Croat Troops ‘Cleansed’
the Serbs,” New York Times, March 21, 1999,
https://nytimes.com/1999/03/21/world/war-crimes-panel-finds-croat-troops-
cleansed-the-serbs.html.

[428] Gibbs, 154–55; Tim Ripley, Operation Deliberate Force: The UN and
NATO Campaign in Bosnia 1995 (Lancaster: Centre for Defence and
International Security Studies, 1999), 316.

[429] Kohlmann, 125–40.

[430] Charles G. Boyd, “Making Peace with the Guilty,” Foreign Affairs,
September/October 1995, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/europe/1995-
09-01/making-peace-guilty.

[431] Leonard Doyle, “Muslims ‘slaughter their own people’: Bosnia bread
queue massacre was propaganda ploy, UN told,” Independent, August 21,
1992, https://independent.co.uk/news/muslims-slaughter-their-own-people-
bosnia-bread-queue-massacre-was-propaganda-ploy-un-told-1541801.html;
George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.
[432] Staff, “Senior official admits to secret UN report on Sarajevo
massacre,” Deutsche Presse-Agentur, June 6, 1996, https://swprs.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/12/dpa_un-report-sarajevo_1996.pdf; David Binder,
“Bosnia’s Bombers,” The Nation, October 2, 1995, https://archive.is/NL7bt;
Shindler, 186; “Russian Disputes UN Report on Shelling,” AP, September
4, 1995.

[433] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area, Appendix II:
Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992–1995, The Role of the Intelligence
and Security Services,” Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April
10, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140508142039/http://publications.niod.knaw
.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf.

[434] Robert J. Allen, “Intelligence Support for Peace Operations,” in

Pickert, Intelligence, 114–15.

[435] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area, Appendix II:
Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992–1995, The Role of the Intelligence
and Security Services,” Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April
10, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140508142039/http://publications.niod.knaw
.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf.
[436] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[437] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[438] Owen, 279–81.

[439] Szamuely, 204–06; Zimmermann, 227.

[440] Owen, 112.

[441] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[442] Kit Klarenberg and Tom Secker, “Declassified Intelligence Files

Expose Inconvenient Truths of Bosnian War,” Grayzone, December 30,
2022, https://thegrayzone.com/2022/12/30/declassified-intelligence-files-
bosnian-war; “Canadian Intelligence Documents Trove,” Grayzone,
https://thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/1F-Copy.pdf.

[443] Kit Klarenberg and Tom Secker, “Declassified Intelligence Files

Expose Inconvenient Truths of Bosnian War,” Grayzone, December 30,
2022, https://thegrayzone.com/2022/12/30/declassified-intelligence-files-
bosnian-war; “Canadian Intelligence Documents Trove,” Grayzone,
https://thegrayzone.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/1F-Copy.pdf.

[444] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.
[445] Mike O’Connor, “Investigation Concludes Bosnian Government
Snipers Shot at Civilians,” New York Times, August 1, 1995,
https://nytimes.com/1995/08/01/world/conflict-balkans-sarajevo-
investigation-concludes-bosnian-government-snipers.html.

[446] Martin Bell, “Sarajevo: Another market massacre,” BBC, August 28,
1995, https://bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-17402772.

[447] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area, Appendix II:
Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992–1995, The Role of the Intelligence
and Security Services,” Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April
10, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140508142039/http://publications.niod.knaw
.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf.

[448] John Sray, “Selling the Bosnian Myth,” US Army Foreign Military
Studies Office, October 1995,
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA305349.pdf.

[449] Cees Wiebes, et al., “Srebrenica: Reconstruction, background,

consequences and analyses of the fall of a ‘safe’ area, Appendix II:
Intelligence and the War in Bosnia 1992–1995, The Role of the Intelligence
and Security Services,” Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, April
10, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140508142039/http://publications.niod.knaw
.nl/publications/srebrenicareportniod_en.pdf.
[450] David Binder, “Bosnia’s Bombers,” The Nation, October 2, 1995,
https://archive.is/NL7bt.

[451] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[452] Hugh McManners, “Serbs ‘Not Guilty’ of Massacre,” Sunday Times,

October 1, 1995, https://swprs.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/sunday-
times_serbs-not-guilty-of-massacre_1995.pdf.

[453] Chollet, 27.

[454] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[455] Rick Atkinson, “Air Assault Set Stage for Broader Role,” Washington
Post, November 15, 1995,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/11/15/air-assault-set-
stage-for-broader-role/6733b72a-0a4c-4960-832d-29163e718573.

[456] Joseph Stromberg, “Truman, Treaties, and the Bricker Amendment,”

Antiwar.com, April 19, 2003, https://antiwar.com/stromberg/s041903.html.

[457] Kevin Fedarko, “Bringing the Serbs to Heel,” Time, September 11,
1995,
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,983401,00.html.

[458] Dan Hebditch, “Allies and Lies,” BBC, June 22, 2001,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/correspondent/1390536.stm.
[459] “General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and
Herzegovina (Dayton Peace Agreement),” Peace Agreements Database,
November 21, 1995, https://peaceagreements.org/view/389.

[460] Szamuely, 238–40.

[461] Zimmermann, 190, 232.

[462] Justin Raimondo, Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against US
Intervention in the Balkans (Burlingame: America First Publishing
Committee, 1996), 7–8.

[463] Chollet, 200; Asmus, 124–25; Goldgeier, 98, 121; Gibbs, 169.

[464] Staff, “Bosnia and Herzegovina: NATO ends SFOR mission NATO,”
Relief Web, December 2, 2004, https://reliefweb.int/report/bosnia-and-
herzegovina/bosnia-and-herzegovina-nato-ends-sfor-mission.

[465] Holbrooke, 358–59.

[466] Asmus, 124–25.

[467] Asmus, 100.

[468] Burns, 106.

[469] Asmus, 103–04.

[470] Paul E. Gallis, “Kosovo: Lessons Learned from Operation Allied

Force,” Congressional Research Service, November 19, 1999,
https://everycrsreport.com/files/19991119_RL30374_4267689feef813e6616
222d1c.c9e743750e93d91.pdf.

[471] “Yeltsin Sees Threat in NATO Enlargement,” Jamestown Foundation

Monitor, Vol. 1, No. 91 (September 8, 1995),
https://jamestown.org/program/yeltsin-sees-war-threat-in-nato-enlargement.

[472] Burns, 105.

[473] Thomas Donnelly, et al., “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy,

Forces and Resources For a New Century,” Project for a New American
Century, September 2000, https://scotthorton.org/pnac/rebuilding-americas-
defenses.

[474] Staff Sgt. Jim Greenhill, “Turnover of Eagle Base symbolizes success
in the Balkans,” National Guard Bureau, July 2, 2007,
https://nationalguard.mil/News/Article/572997/turnover-of-eagle-base-
symbolizes-success-in-the-balkans.

[475] “Peace support operations in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1995–2004),”

NATO, April 11, 2023, https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_52122.htm.

[476] Douglas Jehl, “Bennett Would Limit Rights in War on Drugs,” Los
Angeles Times, March 3, 1989, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-
03-03-mn-238-story.html.

[477] Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, “Bill Bennett Finally Turns
Republican,” Washington Post, June 26, 1986,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/06/27/bill-bennett-finally-
turns-republican/17bdfe0c-9490-44b5-80db-17e9744e0132.

[478] David Tell, “Bosnia: The Republican Challenge,” Weekly Standard,

December 11, 1995, https://washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-
standard/bosnia.

[479] Kohlmann, 152, 172.

[480] Osama bin Laden, “Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans

Occupying the Land of the Two Holiest Sites,” August 23, 1996,
https://ctc.westpoint.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Declaration-of-Jihad-
against-the-Americans-Occupying-the-Land-of-the-Two-Holiest-Sites-
Translation.pdf.

[481] Kohlmann, 167, 185–209.

[482] Kohlmann, 163.

[483] Kohlmann, 218–19.

[484] Gibbs, 168; Bildt, 196–98.

[485] Interview with author, Ted Galen Carpenter, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, April 17, 2023, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/4-14-23-ted-
galen-carpenter-on-the-news-medias-role-in-the-american-empire.

[486] Staff, “Bosnia and Herzegovina: NATO ends SFOR mission,” NATO,
December 2, 2004, https://reliefweb.int/report/bosnia-and-
herzegovina/bosnia-and-herzegovina-nato-ends-sfor-mission.

[487] See Chapter Six.

[488] Janine R. Wedel, “Clique-Run Organizations and US Economic Aid:

An Institutional Analysis,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet
Democratization, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Fall 1996),
https://demokratizatsiya.pub/archives/04-4_wedel.pdf.

[489] Janine R. Wedel, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia,” The Nation, May
14, 1998, https://thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russia.

[490] “Declassified Documents concerning Gore-Chernomyrdin

Commission,” Clinton Digital Library,
https://clinton.presidentiallibraries.us/items/show/36597.

[491] Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the
Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise
and Failed the Russian People,” US House of Representatives Speaker’s
Advisory Group on Russia, September 2000,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf.

[492] Hobart Rowan, “Treasury’s Summers Becomes a Power,” Washington

Post, June 26, 1993,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1993/06/27/treasurys-
summers-becomes-a-power/f74a4db2-c143-48d6-bc33-99a2561ad83b.
[493] James M. Goldgeier and Michael McFaul, Power and Purpose: US
Policy Toward Russia After the Cold War (Washington: Brookings
Institution Press, 2003), 71.

[494] Sarotte, 139; Goldgeier and McFaul, 71–72.

[495] James Powell, Wilson’s War: How Woodrow Wilson’s Great Blunder
Led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II (New York: Forum Books,
2007).

[496] Paul Klebnikov, Godfather of the Kremlin: The Decline of Russia in

the Age of Gangster Capitalism (Orland: Harcourt, 2000), 78.

[497] Anchal Vohra, “Latvia Is Going on Offense Against Russian Culture,”

Foreign Policy, March 21, 2023,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/21/latvia-is-going-on-offense-against-
russian-culture; Lukas Degutis, “Why Latvia is expelling its Russian
speakers,” The Spectator, March 2, 2024,
https://spectator.co.uk/article/why-latvia-is-expelling-its-russian-speakers.

[498] Frank Gardner, “Narva: The Estonian border city where Nato and the
EU meet Russia,” BBC, May 25, 2022, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-
61555691.

[499] John Quigley, “I led talks on Donbas and Crimea in the 90s. Here’s
how the war should end,” Responsible Statecraft, May 9, 2022,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/05/09/i-led-talks-on-the-donbas-and-
crimea-in-the-1990s-heres-how-the-war-should-end.
[500] “Kazakhstan – Country Summary,” CIA World Factbook,
https://cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/kazakhstan/summaries.

[501] Steele, 155.

[502] Steele, 217.

[503] Mehmet Oğuzhan Tulun, “Russification Policies Imposed on the

Baltic People by the Russian Empire and Soviet Union,” DergiPark
Akademik, January 25, 2012, https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-
file/701004.

[504] Robert Zoellick, “Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Gorbachev,” C-

SPAN, November 9, 2017, https://c-span.org/video/?436789-5/reagan-
george-hw-bush-gorbachev; John Vinocur, “For NATO and Russia, A
Landmark Charter,” International Herald Tribune, May 28, 1997,
https://nytimes.com/1997/05/28/IHT-for-nato-and-russia-a-landmark-
charter.html.

[505] “Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and

James Baker in Moscow,” US State Department, February 9, 1990,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16116-document-05-memorandum-
conversation-between.

[506] Klebnikov, 50.

[507] Klebnikov, 51.

[508] Anne Williamson, Unpublished Manuscript.

[509] Steele, 296.

[510] Janine R. Wedel, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia,” The Nation, May
14, 1998, https://thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russia.

[511] Klebnikov, 103–04.

[512] Steele, 38–40.

[513] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like to
Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC, October
13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0.

[514] David McClintick, “How Harvard Lost Russia,” Institutional

Investor, January 12, 2006,
https://institutionalinvestor.com/article/2btfpiwkwid6fq6qrokcg/home/how-
harvard-lost-russia.

[515] Zimmermann, 48–49.

[516] Steele, 299–301.

[517] Murray N. Rothbard, “A Radical Prescription for the Socialist Bloc,”

The Free Market, Vol. 8, No. 3 (March 1990),
https://mises.org/library/radical-prescription-socialist-bloc.

[518] Staff, “Foreign News: Engineer of a Miracle,” Time, October 28,

1957, https://time.com/archive/6612360/foreign-news-engineer-of-a-
miracle; Ludwig Erhard, Prosperity Through Competition (New York:
Frederick A. Praeger books, 1958),
https://mises.org/library/book/prosperity-through-competition.

[519] Klebnikov, 30–31.

[520] Klebnikov, 5, 80.

[521] Steele, 298–99.

[522] Anne Williamson, Unpublished Manuscript.

[523] Anne Williamson, “Russia: Don’t Cry for Yukos,” Ludwig von Mises
Institute, February 18, 2005, https://mises.org/podcasts/austrian-economics-
and-financial-markets/russia-dont-cry-yukos.

[524] Anne Williamson, “Russia’s Fiscal Whistleblower,” Mother Jones,

June 16, 1998, https://motherjones.com/politics/1998/06/russias-fiscal-
whistleblower.

[525] Carey Goldberg, “Huge Fuel Price Boosts Next for Russians,” Los
Angeles Times, May 19, 1992, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-
05-19-mn-237-story.html.

[526] Steele, 310–23.

[527] Anne Williamson, “Russia’s Fiscal Whistleblower,” Mother Jones,

June 16, 1998, https://motherjones.com/politics/1998/06/russias-fiscal-
whistleblower.
[528] Dan Josefsson, “Shock Therapy: The Art of Ruining a Country,”
Torsdag, April 1, 1999,
https://web.archive.org/web/20081121100700/http://josefsson.net/artikelark
iv/51-shock-therapy-the-art-of-ruining-a-country.html.

[529] “US Policy Toward Russia, Part II: Corruption in the Russian
Government,” US House of Representatives, October 7, 1999,
https://govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-106hhrg62963/html/CHRG-
106hhrg62963.htm.

[530] Dan Josefsson, “Shock Therapy: The Art of Ruining a Country,”

Torsdag, April 1, 1999,
https://web.archive.org/web/20081121100700/http://josefsson.net/artikelark
iv/51-shock-therapy-the-art-of-ruining-a-country.html.

[531] Sherry Jones, “Return of the Czar,” PBS Frontline, May 9, 2000,
https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/etc/script.html.

[532] Klebnikov, 5.

[533] Klebnikov, 127–28.

[534] Klebnikov, 128.

[535] Murray N. Rothbard, “How and How Not to Desocialize,” The

Review of Austrian Economics, Vol. 6, No. 1 (1992), 65–77,
https://cdn.mises.org/rae6_1_2_2.pdf.
[536] Murray N. Rothbard, “A Radical Prescription for the Socialist Bloc,”
The Free Market, Vol. 8, No. 3 (March 1990),
https://mises.org/library/radical-prescription-socialist-bloc.

[537] Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the
Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise
and Failed the Russian People,” US House of Representatives Speaker’s
Advisory Group on Russia, September 2000,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf.

[538] Dan Josefsson, “Shock Therapy: The Art of Ruining a Country,”

Torsdag, April 1, 1999,
https://web.archive.org/web/20081121100700/http://josefsson.net/artikelark
iv/51-shock-therapy-the-art-of-ruining-a-country.html.

[539] James K. Galbraith, “Shock Without Therapy,” The American

Prospect, August 12, 2002, https://prospect.org/features/shock-without-
therapy.

[540] Burton W. Folsom Jr., New Deal or Raw Deal?: How FDR’s
Economic Legacy Has Damaged America (New York: Threshold Editions,
2009).

[541] Anne Williamson, Unpublished Manuscript.

[542] Anne Williamson, Unpublished Manuscript.

[543] Anne Williamson, “Russia: Don’t Cry for Yukos,” Ludwig von Mises
Institute, February 18, 2005, https://mises.org/podcasts/austrian-economics-
and-financial-markets/russia-dont-cry-yukos.

[544] Janine R. Wedel, “Clique-Run Organizations and US Economic Aid:

An Institutional Analysis,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet
Democratization, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Fall 1996),
https://demokratizatsiya.pub/archives/04-4_wedel.pdf.

[545] James Risen, “Gore Rejected CIA Evidence of Russian Corruption,”

New York Times, November 23, 1998,
https://nytimes.com/1998/11/23/world/gore-rejected-cia-evidence-of-
russian-corruption.html.

[546] “Text: Tim Russert’s Interview With Vice President Gore,” NBC
News, July 16, 2000, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/onpolitics/elections/goretext071600.htm.

[547] Klebnikov, 134–35.

[548] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like to
Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC, October
13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0; Klebnikov, 114.

[549] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like to
Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC, October
13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0.
[550] David McClintick, “How Harvard Lost Russia,” Institutional
Investor, January 12, 2006,
https://institutionalinvestor.com/article/2btfpiwkwid6fq6qrokcg/home/how-
harvard-lost-russia.

[551] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like to
Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC, October
13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0.

[552] Klebnikov, 27.

[553] Steele, 359–63.

[554] David McClintick, “How Harvard Lost Russia,” Institutional

Investor, January 12, 2006,
https://institutionalinvestor.com/article/2btfpiwkwid6fq6qrokcg/home/how-
harvard-lost-russia.

[555] Jeffrey D. Sachs, “What I did in Russia,” JeffSachs.org, March 12,

2012,
http://acamedia.info/politics/ukraine/jeffrey_sachs/What_I_did_in_Russia.p
df.

[556] Jeffrey D. Sachs, “What I did in Russia,” JeffSachs.org, March 12,

2012,
http://acamedia.info/politics/ukraine/jeffrey_sachs/What_I_did_in_Russia.p
df.
[557] Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Russia Needs Real Aid Now,” Washington Post,
December 18, 1992,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1992/12/18/russia-needs-real-
aid-now/9b7eecbe-1c15-4253-a486-cb10cdd647ba.

[558] Murray N. Rothbard, What Has Government Done to Our Money?

(Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1963),
https://mises.org/library/book/what-has-government-done-our-money.

[559] Jeffrey Sachs and David Lipton, “Russia on the brink,” Financial
Times, October 16, 1992, https://jeffsachs.org/newspaper-
articles/25w2h3ywgysty47ezllaya8ycs4cny; Peter Passell, “Dr. Jeffrey
Sachs, Shock Therapist,” New York Times, June 27, 1993,
https://nytimes.com/1993/06/27/magazine/dr-jeffrey-sachs-shock-
therapist.html.

[560] Anders Åslund, “Lessons from the Collapse of the Ruble Zone,” IFO
Institute, December 2016, https://ifo.de/DocDL/forum-2016-4-aslund-
ruble-zone-collapse-december.pdf.

[561] Jeffrey D. Sachs, “What I did in Russia,” JeffSachs.org, March 12,

2012,
http://acamedia.info/politics/ukraine/jeffrey_sachs/What_I_did_in_Russia.p
df.

[562] Jeffrey D. Sachs, “What I did in Russia,” JeffSachs.org, March 12,

2012,
http://acamedia.info/politics/ukraine/jeffrey_sachs/What_I_did_in_Russia.p
df.

[563] Jeffrey D. Sachs, “Good decisions on economy needed to secure

Russia’s future,” Taipei Times, February 24, 2014,
https://taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2014/02/24/2003584208;
Jeffrey Sachs, Interview with Tyler Cowen, April 9, 2015,
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/jeffrey-sachs.

[564] Steven Erlanger, “2 Western Economists Quit Russia Posts,” New

York Times, January 22, 1994, https://nytimes.com/1994/01/22/world/2-
western-economists-quit-russia-posts.html.

[565] Jeff Hayes, “Russian Privatization and Oligarchs,” Facts and Details,
May 2016,
https://factsanddetails.com/russia/Economics_Business_Agriculture/sub9_7
b/entry-5169.html.

[566] Peter J. Boettke, “Yeltsin’s Shock Therapy Applied Too Little

Voltage,” Orange County Register, January 31, 1994,
https://web.archive.org/web/20100627175313/https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/
pboettke/pubs/03%20Journal%20Articles/1993/yeltsin_shock_therapy.pdf.

[567] Peter J. Boettke, “Yeltsin’s Shock Therapy Applied Too Little

Voltage,” Orange County Register, January 31, 1994,
https://web.archive.org/web/20100627175313/https://econfaculty.gmu.edu/
pboettke/pubs/03%20Journal%20Articles/1993/yeltsin_shock_therapy.pdf.
[568] Peter J. Boettke, “Promises Made and Promises Broken in the
Russian Transition,” Constitutional Political Economy, Vol. 9, No. 2
(1998), 127–36, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1531111.

[569] Peter J. Boettke, “Promises Made and Promises Broken in the

Russian Transition,” Constitutional Political Economy, Vol. 9, No. 2
(1998), 127–36, https://ssrn.com/abstract=1531111.

[570] Peter J. Boettke, “The Russian Crisis: Perils and Prospects for Post-
Soviet Transition,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol.
58, No. 3 (1999), 371–84, http://jstor.org/stable/3487768.

[571] Michael Kelly, “Clinton Says He’s Not Leaning Left but Taking a
New ‘Third Way,’” New York Times, September 26, 1992,
https://nytimes.com/1992/09/26/us/1992-campaign-democrats-clinton-says-
he-s-not-leaning-left-but-taking-new-third.html; Thomas B. Edsall,
“Clinton and Blair Envision a ‘Third Way’ International Movement,”
Washington Post, June 27, 1998,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/06/28/clinton-and-blair-
envision-a-third-way-international-movement/0bc00486-bd6d-4da4-a970-
5255d7aa25d8.

[572] Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the
Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise
and Failed the Russian People,” US House of Representatives Speaker’s
Advisory Group on Russia, September 2000,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf.
[573] Steele, 282.

[574] Steele, 298–99.

[575] Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “Yeltsin Shelled Russian

Parliament 30 Years Ago – US Praised ‘Superb Handling,’” National
Security Archive, October 4, 2023, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-
book/russia-programs/2023-10-04/yeltsin-shelled-russian-parliament-30-
years-ago-us-praised.

[576] “CNN Coverage of Crisis in Moscow,” CNN, October 4, 1993,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=veuAEUwqNg8.

[577] “Yeltsin Under Siege – The October 1993 Constitutional Crisis,”

ADST, October 2, 2014, https://adst.org/2014/10/yeltsin-under-siege-the-
october-1993-constitutional-crisis.

[578] Steele, 384.

[579] Svetlana Savranskaya and Tom Blanton, “Yeltsin Shelled Russian

Parliament 30 Years Ago – US Praised ‘Superb Handling,’” National
Security Archive, October 4, 2023, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-
book/russia-programs/2023-10-04/yeltsin-shelled-russian-parliament-30-
years-ago-us-praised.

[580] James Bennet, “True to Form, Clinton Shifts Energies Back To US

Focus,” New York Times, July 5, 1998,
https://nytimes.com/1998/07/05/us/true-to-form-clinton-shifts-energies-
back-to-us-focus.html.

[581] Interview of Thomas Graham, PBS Frontline, May 2000,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/interviews/graham.html.

[582] Janine R. Wedel, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia,” The Nation, May
14, 1998, https://thenation.com/article/world/harvard-boys-do-russia.

[583] Interview of E. Wayne Merry, PBS Frontline, May 2000,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/interviews/merry.html.

[584] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like to
Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC, October
13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0.

[585] Interview of E. Wayne Merry, PBS Frontline, May 2000,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/interviews/merry.html.

[586] Interview of E. Wayne Merry, PBS Frontline, May 2000,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/interviews/merry.html.

[587] Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the
Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise
and Failed the Russian People,” US House of Representatives Speaker’s
Advisory Group on Russia, September 2000,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf.

[588] Anne Williamson, Unpublished Manuscript.

[589] Interview of Thomas Graham, PBS Frontline, May 2000,
https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/interviews/graham.html.

[590] Graham T. Allison and Matthew Lantz, “Assessing Russia’s

Democratic Presidential Election,” Belfer Center, March 1997,
https://belfercenter.org/publication/assessing-russias-democratic-
presidential-election.

[591] George Soros, “Who Lost Russia?” New York Review of Books, April
13, 2000, https://nybooks.com/articles/2000/04/13/who-lost-russia.

[592] Matt Taibbi, “Putin the Apostate,” Racket News, February 28, 2022,
https://racket.news/p/putin-the-apostate; Chrystia Freeland, “To Russia with
love,” New Statesman, June 19, 2000,
https://newstatesman.com/politics/2000/06/to-russia-with-love; Klebnikov,
212–15.

[593] Klebnikov, 115.

[594] Klebnikov, 220–21.

[595] Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the
Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise
and Failed the Russian People,” US House of Representatives Speaker’s
Advisory Group on Russia, September 2000,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf.
[596] Chris Kaspar De Ploeg, Ukraine in the Crossfire (Atlanta: Clarity
Press, 2017), 301.

[597] Sarotte, 262.

[598] Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the
Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise
and Failed the Russian People,” US House of Representatives Speaker’s
Advisory Group on Russia, September 2000,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf.

[599] Michael Kramer, “Yanks to the Rescue,” Time, July 15, 1996,
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,984833,00.html.

[600] Eleanor Randolph, “Americans Claim Role in Yeltsin Win,” Los

Angeles Times, July 9, 1996, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-07-
09-mn-22423-story.html.

[601] Michael Kramer, “Yanks to the Rescue,” Time, July 15, 1996,
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,984833,00.html.

[602] See Chapter Five.

[603] Klebnikov, 211.

[604] Chrystia Freeland, et al., “Moscow’s Group of Seven,” Financial

Times, November 1, 1996, https://archive.is/qmAA8.
[605] Interview of Donald Jensen, PBS Frontline, May 2000,
https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/interviews/jensen.html.

[606] Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the
Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise
and Failed the Russian People,” US House of Representatives Speaker’s
Advisory Group on Russia, September 2000,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf.

[607] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like to
Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC, October
13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0; Klebnikov, 236–
37.

[608] Klebnikov, 224–25.

[609] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like to
Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC, October
13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0; Graham T. Allison
and Matthew Lantz, “Assessing Russia’s Democratic Presidential Election,”
Belfer Center, March 1997, https://belfercenter.org/publication/assessing-
russias-democratic-presidential-election.

[610] Klebnikov, 218.

[611] Alexander Gentelev, The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchs,
January 3, 2006, https://youtube.com/watch?v=oay8GsSxU4Y.
[612] Alexander Gentelev, The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchs,
January 3, 2006, https://youtube.com/watch?v=oay8GsSxU4Y.

[613] Klebnikov, 21.

[614] Klebnikov, 119.

[615] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like to
Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC, October
13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0; Klebnikov, 236–
37.

[616] Alexander Gentelev, The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchs,
January 3, 2006, https://youtube.com/watch?v=oay8GsSxU4Y.

[617] Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the
Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise
and Failed the Russian People,” US House of Representatives Speaker’s
Advisory Group on Russia, September 2000,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf; Klebnikov, 204–08.

[618] Klebnikov, 210.

[619] Interview of Boris Fyodorov, PBS Frontline, May 2000,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/interviews/fyodorov.htm
l.

[620] Interview of Donald Jensen, PBS Frontline, May 2000,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/interviews/jensen.html.
[621] Klebnikov, 208–10.

[622] Klebnikov, 253.

[623] Chrystia Freeland, et al., “Moscow’s Group of Seven,” Financial

Times, November 1, 1996, https://archive.is/qmAA8.

[624] Alexander Gentelev, The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchs,
January 3, 2006, https://youtube.com/watch?v=oay8GsSxU4Y.

[625] Gary Dempsey, “Mafia Capitalism or Red Legacy?” Cato Institute,

January 7, 1998, https://cato.org/commentary/mafia-capitalism-or-red-
legacy.

[626] Interview of Donald Jensen, PBS Frontline, May 2000,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/interviews/jensen.html.

[627] Sherry Jones, “Return of the Czar,” PBS Frontline, May 9, 2000,
https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/etc/script.html.

[628] Klebnikov, 269.

[629] Robert I. Friedman, “The Money Plane,” New York magazine,

January 22, 1996,
https://swisscorruption.info/royalties/MoneyPlane_english.pdf.

[630] Ben Aris, “Russia’s 1998 crisis redux,” BNE IntelliNews, August 20,
2018, https://intellinews.com/moscow-blog-russia-s-1998-crisis-redux-
147140.
[631] Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the
Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise
and Failed the Russian People,” US House of Representatives Speaker’s
Advisory Group on Russia, September 2000,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf.

[632] Richard C. Paddock, “Russia Lied to Get Loans, Says Aide to

Yeltsin,” Los Angeles Times, September 9, 1998,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1998-sep-09-mn-21002-story.html.

[633] Klebnikov, 281.

[634] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like to
Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC, October
13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0.

[635] Richard C. Paddock, “Russia Plays Loose With IMF Billions,” Los
Angeles Times, September 24, 1998, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-
1998-sep-24-mn-26054-story.html.

[636] Richard C. Paddock, “Russia Plays Loose With IMF Billions,” Los
Angeles Times, September 24, 1998, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-
1998-sep-24-mn-26054-story.html.

[637] Raymond Bonner and Timothy L. O’Brien, “Activity at Bank Raises

Suspicions of Russian Mob Tie,” New York Times, August 19, 1999,
https://archive.www.nytimes.com/nytimes.com/library/world/global/081999
russians-launder.html.
[638] Klebnikov, 281–82.

[639] David McClintick, “How Harvard Lost Russia,” Institutional

Investor, January 12, 2006,
https://institutionalinvestor.com/article/2btfpiwkwid6fq6qrokcg/home/how-
harvard-lost-russia; Emma S. Mackinnon, “Harvard’s Dirty Hands,”
Harvard Crimson, October 23, 2002,
https://thecrimson.com/article/2002/10/23/harvards-dirty-hands-today-is-at.

[640] See Chapter Four.

[641] Peter J. Boettke, “The Russian Crisis: Perils and Prospects for Post-
Soviet Transition,” The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol.
58, No. 3 (1999), 371–84, http://jstor.org/stable/3487768.

[642] Steven Rosefielde, “Premature Deaths: Russia’s Radical Economic

Transition in Soviet Perspective,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 53, No. 8
(December 2001), 1159–176, https://jstor.org/stable/826265.

[643] Dan Josefsson, “Shock Therapy: The Art of Ruining a Country,”

Torsdag, April 1, 1999,
https://web.archive.org/web/20081121100700/http://josefsson.net/artikelark
iv/51-shock-therapy-the-art-of-ruining-a-country.html.

[644] Klebnikov, 5.

[645] Klebnikov, 103–05.

[646] David Satter, “Boris Yeltsin,” Wall Street Journal, April 24, 2007,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB117737318737979751.

[647] Christopher Davis, “The Health Sector: Illness, Medical Care and
Mortality,” in Russia’s Post-Communist Economy (London: Oxford
University Press, 2001), ed. Brigitte Granville and Peter Oppenheimer, 516.

[648] Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the
Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise
and Failed the Russian People,” US House of Representatives Speaker’s
Advisory Group on Russia, September 2000,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf.

[649] Klebnikov, 103–09.

[650] James K. Galbraith, “Shock without Therapy,” The American

Prospect, August 12, 2002, https://prospect.org/features/shock-without-
therapy.

[651] Staff, “Trans-Turkish pipeline deal signed,” BBC, November 18,

1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/526515.stm.

[652] Mark MacKinnon, The New Cold War: Revolutions, Rigged Elections
and Pipeline Politics in the Former Soviet Union (Toronto: Vintage Canada,
2008), 150. (Not to be confused with Mark McKinnon, the Republican
Party adviser.)
[653] “Testimony of Anne Williamson,” US House of Representatives
Committee on Banking and Financial Services, September 21, 1999,
https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/testimony-of-anne-williamson.

[654] Senator Joe Biden, “Speech on NATO Enlargement to the Atlantic

Council,” C-SPAN, June 20, 1996, https://c-span.org/video/?c5073373/user-
clip-joe-biden-russias-response-nato-expansion-baltics.

[655] See Chapter Six.

[656] Sarotte, 266, 270.

[657] Michael R. Gordon, “The Anatomy of a Misunderstanding,” New

York Times, May 25, 1997,
https://nytimes.com/1997/05/25/weekinreview/the-anatomy-of-a-
misunderstanding.html.

[658] “NATO-Russia Founding Act,” White House, May 15, 1997,

https://1997-2001.state.gov/regions/eur/fs_nato_whitehouse.html.

[659] Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the
Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise
and Failed the Russian People,” US House of Representatives Speaker’s
Advisory Group on Russia, September 2000,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2000_rpt/russias-road.pdf.

[660] Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, “NATO Expansion,” US

Senate Foreign Relations Committee, October 7, 1997, https://c-
span.org/video/?92584-1/nato-expansion.

[661] Zbigniew Brzezinski and Anthony Lake, “For a New World, a New
NATO,” New York Times, June 30, 1997,
https://nytimes.com/1997/06/30/opinion/for-a-new-world-a-new-nato.html.

[662] Alexey Pushkov, “Don’t Isolate Us: A Russian View of NATO

Expansion,” The National Interest, March 1, 1997,
https://nationalinterest.org/article/dont-isolate-us-a-russian-view-of-nato-
expansion-722; Once again, the author must note that this all could have
been worked out between European powers without US involvement, but
the contrast between the American and Russian governments’ positions is
what remains at issue.

[663] “Memorandum of Conversation, Clinton-Yeltsin Summit, Helsinki,

Finland, Subject: Morning Meeting with Russian President Yeltsin: NATO-
Russia, START, ABM/TMD,” White House, March 21, 1997,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32237-document-14-memorandum-
conversation-clinton-yeltsin-summit-helsinki-finland-subject.

[664] “Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Secretary of Defense

William Cohen Interview on NBC-TV Today,” July 9, 1997, https://1997-
2001.state.gov/statements/970709.html.

[665] Andrew Tully, “Albright Says Russia Still Concerned With NATO,”
RFERL, October 23, 2009,
https://rferl.org/a/Albright_Says_Russia_Still_Concerned_With_NATO/185
9178.html.

[666] Albright, 320.

[667] Olivier Knox and Caroline Anders, “Some Americans (and others) are
questioning Putin’s mental state,” Washington Post, February 28, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/28/some-americans-others-are-
questioning-putin-mental-state; Carl Bildt, “Why Putin’s gamble on
Ukraine is insane,” Washington Post, January 28, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/28/putin-gamble-ukraine-
russia; Ted Snider, “Six Things the Media Won’t Tell You About Ukraine,”
Antiwar.com, January 6, 2022,
https://original.antiwar.com/ted_snider/2022/01/05/six-things-the-media-
wont-tell-you-about-ukraine.

[668] Paul Sonne, et al., “US plans to discuss missile deployments with
Russia as part of effort to defuse Ukraine crisis,” Washington Post, January
8, 2022, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-russia-talks-
ukraine/2022/01/07/2fb5874e-6ff6-11ec-974b-d1c6de8b26b0_story.html.

[669] Goldgeier and McFaul, 204–05.

[670] Jonathan Masters, “Why NATO Has Become a Flash Point With
Russia in Ukraine,” Council on Foreign Relations, January 20, 2022,
https://cfr.org/backgrounder/why-nato-has-become-flash-point-russia-
ukraine.
[671] Frederick Kempe, “Brent Scowcroft on the Fall of the Berlin Wall,”
New Atlanticist, November 2, 2009, https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-
atlanticist/brent-scowcroft-on-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall.

[672] “Charter on a Distinctive Partnership between the North Atlantic

Treaty Organization and Ukraine,” NATO, July 9, 1997,
https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_25457.htm.

[673] Staff, “Russia Angry About NATO Exercise on Crimea,” BBC,

August 25, 1997,
https://bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/news/08/0825/ukraine.shtml.

[674] Carol J. Williams, “US-Ukraine Military Exercises Rub Russians the

Wrong Way,” Los Angeles Times, August 29, 1997,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-aug-29-mn-27057-story.html.

[675] “Memorandum of Conversation, Clinton-Yeltsin Summit, Helsinki,

Finland, Subject: Morning Meeting with Russian President Yeltsin: NATO-
Russia, START, ABM/TMD,” White House, March 21, 1997,
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32237-document-14-memorandum-
conversation-clinton-yeltsin-summit-helsinki-finland-subject.

[676] Brzezinski, 121.

[677] David Binder, “In Yugoslavia, Rising Ethnic Strife Brings Fears of
Worse Civil Conflict,” New York Times, November 1, 1987,
https://nytimes.com/1987/11/01/world/in-yugoslavia-rising-ethnic-strife-
brings-fears-of-worse-civil-conflict.html.
[678] Szamuely, 340; George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War,
1999, https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[679] Alex N. Dragnich and Slavko Todorovich, The Saga of Kosovo:

Focus on Serbian-Albanian Relations (Boulder: Eastern European
Monographs, 1984), 158.

[680] Gibbs, 175–77.

[681] “Speech of Slobodan Milosevic at Kosovo Polje,” April 24–25, 1987,

http://slobodan-milosevic.org/news/milosevic-1987-3-eng.htm; Tim Judah,
Kosovo: War and Revenge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 52–
53.

[682] David Binder, “In Yugoslavia, Rising Ethnic Strife Brings Fears of
Worse Civil Conflict,” New York Times, November 1, 1987,
https://nytimes.com/1987/11/01/world/in-yugoslavia-rising-ethnic-strife-
brings-fears-of-worse-civil-conflict.html.

[683] Gibbs, 177–78.

[684] Gibbs, 178–80.

[685] Szamuely, 49.

[686] Staff, “Albanians Reject Belgrade Conditions for Talks,” AFP, March
2, 1998, cited in Szamuely, 351.

[687] Owen, 80–81.

[688] Szamuely, 340.

[689] Szamuely, 339; Slocombe is the same guy who in a previous stint as
deputy secretary of defense for policy helped President Jimmy Carter’s
National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski come up with the plan to
support mujahideen fighters against the Communists in Afghanistan in
order to try to lure the USSR into “their own Vietnam,” in 1979 (Gates,
144–46) and helped later-Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas
Feith give the order to Viceroy Paul Bremer to disband the Iraqi army in
2003, a major turning point toward the creation of the broad-based Sunni
insurgency that killed more than 4,000 American troops in Iraq War II
(“Interview with Walter Slocombe,” PBS Frontline, October 26, 2004,
https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pentagon/interviews/slocombe.h
tml). It is nice to know he helped lie us into Kosovo too.

[690] “Transcript: Clinton justifies US involvement in Kosovo,” CNN, May

13, 1999,
https://cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/05/13/clinton.kosovo/transcrip
t.html; Tom Doggett, “Cohen Fears 100,000 Kosovo Men Killed by Serbs,”
Reuters, May 16, 1999, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/cohen051699.htm.

[691] Chris Hedges, “The World: Fog of War – Coping With the Truth
About Friend and Foe; Victims Not Quite Innocent,” New York Times,
March 28, 1999, https://nytimes.com/1999/03/28/weekinreview/world-fog-
war-coping-with-truth-about-friend-foe-victims-not-quite-innocent.html.
[692] Michel Chossudovsky, “Kosovo ‘Freedom Fighters’ Financed by
Organized Crime,” Peace Research 31, No. 2 (1999), 29–42.
http://jstor.org/stable/23607667.

[693] Chris Stephen, “Bin Laden opens European terror base in Albania,”
Sunday Times, November 29, 1998, https://archive.is/G1pi8; Staff, “Bin
Laden operated terrorist network based in Albania,” AP, November 29,
1998, https://archive.is/Qe8St; Chris Stephen, “US Tackles Islamic
Militancy in Kosovo,” The Scotsman, November 30, 1998,
https://archive.is/zywXy; Steve Rodan, “Kosovo seen as new Islamic
bastion,” Jerusalem Post, September 14, 1998, https://archive.is/r5EBY;
Tom Walker, “US alarmed as Mujahidin join Kosovo rebels,” London
Times, November 26, 1998, https://archive.is/GPozj.

[694] US Constitution, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 11, June 21, 1788,

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C11-
3/ALDE_00013589.

[695] Not justifying it, just being descriptive. For the real story, see Horton,
Enough Already, 21–31.

[696] Staff, “Bush News Conference: ‘I Have Not Given Up,’” Los Angeles
Times, January 10, 1991, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-01-10-
mn-11298-story.html; John Elson, “Just Who Can Send Us to War?” Time,
December 17, 1990,
https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,971967,00.html;
“ArtII.S2.C1.1.12 Congressional Control Over President’s Discretion,”
Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute,
https://law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-2/section-2/clause-
1/congressional-control-over-presidents-discretion.

[697] Staff, “Senate tables Kosovo resolution authorizing ‘all necessary

force,’” CNN, May 4, 1999,
https://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/05/04/kosovo.congress
.

[698] Doug Bandow, “Clinton Stepped Beyond Constitutional Limits,”

Cato Institute, April 30, 1999, https://cato.org/commentary/clinton-stepped-
beyond-constitutional-limits; Staff, “ACLU Says Military Action in Kosovo
Violates Constitution and War Powers Act,” ACLU, April 28, 1999,
https://aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-says-military-action-kosovo-violates-
constitution-and-war-powers-act.

[699] Szamuely, 341.

[700] Wolf Blitzer, “President Clinton talks with ‘Late Edition,’” CNN,
June 20, 1999,
https://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/06/20/clinton.transcrip
t.

[701] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.
[702] “S.Con.Res. 21 (106th): Kosovo Resolution,” US House of
Representatives, April 28, 1999, https://govtrack.us/congress/votes/106-
1999/h103.

[703] Bill Miller, “Clinton’s War Powers Upheld,” Washington Post, June 9,
1999, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/national/daily/june99/dismiss09.htm.

[704] John F. Harris, “Clinton Not Thrown By Balkans Setbacks, Aides

Say,” Washington Post, June 8, 1999, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/politics/daily/june99/clinton8.htm.

[705] John Norris, Collision Course: NATO, Russia and Kosovo (Westport:
Praeger, 2005), xxii–xxiii, 293.

[706] Vice President Joe Biden, “Remarks by Vice President Joe Biden at
the Conclusion of a Bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Vucic of Serbia,”
Office of the Vice President, August 19, 2016,
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/08/19/remarks-
vice-president-joe-biden-conclusion-bilateral-meeting-prime.

[707] “US Invasion Ousts Panama’s Noriega,” CQ Almanac, 45th ed.

(Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 1990), 595–609,
http://library.cqpress.com/cqalmanac/cqal89-1139591; Jeremy Scahill, “Joe
Biden Supported Panama Invasion,” Intercept, April 27, 2021,
https://theintercept.com/2021/04/27/biden-panama-manuel-noriega.
[708] Barry Bearak, “Day Two Ushers In a Different Reality,” Los Angeles
Times, January 18, 1991, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-01-18-
mn-251-story.html; “Vintage Operation Desert Shield 1990 Saddam
Hussein So Damn Insane Shirt Small,” Ebay.com, August 2024,
https://ebay.com/itm/364408969703.

[709] Brian Blomquist, “Was Army Active at Waco?: Ex-CIA Man Says
Elite Commandos Took Part,” New York Post, August 28, 1999,
https://nypost.com/1999/08/28/was-army-active-at-waco-ex-cia-man-says-
elite-commandos-took-part.

[710] The Justice Department found that “the Davidians sent out a
videotape of the children in the compound. The negotiators’ log shows that
when the tape was reviewed there was concern that if the tape were released
to the media Koresh would gain much sympathy.” Edward S.G. Dennis Jr.,
“Evaluation of the Handling of the Branch Davidian Stand-off in Waco,
Texas February 28 to April 19, 1993,” US Department of Justice, October 8,
1993, https://justice.gov/archives/publications/waco/evaluation-handling-
branch-davidian-stand-waco-texas-february-28-april-19-1993.

[711] Arianna Huffington, “Clinton Plays into Milosevic’s Hand,” Chicago

Sun-Times, April 11, 1999, cited in Bovard, Feeling Your Pain: The
Explosion and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton-Gore Years (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 331.

[712] First Lady Laura Bush, “Radio Address by Mrs. Bush,” White House,
November 17, 2001, https://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011117.html.

[713] Staff, “US President gives Saddam 48 hour ultimatum,” AP, March
18, 2003, https://youtube.com/watch?v=bkzZfvYNnBQ.

[714] Louis Charbonneau, “US envoy: Gaddafi troops raping, issued

Viagra,” Reuters, April 29, 2011,
https://reuters.com/article/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-envoy-
gaddafi-troops-raping-issued-viagra-idUSTRE73S74B.

[715] Michael O’Hanlon, “The case for deconstructing Syria,” Washington

Post, September 24, 2015,
https://web.archive.org/web/20150930011051/https://washingtonpost.com/o
pinions/deconstructing-syria/2015/09/24/44c4e3e0-6211-11e5-8e9e-
dce8a2a2a679_story.html.

[716] Stephen F. Cohen, “Who Putin Is Not,” The Nation, September 20,
2018, https://thenation.com/article/archive/who-putin-is-not.

[717] Peter Bergen, Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin
Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 176.

[718] Interview with author, Chris Deliso, Scott Horton Show radio archive,
February 20, 2008, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/antiwar-radio-chris-
deliso.

[719] Quoted in Curtis, 240–41.

[720] “The Kosovo Liberation Army: Does Clinton Policy Support Group
with Terror, Drug Ties?” US Senate Republican Policy Committee, March
31, 1999, https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/fr033199.htm; Curtis, 238–41.

[721] Davidson, 140–43.

[722] Deliso, 37.

[723] Albright, 172.

[724] Press Statement by James P. Rubin, US State Department Office of

the Spokesman, March 2, 1998, https://1997-
2001.state.gov/briefings/statements/1998/ps980302b.html.

[725] Curtis, 239.

[726] Chris Hedges, “In New Balkan Tinderbox, Ethnic Albanians Rebel
Against Serbs,” New York Times, March 2, 1998,
https://nytimes.com/1998/03/02/world/in-new-balkan-tinderbox-ethnic-
albanians-rebel-against-serbs.html.

[727] Marcia Christoff Kurop, “Al Qaeda’s Balkan Links,” Wall Street
Journal, November 1, 2001,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB1004563569751363760; Colleen Sullivan,
“Kosovo Liberation Army,” Encyclopedia Britannica, March 28, 2014,
https://britannica.com/topic/Kosovo-Liberation-Army.

[728] Barton Gellman, “US Reaching Out to Kosovo Rebels,” Washington

Post, July 1, 1998,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1998/07/01/us-reaching-out-to-
kosovo-rebels/e5cea352-c7a1-433c-afdc-f9917e4a1743.

[729] Steven Erlanger, “US Meets With Kosovo Rebel Army Leaders,” New
York Times, June 28, 1998, https://nytimes.com/1998/06/28/world/us-meets-
with-kosovo-rebel-army-leaders.html.

[730] Staff, “On This Day: US Embassy bombings kill 224 people,” UPI,
August 7, 2024, https://upi.com/Top_News/2024/08/07/On-This-Day-US-
Embassy-bombings-kill-224-people/2311723002035.

[731] R. Jeffrey Smith, “US Probes Blasts’ Possible Mideast Ties,”

Washington Post, August 12, 1998, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/inatl/longterm/eafricabombing/stories/albania081298.htm.

[732] Deliso, 40–41.

[733] Chris Stephen, “Bin Laden opens European terror base in Albania,”
London Times, November 29, 1998, https://archive.is/G1pi8; Staff, “Report
says bin Laden has network in Albania,” AP, November 30, 1998,
https://newspapers.com/newspage/527790053.

[734] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[735] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[736] Anna Di Lellio and Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers, “The Legendary

Commander: The Construction of an Albanian Master Narrative in Post-
War Kosovo,” Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 12, No. 3 (2006),
http://annadilellio.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Adem-Jashari-NN.pdf.

[737] Szamuely, 363–64.

[738] Gibbs, 185–87; Szamuely, 371; Mike O’Connor, “Yugoslav Forces on

the Move from Positions in Kosovo,” New York Times, October 28, 1998,
https://nytimes.com/library/world/europe/102898yugo-kosovo.html.

[739] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt; Mike O’Connor, “Kosovo Rebels Gain Ground Under
NATO Threat,” New York Times, December 4, 1998,
https://nytimes.com/1998/12/04/world/kosovo-rebels-gain-ground-under-
nato-threat.html.

[740] Szamuely, 379–81.

[741] Guy Gugliotta and Douglas Farah, “12 Years of Tortured Truth on El
Salvador,” Washington Post, March 21, 1993,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/03/21/12-years-of-
tortured-truth-on-el-salvador/9432bb6f-fbd0-4b18-b254-29caa919dc98.
[742] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[743] Szamuely, 387–88.

[744] Barton Gellman, “The Path to Crisis: How the United States and Its
Allies Went to War,” Washington Post, April 18, 1999,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/04/18/the-path-to-crisis-
how-the-united-states-and-its-allies-went-to-war/52533b73-cf3e-4e21-
a771-8f1806bc0577.

[745] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[746] Szamuely, 399.

[747] Albright, 386.

[748] Barton Gellman, “Slaughter in Racak Changed Kosovo Policy,”

Washington Post, April 18, 1999, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/national/longterm/policy041899.htm.

[749] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.
[750] Staff, “Media Ignore Questions About Incident That Sparked Kosovo
War,” FAIR, February 1, 2001, https://fair.org/press-release/media-ignore-
questions-about-incident-that-sparked-kosovo-war.

OceanofPDF.com
[751] Szamuely, 407.

[752] President Clinton, “Excerpt from press conference released by the

White House Office of the Press Secretary,” US State Department, March
19, 1999, https://1997-
2001.state.gov/policy_remarks/1999/990319_clinton_kosovo.html.

[753] Staff, “Excerpts of President Clinton’s Address on NATO Attacks on

Yugoslav Military Forces,” Washington Post, March 24, 1999,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/03/25/excerpts-of-
president-clintons-address-on-nato-attacks-on-yugoslav-military-
forces/ce1ce942-9bf2-490b-817e-e06acc7731f4.

[754] Christophe Châtelot, “Were the Racak Dead Really Massacred in

Cold Blood?” Le Monde, January 21, 1999, https://archive.is/0tIvL.

[755] Szamuely, 403–05; Peter Worthington, “The Hoax That Started a

War,” Toronto Sun, April 1, 2001, https://archive.is/VYzVx; Staff, “Kosovo:
Massacre Victims Discovered Near Racak,” AP, January 16, 1999,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=olFYg-Nh1BI.

[756] Peter Worthington, “The Hoax That Started a War,” Toronto Sun,
April 1, 2001, https://archive.is/VYzVx; Staff, “Media Ignore Questions
About Incident That Sparked Kosovo War,” FAIR, February 1, 2001,
https://fair.org/press-release/media-ignore-questions-about-incident-that-
sparked-kosovo-war; Bo Adam, et al., “‘I Sensed Something Was Wrong,’”
Berliner Zeitung, March 23, 2000, https://archive.is/yP0Ws.
[757] R. Jeffrey Smith, “Kosovo Killings Called a Massacre,” Washington
Post, March 17, 1999,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/03/17/kosovo-killings-
called-a-massacre/30015d06-76ea-4413-9693-a50df689f8d8.

[758] Szamuely, 411–15.

[759] Staff, “New fighting near scene of Kosovo massacre,” CNN, January
17, 1999, http://cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9901/17/kosovo.02/index.html;
“Massacre at Racak, Kosova – Joe DioGuardi Interview,” CNN World
News, January 18, 1999, https://youtube.com/watch?v=cWwogF-L30Y.

[760] Tom Walker and Aidan Laverty, “CIA aided Kosovo guerrilla army,”
Sunday Times, March 12, 2000, https://archive.is/i1Qvk.

[761] Allan Little, “Behind the Kosovo crisis,” BBC, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/674056.stm.

[762] “Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo

(Rambouillet Accord),” Peace Agreements Database, February 23, 1999,
https://peaceagreements.org/view/405.

[763] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[764] Szamuely, 435.

[765] Interim Agreement for Peace and Self-Government in Kosovo
(Rambouillet Agreement), US State Department, February 23, 1999,
https://peaceagreements.org/wview/405.

[766] Noam Chomsky, “A Review of NATO’s War over Kosovo,” Z

Magazine, April–May 2001, https://chomsky.info/200005.

[767] Szamuely, 440–42.

[768] Steven Erlanger, “Crisis in the Balkans: The Serbs; In Milosevic’s

Government, Resignation Over Pact, Confidence in His Strength,” New
York Times, June 5, 1999, https://nytimes.com/1999/06/05/world/crisis-
balkans-serbs-milosevic-s-government-resignation-over-pact-confidence-
his.html.

[769] Boris Johnson, “Cold War warrior scorns ‘new morality,’” Telegraph,
June 28, 1999, https://archive.is/mijk2.

[770] John Pilger, “John Pilger Reminds Us of Kosovo,” New Statesman,

December 13, 2004,
https://web.archive.org/web/20050215122027/http://newstatesman.com/200
412130010.

[771] George Kenney, “Rolling Thunder: the Rerun,” The Nation, May 27,
1999, https://thenation.com/article/archive/rolling-thunder-rerun.

[772] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[773] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[774] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[775] Henry Kissinger, “New World Disorder,” Newsweek, March 30, 1999,
https://newsweek.com/new-world-disorder-166550.

[776] Search results for “Kissinger,” Antiwar.com, October 17, 2024,

https://google.com/search?&q=site%3aantiwar.com+kissinger.

[777] Henry Kissinger, “New World Disorder,” Newsweek, March 30, 1999,
https://newsweek.com/new-world-disorder-166550.

[778] Debate on Authorization to Use Military Force in Serbia, US Senate,

March 23, 1999, https://govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CREC-1999-03-
23/html/CREC-1999-03-23-pt1-PgS3110.htm; Jeremy Scahill, “1999:
NATO Bombing of Serbia and Montenegro,” Intercept, April 27, 2021,
https://theintercept.com/2021/04/27/biden-nato-bombing-serbia-
montenegro.

[779] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[780] Szamuely, 449–51.

[781] Douglas A. Macgregor, “The Balkan Limits to Power and Principle,”
ORBIS, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2001), 93, https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/the-
balkan-limits-to-power-and-principle.

[782] Randolph Bourne, “Part One of the Unfinished Essay, ‘The State,’”
Antiwar.com, 1918, https://antiwar.com/bourne.php.

[783] Henry Kissinger, “New World Disorder,” Newsweek, March 30, 1999,
https://newsweek.com/new-world-disorder-166550.

[784] Douglas A. Macgregor, “The Balkan Limits to Power and Principle,”

ORBIS, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2001), 93, https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/the-
balkan-limits-to-power-and-principle.

[785] “Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright Interview on PBS

Newshour with Jim Lehrer,” March 24, 1999, https://1997-
2001.state.gov/www/statements/1999/990324.html.

[786] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[787] Douglas A. Macgregor, “The Balkan Limits to Power and Principle,”

ORBIS, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2001), 93, https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/the-
balkan-limits-to-power-and-principle.

[788] Philip Hammond, “The Tragedy of Kosovo,” Spiked, March 22,

2019, https://spiked-online.com/2019/03/22/the-tragedy-of-kosovo.
[789] Norris, 115.

[790] James Bovard, “Kosovo Indictment Proves Bill Clinton’s Serbian War
Atrocities,” Libertarian Institute, June 25, 2020,
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/kosovo-indictment-proves-bill-
clintons-serbian-war-atrocities.

[791] Bovard, 332–33.

[792] Staff, “Civilian Deaths ‘necessary price,’” BBC, May 31, 1999,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/357355.stm.

[793] John F. Harris, “Clinton Urges Patience With NATO Bombing

Campaign,” Washington Post, April 25, 1999,
https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/clinton25.htm.

[794] “Jeremy Scahill Confronts Wesley Clark Over His Bombing Of

Civilians, Use Of Cluster Bombs And Depleted Uranium And The Bombing
Of Serb Television,” Democracy Now!, January 26, 2004,
https://democracynow.org/2004/1/26/exclusive_democracy_now_confronts
_wesley_clark.

[795] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.
[796] Staff, “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) /NATO: ‘Collateral
damage’ or unlawful killings? –Violations of the Laws of War by NATO
during Operation Allied Force,” Amnesty International, June 5, 2000,
https://amnesty.org/en/documents/EUR70/018/2000/en.

[797] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[798] Staff, “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) /NATO: ‘Collateral

damage’ or unlawful killings? –Violations of the Laws of War by NATO
during Operation Allied Force,” Amnesty International, June 5, 2000,
https://amnesty.org/en/documents/EUR70/018/2000/en.

[799] Staff, “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) /NATO: ‘Collateral

damage’ or unlawful killings? –Violations of the Laws of War by NATO
during Operation Allied Force,” Amnesty International, June 5, 2000,
https://amnesty.org/en/documents/EUR70/018/2000/en.

[800] “Jeremy Scahill Confronts Wesley Clark Over His Bombing Of

Civilians, Use Of Cluster Bombs And Depleted Uranium And The Bombing
Of Serb Television,” Democracy Now!, January 26, 2004,
https://democracynow.org/2004/1/26/exclusive_democracy_now_confronts
_wesley_clark.

[801] Gen. Joseph W. Ralston, “Aerospace Power and the Use of Force,”
AFA Policy Forum, September 14, 1999,
https://secure.afa.org/media/scripts/rlstn999.asp.

[802] Philip Sherwell, “SAS Teams Move in to Help KLA ‘Rise From the
Ashes,’” Telegraph, April 18, 1999,
https://web.archive.org/web/20030708041432/https://telegraph.co.uk/htmlC
ontent.jhtml?html=/archive/1999/04/18/wwar18.html.

[803] Ian Bruce, “SAS faces own trainees in Balkans,” Sunday Herald,
March 27, 2001, https://archive.is/dCwH2.

[804] Szamuely, 397–98.

[805] Douglas A. Macgregor, “The Balkan Limits to Power and Principle,”

ORBIS, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2001), 93, https://archive.is/bHrXn.

[806] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt; Staff, “Cause of Kosovar Exodus from Pristina Disputed:
Serbs Are Forcing Exit, Some Claim; Others Go on Own,” Washington
Times, March 31, 1999, https://irp.fas.org/world/para/docs/fr033199.htm.

[807] “Monthly Report on the Situation in Kosovo Pursuant to the

Requirements Set Out in Security Council Resolutions 1160 (1998) and
1203 (1998),” S/1999/315, March 23, 1999,
https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/1489702/files/S_1999_315-EN.pdf?
ln=en.

[808] Norris, 6.
[809] Szamuely, 447.

[810] Douglas A. Macgregor, “The Balkan Limits to Power and Principle,”

ORBIS, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2001), 93, https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/the-
balkan-limits-to-power-and-principle.

[811] Bovard, 328–29.

[812] William A. Sayers, “Operation Allied Force,” Air & Space Forces
Magazine, April 16, 2019, https://airandspaceforces.com/article/operation-
allied-force-how-airpower-won-the-war-for-kosovo.

[813] Szamuely, 456.

[814] Szamuely, 458–59.

[815] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[816] John F. Harris, “Clinton Not Thrown By Balkans Setbacks, Aides

Say,” Washington Post, June 8, 1999, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/politics/daily/june99/clinton8.htm.

[817] Bovard, 330.

[818] William Cohen Department of Defense Briefing, “Military Strikes on

Yugoslavia,” C-SPAN, April 7, 1999, https://c-span.org/video/?122356-
1/military-strikes-yugoslavia.
[819] Francis X. Clines, “NATO Hunting for Serb Forces; US Reports
Signs of ‘Genocide,’” New York Times, March 30, 1999,
https://nytimes.com/1999/03/30/world/crisis-balkans-overview-nato-
hunting-for-serb-forces-us-reports-signs-genocide.html.

[820] George F. Will, “Waging war based on polls, not sensible strategy,”
Baltimore Sun, April 28, 1999,
https://baltimoresun.com/1999/04/28/waging-war-based-on-polls-not-
sensible-strategy-the-united-states-is-disastrously-conducting-a-war-
without-having-been-attacked-or-an-ally-having-been-attacked-or-any-
other-emergency-that-would-preclu.

[821] Szamuely, 464–65.

[822] Richard Norton-Taylor, “Nato bombs kill 17 in sanatorium,”

Guardian, May 31, 1999,
https://theguardian.com/world/1999/jun/01/balkans.

[823] Bovard, 332.

[824] Ben Wedeman, et al., “Yugoslavia breaks ties with Albania as NATO
raids continue,” CNN, April 18, 1999,
http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/europe/9904/18/kosovo.02.

[825] Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure: NATO’s War Against

Yugoslavia,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 1999,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/1999-09-01/perfect-failure.
[826] “Transcript: Clinton justifies US involvement in Kosovo,” CNN, May
13, 1999,
https://cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/05/13/clinton.kosovo/transcrip
t.html; Tom Doggett, “Cohen Fears 100,000 Kosovo Men Killed by Serbs,”
Reuters, May 16, 1999, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/cohen051699.htm.

[827] Charles Duelfer, “Comprehensive Report of the Special Advisor to

the DCI on Iraq’s WMD, with Addendums (Duelfer Report),” Central
Intelligence Agency/Iraq Survey Group, April 25, 2005,
https://govinfo.gov/app/details/GPO-DUELFERREPORT.

[828] Jonathan Steele, “Serb killings ‘exaggerated’ by west,” Guardian,

August 17, 2000, https://theguardian.com/world/2000/aug/18/balkans3;
Steven Erlanger, “Early Count Hints at Fewer Kosovo Deaths,” New York
Times, November 11, 1999,
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/europe/11119
9kosovo-un.html; John Laughland, “I Was Right About Kosovo,” The
Spectator, November 20, 1999, https://antiwar.com/rep/laughland1.html.

[829] John Pilger, “Kosovo Killing Fields?” New Statesman, November 21,
1999, https://archive.is/7Wfju.

[830] See above.

[831] Daniel Pearl and Robert Block, “War in Kosovo Was Cruel, Bitter,
Savage; Genocide It Wasn’t,” Wall Street Journal, December 31, 1999,
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/pearl123199.htm.

[832] Nicholas Rufford, “Robin Cook accused of misleading public on

Kosovo massacres,” Sunday Times, October 31, 1999,
https://archive.is/xpkr7.

[833] Peter Finn, “Kosovo Awaits Enumeration of Its Dead,” Washington

Post, January 17, 2000, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPcap/2000-
01/17/060r-011700-idx.html.

[834] “Statement to the Press by Carla Del Ponte, Prosecutor of the

International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda,”
United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia,
The Hague, December 20, 2000, https://icty.org/en/press/statement-press-
carla-del-ponte-prosecutor-international-criminal-tribunals-former-
yugoslavia.

[835] George Bogdanich, Yugoslavia: The Avoidable War, 1999,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XpUJ2CZNKfY.

[836] Staff, “Chinese Embassy Hit in NATO Bombing Of Belgrade; NATO

Expresses Regret,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 1999,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB926144864693007660; Daniel Williams,
“Missiles Hit Chinese Embassy,” Washington Post, May 8, 1999,
https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/belgrade050899.htm.
[837] Deliso, 44; John Sweeney, et al., “Nato bombed Chinese
deliberately,” Guardian, October 17, 1999,
https://theguardian.com/world/1999/oct/17/balkans.

[838] Mark Cozad, et al., “Gaining Victory in Systems Warfare,” RAND

Corporation, December 2021,
https://rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RRA1500/RRA15
35-1/RAND_RRA1535-1.pdf.

[839] Kristen Gunness and Phillip C. Saunders, “Averting Escalation and

Avoiding War: Lessons from the 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis,” Institute
for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, December
2022,
https://ndupress.ndu.edu/Portals/68/Documents/stratperspective/china/china
-perspectives-17.pdf.

[840] Henry Kissinger, “New World Disorder,” Newsweek, March 30, 1999,
https://newsweek.com/new-world-disorder-166550.

[841] Staff, “Kosovo: Civilian Deaths in the NATO Air Campaign,” Human
Rights Watch, February 1, 2000,
https://refworld.org/reference/countryrep/hrw/2000/en/32567.

[842] Daniel Williams, “NATO’s Blunder Ignites Rage in Belgrade,”

Washington Post, May 9, 1999, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/belgrade050999.htm.
[843] Richard Hatfield, “Kosovo: Ground Force Options,” Minister of State
for the Armed Forces, April 29, 1999, https://thegrayzone.com/wp-
content/uploads/2024/03/British-Invasion-Plans-Yugoslavia.pdf.

[844] Kit Klarenberg, “Kosovo War at 25: Blair’s secret invasion plot to
‘topple Milosevic’ revealed,” Grayzone, March 24, 2024,
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/03/24/kosovo-war-blairs-secret-invasion-
plot-milosevic.

[845] Norris, 47–50, 57, 110–11, 114, 190–91.

[846] Szamuely, 500; Martin Walker, “Revealed: How deal was done in
Stalin’s hideaway,” Guardian, June 5, 1999,
https://theguardian.com/world/1999/jun/05/1; Aidan Hehir, Humanitarian
Intervention: An Introduction (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 232;
Simon Chesterman, Just War or Just Peace?: Humanitarian Intervention
and International (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 54.

[847] Steven Erlanger, “NATO Was Closer to Ground War in Kosovo Than
Is Widely Realized,” New York Times, November 7, 1999,
https://nytimes.com/1999/11/07/world/nato-was-closer-to-ground-war-in-
kosovo-than-is-widely-realized.html; William Drozdiak, “Russia’s
Concession Led to Breakthrough,” Washington Post, June 6, 1999,
https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/diplomacy060699.htm.
[848] Douglas A. Macgregor, “The Balkan Limits to Power and Principle,”
ORBIS, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2001), 93, https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/the-
balkan-limits-to-power-and-principle.

[849] Allan Little, “Behind the Kosovo crisis,” BBC, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/674056.stm.

[850] Years later he did excellent work showing the al Qaeda origins of the
2011 war against Libya: Alan J. Kuperman, “A Model Humanitarian
Intervention? Reassessing NATO’s Libya Campaign,” International
Security, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Summer 2013), 105–36; Alan J. Kuperman,
“America’s Little-Known Mission to Support Al Qaeda’s Role in Libya,”
The National Interest, August 13, 2019,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-little-known-mission-support-
al-qaedas-role-libya-73271.

[851] Alan Kuperman, “Botched Diplomacy Led to War,” Wall Street

Journal, June 17, 1999, https://wsj.com/articles/SB929565648195034583.

[852] John Pilger, “Moral Tourism,” Guardian, June 15, 1999,

https://theguardian.com/comment/story/0,,288528,00.html.

[853] Bovard, 335.

[854] John Barry and Evan Thomas, “The Kosovo Cover-Up,” Newsweek,
May 14, 2000, https://newsweek.com/kosovo-cover-160273.
[855] Richard Norton-Taylor, “How the Serb army escaped Nato,”
Guardian, March 9, 2000,
https://theguardian.com/world/2000/mar/09/balkans1.

[856] Bovard, 336.

[857] Philip Hammond, “The Tragedy of Kosovo,” Spiked, March 22,

2019, https://spiked-online.com/2019/03/22/the-tragedy-of-kosovo.

[858] Norris, 270.

[859] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[860] Robert G. Kaiser and David Hoffman, “Secret Russian Troop

Deployment Thwarted,” Washington Post, June 25, 1999,
https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/inatl/longterm/balkans/stories/russians062599.htm.

[861] “Singer James Blunt ‘Prevented World War III,’” BBC, November
14, 2010, https://bbc.com/news/uk-politics-11753050.

[862] Jamie McIntyre, “Top NATO commanders clashed over Russians’

actions in Kosovo,” CNN, August 2, 1999,
https://web.archive.org/web/20180530000749/http://edition.cnn.com/WOR
LD/europe/9908/02/jackson.clark; Mark Tran, “‘I’m not going to start Third
World War for you,’ Jackson told Clark,” Guardian, August 2, 1999,
https://theguardian.com/world/1999/aug/02/balkans3.

[863] Gen. Sir Mike Jackson, “My clash with Nato chief,” Telegraph,
September 4, 2007, https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1562161/Gen-
Sir-Mike-Jackson-My-clash-with-Nato-chief.html; Jonathan Beale and Ruth
Comerford, “Former army head Gen Sir Mike Jackson dies at 80,” BBC,
October 16, 2024, https://bbc.com/news/articles/c8djnnel017o.

[864] Norris, 284–87; Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2,
March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[865] NBC News Dateline, November 29, 1999,

http://archive.mrc.org/cyberalerts/1999/cyb19991130.asp#2; Michael
Eskenazi, “I’ll Give You One More Chance – If You Bomb the Balkans,”
Time, November 29, 1999,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140915084935/http://content.time.com/time/
magazine/article/0,9171,35171,00.html.

[866] Lucinda Franks, “The Intimate Hillary,” Talk, August 8, 1999,

https://archive.is/023Dw.

[867] Gail Sheehy, Hillary’s Choice (New York: Random House, 1999),
345.
[868] Peter Beaumont, et al., “‘CIA’s Bastard Army Ran Riot in Balkans,’”
Observer, March 11, 2001,
https://theguardian.com/world/2001/mar/11/edvulliamy.peterbeaumont.

[869] Bill Clinton, “Videotaped Address to the Serbian People,” The

American Presidency Project, March 25, 1999,
https://presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/videotaped-address-the-serbian-
people.

[870] Allan Little, “Moral Combat: NATO at War,” BBC2, March 12, 2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/events/panorama/transcripts/transcrip
t_12_03_00.txt.

[871] Chris Hedges, “Fog of War – Coping With the Truth About Friend
and Foe; Victims Not Quite Innocent,” New York Times, March 28, 1999,
https://nytimes.com/1999/03/28/weekinreview/world-fog-war-coping-with-
truth-about-friend-foe-victims-not-quite-innocent.html.

[872] Christian Jennings, “Terrorism hits world support for Kosovo,”

Telegraph, February 22, 2001,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1323700/Terrorism-hits-
world-support-for-Kosovo.html.

[873] Thomas Harding, “Kosovo’s Serbs Face a Bleak Future,” Telegraph,

December 30, 2008, http://telegraph.co.uk/comment/3554939/Kosovos-
Serbs-face-a-bleak-future.html.
[874] Douglas A. Macgregor, “The Balkan Limits to Power and Principle,”
ORBIS, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Winter 2001), 93, https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/the-
balkan-limits-to-power-and-principle.

[875] Peter Finn, “NATO Losing Kosovo Battle,” Washington Post, August
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[876] Deliso, 44.

[877] Bovard, 337.

[878] John Pilger, “John Pilger Reminds Us of Kosovo,” New Statesman,

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[879] Edward S. Herman, et al., “Yugoslavia: Human Rights Watch in

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[880] “Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Abuses Against Serbs and Roma in

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[881] Staff, “Kosovo: Six Months On, Climate of Violence and Fear Flies in
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[885] George Robertson, Testimony before the Select Committee on

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[886] John Pilger, “John Pilger Reminds Us of Kosovo,” New Statesman,

December 13, 2004,
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[888] Editorial, “Bin Laden’s new special envoys,” Washington Times, June
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[891] John Kiriakou and Joseph Hickman, The Convenient Terrorist: Two
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[892] Sen. Diane Feinstein, et al., “Report of the Senate Select Committee
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[895] Interview with author, Nebojsa Malic, Scott Horton Show radio
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[896] “When the new president of the USA, Joe Biden, called Hashim
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[897] James Bovard, “When the Spoils of War Are Human Organs,”
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[900] Frank Viviano, “KLA Linked To Enormous Heroin Trade,” San

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[901] Maggie O’Kane, “Kosovo drug mafia supply heroin to Europe,”

Guardian, March 13, 2000,
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[902] Peter Klebnikov, “Heroin Heroes,” Mother Jones, January/February

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[903] “Global Organized Crime Index,” Global Initiative Against

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[904] Barton Gellman, “Allied Air War Struck Broadly in Iraq,” Washington
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[905] Staff, “US, EU Split on Yugoslav Aid Plans,” Orlando Sentinel,

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[906] Jonathan Guyer, “How America’s NATO expansion obsession plays

into the Ukraine crisis,” Vox.com, January 27, 2022,
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[907] Boris Bondarev, “The Sources of Russian Misconduct,” Foreign

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[908] Thomas W. Lippman, “Russian Leader Cancels Trip in Protest,”

Washington Post, March 24, 1999, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
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[909] Sarotte, 309; Talbott, 300.

[910] Talbott, 307.

[911] Norris, 32.

[912] “Telephone Conversation with Russian President Yeltsin,” White

House, April 19, 1999, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/32239-
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[913] Sarotte, 317.

[914] Sarotte, 326.

[915] Norris, 4.

[916] Viktor Chernomyrdin, “Bombs Rule Out Talk of Peace,” Washington

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[917] George Friedman, “Syria, America and Putin’s Bluff,” Stratfor,

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[918] Lothar Gorris, “Putin Lives in Historic Analogies and Metaphors,”

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4829-be90-c20fd5786288.

[919] Henry Kissinger, “New World Disorder,” Newsweek, March 30, 1999,
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[920] Henry Kissinger, “New World Disorder,” Newsweek, March 30, 1999,
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[921] Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by

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[922] Mark Kramer, “Putin Is Only Part Of the Russian Picture,”

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[923] “First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self Portrait by Vladimir

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[924] Michael Mandelbaum, “A Perfect Failure: NATO’s War Against

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[925] Ron Paul, “US Foreign Policy and Involvement in Yugoslavia and
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[926] Philip Hammond, “The Tragedy of Kosovo,” Spiked, March 22,

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[927] “A comprehensive review of the situation in Kosovo,” United Nations

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[928] James Crisp, “KLA guerrillas harvested murdered Serbs’ organs, say
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[929] Carlotta Gall, “How Kosovo Was Turned Into Fertile Ground for
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[930] Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in

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[931] Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway, “Azerbaijan’s Riches Alter the
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[933] David Hoffman, “Baker, Azerbaijan Discuss Ties,” Washington Post,

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[934] Robert A. Manning, “The Myth of the Caspian Great Game and the
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[935] David Leppard, et al., “BP Accused of Backing ‘Arms for Oil’ Coup,”
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[936] Greg Palast, “Lap Dancers, the CIA, Payoffs and BP’s Deepwater
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[937] “Azerbaijan: Presidential Elections 2003,” Human Rights Watch,

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[938] Glen Owen, “Hookers, spies, cases full of dollars. How BP spent
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[940] Klebnikov, 192.

[941] LeVine, 222.

[942] Martin Indyk, “The Clinton Administration’s Approach to the Middle

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[944] LeVine, 210–15.

[945] Stephen Kinzer, “On Piping Out Caspian Oil, US Insists the Cheaper,
Shorter Way Isn’t Better,” New York Times, November 8, 1998,
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[946] Brzezinski, 144.

[947] Brzezinski, 129.

[948] Brzezinski, 46–47.

[949] Brzezinski, 52.

[950] LeVine, 210–15.

[951] LeVine, 223–25.

[952] Sheila Heslin, “Unlocking the Assets: Energy and the Future of
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[953] Sheila Heslin, “The New Pipeline Politics,” New York Times,
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[954] LeVine, 234.

[955] MacKinnon, 94.

[956] “Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline,” BP Azerbaijan, October 2024,

https://bp.com/en_az/azerbaijan/home/who-we-
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[957] Stephen Kinzer, “On Piping Out Caspian Oil, US Insists the Cheaper,
Shorter Way Isn’t Better,” New York Times, November 8, 1998,
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[958] John Pike, “Nagorno-Karabakh/Republic of Artsakh,” Global

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[959] Patrick Reevell, “Nagorno-Karabakh enclave emptied after entire

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[960] Scott Horton, Fool’s Errand: Time to End the War in Afghanistan
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[961] Cooley, 150–51.

[962] LeVine, 187–88.

[963] LeVine, 188.

[964] Cooley, 151.

[965] Greg Palast, “OPEC On the March,” Harper’s, April 2005,

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[966] Ariel Cohen, “The New ‘Great Game’: Oil Politics in the Caucasus
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[967] Stephen Kinzer, “On Piping Out Caspian Oil, US Insists the Cheaper,
Shorter Way Isn’t Better,” New York Times, November 8, 1998,
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[968] “US-Caspian Energy Policy: Promoting Sovereignty and Prosperity,”

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[969] David B. Ottaway and Dan Morgan, “Gas Pipeline Bounces Between
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[970] Greg Palast, Vultures’ Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power

Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores (New York: Plume, 2012), 181–203.

[971] Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway, “Drilling for Influence in

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[972] Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway, “Kazakh Field Stirs US-Russian
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[974] LeVine, 195.

[975] David B. Ottaway and Dan Morgan, “Gas Pipeline Bounces Between
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[976] Rashid, Taliban, 5–6, 168–80.

[977] Sheila Heslin, Testimony before the US Senate, September 17, 1997,
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[978] Rashid, Taliban, 175; Dan Morgan and David B. Ottaway, “Drilling
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[979] Staff, “Axis of Evil Shaping Against Moscow,” Kommersant, March

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[980] Anatol Lieven, “The (Not So) Great Game,” The National Interest,
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[981] Paul Rogers, Losing Control: Global Security in the 21st Century
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[983] “Azerbaijan, Presidential Election, 15 October 2003: Final Report,”

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[984] Staff, “Azerbaijan: Presidential Elections 2003,” Human Rights

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[985] Jonathan Steele, “The new cold war,” Guardian, January 2, 2004,
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[986] Jeremy Page, “West Balks at Backing Revolution as Elections Loom

in Oil Rich State,” London Times, November 4, 2005,
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[987] Staff, “Violence mars Azerbaijan oil pipeline protest,” AFP, May 21,
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[990] Staff, “Azeri election marred by serious shortcomings – observers,”

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[991] Eric Margolis, American Raj: Liberation or Domination?: Resolving

the Conflict Between the West and the Muslim World (Toronto: Key Porter
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[992] Celestine Bohlen, “Split by Muslim Region Rattles the Yeltsin

Camp,” New York Times, November 11, 1991,
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[993] Klebnikov, 40–42.

[994] Aaron Glantz, “Did defense secretary nominee James Mattis commit
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https://revealnews.org/article/did-defense-secretary-nominee-james-mattis-
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[995] Staff, “Russian Ultimatum to Grozny Condemned,” Human Rights

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[996] Margolis, 280.

[997] Klebnikov, 43.

[998] Burns, 98; Rep. Christopher Cox, et al., “Russia’s Road to

Corruption: How the Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead
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[999] Margolis, 282–83; Robert W. Schaefer, The Insurgency in Chechnya

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[1000] Cooley, 152.

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[1002] Brian Glyn Williams, “The ‘Chechen Arabs’: An Introduction To

The Real Al-Qaeda Terrorists From Chechnya,” Jamestown Foundation
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[1003] Marcin Mamon and Mariusz Pilis, “The Smell of Paradise,” BBC
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[1004] Margolis, 281.

[1005] Marcin Mamon and Mariusz Pilis, “The Smell of Paradise,” BBC
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[1006] “Footage from the 1996 Shatoi Ambush, carried out by fighters
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[1007] Schaefer, 132–34; Klebnikov, 43–44, 254–55.

[1008] Klebnikov, 255.

[1009] Lt. Col. Eric A. Beene, et al., “US, Russia and the Global War on
Terror: ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ Into Battle?” Air University, March 2005,
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA477122.pdf.

[1010] Lt. Col. Eric A. Beene, et al., “US, Russia and the Global War on
Terror: ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ Into Battle?” Air University, March 2005,
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA477122.pdf.

[1011] Paul Tumelty, “The Rise and Fall of Foreign Fighters in Chechnya,”
Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 2 (January 31,
2006), https://jamestown.org/program/the-rise-and-fall-of-foreign-fighters-
in-chechnya.

[1012] Schaefer, 172.

[1013] Lt. Col. Eric A. Beene, et al., “US, Russia and the Global War on
Terror: ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ Into Battle?” Air University, March 2005,
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA477122.pdf.

[1014] Steve Gutterman, “The Rasputin of post-Soviet Russia: Boris

Berezovsky,” Reuters, March 23, 2013, https://reuters.com/article/us-
britain-russia-berezovsky-newsmaker/the-rasputin-of-post-soviet-russia-
boris-berezovsky-idUKBRE92M0EY20130323.

[1015] Klebnikov, 258–61.

[1016] Klebnikov, 262–64.

[1017] Klebnikov, 301.

[1018] John Daniszewski, “Russian Politician Lebed Killed in Crash,” Los
Angeles Times, April 29, 2002, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-
apr-29-mn-40623-story.html.

[1019] Christopher Miller, “Ukraine arrests suspect in 2004 murder of

Forbes editor Paul Klebnikov,” Committee to Protect Journalists, November
21, 2017, https://cpj.org/2017/11/ukraine-arrests-suspect-in-2004-murder-
of-forbes.

[1020] Paul Tumelty, “The Rise and Fall of Foreign Fighters in Chechnya,”
Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 2 (January 31,
2006), https://jamestown.org/program/the-rise-and-fall-of-foreign-fighters-
in-chechnya; Justine A. Rosenthal, “A Confusing Target for the United
States,” Brookings Institution, October 6, 2004,
https://brookings.edu/articles/a-confusing-target-for-the-united-states.

[1021] Loretta Napoleoni, Insurgent Iraq: Al Zarqawi and the New

Generation (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).

[1022] See below.

[1023] John Pike, “Armed Islamic Group (GIA),” Federation of American

Scientists Intelligence Resource Program, April 30, 2004,
https://irp.fas.org/world/para/gia.htm.

[1024] “Libyan Islamic Fighting Group,” Mapping Militants Project, July 1,

2018, https://mappingmilitants.org/profiles/libyan-islamic-fighting-group.
[1025] David D. Kirkpatrick, “Libya Singles Out Islamist as a Commander
in Consulate Attack, Libyans Say,” New York Times, October 17, 2012,
https://nytimes.com/2012/10/18/world/africa/libya-singles-out-islamist-as-
a-commander-in-benghazi-consulate-attack.html.

[1026] Victoria Nuland, “Terrorist Designations of the al-Nusrah Front as

an Alias for al-Qa’ida in Iraq,” US State Department, December 11, 2012,
https://2009-2017.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/12/201759.htm.

[1027] Sharon LaFraniere, “How Jihad Made Its Way to Chechnya,”

Washington Post, April 26, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/04/26/how-jihad-made-
its-way-to-chechnya/5b941796-ed50-4f65-9a2b-18a90155e571.

[1028] Marcin Mamon and Mariusz Pilis, “The Smell of Paradise,” BBC
Four, April 13, 2013, https://youtube.com/watch?v=WPzaF5gJlsY.

[1029] Patrick Cockburn, “Iraq crisis: How Saudi Arabia helped Isis take
over the north of the country,” Independent, July 14, 2014,
https://independent.co.uk/voices/comment/iraq-crisis-how-saudi-arabia-
helped-isis-take-over-the-north-of-the-country-9602312.html.

[1030] “Security Council Committee Established Pursuant to Resolution

1267 (1999) Concerning Al-Qaida and the Taliban and Associated
Individuals and Entities,” United Nations Security Council, October 15,
1999,
https://web.archive.org/web/20110514193822/http://un.org/sc/committees/1
267/NSQE09903E.shtml.

[1031] Staff, “Russian and Ingush Authorities Blame Umarov and Al-
Qaeda,” North Caucasus Weekly, Vol. 8, No. 35 (September 13, 2007),
https://web.archive.org/web/20081009161344/https://jamestown.org/chechn
ya_weekly/article.php?articleid=2373648.

[1032] Sharon LaFraniere, “How Jihad Made Its Way to Chechnya,”

Washington Post, April 26, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/04/26/how-jihad-made-
its-way-to-chechnya/5b941796-ed50-4f65-9a2b-18a90155e571.

[1033] Schaefer, 177.

[1034] Maura Reynolds, “Fears of Bombing Turn to Doubts for Some in

Russia,” Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2000,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-jan-15-mn-54302-story.html.

[1035] Brian Whitmore, “Russia: Ghosts Of 1999 Haunt Presidential

Succession,” RFERL, August 9, 2007, https://rferl.org/a/1078057.html.

[1036] Pavel Voloshin, “What was in Ryazan: sugar or hexogen?” Novaya

Gazeta, February 14, 2000,
https://web.archive.org/web/20020702063704/http://2000.novayagazeta.ru/
nomer/2000/06n/n06n-s01.shtml.
[1037] David Satter, The Less You Know, The Better You Sleep: Russia’s
Road to Terror and Dictatorship under Yeltsin and Putin (Cambridge: Yale
University Press, 2017); David Satter, “The Unsolved Mystery Behind the
Act of Terror That Brought Putin to Power,” National Review, August 17,
2016, https://nationalreview.com/2016/08/vladimir-putin-1999-russian-
apartment-house-bombings-was-putin-responsible; Scott Anderson, “None
Dare Call It a Conspiracy,” GQ, March 30, 2017,
https://gq.com/story/moscow-bombings-mikhail-trepashkin-and-putin; Amy
Knight, “Finally, We Know About the Moscow Bombings,” New York
Review of Books, November 22, 2012,
https://nybooks.com/articles/2012/11/22/finally-we-know-about-moscow-
bombings; John McCain, “New Authoritarianism in Russia,” American
Enterprise Institute, November 4, 2003, https://aei.org/research-
products/speech/senator-mccain-decries-new-authoritarianism-in-russia;
Staff, “Rubio: Trump’s Friend Putin Bombed An Apartment Building As A
Pretext To Attack Chechnya,” RealClearPolitics, December 20, 2015,
https://realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/12/20/rubio_putin_bombed_an_apa
rtment_building_as_a_pretext_to_attack_chechnya.html.

[1038] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf.

[1039] Oleg Gordievsky, “Putin may be worse than we think,” Telegraph,

November 5, 2000, http://russialist.org/archives/4623.html##3.

[1040] Klebnikov, 296–97.

[1041] Andrew Kramer, “Fact Check: Marco Rubio’s Claim on Putin’s
Acts,” New York Times, December 23, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/12/24/us/politics/fact-check-marco-rubios-claim-
on-putins-acts.html.

[1042] Staff, “Attacks in Moscow: 1996–2011,” CBC News, January 24,

2011, https://cbc.ca/news/world/attacks-in-moscow-1996-2011-1.1008425.

[1043] Klebnikov, 304–05.

[1044] Robert Bruce Ware and Enver Kisriev, Dagestan: Russian

Hegemony and Islamic Resistance in the North Caucasus (Oxfordshire:
Routledge, 2009).

[1045] Robert Bruce Ware, “Revisiting Russia’s Apartment Block Blasts,”

The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2005), 599–606,
https://doi.org/10.1080/13518040590914118.

[1046] Robert Bruce Ware, “Revisiting Russia’s Apartment Block Blasts,”

The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, Vol. 18, No. 4 (2005), 599–606,
https://doi.org/10.1080/13518040590914118.

[1047] “Chechnya: Campaign of Terror Against Russia Threat,” AP,

September 11, 1999, https://newsroom.ap.org/editorial-photos-
videos/detail?itemid=f5261f18c72b98b7e264c48033ee6f8a.

[1048] Staff, “Attacks in Moscow: 1996–2011,” CBC News, January 24,

2011, https://cbc.ca/news/world/attacks-in-moscow-1996-2011-1.1008425.
[1049] Interview of Shamil Basayev, Lidove Noviny, September 9, 1999,
cited in Ware.

[1050] Matthew Brzezinski, “Surrealpolitik – How a Chechen terror suspect

wound up living on taxpayers’ dollars near the National Zoo,” Washington
Post, March 20, 2005, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38200-
2005Mar15.html.

[1051] George Soros, “Who Lost Russia?” New York Review of Books,
April 13, 2000, https://nybooks.com/articles/2000/04/13/who-lost-russia.

[1052] George Soros, “Who Lost Russia?” New York Review of Books,
April 13, 2000, https://nybooks.com/articles/2000/04/13/who-lost-russia.

[1053] MacKinnon, 4, 29. Many American conservatives have been

convinced that Soros is some sort of Marxist due to his support for so-called
“woke” cultural policies in the United States, but he is best understood as a
center-left, liberal, anti-Communist, Truman-type Cold War Democrat. He
is a billionaire, after all. More on Soros and his politics below.

[1054] Scott Peterson, “Heavy civilian toll in Chechnya’s ‘unlimited

violence,’” Christian Science Monitor, December 11, 2000,
https://csmonitor.com/2000/1211/p7s1.html.

[1055] Schaefer, 183.

[1056] Schaefer, 187–92.

[1057] Staff, “Clinton’s Words to Press: On the Mideast, Chechnya and
Other Matters,” New York Times, December 9, 1999,
https://nytimes.com/1999/12/09/world/clinton-s-words-to-press-on-the-
mideast-chechnya-and-other-matters.html.

[1058] Richard C. Paddock and Anthony Kuhn, “Yeltsin Reminds US of

Moscow’s Nuclear Capability,” Los Angeles Times, December 10, 1999,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-dec-10-mn-42521-story.html.

[1059] Schaefer, 193.

[1060] Schaefer, 213.

[1061] Schaefer, 231–32; See Chapter Three.

[1062] President Bill Clinton, “Remarks at the Opening of the Organization

for Security and Cooperation in Europe Summit in Istanbul,” The American
Presidency Project, November 18, 1999,
https://presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-opening-the-
organization-for-security-and-cooperation-europe-summit-istanbul.

[1063] “US, Saudi Arabia: Holding the Chechen Card,” Stratfor, August 14,
2008, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/us-saudi-arabia-holding-
chechen-card.

[1064] Staff, “Who is Osama Bin Laden?” BBC, September 18, 2001,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/155236.stm.

[1065] Soufan, 61.

[1066] Soufan, 62.

[1067] “US, Saudi Arabia: Holding the Chechen Card,” Stratfor, August 14,
2008, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/us-saudi-arabia-holding-
chechen-card.

[1068] The same guy who predicted the 1999 Kosovo War in 1996. See
above.

[1069] Horton, Enough Already, 39–43.

[1070] Yossef Bodansky, “The Great Game for OIL,” Defense & Foreign
Affairs Strategic Policy, June–July 2000, https://archive.is/EW9E8.

[1071] Yossef Bodansky, “The New Azerbaijan Hub; How Islamist

operations are targeting Russia, Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh,” Defense
& Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy, October 1999,
https://web.archive.org/web/20010629041938/http://aliyev.com/archive/199
909DefenseForeignAffairs.htm.

[1072] “Country Reports on Terrorism 2004,” US State Department, April

2005, https://2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/45313.pdf.

[1073] Sergei Blagov, “Petrodollars Behind the Chechen Tragedy,” Inter

Press Service, December 7, 1999,
https://archive.globalpolicy.org/security/natres/oil/centralasia/1999/1207gro
z.htm.
[1074] Ariel Cohen, “The New ‘Great Game’: Oil Politics in the Caucasus
and Central Asia,” Heritage Foundation, January 25, 1996,
https://heritage.org/europe/report/the-new-great-game-oil-politics-the-
caucasus-and-central-asia.

[1075] John Daly, “Boston Marathon Attacks, Chechnya and Oil – the
Hidden US Connection,” OilPrice.com, April 22, 2013,
https://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/International/Boston-Marathon-Attacks-
Chechnya-and-Oil-the-Hidden-US-Connection.html.

[1076] Richard Labévière, Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam
(New York: Algora Publishing, 2000), 6.

[1077] Ahmed Rashid, Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 204.

[1078] Eric Margolis, War at the Top of the World (New York: Routledge,
2002), 69; Interview with author, Eric Margolis, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, June 25, 2007, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/antiwar-radio-
eric-margolis.

[1079] Margolis, 281–82.

[1080] Staff, “Moscow fingers warlord in school takeover,” AP, September

9, 2004, https://nbcnews.com/id/wbna5951331.

[1081] Scott Peterson, “Al Qaeda among the Chechens,” Christian Science
Monitor, September 7, 2004, https://csmonitor.com/2004/0907/p01s02-
woeu.html.

[1082] Kevin Cirilli, “Chechen Rebels’ Ties to Al Qaeda, Osama bin

Laden,” Politico, April 19, 2013,
http://politico.com/story/2013/04/chechnya-primer-090326.

[1083] Staff, “Bin Laden Group Aiding Chechen Rebels, US Says,” AP,
December 4, 1999, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-dec-04-mn-
40305-story.html.

[1084] “Swift Knight: Usam Ben Laden’s Current and Historical

Activities,” DIA Document NC 3095345, Judicial Watch, October 16, 1998,
https://web.archive.org/web/20090610200903/https://judicialwatch.org/case
s/102/dia.pdf.

[1085] “Address by the President of the Russian Federation,” Kremlin,

February 24, 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67843.

[1086] Breffni O’Rourke, “OSCE: Summit Hears Clinton, Yeltsin Comment

On Chechnya,” RFERL, November 9, 1999,
https://rferl.org/a/1092699.html. More on Chechnya in Chapter Three.

[1087] Sharon LaFraniere, “How Jihad Made Its Way to Chechnya,”

Washington Post, April 26, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/04/26/how-jihad-made-
its-way-to-chechnya/5b941796-ed50-4f65-9a2b-18a90155e571; Lawrence
Wright, “The Man Behind Bin Laden,” The New Yorker, September 8,
2002, https://newyorker.com/magazine/2002/09/16/the-man-behind-bin-
laden.

[1088] Shindler, 281.

[1089] Martin F. Piechot, “Who Were the Fifteen Saudis,” Naval

Postgraduate School, June 2003,
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA417628.pdf; Lara Keay, “Who were the
September 11th attackers and what are the links with the new Taliban
regime?” Sky News, September 11, 2021, https://news.sky.com/story/9-11-
anniversary-who-were-the-september-11th-attackers-and-what-are-the-
links-with-the-new-taliban-regime-12402917.

[1090] Paul Salopek, “Terrorism finds foot soldiers in Saudis,” Chicago

Tribune, October 7, 2001, https://chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2001-
10-07-0110070175-story.html.

[1091] Lara Keay, “Who were the September 11th attackers and what are
the links with the new Taliban regime?” Sky News, September 11, 2021,
https://news.sky.com/story/9-11-anniversary-who-were-the-september-11th-
attackers-and-what-are-the-links-with-the-new-taliban-regime-12402917.

[1092] Sharon LaFraniere, “How Jihad Made Its Way to Chechnya,”

Washington Post, April 26, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/04/26/how-jihad-made-
its-way-to-chechnya/5b941796-ed50-4f65-9a2b-18a90155e571.
[1093] Sharon LaFraniere, “How Jihad Made Its Way to Chechnya,”
Washington Post, April 26, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/04/26/how-jihad-made-
its-way-to-chechnya/5b941796-ed50-4f65-9a2b-18a90155e571.

[1094] “Coleen Rowley’s Memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller,” May 21,
2002, https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/coleen-rowleys-memo-to-fbi-director-
robert-mueller.

[1095] Interview with author, Coleen Rowley, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, May 31, 2020, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/5-29-20-coleen-
rowley-on-the-dangerous-failings-of-the-fbi.

[1096] Atwan, 266.

[1097] Laurie P. Cohen, et al., “Moussaoui May Have Recruited Chechen

Fighters, Evidence Shows,” Wall Street Journal, February 4, 2002,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB1012773398275634680.

[1098] Philip Shenon, “The Terrible Missed Chance,” Newsweek,

September 4, 2011, https://newsweek.com/terrible-missed-chance-67401.

[1099] Dale Watson, Memo to FBI Director Louis Freeh, “Bin Laden/Ibn
Khattab Threat Reporting,” April 2001,
https://coop.vaed.uscourts.gov/moussaoui/exhibits/defense/792.pdf.

[1100] Coleen Rowley, “Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons,” Consortium

News, April 19, 2013, https://consortiumnews.com/2013/04/19/chechen-
terrorists-and-the-neocons; Philip Shenon, “The Terrible Missed Chance,”
Newsweek, September 4, 2011, https://newsweek.com/terrible-missed-
chance-67401.

[1101] Richard H. Schultz Jr., “Showstoppers: Nine Reasons Why We

Never Sent Our Special Operations Forces After Al Qaeda Before 9/11,”
Weekly Standard, January 26, 2004,
https://washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/1255154/showstoppers.

[1102] “Hosea 8:7,” The Bible, https://biblehub.com/hosea/8-7.htm.

[1103] “New WTC 9/11 Video Helicopter view,” 9/11 Kevin Palmgren,
February 10, 2024, https://youtube.com/watch?v=wZ34eWqbayk; Aaron
Katersky, “2 new 9/11 victims identified as medical examiner vows to
continue testing remains,” ABC News, September 8, 2023,
https://abcnews.go.com/US/2-new-911-victims-identified-medical-
examiner-vows/story?id=103032291.

[1104] Fittingly, the Bangladeshis call NGOs “Next-to-Government

Organizations.” Susanne Heim, “Sandwich at the round table,” Taz, July 5,
1994, https://taz.de/!1554681.

[1105] David Ignatius, “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless

Coups,” Washington Post, September 21, 1991,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/09/22/innocence-abroad-
the-new-world-of-spyless-coups/92bb989a-de6e-4bb8-99b9-462c76b59a16.

[1106] See above.

[1107] Andrew Mollison, “Overseas Political Gifts? It’s US Policy,” Austin
American-Statesman, February 23, 1997, cited in James Bovard, Attention
Deficit Democracy (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 61;
MacKinnon, 30.

[1108] MacKinnon, 31; Justin Raimondo, “The Next Balkan War,”

Antiwar.com, January 7, 2000, https://antiwar.com/justin/pf/p-
j010700.html; Staff, “Montenegro’s new president sworn in,” CNN, January
15, 1998, http://edition.cnn.com/WORLD/9801/15/montenegro.update.

[1109] Christine Stone, “Some Thoughts on the Killings in Armenia – Who

did it and Why?” Antiwar.com, November 1, 1999,
https://original.antiwar.com/christine-stone/1999/11/01/some-thoughts-on-
the-killings-in-armenia-who-did-it-and-why.

[1110] Sussman, 126; MacKinnon, 30–33; Barbara Rieffer and Kristan

Mercer, “US Democracy Promotion: The Clinton and Bush
Administrations,” Global Society, Vol. 19 (2005), 398,
https://tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/13600820500242654; Bovard,
Attention Deficit Democracy, 61–62; Christine Stone, “McCain Rocks the
Vote,” Antiwar.com, February 9, 2000,
https://antiwar.com/orig/stone5.html.

[1111] MacKinnon, 31.

[1112] MacKinnon, 30–33.

[1113] MacKinnon, 33–34.

[1114] Sussman, 130.

[1115] Staff, “Madeleine Albright Assumes Chairmanship of NDI,” NDI

Reports, No. 1, 2001,
https://ndi.org/sites/default/files/1326_ww_newdemocs301_1.pdf.

[1116] MacKinnon, 35.

[1117] MacKinnon, 36.

[1118] Jürgen Hogrefe, “Help For the Revolution,” Der Spiegel, October 8,
2000, https://spiegel.de/politik/hilfe-zur-revolution-a-22b5f7a5-0002-0001-
0000-000017540534.

[1119] MacKinnon, 39.

[1120] Tina Rosenberg, “Revolution U,” Foreign Policy, February 17, 2011,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/02/17/revolution-u-2.

[1121] MacKinnon, 40.

[1122] Sussman, 142; Roger Cohen, “Who Really Brought Down

Milosevic?” New York Times, November 26, 2000,
https://nytimes.com/2000/11/26/magazine/who-really-brought-down-
milosevic.html.

[1123] Christopher Ingraham, “Somebody just put a price tag on the 2016
election. It’s a doozy,” Washington Post, April 14, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/04/14/somebody-just-put-
a-price-tag-on-the-2016-election-its-a-doozy; Edith Olmsted, “Harris
Raised $1 Billion. Where Did it All Go?” The New Republic, November 8,
2024, https://newrepublic.com/post/188216/kamala-harris-campaign-
billion-fundraising.

[1124] MacKinnon, 30.

[1125] MacKinnon, 41.

[1126] Jürgen Hogrefe, “Help For the Revolution,” Der Spiegel, October 8,
2000, https://spiegel.de/politik/hilfe-zur-revolution-a-22b5f7a5-0002-0001-
0000-000017540534.

[1127] MacKinnon, 46.

[1128] Michael Dobbs, “US Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition,”

Washington Post, December 10, 2000,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/12/11/us-advice-guided-
milosevic-opposition/ba9e87e5-bdca-45dc-8aad-da6571e89448.

[1129] Sussman, 145–46.

[1130] MacKinnon, 51.

[1131] Roger Cohen, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?” New York
Times, November 26, 2000, https://nytimes.com/2000/11/26/magazine/who-
really-brought-down-milosevic.html.
[1132] Jürgen Hogrefe, “Help For the Revolution,” Der Spiegel, October 8,
2000, https://spiegel.de/politik/hilfe-zur-revolution-a-22b5f7a5-0002-0001-
0000-000017540534.

[1133] MacKinnon, 52.

[1134] Jürgen Hogrefe, “Help for the revolution,” Der Spiegel, October 8,
2000, https://spiegel.de/politik/hilfe-zur-revolution-a-22b5f7a5-0002-0001-
0000-000017540534.

[1135] R. Jeffrey Smith, “Milosevic Maneuvers For Election Runoff,”

Washington Post, September 27, 2000,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/09/27/milosevic-
maneuvers-for-election-runoff/135c9d1c-163d-4282-8662-0308d1653852.

[1136] Staff, “Yugoslav Protesters Set Parliament on Fire,” New York Times,
October 5, 2000, https://nytimes.com/2000/10/05/continuous/yugoslav-
protesters-set-parliament-on-fire.html.

[1137] Steve York, Bringing Down a Dictator, International Center on

Nonviolent Conflict, 2001, https://youtube.com/watch?v=r7dNLt5mC1A.

[1138] Jürgen Hogrefe, “Help for the revolution,” Der Spiegel, October 8,
2000, https://spiegel.de/politik/hilfe-zur-revolution-a-22b5f7a5-0002-0001-
0000-000017540534.

[1139] Roger Cohen, “Who Really Brought Down Milosevic?” New York
Times, November 26, 2000, https://nytimes.com/2000/11/26/magazine/who-
really-brought-down-milosevic.html.

[1140] MacKinnon, 59.

[1141] Steve York, Bringing Down a Dictator, International Center on

Nonviolent Conflict, 2001, https://youtube.com/watch?v=r7dNLt5mC1A.

[1142] Gerald Sussman, Branding Democracy: US Regime Change in Post-

Soviet Eastern Europe (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2010), 96–97.

[1143] No relation to the Libertarian Institute’s Jeremy R. Hammond.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/author/jhammond.

[1144] Press Release, “Jeremy Hammond Sentenced To 10 Years In Prison

For Hacking Into The Stratfor Website And Other Company, Federal, State,
And Local Government Websites,” US Department of Justice, November
15, 2013, https://justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/jeremy-hammond-sentenced-10-
years-prison-hacking-stratfor-website-and-other-company.

[1145] Carl Gibson and Steve Horn, “WikiLeaks Docs Expose Famed
Serbian Activist’s Ties to ‘Shadow CIA,’” In These Times, December 2,
2013, https://inthesetimes.com/article/WikiLeaks-docs-expose-famed-
serbian-activists-ties-to-shadow-cia.

[1146] O-Gon Kwon, et al., “Prosecutor v. Radovan Karadžić,” Paras 3275–

3297, 3460, Footnote 11027, International Tribunal for the Prosecution of
Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian
Law Committed in the Territory of the former Yugoslavia since 1991,
March 24, 2016,
https://icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/tjug/en/160324_judgement.pdf.

[1147] Anna Holligan, “Radovan Karadžić sentence increased to life at UN

tribunal,” BBC, March 20, 2019, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-
47642327; “UN court upholds Ratko Mladić convictions and life sentence,”
UN, June 8, 2021, https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/06/1093582.

[1148] Staff, “Clinton Policies to Blame, says Kostunica,” Radio B92,

September 21, 2001, https://archive.is/Ojlih.

[1149] Jolyon Naegele, “Yugoslavia: In Belgrade, Kostunica-Djindjic

Rivalry Worsens,” RFERL, June 13, 2002, https://rferl.org/a/1099985.html.

[1150] Staff, “Arrest and Transfer,” International Criminal Tribunal for the
Former Yugoslavia, June 29, 2001, https://icty.org/en/content/arrest-and-
transfer.

[1151] Daniel Simpson, “Yugoslavia Is Again Reinvented, in Name and

Structure,” New York Times, February 5, 2003,
https://nytimes.com/2003/02/05/world/yugoslavia-is-again-reinvented-in-
name-and-structure.html.

[1152] Staff, “Serbia: Kostunica Blames Djindjic For Election Failure,”

RFERL, October 15, 2002, https://rferl.org/a/1101074.html.

[1153] Mark Tran, “Serbian PM shot dead,” Guardian, March 12, 2003,
https://theguardian.com/world/2003/mar/12/balkans.
[1154] Dusan Stojanovic, “Serbian president’s victory moves nation closer
to EU,” AP, February 4, 2008, https://sfgate.com/politics/article/serbian-
president-s-victory-moves-nation-closer-3295639.php.

[1155] Staff, “US-sanctioned Serbian deputy premier disavows West as he

defends Russia and Putin,” AP, September 4, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/russia-serbia-putin-vulin-sanctions-relations-
3950358c5d75e8334001d22f156b2abe.

[1156] MacKinnon, 277.

[1157] Julian Barnes, “Ex-CIA Officer’s Brief Detention Deepens Mystery

in Montenegro,” New York Times, November 23, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/11/23/us/politics/cia-montenegro-russia-coup-
joseph-assad.html.

[1158] Brzezinski, 46.

[1159] Halford John Mackinder, Democratic Ideals and Reality: A Study in

the Politics of Reconstruction (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1919), 186.

[1160] Brzezinski, 35, 38.

[1161] Brzezinski, xiv.

[1162] Brzezinski, 35.

[1163] Brzezinski, 40.

[1164] Samuel Helfont, “From Iraq to Ukraine: A New Perspective on the
Russian-Western Confrontation,” War on the Rocks, May 16, 2022,
https://warontherocks.com/2022/05/from-iraq-to-ukraine-a-new-
perspective-on-the-russian-western-confrontation.

[1165] Eugene J. Carroll Jr., “NATO Expansion Would Be an Epic ‘Fateful

Error,’” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 1997, https://latimes.com/archives/la-
xpm-1997-jul-07-me-10464-story.html.

[1166] Jason Cooper, “Washington calls 5,500 US troops ‘hardly any’ but
1,200 Russians in PMR must go,” Tiraspol Times, June 13, 2007,
https://web.archive.org/web/20070927192504/http://tiraspoltimes.com/new
s/for_washington_5_500_u_s_troops_are_hardly_any_but_1_200_russian_t
roops_must_go.html; Staff, “Bulgaria OKs 3 bases for US troops,”
Washington Times, April 24, 2006,
https://washingtontimes.com/news/2006/apr/24/20060424-121528-1841r.

[1167] Daryl Kimball, “The Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE)

Treaty and the Adapted CFE Treaty at a Glance,” Arms Control
Association, November 2023,
https://armscontrol.org/factsheets/conventional-armed-forces-europe-cfe-
treaty-and-adapted-cfe-treaty-glance.

[1168] Thomas W. Lippman, “NATO Embraces 3 From Warsaw Pact,”

Washington Post, March 13, 1999, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/world/daily/april99/nato0313.htm.
[1169] “The Alliance’s Strategic Concept (1999),” NATO, April 24, 1999,
https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_27433.htm.

[1170] Sarotte, 320.

[1171] Sarotte, 320.

[1172] Sarotte, 321–22.

[1173] Tim Hains, “Putin Says He Asked Bill Clinton About Russia Joining
NATO In Year 2000,” RealClearPolitics, February 22, 2022,
https://realclearpolitics.com/video/2022/02/22/putin_says_he_asked_bill_cl
inton_about_russia_joining_nato_in_year_2000.html.

[1174] Talbott, 132.

[1175] Brzezinski, 100–02.

[1176] Brzezinski, 52.

[1177] Interview of Boris Fyodorov, PBS Frontline, May 2000,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/interviews/fyodorov.htm
l.

[1178] Richard C. Paddock, “Putin Says He Tried to Dissuade Yeltsin,” Los

Angeles Times, January 5, 2000, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-
jan-05-mn-50919-story.html.

[1179] Klebnikov, 290–92.

[1180] “Yeltsin Sacks PM Sergei Stepashin to Make Way for Putin,” BBC,
August 9, 1999, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/415459.stm.

[1181] Klebnikov, 296–97.

[1182] Klebnikov, 298.

[1183] Talbott, 365.

[1184] Celestine Bohlen, “Yeltsin Resigns, Naming Putin as Acting

President To Run in March Election,” New York Times, January 1, 2000,
https://nytimes.com/2000/01/01/world/yeltsin-resigns-overview-yeltsin-
resigns-naming-putin-acting-president-run-march.html.

[1185] Interview of Strobe Talbott, PBS Frontline, October 25, 2017,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/strobe-talbott.

[1186] Talbott, 7.

[1187] Matt Taibbi, “Putin the Apostate,” Racket News, February 28, 2022,
https://racket.news/p/putin-the-apostate.

[1188] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like
to Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC,
October 13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0.

[1189] David Leppard, et al., “The bastards got me,” London Times,
November 26, 2006, https://thetimes.co.uk/article/the-bastards-got-me-
5hxsdrn09r0.
[1190] Yevgenia Borisova, et al., “And the Winner Is?” Moscow Times,
September 9, 2000,
https://web.archive.org/web/20001202075400/http://themoscowtimes.com/s
tories/2000/09/09/119.html; Scott Peterson and Fred Weir, “Russians shrug
off stolen votes,” Christian Science Monitor, September 18, 2000,
https://csmonitor.com/2000/0918/p6s1.html.

[1191] “The Russian Presidential Elections,” US Senate Foreign Relations

Committee, April 12, 2000, https://govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-
106shrg67222/html/CHRG-106shrg67222.htm.

[1192] Chrystia Freeland, “To Russia With Love,” New Statesman, June 19,
2000, https://newstatesman.com/politics/2000/06/to-russia-with-love.

[1193] Ambassador Thomas Hart Armbruster, “Russian Far East:

Chukotkans Worry as Their ‘Hero,’ Billionaire Roman Abramovich, Steps
Down as Governor,” US State Department, July 9, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08VLADIVOSTOK68_a.html; Samuel
Petrequin, “EU imposes sanctions on Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich,”
AP, March 15, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-new-
sanctions-target-abramovich-ab2fd335f68c9b877a71c54413e9c757.

[1194] Staff, “Leonid Nevzlin: The One Who Got Away,” Forbes, August 1,
2008, https://forbes.com/2008/08/01/nevzlin-khodorkovsky-yukos-face-
cx_vr_0801autofacescan01.html; Ellen Barry, “Putin Plays Sheriff for
Cowboy Capitalists,” New York Times, June 4, 2009,
https://nytimes.com/2009/06/05/world/europe/05russia.html; “Vladimir
Putin takes Oleg Deripaska to task,” June 4, 2009,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=48Kk7kobMQY.

[1195] Interview of Boris Fyodorov, PBS Frontline, May 2000,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/yeltsin/interviews/fyodorov.htm
l.

[1196] Vladimir Pozner, “How the United States Created Vladimir Putin,”
Yale University, September 27, 2018, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=8X7Ng75e5gQ.

[1197] Adam Curtis, “Russia 1985–1999: Trauma Zone: What It Felt Like
to Live Through the Collapse of Communism and Democracy,” BBC,
October 13, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ke600MgW1F0.

[1198] Simon Bell, et al., “Rothschild is the new power behind Yukos,”
Sunday Times, November 2, 2003, https://thetimes.com/article/rothschild-
is-the-new-power-behind-yukos-9wtmr3d90nz.

[1199] Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser, “Russia Jails Executive Of Media
Company,” Washington Post, January 16, 2001,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/01/17/russia-jails-
executive-of-media-company/411020ac-cc46-48ed-90ff-c17302b31236;
David Hoffman, “Russian Media Magnate Arrested at Villa in Spain,”
Washington Post, December 12, 2000,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/12/13/russian-media-
magnate-arrested-at-villa-in-spain/c99cf364-ad0b-4182-9e3d-
d3241fc9a5f9; Staff, “Russian Court Orders Media-Most Liquidation,” PBS
NewsHour, May 29, 2001, https://pbs.org/newshour/nation/media-jan-
june01-russia_05-29.

[1200] Alexander Gentelev, The Rise and Fall of the Russian Oligarchs,
January 3, 2006, https://youtube.com/watch?v=oay8GsSxU4Y.

[1201] David Hoffman, “Russian Tycoon Faces Charges,” Washington Post,

April 7, 1999, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
srv/inatl/longterm/russiagov/stories/berez040799.htm.

[1202] Melissa Kite and Richard Beeston, “Asylum for tycoon threatens
Blair’s links with Putin,” London Times, September 11, 2003,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/asylum-for-tycoon-threatens-blairs-links-with-
putin-625lz5l358g.

[1203] Toby Melville, “UK coroner records open verdict on death of

Russian oligarch Berezovsky,” Reuters, March 27, 2014,
https://reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2Q25O.

[1204] Matt Taibbi, “Putin’s Night Of The Long Knives,” The eXile,
December 21, 2000,
https://web.archive.org/web/20060516012730/https://ukemonde.com/putin/l
ongknives.html.

[1205] Rep. Ron Paul, “Relations with Russia,” Texas Straight Talk,
January 31, 2000,
https://ronpaulquotes.com/Texas_Straight_Talk/tst013100.html.
OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter 3: George W. Bush

[1] Jonathan Rauch, “Putin Is Right: Russia Belongs in NATO,” The

Atlantic, July 31, 2001,
https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2001/08/putin-is-right-russia-
belongs-in-nato/377557.

[2] This is not a brief for Russian entry into the alliance, or for the alliance
at all; just noting the powers’ discussions at the time.

[3] Patrick E. Tyler, “Russia and China Sign ‘Friendship’ Pact,” New York
Times, July 17, 2001, https://nytimes.com/2001/07/17/world/russia-and-
china-sign-friendship-pact.html; Aaron Brown, “Poll Shows Half of Russia
Thinks NATO is a Threat,” CNN, May 27, 2002,
http://cnn.com/transcripts/0205/27/asb.00.html.

[4] Vladimir Putin, et al., First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-

Portrait by Russia’s President (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), 169.

[5] Madeleine Albright, “Putin Is Making a Historic Mistake,” New York

Times, February 23, 2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/02/23/opinion/putin-
ukraine.html.

[6] “Interview of Vladimir Putin,” Breakfast with Frost, BBC, March 5,

2000,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/breakfast_
with_frost/transcripts/putin5.mar.txt.
[7] Richard Sakwa, Russia Against the Rest (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017), 86.

[8] Vladimir Putin, “Russia and the changing world,” Moscow News,
February 27, 2012, https://mn.ru/politics/78738.

[9] Vladimir Putin, “Speech in the Bundestag of the Federal Republic of

Germany,” Kremlin, September 25, 2001,
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21340.

[10] Suzanne Daley, “Putin Softens His Stance Against NATO Expansion,”
New York Times, October 4, 2001, https://nytimes.com/2001/10/04/world/a-
nation-challenged-the-allies-putin-softens-his-stance-against-nato-
expansion.html.

[11] Eric Engleman, “Putin Calls Bush on Sept. 11,” AP, September 11,
2002, https://apnews.com/article/5373d96aa8ed8f3fe3a2010b7ad521c7.

[12] George W. Bush, Decision Points, 196.

[13] Oliver Stone, The Putin Interviews (New York: Hot Books, 2017), 32.

[14] Staff, “Worldview,” Christian Science Monitor, September 13, 2001,

https://csmonitor.com/2001/0913/p24s3-nbgn.html.

[15] Jack F. Matlock Jr., “Today’s Crisis Over Ukraine Was Predictable and
Avoidable,” Antiwar.com, February 15, 2022,
https://original.antiwar.com/jack_matlock/2022/02/14/todays-crisis-over-
ukraine-was-avoidable-and-predictable.
[16] David Ignatius, “The moment when Putin turned away from the West,”
Washington Post, March 9, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/09/putin-bush-chechnya-
ukraine-war.

[17] Burns, 208.

[18] William Burns, “CSTO: Russia’s Counter to NATO,” US State

Department, March 14, 2007,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07MOSCOW1105_a.html.

[19] Suzanne Daley, “Putin Softens His Stance Against NATO Expansion,”
New York Times, October 4, 2001, https://nytimes.com/2001/10/04/world/a-
nation-challenged-the-allies-putin-softens-his-stance-against-nato-
expansion.html.

[20] Paul Reynolds, “Analysis: Bush and Putin on nickname terms,” BBC,
May 23, 2002, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2000197.stm.

[21] Robin Wright, “Ties That Terrorism Transformed,” Los Angeles Times,
March 13, 2002, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-mar-13-mn-
32572-story.html.

[22] Charap and Colton, 68.

[23] Suzanne Daley, “Putin Softens His Stance Against NATO Expansion,”
New York Times, October 4, 2001, https://nytimes.com/2001/10/04/world/a-
nation-challenged-the-allies-putin-softens-his-stance-against-nato-
expansion.html.

[24] Marc Grossman, “US Grossman Delegation Consults With Italian

Officials on Prague Summit,” US State Department, April 17, 2002,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/02ROME1918_a.html.

[25] Michael Klare, “Bush-Cheney Energy Strategy: Procuring the Rest of

the World’s Oil,” Oil & Politics, January 18, 2004,
https://laohamutuk.org/OilWeb/Bground/War/PetroPol%20Bush%20Klare.
pdf.

[26] Burns, 208.

[27] David Rohde and Arshad Mohammed, “How the US made its Putin
problem worse,” Reuters, April 19, 2014, https://reuters.com/article/us-
ukraine-putin-diplomacy-special-repor/special-report-how-the-u-s-made-
its-putin-problem-worse-idUSBREA3H0OQ20140418.

[28] Terence Neilan, “Bush Pulls Out of ABM Treaty; Putin Calls Move a
Mistake,” New York Times, December 13, 2001,
https://nytimes.com/2001/12/13/international/bush-pulls-out-of-abm-treaty-
putin-calls-move-a-mistake.html.

[29] Daryl Kimball and Kingston Reif, “The Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM)
Treaty at a Glance,” Arms Control Association, December 2020,
https://armscontrol.org/factsheets/anti-ballistic-missile-abm-treaty-glance.
[30] Carla Anne Robbins, “How Little-Debated Expansion Plan Will Alter
the Structure of NATO,” Wall Street Journal, March 12, 1998,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB889655079880546500.

[31] Daryl Kimball, “START II and Its Extension Protocol at a Glance,”

Arms Control Association, July 2022,
https://armscontrol.org/factsheets/start-ii-and-its-extension-protocol-glance.

[32] Sharon LaFraniere, “Russia Quits Arms Pact,” Washington Post, June
14, 2002, https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/06/15/russia-
quits-arms-pact/3565c2d1-47ae-471a-a2a7-d2786f29140a.

[33] Presidents George H.W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin, “Treaty Between the
United States of America and the Russian Federation on Further Reduction
and Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms (START II),” January 3, 1993,
https://2009-2017.state.gov/t/avc/trty/102887.htm.

[34] Andrew Cockburn, Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy
(New York: Scribner, 2011), 95–96.

[35] Peter Certo, “John Bolton,” Militarist Monitor, January 3, 2020,

https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/john-bolton.

[36] “Arms Control Today Interview With Undersecretary John Bolton,”

Arms Control Today, February 20, 2002,
https://armscontrol.org/pressroom/2002-02/arms-control-today-interview-
undersecretary-john-bolton-available.
[37] Staff, “Russian Federation ratifies Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban
Treaty,” CTBTO, May 23, 2008, https://ctbto.org/resources/for-the-
media/press-releases/russian-federation-ratifies-comprehensive-nuclear-
test-ban.

[38] “Text of Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty,” White House, May

24, 2002, https://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020524-3.html.

[39] Corey Flintoff, “Bush, Critics Face Off on European Missile Shield,”
NPR News, October 28, 2007, https://npr.org/2007/10/28/15674582/bush-
critics-face-off-on-european-missile-shield.

[40] Chargé d’Affaires Daniel Russell, “Local Pundits on Russia’s

Escalating Rhetoric,” US State Department, June 5, 2007,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07MOSCOW2659_a.html.

[41] Daniel A. Russell, “US-Russia Strategic Security Talks,” April 23,

2007, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07MOSCOW1877_a.html.

[42] See Chapter Seven; Ray McGovern, “Peeking Past the Pall Put Over
Arms Talks With Russia,” Antiwar.com, January 14, 2022,
https://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2022/01/13/peeking-past-the-pall-
put-over-arms-talks-with-russia; Corey Flintoff, “Bush, Critics Face Off on
European Missile Shield,” NPR News, October 28, 2007,
https://npr.org/2007/10/28/15674582/bush-critics-face-off-on-european-
missile-shield; J. David Goodman, “Microphone Catches a Candid Obama,”
New York Times, March 26, 2012,
https://nytimes.com/2012/03/27/us/politics/obama-caught-on-microphone-
telling-medvedev-of-flexibility.html; Andrew Higgins, “On the Edge of a
Polish Forest, Where Some of Putin’s Darkest Fears Lurk,” New York
Times, February 16, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/02/16/world/europe/poland-missile-base-russia-
ukraine.html.

[43] Corey Flintoff, “Bush, Critics Face Off on European Missile Shield,”
NPR News, October 28, 2007, https://npr.org/2007/10/28/15674582/bush-
critics-face-off-on-european-missile-shield; Robert Gates, “Nuclear
Weapons and Deterrence in the 21st Century,” Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, October 28, 2008,
https://carnegieendowment.org/2008/10/28/gates-nuclear-weapons-and-
deterrence-in-21st-century-event-1202.

[44] Steven Lee Myers, “Bush Stands by Plan for Missile Defenses,” New
York Times, October 24, 2007,
https://nytimes.com/2007/10/24/washington/24prexy.html.

[45] Gareth Porter, “Was There Ever an Iranian Nuclear Weapons

Program?” The American Conservative, May 14, 2018,
https://theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-if-there-never-was-an-
iranian-nuclear-weapons-program; Shemuel Meir, “Was the Iranian Threat
Fabricated by Israel and the US?” Haaretz, May 31, 2014,
https://haaretz.com/premium-an-imaginary-iran-threat-1.5250169; Gareth
Porter, “When the Ayatollah Said No to Nukes,” Foreign Policy, October
16, 2014, https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/10/16/when-the-ayatollah-said-no-
to-nukes.

[46] Theodore A. Postol, “Russia may have violated the INF Treaty. Here’s
how the United States appears to have done the same,” Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, February 14, 2019, https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/russia-
may-have-violated-the-inf-treaty-heres-how-the-united-states-appears-to-
have-done-the-same.

[47] Katrina vanden Heuvel, “Missile Defense: ‘Longest Running Scam’

Exposed,” The Nation, March 7, 2008,
https://thenation.com/article/archive/missile-defense-longest-running-scam-
exposed; Eric Lipton, “Insider’s Projects Drained Missile-Defense
Millions,” New York Times, October 11, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/10/12/washington/12missile.html.

[48] Leo J. Schneider Jr., “VLS: A Challenge Met, An Old Rule Kept,” US
Navy, April 1987,
https://web.archive.org/web/20170222163407/https://dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext
/u2/a183944.pdf; Jack Detsch, “Putin’s Fixation With an Old-School US
Missile Launcher,” Foreign Policy, January 12, 2022,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/12/putin-russia-us-missile-defense-nato-
ukraine.

[49] Mikhail Kamynin, “Spokesman of Russia’s Ministry of Foreign

Affairs, Answers a Question from ITAR-TASS Regarding US Intention to
Deploy Elements of Its National Missile Defense System in Poland and
Czech Republic,” Russian Foreign Ministry, January 26, 2007,
https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1722988.

[50] Burns, 231.

[51] Gareth Porter, Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran
Nuclear Scare (Washington, D.C.: Just World Books, 2014); That was a
generation ago, and Iran still has not chosen to attempt to make nuclear
weapons. Thomas Fingar, et al., “National Intelligence Estimate: Iran –
Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities,” National Intelligence Council,
November 2007,
https://dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Reports%20and%20Pubs/20071
203_release.pdf; The Director of National Intelligence reported in February
2024, “Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons-
development activities necessary to produce a testable nuclear device,”
“Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community,” Office of
the Director of National Intelligence, February 5, 2024,
https://dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2024-Unclassified-
Report.pdf.

[52] “President Vladimir Putin Press Conference following the end of the
G8 Summit,” Kremlin, June 8, 2007,
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24322.

[53] Adrian Blomfield and Mike Smith, “Gorbachev: US Could Start New
Cold War,” Telegraph, May 6, 2008,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/1933223/Gorbachev-
US-could-start-new-Cold-War.html.

[54] William Burns, “Senator Hagel’s Meeting With FM Lavrov,” US State

Department, January 18, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW142_a.html; Staff, “Russia
tested a new missile,” Russian Forces Blog, May 29, 2007,
https://russianforces.org/blog/2007/05/russia_tested_a_new_missile.shtml.

[55] John Koenig, “Germany/Russia: Merel [sic] Goes to Moscow,” US

State Department, March 10, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08BERLIN303_a.html.

[56] Chargé d’Affaires Daniel Russell, “Local Pundits on Russia’s

Escalating Rhetoric,” US State Department, June 5, 2007,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07MOSCOW2659_a.html.

[57] Staff, “Russian leader talks tough,” AP, November 5, 2008,

https://denverpost.com/2008/11/05/russian-leader-talks-tough.

[58] William Burns, “Fundamentals of Russian Foreign Policy Contribute

to Tension With the West,” US State Department, September 13, 2007,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07MOSCOW4505_a.html.

[59] Mitchell Prothero, “The ‘Cedar Revolution’ meets Hezbollah,”

Salon.com, March 5, 2005, https://salon.com/2005/03/05/hezbollah.
[60] Daniel McAdams, “How Lukashenko Won,” Antiwar.com, March 27,
2006, https://original.antiwar.com/daniel-mcadams/2006/03/27/how-
lukashenko-won; Vladimir Radyuhin and John Cherian, “Snub to the West,”
The Hindu, April 21, 2006, https://frontline.thehindu.com/world-
affairs/article30209035.ece.

[61] Kenneth Timmerman, “State Department Backs ‘Reformists’ in Wild

Iranian Election,” Newsmax.com, June 11, 2009,
https://newsmax.com/kentimmerman/iran-elections-
reformists/2009/06/11/id/348747.

[62] “US Democracy Group Rebuts Hong Kong Meddling Allegations,”

Voice of America, October 23, 2014, https://voanews.com/a/voa-exclusive-
us-democracy-group-rebuts-hong-kong-meddling-
allegations/2493257.html.

[63] “George W. Bush on Humble Foreign Policy 2000,” C-SPAN, October

11, 2000, https://c-span.org/video/?c4788564/user-clip-george-w-bush-
humble-foreign-policy-2000.

[64] Alan Bock, “Dubya’s Expansive Vision,” Antiwar.com, November 25,

1999, https://antiwar.com/bock/b112599.html.

[65] MacKinnon, 61–65.

[66] MacKinnon, 60, 66.

[67] Yauheniya Nechyparenka, “Democratic Transition in Belarus: Cause(s)
of Failure,” Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, 2011,
http://jstor.com/stable/pdf/resrep14202.5.pdf.

[68] MacKinnon, 67.

[69] Benjamin Smith, “US Plays Its Part in Belarus In Efforts to Oust
Lukashenko,” Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2001,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB999464004722987441.

[70] MacKinnon, 67.

[71] MacKinnon, 68.

[72] Ian Traynor, “Belarussian foils dictator-buster . . . for now,” Guardian,

September 13, 2001, https://theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/14/iantraynor.

[73] Ian Traynor, “Belarussian foils dictator-buster . . . for now,” Guardian,

September 13, 2001, https://theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/14/iantraynor.

[74] MacKinnon, 71.

[75] Ian Traynor, “Belarussian foils dictator-buster . . . for now,” Guardian,

September 13, 2001, https://theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/14/iantraynor.

[76] Giorgio Comai and Bernardo Venturi, “Language and education laws
in multi-ethnic de facto states: the cases of Abkhazia and Transnistria,”
Nationalities Papers, Vol. 43, No. 6 (November 2015),
https://researchgate.net/publication/283535510_Language_and_education_l
aws_in_multi-
ethnic_de_facto_states_the_cases_of_Abkhazia_and_Transnistria.

[77] Steele, 148.

[78] Charap and Colton, 70.

[79] William H. Hill, Russia, The Near Abroad and the West: Lessons from
the Moldova-Transdniestria Conflict (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson
Center Press, 2012), xii.

[80] See Chapter Two.

[81] MacKinnon, 97; Jonathan Steele, “The new cold war,” Guardian,
January 2, 2004, https://theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/03/russia.usa.

[82] Heidi Tagliavini, et al., “Independent International Fact-Finding

Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, Report, Volume I–III,” 2009,
https://mpil.de/en/pub/publications/archive/independent_international_fact.
cfm.

[83] Zeyno Baran, “Deals Give Russian Companies Influence Over

Georgia’s Energy Infrastructure,” Eurasianet, August 18, 2003,
https://eurasianet.org/deals-give-russian-companies-influence-over-
georgias-energy-infrastructure.

[84] Jonathan Steele, “The new cold war,” Guardian, January 2, 2004,
https://theguardian.com/world/2004/jan/03/russia.usa.
[85] MacKinnon, 106–07.

[86] See Chapter Two.

[87] “Biography: Richard Miles,” US State Department, April 11, 2002,

https://2001-2009.state.gov/outofdate/bios/m/9527.htm.

[88] MacKinnon, 101–02.

[89] MacKinnon, 107.

[90] Hugh Pope, “Pro-West Leaders In Georgia Push Shevardnadze Out,”

Wall Street Journal, November 24, 2003,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB1069507873431700.

[91] Sussman, 148, 154.

[92] MacKinnon, 110.

[93] Mark MacKinnon, “Georgia Revolt Carried Mark of Soros,” Globe

and Mail, November 26, 2003,
https://theglobeandmail.com/news/world/georgia-revolt-carried-mark-of-
soros/article18437463; MacKinnon, 114.

[94] George Melloan, “Putin Is Not Amused By the Coup in Georgia,” Wall
Street Journal, December 2, 2003,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB107032301988570800.

[95] MacKinnon, 103.

[96] MacKinnon, 112.

[97] Christopher Marquis, “US Sending Officials to Georgia to Offer Help

on Transition,” New York Times, November 27, 2003,
https://nytimes.com/2003/11/27/world/us-sending-officials-to-georgia-to-
offer-help-on-transition.html.

[98] Staff, “Ruling party takes lead in parliamentary elections,” Chicago

Tribune, November 4, 2003, https://chicagotribune.com/2003/11/04/ruling-
party-takes-lead-in-parliamentary-elections.

[99] MacKinnon, 117.

[100] Mark MacKinnon, “Georgia Revolt Carried Mark of Soros,” Globe

and Mail, November 26, 2003,
https://theglobeandmail.com/news/world/georgia-revolt-carried-mark-of-
soros/article18437463.

[101] MacKinnon, 118.

[102] Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser, “Protesters Storm Georgia

Parliament,” Washington Post, November 23, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/11/23/protesters-storm-
georgia-parliament/4a24b5a6-8e32-4326-bfa7-a7e04d6ad193.

[103] MacKinnon, 118.

[104] MacKinnon, 121.

[105] MacKinnon, 123.

[106] MacKinnon, 124.

[107] Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser, “Protesters Storm Georgia

Parliament,” Washington Post, November 23, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/11/23/protesters-storm-
georgia-parliament/4a24b5a6-8e32-4326-bfa7-a7e04d6ad193.

[108] Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser, “Protesters Storm Georgia

Parliament,” Washington Post, November 23, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/11/23/protesters-storm-
georgia-parliament/4a24b5a6-8e32-4326-bfa7-a7e04d6ad193.

[109] Mark MacKinnon, “Georgia Revolt Carried Mark of Soros,” Globe

and Mail, November 26, 2003,
https://theglobeandmail.com/news/world/georgia-revolt-carried-mark-of-
soros/article18437463.

[110] Richard W. Carlson, “Georgia on His Mind – George Soros’s

Potemkin Revolution,” Weekly Standard, May 24, 2004,
https://washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-standard/georgia-on-his-mind.

[111] Interview with author, Joshua Eaton, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, February 12, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/021214-
joshua-eaton.
[112] Tweet by Joshua Eaton, March 22, 2023,
https://x.com/joshua_eaton/status/1638666761884278784.

[113] MacKinnon, 25–26.

[114] MacKinnon, 24–25.

[115] Carey Goldberg, “Wealthy Ally for Dissidents in the Drug War,” New
York Times, September 11, 1996,
https://nytimes.com/1996/09/11/us/wealthy-ally-for-dissidents-in-the-drug-
war.html.

[116] Scott Bland, “George Soros’ quiet overhaul of the US justice system,”
Politico, August 30, 2016, https://politico.com/story/2016/08/george-soros-
criminal-justice-reform-227519.

[117] MacKinnon, 26.

[118] George Soros, The Bubble of American Supremacy: Correcting The

Misuse Of American Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2003).

[119] Connie Bruck, “The World According to George Soros,” The New
Yorker, January 15, 1995, https://newyorker.com/magazine/1995/01/23/the-
world-according-to-soros.

[120] The author is occasionally confused with The Other Scott Horton, as I
affectionately call him. Other Scott (no relation) is an international human
rights lawyer, journalist for Harper’s magazine, professor at Columbia
University, co-founder of the American University of Central Asia in
Bishkek and author of Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and
America’s Stealth Warfare (New York: Nation Books, 2015). He taught
Saakashvili law and Hayekian economics at Columbia, inspiring his initial
anti-corruption push, and has been associated with Mr. Soros in various
capacities over the years. There is zero reason to believe that has been in
anything but the most honorable circumstances. He is a great guy. I have
interviewed him many times. But just to be clear: we are different people,
and the author has no such associations. And for his sake, I am sure he
would disagree with many conclusions in this book. Myron A. Farber, “The
Reminiscences of Scott Horton,” The Rule of Law Oral History Project,
Columbia University, November 21, 2012,
https://columbia.edu/cu/libraries/inside/ccoh_assets/ccoh_10571338_transcr
ipt.pdf.

[121] Connie Bruck, “The World According to George Soros,” The New
Yorker, January 15, 1995, https://newyorker.com/magazine/1995/01/23/the-
world-according-to-soros; Luke Baker, “Israel backs Hungary, says
financier Soros is a threat,” Reuters, July 10, 2017,
https://reuters.com/article/idUSKBN19V1IY; Bernd Debusmann, “Soros
adds voice to debate over Israel lobby,” Reuters, August 9, 2007,
https://reuters.com/article/idUSN13215323; Staff, “Hacked Soros e-mails
reveal plans to fight Israel’s ‘racist’ policies,” Jerusalem Post, August 15,
2016, https://jpost.com/israel-news/politics-and-diplomacy/hacked-soros-e-
mails-reveal-plans-to-fight-israels-racist-policies-464149.
[122] Arthur Bloom, “The Case for George Soros,” Arthuriana, January 29,
2024, https://arthuriana.substack.com/p/the-case-for-george-soros.

[123] For Soros’s more off-the-wall statements about considering himself

‘some kind of god,’ see, Gail Counsell, “The billionaire who built on
chaos,” Independent, June 3, 1993,
https://independent.co.uk/news/business/the-billionaire-who-built-on-
chaos-gail-counsell-charts-the-rise-of-a-speculator-who-considers-himself-
some-kind-of-god-1489380.html.

[124] Nora Boustany, “A Georgian Reborn, Still Straddling Two Cultures,”

Washington Post, June 4, 2004,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/06/04/a-georgian-reborn-
still-straddling-two-cultures/a5d37ba3-3c97-463d-9d56-c939107d3d14.

[125] Staff, “Georgia a ‘trailblazer for democracy in Caucasus’ or facing

‘uncertain future’?” NED, December 6, 2018,
https://demdigest.org/georgia-a-trailblazer-for-democracy-in-caucasus-or-
facing-uncertain-future.

[126] Interview with Salomé Zourabichvilii, “The Rose Revolution at an

impasse,” Hérodote, No. 129, August 14, 2008,
https://legrandsoir.info/nouvelle-attaque-de-l-internationale-noire.html.

[127] MacKinnon, 274.

[128] MacKinnon, 129–30.

[129] “Georgia’s Rose Revolution,” CSCE, July 1, 2004,
https://csce.gov/international-impact/publications/georgias-rose-revolution.

[130] George Melloan, “Putin Is Not Amused By the Coup in Georgia,”

Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2003,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB107032301988570800.

[131] Christopher Marquis, “US Sending Officials to Georgia to Offer Help

on Transition,” New York Times, November 27, 2003,
https://nytimes.com/2003/11/27/world/us-sending-officials-to-georgia-to-
offer-help-on-transition.html.

[132] Wendell Steavenson, “Marching Through Georgia,” The New Yorker,

December 15, 2008, http://newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/marching-
through-georgia.

[133] “Text: Bush’s speech in Georgia,” BBC, May 10, 2005,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4534267.stm; The Iraqi January
2005 ‘purple finger’ election of the United Iraqi Alliance and their prime
minister, Nouri al-Maliki, under American military occupation, belongs in a
separate category from the rest of the revolutions/coups he cited. After all,
they were trying to rig it for Iyad Allawi: Seymour Hersh, “Get Out the
Vote,” The New Yorker, July 17, 2005,
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2005/07/25/get-out-the-vote.

[134] Christian Caryl, “The Georgian Paradox,” Foreign Policy, January

31, 2012, https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/01/31/the-georgian-paradox.
[135] C.J. Chivers, “Thousands Rally in Capital Against Georgia
President,” New York Times, November 3, 2007,
https://nytimes.com/2007/11/03/world/europe/03tbilisi.html.

[136] Joshua Keating, “The dictator’s dilemma: To win with 95 percent or

99?” Foreign Policy, February 13, 2012,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/02/13/the-dictators-dilemma-to-win-with-
95-percent-or-99.

[137] Staff, “Russian MPs Condemn Arrest of Giorgadze Allies,” Civil.ge,

September 7, 2006, https://old.civil.ge/eng/article.php?id=13483.

[138] Wendell Steavenson, “Marching Through Georgia,” The New Yorker,

December 15, 2008, http://newyorker.com/magazine/2008/12/15/marching-
through-georgia.

[139] Simon Shuster, “Inside the Prison That Beat a President: How
Georgia’s Saakashvili Lost His Election,” Time, October 2, 2012,
https://world.time.com/2012/10/02/inside-the-prison-that-beat-a-president-
how-georgias-saakashvili-lost-his-election.

[140] C.J. Chivers, “Thousands Rally in Capital Against Georgia

President,” New York Times, November 3, 2007,
https://nytimes.com/2007/11/03/world/europe/03tbilisi.html.

[141] Staff, “Georgia: Riot Police Violently Disperse Peaceful Protesters,”

Human Rights Watch, November 7, 2007,
https://hrw.org/news/2007/11/07/georgia-riot-police-violently-disperse-
peaceful-protesters.

[142] Melinda Haring and Michael Cecire, “Why the Color Revolutions
Failed,” Foreign Policy, March 18, 2013,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/18/why-the-color-revolutions-failed.

[143] Transcript, “Bush’s Vision: ‘We Will Not Trade Away the Fate of Free
European Peoples,’” New York Times, June 16, 2001,
https://nytimes.com/2001/06/16/world/president-europe-bush-s-vision-we-
will-not-trade-away-fate-free-european-peoples.html.

[144] Charap and Colton, 90.

[145] Press Release, “President Bush Welcomes Seven Nations to the

NATO Alliance,” White House, March 29, 2004, https://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2004/03/20040329-4.html.

[146] Seth Mydans, “Putin Doubts Expanded NATO Meets New Threats,”
New York Times, April 9, 2004,
https://nytimes.com/2004/04/09/world/putin-doubts-expanded-nato-meets-
new-threats.html.

[147] Steven Lee Myers, “As NATO Finally Arrives on Its Border, Russia
Grumbles,” New York Times, April 3, 2004,
https://nytimes.com/2004/04/03/world/as-nato-finally-arrives-on-its-border-
russia-grumbles.html.
[148] Staff, “Russia Defends ‘Paranoia’ Over NATO Enlargement,” AFP,
https://spacewar.com/2004/040402185237.gy0eladg.html.

[149] Thom Shanker, “Russian Faults NATO Opening To Baltic States,”

New York Times, August 15, 2004,
https://nytimes.com/2004/08/15/world/russian-faults-nato-opening-to-
baltic-states.html.

[150] David Rohde and Arshad Mohammed, “How the US made its Putin
problem worse,” Reuters, April 19, 2014, https://reuters.com/article/us-
ukraine-putin-diplomacy-special-repor/special-report-how-the-u-s-made-
its-putin-problem-worse-idUSBREA3H0OQ20140418.

[151] Interview with author, Pat Buchanan, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, March 5, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/030514-pat-
buchanan; Patrick J. Buchanan, “Where Does NATO Enlargement End?”
Antiwar.com, January 11, 2022,
https://original.antiwar.com/buchanan/2022/01/10/where-does-nato-
enlargement-end.

[152] Tim Weiner, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (New York:
DoubleDay, 2007), 128–35; John Prados, Safe For Democracy: The Secret
Wars of the CIA (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 158.

[153] Staff, “Prague Spring 1968 Broadcasts of Radio Free Europe

Released,” Hoover Institution, October 31, 2014,
https://hoover.org/news/prague-spring-1968-broadcasts-radio-free-europe-
released.

[154] Sussman, 128; David Ignatius, “Innocence Abroad: The New World
of Spyless Coups,” Washington Post, September 21, 1991,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/09/22/innocence-abroad-
the-new-world-of-spyless-coups/92bb989a-de6e-4bb8-99b9-462c76b59a16.

[155] President Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Statement by the President on the

Developments in Hungary,” October 25, 1956,
https://presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-president-the-
developments-hungary; Transcript of President Lyndon Johnson phone call
with former Vice President Richard Nixon, Miller Center, August 20, 1968,
https://prde.upress.virginia.edu/conversations/4006029.

[156] Staff, “New Study on US-Russia nuclear war: 91.5 million casualties
in first few hours,” ICAN, September 18, 2019,
https://icanw.org/new_study_on_us_russia_nuclear_war.

[157] See below.

[158] “NATO-Ukraine Action Plan,” NATO, November 22, 2002,

https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_19547.htm.

[159] Stephen D. Krasner and Carlos Pascual, “Addressing State Failure,”

Foreign Affairs, July/August 2005, https://foreignaffairs.com/addressing-
state-failure.
[160] Stephen D. Krasner, “Building Democracy after Conflict: The Case
for Shared Sovereignty,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2005), 69–
83, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/177520.

[161] Naomi Klein, “The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” The Nation, April
14, 2005, https://thenation.com/article/archive/rise-disaster-capitalism.

[162] Petro, 80–81.

[163] Heiko Pleines, “Ukraine’s gas industry: Rent-seeking and

corruption,” Alexander’s Gas & Oil Connections, October 3, 2000,
https://web.archive.org/web/20051128090522/http://gasandoil.com/goc/co
mpany/cnr04017.htm.

[164] “Amended Complaint: Universal Trading & Investment Co. Inc. vs.
Yulia Tymoshenko-Alexander Tymoshenko, Andrey Vavilov, Case 1:22-cv-
07877-PAC Document 38,” US District Court for the Southern District of
New York, June 4, 2013,
https://issuu.com/singa/docs/tymoshenkoamendedcmplnt.june.6.13.s.

[165] “Yulia Tymoshenko: Ukraine’s ‘Iron Lady,” Telegraph, June 24, 2011,
https://web.archive.org/web/20110627164005/http://telegraph.co.uk/news/
worldnews/europe/ukraine/8597402/Yulia-Tymoshenko-Ukrains-Iron-
Lady.html; Staff, “Ukraine. . .,” Jamestown Foundation, September 13,
2000, https://jamestown.org/program/ukraine-18; Peter Byrne,
“Tymoshenko lashes out at opponents,” Kyiv Post, January 12, 2001,
https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/tymoshenko-
lashes-out-at-opponents-6905.html; “Yuliya Tymoshenko,” Eurasian Home,
https://web.archive.org/web/20120303072454/https://eurasianhome.org/xml
/t/databases.xml?
lang=en&nic=databases&country=188&letter=all&person=478.

[166] “News Brief: Release of PricewaterhouseCoopers Report on the

National Bank of Ukraine,” IMF, May 4, 2000,
https://imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/29/18/03/nb0026.

[167] MacKinnon, 81.

[168] “Tymoshenko implicated in crimes by USA Federal Prosecutor,”

Exhibit A, Case 1:04-cv-00798-PLF Document 152-3, Department of
Justice, April 8, 2010,
https://archive.org/stream/TymoshenkoImplicatedInCrimesByUsaFederalPr
osecutor/TYMOSHENKOatUSACourtofLaw_djvu.txt.

[169] Michael Meacher, “One for oil and oil for one,” The Spectator, March
5, 2005, https://spectator.co.uk/article/one-for-oil-and-oil-for-one.

[170] MacKinnon, 82–83.

[171] Tim Vickery, “Putin to Back Common Economic Space,” AP, May 4,
2003, https://beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/putin-to-back-common-
economic-space-757091.php.

[172] MacKinnon, 84.

[173] Staff, “US Spent $65M To Aid Ukrainian Groups,” AP, December 10,
2004, https://foxnews.com/story/u-s-spent-65m-to-aid-ukrainian-groups.

[174] William Branigin, “US Rejects Tally, Warns Ukraine,” Washington

Post, November 25, 2004,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/11/25/us-rejects-tally-
warns-ukraine/5ad29403-b545-486f-9733-65866f17c87a.

[175] Mark Rachkevych, “Orange Evolution,” Kyiv Post, January 15, 2010,
https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/orange-
evolution-57094.html.

[176] Connie Bruck, “The World According to George Soros,” The New
Yorker, January 15, 1995, https://newyorker.com/magazine/1995/01/23/the-
world-according-to-soros.

[177] MacKinnon, 82, 159.

[178] Jeremy Bransten, “Ukraine: Part Homegrown Uprising, Part Imported

Production?” RFERL, December 20, 2004, https://rferl.org/a/1056498.html.

[179] “Ukraine’s Cold War Déjà vu,” CBS News/AP, December 14, 2004,
https://cbsnews.com/news/ukraines-cold-war-deja-vu.

[180] Staff, “US Spent $65M To Aid Ukrainian Groups,” AP, December 10,
2004, https://foxnews.com/story/u-s-spent-65m-to-aid-ukrainian-groups.

[181] MacKinnon, 161.

[182] Sussman, 149; MacKinnon, 174.

[183] MacKinnon, 161, 171.

[184] MacKinnon, 167–69.

[185] Sussman, 149; Stephen F. Cohen, “The Media’s New Cold War,” The
Nation, January 13, 2005, https://thenation.com/article/archive/medias-new-
cold-war.

[186] Staff, “Madeleine Albright Assumes Chairmanship of NDI,” NDI

Reports, No. 1, 2001,
https://ndi.org/sites/default/files/1326_ww_newdemocs301_0.pdf; Staff,
“Democracy group gives donors access to McCain,” New York Times, July
28, 2008, https://nytimes.com/2008/07/28/world/americas/28iht-
lobbyists.1.14830046.html.

[187] MacKinnon, 154–55.

[188] Andrew Osborn, “Berezovsky ‘funded revolution,’” Independent,

November 12, 2005,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/berezovsky-funded-
revolution-514948.html.

[189] Jeffrey Clark and Jason Stout, “Elections, Revolution and Democracy
in Ukraine,” Development Associates, October 2005,
https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/pnade309.pdf.
[190] Staff, “The man who survived Russia’s poison chalice,” The Age,
January 23, 2005, https://theage.com.au/world/the-man-who-survived-
russias-poison-chalice-20050123-gdzf3h.html.

[191] C.J. Chivers, “How Top Spies in Ukraine Changed the Nation’s
Path,” New York Times, January 17, 2005,
https://nytimes.com/2005/01/17/world/europe/how-top-spies-in-ukraine-
changed-the-nations-path.html.

[192] Mark Rachkevych, “Orange Evolution,” Kyiv Post, January 15, 2010,
https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/orange-
evolution-57094.html.

[193] Staff, “The man who survived Russia’s poison chalice,” The Age,
January 23, 2005, https://theage.com.au/world/the-man-who-survived-
russias-poison-chalice-20050123-gdzf3h.html.

[194] Taras Kuzio, “Yushchenko Poisoning Investigation Nearing Climax,”

Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor, Vol. 2, No. 35 (February 18,
2005), http://taraskuzio.com/media14_files/39.pdf.

[195] Yuras Karmanau, “Yushchenko blames government for poisoning,”

Irish Examiner, December 17, 2004, https://irishexaminer.com/world/arid-
10109542.html.

[196] C.J. Chivers, “How Top Spies in Ukraine Changed the Nation’s
Path,” New York Times, January 17, 2005,
https://nytimes.com/2005/01/17/world/europe/how-top-spies-in-ukraine-
changed-the-nations-path.html.

[197] Staff, “Yushchenko Aide Alleges ‘KGB’ Plot,” ABC News, December
12, 2004, https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=322922.

[198] Staff, “Poison Assertion Rejected,” Reuters, September 29, 2004,

https://nytimes.com/2004/09/29/world/europe/poison-assertion-
rejected.html.

[199] Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Ukraine Candidate’s Illness Stumps Doctors,”

New York Times, December 4, 2004,
https://nytimes.com/2004/12/04/world/ukraine-candidates-illness-stumps-
doctors.html.

[200] Erna Lackner, “Kiev election campaign in Vienna,” Frankfurter

Allgemeine Zeitung, December 12, 2004,
https://faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/ukraine-kiewer-wahlkampf-in-wien-
1193320.html.

[201] Bojan Pancevski, “I received death threats, says doctor who denied
that Ukrainian leader was poisoned,” Telegraph, March 27, 2005,
https://web.archive.org/web/20051226142658/http://telegraph.co.uk/news/
main.jhtml?
xml=/news/2005/03/27/wukr27.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/03/27/ixportal.ht
ml.

[202] MacKinnon, 185.

[203] MacKinnon, 185, 199–200.

[204] MacKinnon, 186.

[205] MacKinnon, 187–88.

[206] MacKinnon, 193.

[207] Brian Knowlton, “Powell Says US Will Not Accept Final Tally in
Ukraine,” International Herald Tribune, November 24, 2004,
https://nytimes.com/2004/11/24/international/middleeast/powell-says-us-
will-not-accept-final-tally-in.html.

[208] Steven Lee Myers, “Parliament Says Votes in Ukraine Were Not
Valid,” New York Times, November 28, 2004,
https://nytimes.com/2004/11/28/world/europe/parliament-says-votes-in-
ukraine-were-not-valid.html.

[209] MacKinnon, 204.

[210] MacKinnon, 205.

[211] MacKinnon, 206–08.

[212] Ian Traynor, “US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev,” Guardian,
November 25, 2004,
https://theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.usa.
[213] Jonathan Steele, “Ukraine’s Postmodern Coup D’etat,” Guardian,
November 26, 2004,
https://theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.comment.

[214] MacKinnon, 208.

[215] MacKinnon, 208.

[216] Ron Paul, “US Hypocrisy on Ukraine,” Speech to US House of

Representatives, December 9, 2004,
https://original.antiwar.com/paul/2004/12/09/us-hypocrisy-on-ukraine.

[217] Michael McFaul, “‘Meddling’ In Ukraine Democracy is Not an

American Plot,” Washington Post, December 21, 2004,
https://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15131-2004Dec20.html.

[218] Michael McFaul, “Transitions From Postcommunism,” Journal of

Democracy, Vol. 16, No. 3 (July 2005), 5–19,
https://journalofdemocracy.org/articles/transitions-from-postcommunism.

[219] “Vote in eastern Ukraine fuels fears of break-up,” Irish Times,

November 28, 2004, https://irishtimes.com/news/vote-in-eastern-ukraine-
fuels-fears-of-break-up-1.995932.

[220] Michael McFaul, “Ukraine Imports Democracy: External Influences

on the Orange Revolution,” International Security, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2007),
45–83, http://jstor.org/stable/30133875.

[221] See Chapter Four.

[222] Michael McFaul, “Ukraine Imports Democracy: External Influences
on the Orange Revolution,” International Security, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2007),
45–83, http://jstor.org/stable/30133875.

[223] Michael McFaul, “Ukraine Imports Democracy: External Influences

on the Orange Revolution,” International Security, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2007),
45–83, http://jstor.org/stable/30133875.

[224] Michael McFaul, “Ukraine Imports Democracy: External Influences

on the Orange Revolution,” International Security, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2007),
45–83, http://jstor.org/stable/30133875.

[225] Rusel DeMaria, “Taking a Look at A Force More Powerful,” Game

Developer, December 1, 2005, https://gamedeveloper.com/business/taking-
a-look-at-i-a-force-more-powerful-i-.

[226] David Goldman, “Americans Play Monopoly, Russians Chess,” Asia

Times, August 19, 2008, https://asiatimes.com/2008/08/americans-play-
monopoly-russians-chess.

[227] Jonathan Steele, “Ukraine’s Postmodern Coup D’etat,” Guardian,

November 26, 2004,
https://theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/26/ukraine.comment.

[228] Michael R. Gordon, et al., “Vladimir Putin’s 20-Year March to War in

Ukraine—and How the West Mishandled It,” Wall Street Journal, April 1,
2022, https://wsj.com/articles/vladimir-putins-20-year-march-to-war-in-
ukraineand-how-the-west-mishandled-it-11648826461.
[229] George Friedman, “Syria, America and Putin’s Bluff,” Stratfor,
September 10, 2013, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/syria-america-
and-putins-bluff.

[230] Charles Krauthammer, “Why Only in Ukraine?” Washington Post,

December 2, 2004,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2004/12/03/why-only-in-
ukraine/a172f244-64af-4123-a3a5-d7b680eb2744.

[231] Simon Jeffery, “Yushchenko’s outspoken lieutenant,” Guardian,

December 3, 2004,
https://theguardian.com/news/blog/2004/dec/03/yushchenkosout.

[232] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An

Experiment in Literary Investigation (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1973).

[233] Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Rebuilding Russia, trans. Alexis Limoff

(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991), 20.

[234] Paul Klebnikov, “Alexander Solzhenitsyn On The New Russia,”

Forbes, Spring 1994, https://forbes.com/2008/08/05/solzhenitsyn-forbes-
interview-oped-cx_pm_0804russia.html.

[235] Staff, “Kravchuk bet with Savchenko about three different Ukraines,”
RIA Novosti, January 3, 2020, https://ria.ru/20200103/1563095636.html.

[236] Petro, 49.

[237] Petro, 36.

[238] See Chapter Four.

[239] Petro, 39–40.

[240] See Chapter Four.

[241] Steele, 217.

[242] Gordon M. Hahn, Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West and the
“New Cold War” (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2018), 117.

[243] Randall Lesaffer, “The Peace of Brest-Litovsk (March 3, 1918),”

Oxford Public International Law, https://opil.ouplaw.com/page/679.

[244] Ukrainian War of Independence – November 8, 1917–November 14,

1921, History Maps, September 26, 2023, https://history-
maps.com/story/History-of-Ukraine/event/Ukrainian-War-of-Independence.

[245] Omer Bartov, “On Eastern Galicia’s Past & Present,” Daedalus, Fall
2007, https://amacad.org/publication/eastern-galicias-past-present.

[246] James Bovard, “Yalta and the Death of the ‘Good War,’” The
American Conservative, February 18, 2020,
https://theamericanconservative.com/yalta-and-the-death-of-the-good-war.

[247] Hahn, 267.

[248] Hahn, 141.

[249] Murray N. Rothbard, For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto
(Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1978), 334–36.

[250] Justin Raimondo, “The Fallacy of ’39,” Antiwar.com, December 27,

2004, https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2004/12/27/the-fallacy-of-39.

[251] See Chapters One and Two.

[252] See Chapter Four.

[253] Staff, “US Secretary of State Powell Urges Ukraine to Remain

Intact,” Mos News, November 30, 2004,
https://web.archive.org/web/20041208133052/https://mosnews.com/news/2
004/11/30/powukr1.shtml.

[254] MacKinnon, 208.

[255] Diane Francis, “In Ukraine, ‘how little has changed’ even after
Orange Revolution,” Financial Post, March 10, 2012,
https://financialpost.com/diane-francis/in-ukraine-how-little-has-changed-
even-after-orange-revolution.

[256] See Chapter Two.

[257] Connie Bruck, “The World According to George Soros,” The New
Yorker, January 15, 1995, https://newyorker.com/magazine/1995/01/23/the-
world-according-to-soros.
[258] Tweet by Anders Åslund, November 15, 2022,
https://x.com/anders_aslund/status/1592616431291535360.

[259] Staff, “Correction: Russia-Ukraine-War story,” AP, November 16,

2022, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-zelenskyy-kherson-
9202c032cf3a5c22761ee71b52ff9d52.

[260] Anders Åslund, “Betraying a Revolution,” Washington Post, May 17,

2005, https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2005/05/18/betraying-a-
revolution/57b7f2ce-3ac1-4a51-906f-7112b1e030bd.

[261] Steven Lee Myers, “Ukraine president fires his cabinet,” New York
Times, September 9, 2005,
https://nytimes.com/2005/09/09/world/europe/ukraine-president-fires-his-
cabinet.html.

[262] Staff, “Ukrainian president appoints onetime foe,” International

Herald Tribune, August 3, 2006,
https://nytimes.com/2006/08/03/world/europe/03iht-ukraine.2375004.html;
Vladimir Radyuhin and John Cherian, “Snub to the West,” The Hindu, April
21, 2006, https://frontline.thehindu.com/world-affairs/article30209035.ece.

[263] Andrew Osborn, “Ukraine Election: Viktor Yanukovych Claims

Victory,” Telegraph, February 7, 2010,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/7184349/Ukraine-
election-Viktor-Yanukovych-claims-victory.html.
[264] Philip Pan, “World Digest: International observers say Ukrainian
election was free and fair,” Washington Post, February 9, 2010,
https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2010/02/08/AR2010020803583.html.

[265] Yuras Karmanau, “Ukrainian ends vote protest, blames court,” AP,
February 21, 2010, https://arkansasonline.com/news/2010/feb/21/ukrainian-
ends-vote-protest-blames-court-20100221.

[266] Pamala Brogan, The Torturer’s Lobby: How Human Rights-Abusing

Nations are Represented in Washington (Washington, D.C.: Center for
Public Integrity, 1992), https://cloudfront-files-
1.publicintegrity.org/legacy_projects/pdf_reports/THETORTURERSLOBB
Y.pdf.

[267] Sussman, 161–62.

[268] “The Future of Democracy in the Black Sea Area,” US Senate

Foreign Affairs Committee, March 8, 2005,
https://govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-109shrg23171/html/CHRG-
109shrg23171.htm.

[269] Vice President Joe Biden, “Remarks by Vice President Joe Biden to
The Ukrainian Rada,” White House, December 9, 2015,
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/12/09/remarks-
vice-president-joe-biden-ukrainian-rada.
[270] Staff, “Former president testifies in Tymoshenko trial,” France 24,
August 17, 2011, https://france24.com/en/20110817-europe-ukraine-justice-
former-president-testify-tymoshenko-trial-russia-gas-deal-yushchenko-
Yanukovych.

[271] Paul Richter, “Russia Policy Under Review,” Los Angeles Times,
December 12, 2004, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2004-dec-12-fg-
usrussia12-story.html.

[272] Zlatica Hoke, “Promoting Democracy Abroad or Interfering?” Voice

of America, October 26, 2009, https://voanews.com/a/a-13-a-2004-02-11-
58-1-66339577/544955.html.

[273] Staff, “Profile: Askar Akayev,” BBC, April 4, 2005,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4371819.stm.

[274] Staff, “Kyrgyz President Implicated In Aksy Killings,” RFERL,

September 14, 2007, https://rferl.org/a/1078671.html.

[275] Staff, “Kyrgyzstan: the perpetrators of the Aksy tragedy, in which

several persons were wounded and at least five died, are still enjoying total
impunity,” World Organisation Against Torture, August 21, 2002,
https://omct.org/en/resources/urgent-interventions/kyrgyzstan-the-
perpetrators-of-the-aksy-tragedy-in-which-several-persons-were-wounded-
and-at-least-five-died-are-still-enjoying-total-impunity.

[276] John C.K. Daly, “Kyrgyzstan’s Manas Airbase: A Key Asset in the
War on Terrorism,” Jamestown Foundation Terrorism Monitor, Vol. 5, No. 1
(February 21, 2007), https://jamestown.org/program/kyrgyzstans-manas-
airbase-a-key-asset-in-the-war-on-terrorism.

[277] David S. Cloud, “Pentagon’s Fuel Deal Is Lesson in Risks of Graft-

Prone Regions,” New York Times, November 15, 2005,
https://nytimes.com/2005/11/15/world/asia/Pentagons-fuel-deal-is-lesson-
in-risks-of-graftprone-regions.html.

[278] Gulnoza Saidazimova, “Kyrgyzstan: Is Bishkek Moving Toward

Russia Ahead Of Elections?” Eurasianet, February 15, 2005,
http://eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/pp021505.shtml.

[279] Letter from Gary Schmitt, “Democracy in Russia,” Project for a New
American Century, February 17, 2005,
https://scotthorton.org/pnac/memorandum-to-opinion-leaders-on-the-
subject-of-democracy-in-russia.

[280] Gulnura Toralieva, “Kyrgyz Officials Criticise Western Contact With

Islamists,” IWPR, July 9, 2004,
https://web.archive.org/web/20040714034829/http://iwpr.net/index.pl?
archive/rca/rca_200407_298_2_eng.txt.

[281] Assistant Secretary for European Affairs Daniel Fried Testimony

before the Subcommittee on European Affairs of the Senate Foreign
Relations Committee, “Overview of Islamist Extremism in Europe,” April
5, 2006, https://2001-2009.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/64192.htm.
[282] “On the Detention of Members of the Terrorist Organization, ‘Islamic
Liberation Party’ (‘Hizb ut-Tahrir al Islami’),” Russian Foreign Ministry,
June 6, 2003,
https://web.archive.org/web/20051112034459/http://ln.mid.ru/brp_4.nsf/0/6
92f13b763610543c3256ec9001d19bb?OpenDocument.

[283] “2021 Report on International Religious Freedom: Uzbekistan,”

Office of International Religious Freedom, June 2, 2022,
https://state.gov/reports/2021-report-on-international-religious-
freedom/uzbekistan.

[284] Richard Spencer, “Quiet American Behind Tulip Revolution,”

Telegraph, April 2, 2005,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/kyrgyzstan/1486983/Quiet-
American-behind-tulip-revolution.html; Michael Steen, “4 Officers Said
Beaten to Death; Opposition Protests Vote Results,” Reuters, March 21,
2005,
http://archive.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2005/03/21/violence_
rocks_south_kyrgyzstan.

[285] International Election Observer Mission, “Parliamentary Elections,

The Kyrgyz Republic,” February 27, 2005,
https://web.archive.org/web/20050916151153/https://osce.org/documents/o
dihr/2005/02/4334_en.pdf.

[286] John Laughland, “The mythology of people power,” Guardian, March

31, 2005, https://theguardian.com/world/2005/apr/01/usa.russia.
[287] Philip Shishkin, “In Putin’s Backyard, Democracy Stirs – With US
Help,” Wall Street Journal, February 25, 2005,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB110929289650463886.

[288] Staff, “A Tulip Revolution,” The Economist, March 24, 2005,

https://economist.com/unknown/2005/03/24/a-tulip-revolution.

[289] John Laughland, “The mythology of people power,” Guardian, March

31, 2005, https://theguardian.com/world/2005/apr/01/usa.russia.

[290] Craig S. Smith, “US Helped to Prepare the Way for Kyrgyzstan’s
Uprising,” New York Times, March 30, 2005,
https://nytimes.com/2005/03/30/world/asia/us-helped-to-prepare-the-way-
for-kyrgyzstans-uprising.html.

[291] Marat Kazakpaev, “US-Kyrgyzstan: partners in different weight

divisions,” Central Asia and the Caucasus, Vol. 7, No. 3 (2006), https://ca-
c.org/CAC/index.php/cac/article/view/899.

[292] Daniel Drezner, “The Fourth Wave of Democratization?”

DanielDrezner.com, March 24, 2005,
http://danieldrezner.com/archives/001960.html.

[293] Charap and Colton, 75.

[294] Robert McMahon, “Russia: Putin ‘Foreign Funding’ Remarks Draw

Civil Society Concerns,” RFERL, July 21, 2005,
https://rferl.org/a/1060072.html.
[295] Burns, 222, 228–29.

[296] MacKinnon, 228.

[297] MacKinnon, 231–33; Jim Lobe, “US Caught Up Short by Uzbekistan

Violence,” IPS News, May 19, 2005, https://ipsnews.net/2005/05/politics-
us-caught-up-short-by-uzbekistan-violence.

[298] MacKinnon, 232–33.

[299] See Chapter Three.

[300] See below.

[301] Julian Borger, “Russian hostility ‘partly caused by west’, claims

former US defence head,” Guardian, March 9, 2016,
https://theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/09/russian-hostility-to-west-partly-
caused-by-west.

[302] Alan Cullison, et al., “Kyrgyz Leaders Say US Enriched Regime,”

Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2010,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023040246045751732009940773
26.

[303] Erica Marat, “Public Anger Against US Military Base Grows in

Kyrgyzstan,” Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor, Vol. 4, No. 97
(May 17, 2007), https://jamestown.org/program/public-anger-against-u-s-
military-base-grows-in-kyrgyzstan.
[304] The Other Scott Horton (no relation), “The Mess at Manas,”
Harper’s, February 4, 2009, https://harpers.org/2009/02/the-mess-at-manas.

[305] Ethan Wilensky-Lanford, “Kyrgyzstan: Leader Threatens To Shut

Down US Base,” New York Times, April 20, 2006,
https://nytimes.com/2006/04/20/world/world-briefing-asia-kyrgyzstan-
leader-threatens-to-shut-down-us-base.html.

[306] Staff, “Kyrgyz Leader Threatens to Close Down US Military Base,”

Voice of America, October 31, 2009, https://voanews.com/a/a-13-2006-04-
19-voa23/317409.html.

[307] Bruce Pannier, “Rethinking Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution,” RFERL,

August 25, 2009,
https://rferl.org/a/Rethinking_Kyrgyzstans_Tulip_Revolution/1807335.html
.

[308] Staff, “President flees capital as opposition leaders claim they have
taken control,” France 24, https://france24.com/en/20100407-president-
flees-capital-opposition-leaders-claim-they-have-taken-control07/04/2010;
Staff, “Kyrgyz President to Resign if Family’s Safety Guaranteed,” Voice of
America, April 12, 2010, https://voanews.com/a/kyrgyz-president-to-resign-
if-familys-safety-guaranteed-90747154/115802.html.

[309] Staff, “Kyrgyz president defies rebels,” Toronto Star, April 9, 2010,
https://thestar.com/news/world/2010/04/09/kyrgyz_president_defies_rebels.
html; Staff, “Kyrgyz military joining ethnic violence: report,” ABC News
Australia, June 16, 2010,
https://web.archive.org/web/20190722114530/https://abc.net.au/news/2010-
06-17/kyrgyz-military-joining-ethnic-violence-report/870642.

[310] Steve LeVine, “The End of the Great Game,” The New Republic,
October 5, 2010, https://newrepublic.com/article/78168/obama-central-asia-
great-game.

[311] Johannes F. Linn, “An American Opportunity in Kyrgyzstan,”

Brookings Institution, April 14, 2010, https://brookings.edu/blog/up-
front/2010/04/14/an-american-opportunity-in-kyrgyzstan.

[312] Michael Schwirtz, “New Leader Says US Base in Kyrgyzstan Will Be

Shut,” New York Times, November 1, 2011,
https://nytimes.com/2011/11/02/world/asia/kyrgyzstan-says-united-states-
manas-air-base-will-close.html; Morgan Hartley and Chris Walker, “The US
Spent Billions in Kyrgyzstan, but Is Leaving Without a Trace,” Forbes,
September 25, 2013,
https://forbes.com/sites/morganhartley/2013/09/25/the-us-spent-billions-in-
kyrgyzstan-but-is-leaving-without-a-trace.

[313] Staff, “US air base at center of Kyrgyz crisis,” NBC News, April 7,
2010, https://nbcnews.com/id/wbna36214883.

[314] Olga Dzyubenko, “US vacates base in Central Asia as Russia’s clout
rises,” Reuters, June 3, 2014, https://reuters.com/article/us-kyrgyzstan-usa-
manas/u-s-vacates-base-in-central-asia-as-russias-clout-rises-
idUSKBN0EE1LH20140603; Akhilesh Pillalamarri, “The United States
Just Closed Its Last Base in Central Asia,” The Diplomat, June 10, 2014,
https://thediplomat.com/2014/06/the-united-states-just-closed-its-last-base-
in-central-asia.

[315] Nenad Pejic, “Serbia: The First Colored Revolution?” RFERL,

January 17, 2008, https://rferl.org/a/1079368.html; Justin Raimondo, “The
‘Color’ Revolutions: Fade to Black,” Antiwar.com, September 29, 2006,
https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2006/09/29/the-color-revolutions-fade-
to-black.

[316] Christopher J. Coyne, “The ‘New’ Fatal Conceit: The Errors of

Foreign Intervention,” Mercatus Center, July 2008,
https://researchgate.net/publication/255607240_The_New_Fatal_Conceit_T
he_Errors_of_Foreign_Intervention.

[317] MacKinnon, 238.

[318] MacKinnon, 237.

[319] Staff, “Rice calls for political ‘change’ in Belarus,” NBC News, April
19, 2005, https://nbcnews.com/id/wbna7558665.

[320] Nick Paton Walsh, “Europe’s ‘last dictator’ defies calls for change,”
Guardian, May 6, 2005,
https://theguardian.com/world/2005/may/06/russia.nickpatonwalsh.

[321] MacKinnon, 241.

[322] MacKinnon, 242.

[323] MacKinnon, 244.

[324] Jonathan Steele, “Europe and the US decide the winner before the
vote,” Guardian, March 10, 2006,
https://theguardian.com/Columnists/Column/0,,1727954,00.html.

[325] Staff, “Police, Protesters Clash In Belarus,” CBS News, March 25,
2006, https://cbsnews.com/news/police-protesters-clash-in-belarus.

[326] Daniel McAdams, “How Lukashenko Won,” Antiwar.com, March 27,

2006, https://original.antiwar.com/daniel-mcadams/2006/03/27/how-
lukashenko-won.

[327] Interview with author, Daniel McAdams, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, May 22, 2024, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/5-22-24-daniel-
mcadams-on-color-revolutions-past-and-present.

[328] Jonathan Steele, “Europe and the US decide the winner before the
vote,” Guardian, March 10, 2006,
https://theguardian.com/Columnists/Column/0,,1727954,00.html.

[329] Steven Lee Myers, “Bringing Down Europe’s Last Ex-Soviet

Dictator,” New York Times, February 26, 2006,
https://nytimes.com/2006/02/26/magazine/26belarus.html.

[330] Steven Lee Myers, “Bringing Down Europe’s Last Ex-Soviet

Dictator,” New York Times, February 26, 2006,
https://nytimes.com/2006/02/26/magazine/26belarus.html.

[331] Jonathan Steele, “Europe and the US decide the winner before the
vote,” Guardian, March 10, 2006,
https://theguardian.com/Columnists/Column/0,,1727954,00.html.

[332] Thomas Carothers, “The Backlash Against Democracy Promotion,”

Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006, https://foreignaffairs.com/united-
states/backlash-against-democracy-promotion.

[333] Matt Spetalnick and Tabassum Zakaria, “Bush says committed to

Saudi arms deal,” Reuters, January 14, 2008,
https://reuters.com/article/idUSL14495091.

[334] Peter Baker, “Bush: US to Sell F-16s to Pakistan,” Washington Post,

March 25, 2005,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2005/03/26/bush-us-to-sell-f-
16s-to-pakistan/a6bafaf5-0a17-4ebf-ae3e-0e9e58e05829; Staff, “Bush,
Mubarak discuss Mideast arms ship,” UPI, January 10, 2002,
https://upi.com/Archives/2002/01/10/Bush-Mubarak-discuss-Mideast-arms-
ship/4761010638800.

[335] Rep. Ron Paul, “Congress Must Say Yes or No to War,” US House of
Representatives, October 8, 2002, https://antiwar.com/paul/paul50.html.

[336] Larry Siems, “Family of Afghan man tortured by CIA demands US

reveal location of his body,” Guardian, April 19, 2018,
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/18/gul-rahman-cia-black-site-
torture-family-demands-body; “CIA officer’s role in Abu Ghraib death
probed,” CBS News, July 13, 2011, https://cbsnews.com/news/ex-cia-
officers-role-in-abu-ghraib-death-probed; The Other Scott Horton (no
relation), “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides,’” Harper’s, March 2010,
https://harpers.org/archive/2010/03/the-guantanamo-suicides; Jeffrey Kaye,
“Recently Released Autopsy Reports Heighten Guantanamo ‘Suicides’
Mystery,” Truthout.org, February 29, 2012,
https://truthout.org/articles/recently-released-autopsy-reports-heighten-
guantanamo-suicides-mystery.

[337] Staff, “108 Died In US Custody,” CBS News, March 16, 2005,
https://cbsnews.com/news/report-108-died-in-us-custody.

[338] Solomon Moore, “Killings by Shiite Militias Detailed,” Los Angeles

Times, September 28, 2006, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-sep-
28-fg-intel28-story.html; “Preventing Torture and Upholding the Rights of
Detainees in Afghanistan: A Factor for Peace,” UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights, January 2021,
https://ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Countries/AF/2021report/20
21-Torture-Public-Report.pdf; Michael Kirk, et al., “The Torture Question,”
PBS Frontline, October 18, 2005,
https://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/torture/etc/script.html.

[339] James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets US Spy on Callers
Without Courts,” New York Times, December 16, 2005,
https://nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/bush-lets-us-spy-on-callers-
without-courts.html.
[340] Thomas E. Woods, Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock
Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will
Make Things Worse (New York: Regnery, 2009).

[341] “President Bush’s Second Inaugural Address,” NPR News, January

20, 2005, https://npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4460172.

[342] Thomas Carothers, “The Backlash Against Democracy Promotion,”

Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006, https://foreignaffairs.com/united-
states/backlash-against-democracy-promotion.

[343] MacKinnon, 275.

[344] It was a Freudian slip, but after catching his mistake, Bush muttered,
“Iraq too”: Libby Cathey, “Bush condemns ‘unjustified and brutal invasion
of Iraq,’ instead of Ukraine, in speech gaffe,” ABC News, May 19, 2022,
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bush-condemns-unjustified-brutal-
invasion-iraq-ukraine-speech/story?id=84831140.

[345] Anne Williamson, “Russia: Don’t Cry for Yukos,” Ludwig von Mises
Institute, February 18, 2005, https://mises.org/podcasts/austrian-economics-
and-financial-markets/russia-dont-cry-yukos.

[346] MacKinnon, 142–43.

[347] Burns, 207; See Chapter Two.

[348] Ben Aris, “Russia’s 1998 crisis redux,” BNE IntelliNews, August 20,
2018, https://intellinews.com/moscow-blog-russia-s-1998-crisis-redux-
147140.

[349] Jill Dougherty, “Putin’s Fight Against the Oligarchs,” CNN, October
28, 2003,
https://edition.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/europe/10/28/russia.oligarchs; Susan
B. Glasser and Peter Baker, “Russian Tycoon And Putin Critic Arrested in
Raid,” Washington Post, October 25, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/10/26/russian-tycoon-
and-putin-critic-arrested-in-raid/22e60f62-2db0-4dc3-b95c-cc90c0cbc1bf.

[350] Sabrina Tavernise, “Fortune in Hand, Russian Tries to Polish Image,”

New York Times, August 18, 2001,
https://nytimes.com/2001/08/18/business/international-business-fortune-in-
hand-russian-tries-to-polish-image.html.

[351] MacKinnon, 133; Anne Applebaum, “This man is now the people’s
billionaire,” Telegraph, June 13, 2004,
https://telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3607189/This-man-is-now-
the-peoples-billionaire.html.

[352] William Safire, “Siloviki Versus Oligarchy,” New York Times,

November 5, 2003, https://nytimes.com/2003/11/05/opinion/siloviki-versus-
oligarchy.html.

[353] Susan B. Glasser and Peter Baker, “Russian Tycoon And Putin Critic
Arrested in Raid,” Washington Post, October 25, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/10/26/russian-tycoon-
and-putin-critic-arrested-in-raid/22e60f62-2db0-4dc3-b95c-cc90c0cbc1bf.

[354] Peter Baker and Susan B. Glasser, “Russia Freezes Stock of Oil
Giant,” Washington Post, October 30, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2003/10/31/russia-freezes-
stock-of-oil-giant/d5f0ea31-7d67-46a1-81d1-2fb3bb99f9ac.

[355] “Russian oil tycoon sentenced to 9 years,” NBC News, May 13, 2005,
https://nbcnews.com/id/wbna7845597.

[356] Tom Parfitt, “Mikhail Khodorkovsky sentenced to 14 years in

prison,” Guardian, December 30, 2010,
https://theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/30/mikhail-khodorkovsky-jail-
term.

[357] MacKinnon, 134, 286.

[358] Tweet by author, “28 Articles About How the Neoconservatives Lied
Us Into Iraq War II,” February 23, 2024,
https://x.com/scotthortonshow/status/1628868264120971264.

[359] Kim Murphy, “Financier’s Institute in Moscow Is Raided,” Los

Angeles Times, November 7, 2003, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-
2003-nov-07-fg-soros7-story.html; Staff, “Hawk: Kick Russia out of G-8
over Yukos,” UPI, October 31, 2003,
https://upi.com/Top_News/2003/10/31/Hawk-Kick-Russia-out-of-G-8-over-
Yukos/66151067616727.
[360] John McCain speech, “The New Authoritarianism in Russia,”
American Enterprise Institute, November 4, 2003, https://aei.org/research-
products/speech/senator-mccain-decries-new-authoritarianism-in-russia.

[361] “Testimony of Bruce Pitcairn Jackson Before the US Senate

Committee on Foreign Relations On Democracy in Russia,” US Senate,
February 17, 2005,
https://web.archive.org/web/20050222221918/http://newamericancentury.or
g/russia-20050217.htm.

[362] Sheldon Richman, “Social Cooperation,” Foundation for Economic

Education, October 26, 2011, https://fee.org/articles/social-cooperation.

[363] Anne Williamson, “Russia: Don’t Cry for Yukos,” Ludwig von Mises
Institute, February 18, 2005, https://mises.org/podcasts/austrian-economics-
and-financial-markets/russia-dont-cry-yukos.

[364] Kim Murphy, “Financier’s Institute in Moscow Is Raided,” Los

Angeles Times, November 7, 2003, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-
2003-nov-07-fg-soros7-story.html.

[365] Paul Sonne, “Russia Frees Mikhail Khodorkovsky,” Wall Street

Journal, December 20, 2013,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023047731045792695823723515
84.

[366] Alexander Litvinenko and Yuri Felshtinsky, Blowing Up Russia: The

Secret Plot to Bring Back KGB Terror (New York: Encounter Books, 2007);
See below.

[367] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf.

[368] UK MP Tom Brake, “Litvinenko Inquiry, Volume 604: debate,”

January 21, 2016, https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2016-01-
21/debates/16012124000003/LitvinenkoInquiry.

[369] Oleg Gordievsky, “Putin may be worse than we think,” Telegraph,

November 5, 2000, http://russialist.org/archives/4623.html##3.

[370] Charlie Rose, “Alexander Litvinenko Panel,” Charlie Rose,

December 5, 2006, https://charlierose.com/videos/12780.

[371] David Leppard, et al., “The bastards got me,” London Times,
November 26, 2006, https://thetimes.co.uk/article/the-bastards-got-me-
5hxsdrn09r0.

[372] The same man President Clinton had prevented from making peace in
Bosnia. See Chapter Two.

[373] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf.

[374] David Leppard, et al., “The bastards got me,” London Times,
November 26, 2006, https://thetimes.co.uk/article/the-bastards-got-me-
5hxsdrn09r0; Ian Cobain, et al., “Detectives fly to Russia to question
businessmen,” Guardian, December 3, 2006,
https://theguardian.com/uk/2006/dec/04/russia.world.

[375] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf; Staff,
“Nuclear poison: the deadly trade,” Guardian-Observer, November 26,
2006, https://theguardian.com/uk/2006/nov/26/politics.russia1; Philip Jarke,
“Germans find radiation linked to Litvinenko contact,” Reuters, January 20,
2007, https://reuters.com/article/us-britain-poisoning/germans-find-
radiation-linked-to-litvinenko-contact-idUKL0837387320061209.

[376] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf.

[377] Alan Cowell and Steven Lee Myers, “Russian Is Accused of

Poisoning Ex-KGB Agent,” New York Times, May 23, 2007,
https://nytimes.com/2007/05/23/world/europe/23poison.html.

[378] Jeevan Vasagar, et al., “Former KGB officer was poisoned because he
was enemy of Putin, say friends,” Guardian, November 20, 2006,
https://theguardian.com/world/2006/nov/20/russia.uk.

[379] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf.

[380] “President Putin ‘probably’ approved Litvinenko murder,” BBC,

January 21, 2016, https://bbc.co.uk/news/uk-35370819.

[381] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf.

[382] Pjotr Sauer, “Alexander Litvinenko assassination suspect dies of

Covid,” Guardian, June 4, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/04/alexander-litvinenko-
assassination-suspect-dies-of-covid-dmitry-kovtun.

[383] C.J. Chivers, “Journalist Critical of Chechen War Is Shot Dead,” New
York Times, October 8, 2006,
https://nytimes.com/2006/10/08/world/europe/08russia.html.

[384] Andrew Osborn and Cahal Milmo, “Former Russian PM Gaidar

poisoned, say his doctors,” Independent, December 1, 2006,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/former-russian-pm-gaidar-
poisoned-say-his-doctors-426569.html.

[385] Justin Raimondo, “Alexander Litvinenko: Blackmailer, Smuggler,

Gangster Extraordinaire,” Antiwar.com, December 4, 2006,
https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2006/12/04/alexander-litvinenko-
blackmailer-smuggler-gangster-extraordinaire.
[386] Cahal Milmo and Arifa Akbar, “Litvinenko ‘smuggled nuclear
material,’” Independent, November 29, 2006,
https://independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/litvinenko-smuggled-nuclear-
material-426266.html.

[387] Uwe Klußmann und Andreas Ulrich, “Germany Plays Central Role in
Polonium Investigation,” Der Spiegel, December 19, 2006,
https://spiegel.de/international/spiegel/the-litvinenko-poisoning-germany-
plays-central-role-in-polonium-investigation-a-455396.html.

[388] Staff, “Man detained over spy poisoning,” Australian, December 4,

2006, http://theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0%2C20867%2C20865991-
2703%2C00.html.

[389] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf.

[390] Staff, “Judge rejects bid to extradite Chechen rebel leader,” Guardian,
November 13, 2003, https://theguardian.com/uk/2003/nov/13/world.russia.

[391] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf.

[392] Mark Townsend, et al., “‘I can blackmail them. We can make
money,’” Guardian-Observer, December 3, 2006,
https://theguardian.com/uk/2006/dec/03/world.russia.
[393] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf.

[394] Mark Townsend, et al., “Revealed: Litvinenko’s Russian ‘blackmail

plot,’” Guardian, December 3, 2006,
https://theguardian.com/uk/2006/dec/03/russia.world.

[395] Mark Townsend, et al., “‘I can blackmail them. We can make
money,’” Guardian, December 2, 2006,
https://theguardian.com/uk/2006/dec/03/world.russia.

[396] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf.

[397] Lord David Owen, “The Litvinenko Inquiry,” January 2016,

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads
/attachment_data/file/493855/The-Litvinenko-Inquiry-H-C-695.pdf.

[398] Staff, “Poisoned spy Litvinenko was working for Spain,” El País,
December 13, 2012,
https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2012/12/13/inenglish/1355417591_555937
.html.

[399] Chargé d’Affaires Arnold A. Chacon, “Updates in Spain’s

Investigation of Russian Mafia,” State Department, August 31, 2009,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09MADRID869_a.html.
[400] Staff, “Spain Acquits Group of Russians Suspected of Mafia Ties,”
Moscow Times, October 19, 2018,
https://themoscowtimes.com/2018/10/19/chinese-port-refuses-to-service-
stranded-russian-ship-over-us-sanctions-fears-company-says-a63240.

[401] Steve Gutterman, “The Rasputin of post-Soviet Russia: Boris

Berezovsky,” Reuters, March 23, 2013, https://reuters.com/article/us-
britain-russia-berezovsky-newsmaker/the-rasputin-of-post-soviet-russia-
boris-berezovsky-idUKBRE92M0EY20130323.

[402] Luke Harding and Esther Addley, “Putin ordered Alexander

Litvinenko murder, inquiry into death told,” Guardian, January 27, 2015,
https://theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/27/putin-ordered-alexander-
litvinenko-murder-inquiry-told; Scott Neuman, “Russia Fatally Poisoned A
Prominent Defector In London, A Court Concludes,” NPR News,
September 22, 2021, https://npr.org/2021/09/21/1039224996/russia-
alexander-litvinenko-european-court-human-rights-putin; Alan Cowell,
“Putin ‘Probably Approved’ Litvinenko Poisoning, British Inquiry Says,”
New York Times, January 21, 2016,
https://nytimes.com/2016/01/22/world/europe/alexander-litvinenko-
poisoning-inquiry-britain.html; Staff, “Sen. John McCain calls Vladimir
Putin a thug amid reports of connection to murdered spy,” CBS News,
January 21, 2016, https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/sen-john-
mccain-calls-vladimir-putin-a-thug-amid-reports-of-connection-to-
murdered-spy.
[403] “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,” White
House, March 2006,
https://history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss2006.pdf.

[404] Staff, “Bulgaria OKs 3 bases for US troops,” Washington Times, April
24, 2006, https://washingtontimes.com/news/2006/apr/24/20060424-
121528-1841r.

[405] See Chapter Two.

[406] Hahn, 159–60.

[407] Transcript, “Vice President’s Remarks at the 2006 Vilnius Conference

Reval Hotel Lietuva, Vilnius, Lithuania,” Office of the Vice President, May
4, 2006, https://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/05/20060504-1.html.

[408] Peter Baker, “US Warns Russia to Act More Like A Democracy,”
Washington Post, May 4, 2006,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2006/05/05/us-warns-russia-to-
act-more-like-a-democracy-span-classbankheadst-petersburg-hosts-g-8-
summit-in-julyspan/2dcf2ae0-a470-4b67-a858-0f7dca9353c0; MacKinnon,
253.

[409] Charap and Colton, 80.

[410] C.J. Chivers, “Putin calls for steps to end drop in population,” New
York Times, May 10, 2006,
https://nytimes.com/2006/05/10/world/europe/10iht-russia.html.

[411] Simon Pirani, “The Russo-Ukrainian Gas Dispute, 2009,” Russian

Analytical Digest, Vol. 53, No. 9 (January 20, 2009),
https://files.ethz.ch/isn/95596/Russian_Analytical_Digest_53.pdf.

[412] Hahn, 162; Jérôme Guillet and John Evans, “The battle of the
oligarchs behind the gas dispute,” Financial Times, January 6, 2009,
https://ft.com/content/2accfea0-dc17-11dd-b07e-000077b07658.

[413] MacKinnon, 259.

[414] Paul Quinn-Judge, “The Forbidden Valley,” Time, March 25, 2002,
https://web.archive.org/web/20130112235829/http://time.com/time/magazin
e/article/0,9171,219938,00.html.

[415] John B. Dunlop, “The Forgotten War,” Hoover Digest, January 30,
2002, https://hoover.org/research/forgotten-war.

[416] Steven R. Weisman, “US Lists 3 Chechen Groups As Terrorist and

Freezes Assets,” New York Times, March 1, 2003,
https://nytimes.com/2003/03/01/world/threats-responses-terror-links-us-
lists-3-chechen-groups-terrorist-freezes.html.

[417] Matthew Brzezinski, “Surrealpolitik – How a Chechen terror suspect

wound up living on taxpayers’ dollars near the National Zoo,” Washington
Post, March 20, 2005, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38200-
2005Mar15.html.
[418] C.J. Chivers, “The School,” Esquire, March 14, 2007,
https://esquire.com/news-politics/a1173/esq0606beslan-140.

[419] Maj. John J. Donahoe, “The Moscow Hostage Crisis: An Analysis of

Chechen Terrorist Goals,” Naval Postgraduate School Center for
Contemporary Conflict, May 1, 2003,
https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/olj/si/si_2_5/si_2_5_doj01.pdf.

[420] Sharon LaFraniere, “Britain Arrests Key Chechen Envoy,”

Washington Post, December 7, 2002,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2002/12/07/britain-arrests-key-
chechen-envoy/8b5400c3-eeb3-4473-a548-ea2e95db7de2.

[421] Ryan Chilcote, “Toll rises from Russia attack,” CNN, June 23, 2004,
https://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/06/23/russia.toll/index.html.

[422] Jill Dougherty, “Chechen ‘claims Beslan attack,’” CNN, September

17, 2004,
https://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/europe/09/17/russia.beslan.

[423] Staff, “Deadly Blast Hits Moscow,” AP, August 31, 2004,
https://cbsnews.com/news/deadly-blast-hits-moscow.

[424] C.J. Chivers, “The School,” Esquire, March 14, 2007,

https://esquire.com/news-politics/a1173/esq0606beslan-140.

[425] MacKinnon, 216.

[426] Staff, “Many dead in Moscow metro blast,” BBC, February 6, 2004,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3464545.stm.

[427] “President Bush’s Speech,” New York Times, October 6, 2005,

https://nytimes.com/2005/10/06/politics/president-bushs-speech.html.

[428] Burns, 208–09.

[429] Matthew Brzezinski, “Surrealpolitik – How a Chechen terror suspect

wound up living on taxpayers’ dollars near the National Zoo,” Washington
Post, March 20, 2005, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38200-
2005Mar15.html.

[430] Jeremy Page, “Siege fallout deepens Russia’s rift with the West,”
Sunday Times, September 11, 2004, https://thetimes.co.uk/article/siege-
fallout-deepens-russias-rift-with-the-west-x5vv25mqgqm.

[431] Jason M. Breslow, “Colin Powell: U.N. Speech ‘Was a Great

Intelligence Failure,’” PBS Frontline, May 17, 2016,
https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/colin-powell-u-n-speech-was-a-great-
intelligence-failure.

[432] Matt Barganier, “Scheuer Corrects National Review, Weekly

Standard,” Antiwar.com, April 18, 2007,
https://antiwar.com/blog/2007/04/18/scheuer-corrects-national-review-
weekly-standard; Walter Pincus, “CIA Learned in ’02 That Bin Laden Had
No Iraq Ties, Report Says,” Washington Post, September 15, 2006,
http://washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2006/09/14/AR2006091401545.html; David Stout,
“Voice Said to Be Bin Laden’s Urges Muslims to Fight ‘Despots,’” New
York Times, February 11, 2003,
https://nytimes.com/2003/02/11/international/voice-said-to-be-bin-ladens-
urges-muslims-to-fight-despots.html.

[433] President George W. Bush, “President Says Saddam Hussein Must

Leave Iraq Within 48 Hours,” White House, March 17, 2003,
https://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030317-7.html.

[434] Staff, “Who is Osama Bin Laden?” BBC, September 18, 2001,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/155236.stm.

[435] Steven R. Weisman, “US Lists 3 Chechen Groups As Terrorist and

Freezes Assets,” New York Times, March 1, 2003,
https://nytimes.com/2003/03/01/world/threats-responses-terror-links-us-
lists-3-chechen-groups-terrorist-freezes.html.

[436] Mark Bassin, “On the eve of Beslan,” UCL, March 16, 2005,
https://ucl.ac.uk/news/2005/mar/eve-beslan.

[437] “Russia, United States: The Chechen War as a Geopolitical Battle,”

Stratfor, April 23, 2005, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/russia-united-
states-chechen-war-geopolitical-battle.

[438] American Morning, CNN, September 7, 2004,

https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/ltm/date/2004-09-07/segment/06.
[439] Staff, “Claim (in 2004, 2015 and 2017), The US government
supported Chechen separatism,” Russia Matters/Belfer Center, September
2020, https://russiamatters.org/node/20317.

[440] Staff, “US prison due to free Russian mob boss,” Baltimore Sun,
September 30, 2021, https://baltimoresun.com/2004/07/08/us-prison-due-
to-free-russian-mob-boss.

[441] David Ignatius, “The moment when Putin turned away from the
West,” Washington Post, March 9, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/09/putin-bush-chechnya-
ukraine-war.

[442] Matthew Brzezinski, “Surrealpolitik – How a Chechen terror suspect

wound up living on taxpayers’ dollars near the National Zoo,” Washington
Post, March 20, 2005, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38200-
2005Mar15.html.

[443] Yuliya Fedorinova, “Putin Says US Special Service Contacted

Fighters From Caucasus,” Bloomberg News, April 26, 2015,
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-04-26/putin-says-u-s-special-
service-contacted-fighters-from-caucasus; “Putin Claims US Helped
Russian Separatists,” Sky News, April 26, 2015,
https://news.sky.com/story/putin-claims-us-helped-russian-separatists-
10361944.
[444] Staff, “Warlord Killed in Chechnya Was Ex-US Marine,” RIA
Novosti, March 24, 2005,
https://globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2005/03/mil-050324-
rianovosti21.htm.

[445] John C.K. Daly, “UPI Intelligence Watch,” UPI, March 24, 2005,
https://upi.com/Defense-News/2005/03/24/UPI-Intelligence-
Watch/95731111696882.

[446] John C.K. Daly, “UPI Intelligence Watch,” UPI, March 24, 2005,
https://upi.com/Defense-News/2005/03/24/UPI-Intelligence-
Watch/95731111696882.

[447] Staff, “Claim (in 2004, 2015 and 2017), The US government
supported Chechen separatism,” Russia Matters/Belfer Center, September
2020, https://russiamatters.org/node/20317.

[448] Staff, “Russia’s Chechen chief blames CIA for violence,” Reuters,
September 24, 2009, https://reuters.com/article/idUSTRE58N5S120090924.

[449] See Chapter Four.

[450] Kevin Cirilli, “A primer on Chechen ties,” Politico, April 19, 2013,
https://politico.com/story/2013/04/chechnya-primer-090326.

[451] Staff, “Chechen Militancy: The Path from Nationalism to Islamism,”

Stratfor, March 24, 2005, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/chechen-
militancy-path-nationalism-islamism.
[452] Bill Kristol, et al., “An Open Letter,” American Enterprise Institute,
September 28, 2004, https://aei.org/articles/an-open-letter.

[453] “About” page, American Committee for Peace in Chechnya,

http://peaceinchechnya.org/about_members.htm.

[454] Maria Lipman, “Putin’s Burden,” Washington Post, September 9,

2004, https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2004/09/putins-burden; Maria
Lipman, “Putin’s Spreading War,” Washington Post, October 17, 2005,
https://carnegieendowment.org/posts/2005/10/putins-spreading-war.

[455] John Laughland, “The Chechens’ American friends,” Guardian,

September 8, 2004, https://theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/08/usa.russia.

[456] “International Islamic Brigade (IIB),” United Nations Security

Council, June 27, 2018,
https://un.org/securitycouncil/sanctions/1267/aq_sanctions_list/summaries/e
ntity/islamic-international-brigade-%28iib%29.

[457] Interview with author, Glen Howard, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, September 11, 2004, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/september-
11-2004-hour-1-glen-howard.

[458] Neil Mackay, “US Neo-Cons: Kremlin is ‘Morally’ to Blame for the
School Massacre,” Sunday Herald, September 15, 2004,
http://sundayherald.com/44741.
[459] Brian Glyn Williams, “The ‘Chechen Arabs’: An Introduction To The
Real Al-Qaeda Terrorists From Chechnya,” Jamestown Foundation
Terrorism Monitor, Vol. 2, No. 1 (May 5, 2005),
https://jamestown.org/program/the-chechen-arabs-an-introduction-to-the-
real-al-qaeda-terrorists-from-chechnya.

[460] “Chechen Guerrilla Leader Calls Russians ‘Terrorists,’” ABC News

Nightline, July 29, 2005,
https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/International/story?id=990187.

[461] “Book Excerpt: ‘Imperial Hubris,’” NPR News, June 24, 2004,
https://npr.org/2004/06/24/1977111/book-excerpt-imperial-hubris.

[462] Isn’t that hilarious?; Staff, “Networks Agree to Limit al Qaeda

Broadcasts,” ABC News, October 10, 2001,
https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92343; Staff, “Bush: Bin Laden
sending hidden messages on TV,” AP, October 10, 2001,
https://helenair.com/news/nation-world/bush-bin-laden-sending-hidden-
messages-on-tv/article_acc5b3fa-761b-5e81-9cc0-2ded92f761be.html;
Staff, “Caution Advised on Airing Bin Laden Videotapes,” Hartford
Courant, October 11, 2001, https://courant.com/2001/10/11/caution-
advised-on-airing-bin-laden-videotapes; Staff, “2 networks pass on showing
bin Laden tape,” AP, October 15, 2001,
https://universityofleeds.github.io/philtaylorpapers/vp01e3d9.html.

[463] “Chechen Guerrilla Leader Calls Russians ‘Terrorists,’” ABC News

Nightline, July 29, 2005,
https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/International/story?id=990187.

[464] Paul J. Gough, “Russia raises curtain for ABC News,” Reuters,
October 5, 2007, https://reuters.com/article/us-russia-
idUSN0541485120071005; Staff, “Network’s Aim Was to Inform
Americans About Global Terrorism,” ABC News, October 28, 2005,
https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=1260609.

[465] Robert Parsons, “Basayev’s Death Confirmed,” RFERL, July 10,

2006, https://rferl.org/a/1069732.html.

[466] Angela Charlton, “Russia accuses British mine-clearing charity of

aiding Chechens,” AP, August 10, 2000,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russia-accuses-british-
mineclearing-charity-of-aiding-chechens-711627.html.

[467] Saudi omitted from their list because they are the key to it all.

[468] Michael Dobbs, “Britain a Refuge for Mideast Dissidents,”

Washington Post, October 7, 2001,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/10/07/britain-a-refuge-
for-mideast-dissidents/45633c48-c5cc-49c5-846b-8479cab09c62.

[469] Atwan, 255–56.

[470] Michael Dobbs, “Britain a Refuge for Mideast Dissidents,”

Washington Post, October 7, 2001,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/10/07/britain-a-refuge-
for-mideast-dissidents/45633c48-c5cc-49c5-846b-8479cab09c62.

[471] Alan J. Kuperman, “A Model Humanitarian Intervention?

Reassessing NATO’s Libya Campaign,” International Security, Vol. 38, No.
1 (Summer 2013), 105–36; Alan J. Kuperman, “America’s Little-Known
Mission to Support Al Qaeda’s Role in Libya,” The National Interest,
August 13, 2019, https://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-little-known-
mission-support-al-qaedas-role-libya-73271; Horton, Enough Already, 163–
66.

[472] Annie Machon, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 and the
Shayler Affair (Leicestershire: Book Guild Ltd., 2005); Mark
Hollingsworth, “Secrets, lies and David Shayler,” Guardian, March 17,
2000, https://theguardian.com/comment/story/0,,181807,00.html.

[473] Michael Dobbs, “Britain a Refuge for Mideast Dissidents,”

Washington Post, October 7, 2001,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/10/07/britain-a-refuge-
for-mideast-dissidents/45633c48-c5cc-49c5-846b-8479cab09c62.

[474] The Rt. Hon. Dr. Kim Howells, MP, “Intelligence and Security
Committee Could 7/7 Have Been Prevented? Review of the Intelligence on
the London Terrorist Attacks on 7 July 2005,” UK House of Commons,
May 2009,
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c153540f0b61a825d6582
/7-7_attacks_intelligence.pdf.
[475] Horton, Enough Already, 271–72.

[476] Staff, “Heroes of terror attack praised 10 years on,” BBC, June 29,
2017, https://bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-40442186; “Counter-terrorism
inquiry: Met Police briefing over Lee Rigby murder,” UK Parliament Home
Affairs Committee’s Counter-terrorism inquiry, May 30, 2013,
https://parliament.uk/external/committees/committee-news-pre-oct-
2020/2013/may/130530-terrorism-ev; Andrew Griffin, “London attacker
was known to MI5 but had no terror convictions,” Independent, March 23,
2017, https://independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/khalid-masood-
terrorist-westminster-london-attack-who-is-he-profile-a7646336.html;
Staff, “London Bridge attack: What happened,” BBC, May 3, 2019,
https://bbc.com/news/live/uk-40147014; Staff, “London attack: Seven
killed in vehicle and stabbing incidents,” BBC, June 4, 2017,
https://bbc.com/news/uk-40146916; Leon Watson, “‘A fireball singed all
my hair’: What Parsons Green terror attack witnesses saw,” Telegraph,
September 15, 2017, https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/09/15/parsons-
green-terror-attack-witnesses-saw; Staff, “London Bridge: Attacker had
been convicted of terror offence,” BBC, November 30, 2019,
https://bbc.com/news/uk-50610215; Costas Pitas, “Libyan jailed for life for
UK attack that killed three,” Reuters, January 11, 2021,
https://reuters.com/article/uk-britain-security-reading-idUSKBN29G2BO.

[477] “Profile: Abu Qatada,” BBC, June 26, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/uk-

16584923.
[478] Staff, “Britain ‘sheltering al-Qaeda leader,’” BBC, July 8, 2002,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2115371.stm.

[479] Bruce Crumley, “Sheltering A Puppet Master?” Time, July 7, 2002,

https://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,300609,00.html.

[480] Jason Burke, “Al-Qaeda trained hundreds from UK,” Guardian,

February 24, 2002,
https://theguardian.com/uk/2002/feb/24/religion.september111.

[481] Daniel McGrory and Richard Ford, “Al Qaeda cleric exposed as an
MI5 double agent,” London Times, March 25, 2004,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/al-qaeda-cleric-exposed-as-an-mi5-double-
agent-fs0zcfp390s.

[482] Lee Elliot Major, “Muslim student group linked to terrorist attacks,”
Guardian, September 19, 2001,
https://theguardian.com/education/2001/sep/19/students.september11.

[483] Daniel McGrory and Shirley English, “Europe’s police round up

terror suspects,” London Times, December 19, 2002,
http://timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0%2C%2C1-3-518387%2C00.html.

[484] Not to be confused with Khaled El-Masri, an innocent man brutally

tortured by W. Bush and the CIA: Darian Pavli, “Mistaken identity, abuse
and rendition: Khaled El-Masri finally has day in court,” Guardian, May
15, 2012, https://theguardian.com/law/2012/may/15/el-masri-rendition-
european-court.
[485] Staff, “Web sting links Hamza to terror camps,” London Times, July
20, 2003, https://thetimes.co.uk/article/web-sting-links-hamza-to-terror-
camps-9dc5xgn35hh.

[486] Kohlmann, xi.

[487] Kohlmann, xii, 63, 190–91.

[488] Joseph Ax London, “Imam Abu Hamza convicted of US terrorism

charges,” Reuters, May 19, 2014, https://reuters.com/article/uk-usa-
security-imam/london-imam-abu-hamza-convicted-of-u-s-terrorism-
charges-idUKKBN0DZ1QK20140519.

[489] “Suspected bomb mastermind caught,” Sydney Morning Herald, July

22, 2005, https://smh.com.au/world/suspected-bomb-mastermind-caught-
20050722-gdlqce.html.

[490] John Loftus interview, “Haroon Ashid Aswat is an MI6 double

agent,” Fox News, July 25, 2005, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=MoxPY3H5EqA.

[491] Press Release, “Haroon Aswat, Abu Hamza Co-Conspirator, Pleads

Guilty to Terrorism Charges in Federal Court,” US Department of Justice,
March 30, 2015, https://justice.gov/opa/pr/haroon-aswat-abu-hamza-co-
conspirator-pleads-guilty-terrorism-charges-federal-court.

[492] Timur Aliev, “Bloody raid stuns Ingushetia,” ReliefWeb, June 23,
2004, https://reliefweb.int/report/russian-federation/bloody-raid-stuns-
ingushetia.

[493] Paul Reynolds, “Chechnya: Why Putin is implacable,” BBC,

September 6, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3631792.stm.

[494] Marcin Mamon, “The Mujahedeen’s Valley,” Intercept, July 9, 2015,

https://theintercept.com/2015/07/09/mujahedeensvalley; See Chapter Four.

[495] John Davison and Ahmed Tolba, “Egypt’s Sisi wins 97 percent in
election with no real opposition,” Reuters, April 2, 2018,
https://reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1H915X.

[496] MacKinnon, 136–37.

[497] Steven A. Hildreth and Carl Ek, “Long-Range Ballistic Missile

Defense in Europe,” Congressional Research Service, September 23, 2009,
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/weapons/RL34051.pdf.

[498] Bruce I. Konviser, “US Missiles in E. Europe Opposed by Locals,

Russia Kremlin Calls Proposed Interceptors a ‘Clear Threat,’” Washington
Post, January 28, 2007,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2007/01/28/us-missiles-in-e-
europe-opposed-by-locals-russia-span-classbankheadkremlin-calls-
proposed-interceptors-a-clear-threatspan/b1c7ef2a-92f6-4b8d-9955-
8adc63d7b537.

[499] “Transcript: 2007 Putin Speech and the Following Discussion at the
Munich Conference on Security Policy,” Johnson’s Russia List, March 27,
2014, https://russialist.org/transcript-putin-speech-and-the-following-
discussion-at-the-munich-conference-on-security-policy; Doug Bandow,
“We Poked The Bear,” The American Conservative, March 17, 2022,
https://theamericanconservative.com/articles/we-poked-the-bear.

[500] Vladimir Putin, “Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich
Conference on Security Policy,” Kremlin, February 10, 2007,
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24034.

[501] David Ignatius, “Putin warned the West 15 years ago. Now, in
Ukraine, he’s poised to wage war,” Washington Post, February 20, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/20/putin-ukraine-nato-2007-
munich-conference.

[502] Ian Traynor, “Putin hits at US for triggering arms race,” Guardian,
February 11, 2007, https://theguardian.com/world/2007/feb/11/usa.russia.

[503] Burns, 224.

[504] William Burns, “Fundamentals of Russian Foreign Policy Contribute

to Tension with the West,” US State Department, September 13, 2007,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07MOSCOW4505_a.html.

[505] Vovan and Lexus, “Russian Prank Call Duo Trick George W Bush
into Talking About Ukraine [FULL] Must See!” The Court Jester’s Club,
May 24, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=-U10s50baCw.
[506] Benson Whitney, “Norway’s FM Praises New NATO, Stresses
Relations With Russia,” US State Department, April 11, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08OSLO206_a.html.

[507] See below.

[508] See Chapter Six.

[509] Kingston Reif, “Russia Completes CFE Treaty Suspension,” Arms

Control Today, April 2015, https://armscontrol.org/act/2015-04/news-
briefs/russia-completes-cfe-treaty-suspension.

[510] William Burns, “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement

Redlines,” US State Department, February 1, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html.

[511] William Burns, “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement

Redlines,” US State Department, February 1, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html.

[512] Joe Lauria, “UN Torture Report: ‘Demonized’ Assange Has Faced
‘Psychological Torture,’” Consortium News, May 31, 2019,
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/05/31/un-torture-report-demonized-
assange-has-faced-psychological-torture; Brett Wilkins, “Top UN Anti-
Torture Official Urges Trump to Send Message of ‘Justice, Truth, and
Humanity’ by Pardoning Julian Assange,” Common Dreams, December 22,
2020, https://commondreams.org/news/2020/12/22/top-un-anti-torture-
official-urges-trump-send-message-justice-truth-and-humanity; Peter
Hobson and Kirsty Needham, “WikiLeaks founder Assange welcomed
home in Australia a free man after US deal,” Reuters, June 26, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/wikileaks-assange-arrives-mariana-islands-us-
plea-deal-2024-06-25.

[513] William Burns, “Acting U/S Fried’s Meeting With DFM Karasin,”
US State Department, March 18, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW748_a.html; Douglas
Hamilton, “US and EU powers recognize Kosovo as some opposed,”
Reuters, February 17, 2008, https://reuters.com/article/us-kosovo-serbia/u-
s-and-eu-powers-recognize-kosovo-as-some-opposed-
idUSHAM53437920080218.

[514] Burns, 237–38.

[515] Burns, 232–33.

[516] Burns, 111, 230–31.

[517] Craig Stapleton, “Eur A/S Fried’s September 1 Meetings With Senior
MFA and Presidency Officials on Improving Relations With Europe,” US
State Department, September 9, 2005,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05PARIS6125_a.html.

[518] State Department Staff, “EUR A/S Freid’s September 1 Meetings

With Senior MFA and Presidency Officials on Improving Relations With
Europe,” WikiLeaks.org, September 9, 2005,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/05PARIS6125_a.html.
[519] Branko Marcetic, “Diplomatic Cables Show Russia Saw NATO
Expansion as a Red Line,” ACURA, January 16, 2023,
https://usrussiaaccord.org/acura-viewpoint-guest-post-by-branko-marcetic-
diplomatic-cables-show-russia-saw-nato-expansion-as-a-red-line.

[520] “‘La Russie a un plan global pour le monde’ (Maurice Gourdault-

Montagne),” Europe 1, March 24, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=9Evk2FM5cg0; Pedro L. Gonzalez, “The Blood on George W. Bush’s
Hands,” Contra, May 19, 2022, https://contra.substack.com/p/the-blood-on-
george-w-bushs-hands.

[521] “The North Atlantic Treaty,” NATO, April 4, 1949,

https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm.

[522] “NATO-Ukraine Action Plan adopted at Prague,” NATO, November

22, 2002, https://nato.int/docu/update/2002/11-november/e1122c.htm.

[523] Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (New York:

Vintage, 2014), 158.

[524] Darryl Cooper, “Thoughts on Ukraine (Remastered),” Martyr Made,

March 17, 2022, https://martyrmade.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-ukraine-
remastered.

[525] Peter Finn, “Putin Threatens Ukraine On NATO,” Washington Post,

February 13, 2008, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/02/12/AR2008021201658.html.
[526] Peter Finn, “Putin Threatens Ukraine On NATO,” Washington Post,
February 13, 2008, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/02/12/AR2008021201658.html.

[527] Staff, “France won’t back Ukraine and Georgia NATO bids,” Reuters,
April 1, 2008, https://reuters.com/article/us-nato-france-ukraine/france-
wont-back-ukraine-and-georgia-nato-bids-idUSL0115117020080401.

[528] George W. Bush, Decision Points, 430–31.

[529] Ambassador William R. Timken, “Germany: Still Not Enthusiastic

About Missile Defense, But Can Support Bucharest Deliverable,” US State
Department, March 20, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08BERLIN358_a.html.

[530] Andrew Cockburn, “Undelivered Goods,” Harper’s, August 13, 2015,

https://harpers.org/2015/08/undelivered-goods.

[531] Steven Lee Myers, “Bush backs Ukraine’s bid to join NATO,” New
York Times, April 1, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/04/01/world/europe/01iht-prexy.4.11593095.html.

[532] Steven Erlanger and Steven Lee Myers, “NATO Allies Oppose Bush
on Georgia and Ukraine,” New York Times, April 3, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/04/03/world/europe/03nato.html.

[533] “Framework document on the establishment of the NATO-Georgia

Commission,” NATO, September 15, 2008,
https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_46406.htm.

[534] “NATO-Ukraine Commission (1997-2023),” NATO, July 13, 2023,

https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_50319.htm.

[535] Interview with author, John J. Mearsheimer, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, August 21, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/082114-john-j-
mearsheimer.

[536] David Brunnstrom and Susan Cornwell, “NATO promises Ukraine,

Georgia entry one day,” Reuters, April 3, 2008,
https://web.archive.org/web/20180609124905/https://reuters.com/article/us-
nato/nato-promises-ukraine-georgia-entry-one-day-
idUSL0179714620080403.

[537] “Bucharest Summit Declaration,” NATO, April 3, 2008,

https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_8443.htm.

[538] William Burns, “Russia’s Expectations For NATO Summit Depend on

MAP for Ukraine and Georgia,” US State Department, March 25, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW806_a.html.

[539] “Press Statement and Answers to Journalists’ Questions Following a

Meeting of the Russia-NATO Council,” Kremlin, April 4, 2008,
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24903; Helene Cooper, C.J.
Chivers, and Clifford J. Levy, “US Watched as a Squabble Turned Into a
Showdown,” New York Times, August 17, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/08/18/washington/18diplo.html.
[540] Mikhail Zygar, All the Kremlin’s Men: Inside the Court of Vladimir
Putin (New York: Public Affairs, 2016), 153–54.

[541] Staff, “Russia Talks Tough in Response to NATO’s Eastward

Expansion,” DW, April 11, 2008, https://dw.com/en/russia-talks-tough-in-
response-to-natos-eastward-expansion/a-3261078.

[542] Brzezinski, 84.

[543] Michael R. Gordon, et al., “Vladimir Putin’s 20-Year March to War in

Ukraine—and How the West Mishandled It,” Wall Street Journal, April 1,
2022, https://wsj.com/articles/vladimir-putins-20-year-march-to-war-in-
ukraineand-how-the-west-mishandled-it-11648826461.

[544] Ambassador William R. Timken, “Germany/Russia: Chancellery

Views on Map for Ukraine and Georgia,” US State Department, June 6,
2008, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08BERLIN749_a.html.

[545] Maura Reynolds, “‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes,”
Politico Magazine, February 28, 2022,
https://politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-
there-00012340.

[546] Fiona Hill, “Putin Has the US Right Where He Wants It,” New York
Times, January 24, 2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/01/24/opinion/russia-
ukraine-putin-biden.html.
[547] Robert Draper, “‘This Was Trump Pulling a Putin,’” New York Times
Magazine, April 11, 2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/04/11/magazine/trump-
putin-ukraine-fiona-hill.html.

[548] Peter Baker, “The Seduction of George W. Bush,” Foreign Policy,

November 6, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/11/06/the-seduction-of-
george-w-bush.

[549] Maura Reynolds, “‘Yes, He Would’: Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes,”
Politico Magazine, February 28, 2002,
https://politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-
there-00012340.

[550] Chargé d’Affaires Daniel Russell, “Russian-Ukrainian Relations

Monopolized by Ukraine’s NATO Bid,” US State Department, May 30,
2008, https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW1517_a.html.

[551] Burns, 239; Becky Sullivan, “How NATO’s expansion helped drive
Putin to invade Ukraine,” NPR News, February 24, 2022,
https://npr.org/2022/01/29/1076193616/ukraine-russia-nato-explainer;
Samuel Charap, “Nato honesty on Ukraine could avert conflict with
Russia,” Financial Times, January 13, 2022,
https://ft.com/content/74089d46-abb8-4daa-9ee4-e9e9e4c45ab1.

[552] MacKinnon, 75.

[553] John Koenig, “Germany/Russia: Merel [sic] Goes to Moscow,” US

State Department, March 10, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08BERLIN303_a.html.

[554] William R. Timken, “Chancellor Merkel’s June 5 Meeting With

President Medvedev in Berlin,” US State Department, June 6, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08BERLIN755_a.html.

[555] Chargé d’Affaires Daniel Russell, “Medvedev’s New European

Security Treaty?” June 16, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW1714_a.html.

[556] “Bill Bradley on Russia and NATO,” Carnegie Council for Ethics in
International Affairs, March 4, 2008, https://youtube.com/watch?v=K-
alxZvUCS8.

[557] David Rohde and Arshad Mohammed, “How the US made its Putin
problem worse,” Reuters, April 19, 2014, https://reuters.com/article/us-
ukraine-putin-diplomacy-special-repor/special-report-how-the-u-s-made-
its-putin-problem-worse-idUSBREA3H0OQ20140418.

[558] Brian Rohan, “Saakashvili ‘planned S. Ossetia invasion’: ex-

minister,” Reuters, September 14, 2008, https://reuters.com/article/us-
georgia-russia-opposition-idUSLD12378020080914.

[559] Pavel Felgenhauer, “Putin Confirms the Invasion of Georgia Was

Preplanned,” Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor, Vol. 9, No.
152 (August 9, 2012), https://jamestown.org/program/putin-confirms-the-
invasion-of-georgia-was-preplanned.
[560] Andrew Cockburn, “The ghost of Georgia 2008 should be haunting
Kiev right now,” Responsible Statecraft, December 15, 2021,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/12/15/the-ghost-of-georgia-2008-
should-be-haunting-kiev-right-now.

[561] “US Troops Start Training Exercise in Georgia,” Reuters, July 15,
2008, https://reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSL1556589920080715.

[562] See Chapter Two.

[563] Charles Clover and Demetri Sevastopulo, “US military trained

Georgian commandos,” Financial Times, September 5, 2008,
https://ft.com/content/bdffd9a6-7b71-11dd-b839-000077b07658.

[564] Peter Baker, “The Seduction of George W. Bush,” Foreign Policy,

November 6, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/11/06/the-seduction-of-
george-w-bush.

[565] “Study on NATO Enlargement,” North Atlantic Treaty Organization,

September 3, 1995 (updated November 5, 2008),
https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_24733.htm; Brett V. Benson and
Bradley C. Smith, “NATO’s membership rules invite conflict – and benefit
Putin,” Washington Post, February 22, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/02/22/natos-membership-rules-
invite-conflict-benefit-putin.

[566] Michael Dobbs, “Soviet Georgian Republic Proclaims

Independence,” Washington Post, April 10, 1991,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/04/10/soviet-georgian-
republic-proclaims-independence/f0c3d67c-e38e-46f7-8a27-0991eab22080.

[567] “South Ossetia Profile,” BBC, April 21, 2016,

https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-18269210; “Abkhazia Profile,” BBC,
January 13, 2020, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18175030.

[568] Richard Foltz, “South Ossetia: The Case For International

Recognition,” The Conversation, June 9, 2019,
https://theconversation.com/south-ossetia-the-case-for-international-
recognition-118299.

[569] James Brooke, “As Centralized Rule Wanes, Ethnic Tension Rises
Anew in Soviet Georgia,” New York Times, October 2, 1991,
https://nytimes.com/1991/10/02/world/as-centralized-rule-wanes-ethnic-
tension-rises-anew-in-soviet-georgia.html.

[570] Hahn, 103.

[571] James Brooke, “As Centralized Rule Wanes, Ethnic Tension Rises
Anew in Soviet Georgia,” New York Times, October 2, 1991,
https://nytimes.com/1991/10/02/world/as-centralized-rule-wanes-ethnic-
tension-rises-anew-in-soviet-georgia.html.

[572] Richard Foltz, “South Ossetia: The Case For International

Recognition,” The Conversation, June 9, 2019,
https://theconversation.com/south-ossetia-the-case-for-international-
recognition-118299; Philip Remler, “Russia and Cooperative Security in
Europe: Times Change, Tactics Remain,” Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, August 1, 2019,
https://carnegieendowment.org/2019/08/01/russia-and-cooperative-security-
in-europe-times-change-tactics-remain-pub-79611.

[573] Hahn, 103.

[574] Helene Cooper, et al., “US Watched as a Squabble Turned Into a

Showdown,” New York Times, August 17, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/08/18/washington/18diplo.html.

[575] “US Boosts Successful Military Cooperation with Georgia,” Civil.ge,

May 8, 2004, https://civil.ge/archives/115803.

[576] Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, “US Recognizes Kosovo as

Independent State,” US State Department, February 18, 2008, https://2001-
2009.state.gov/secretary/rm/2008/02/100973.htm.

[577] Charap and Colton, 91.

[578] Charap and Colton, 92.

[579] “Georgia ‘triggered’ war with Russia, EU investigation finds,” France

24, September 30, 2009, https://france24.com/en/20090930-georgia-war-
russia-eu-south-ossetia-tskhinvali-putin-military.

[580] “Georgia accused of targeting civilians,” BBC, October 28, 2008,

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7692751.stm.
[581] Mark Tran, “Russia defies west by recognising Georgian rebel
regions,” Guardian, August 26, 2008,
https://theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/26/russia.georgia1.

[582] See Chapter Two.

[583] Heidi Tagliavini, et al., “Independent International Fact-Finding

Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, Report, Volume I–III,” 2009,
https://mpil.de/en/pub/publications/archive/independent_international_fact.
cfm.

[584] “Accordance with international law of the unilateral declaration of

independence in respect of Kosovo,” International Court of Justice, July 22,
2010, https://icj-cij.org/node/101885; Staff, “Kosovo independence move
not illegal, says UN court,” BBC, July 22, 2010,
https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-10730573.

[585] Burns, 200–02.

[586] Burns, 241.

[587] Burns, 236–37.

[588] Staff, “South Ossettia leader says 1,400 killed in conflict,”

Independent, August 8, 2008,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/south-ossettia-leader-says-1-
400-killed-in-conflict-888487.html.
[589] Robert Kagan, “Putin Makes His Move,” Washington Post, August
11, 2008, https://washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2008/08/10/AR2008081001871.html.

[590] John McCormack, “‘Today, We Are All Georgians,’” Washington

Examiner, August 12, 2008, https://washingtonexaminer.com/weekly-
standard/today-we-are-all-georgians.

[591] Melvin A. Goodman, “David Ignatius: CIA’s Senior Apologist Strikes

Again,” Truthout, May 8, 2010, https://truthout.org/david-ignatius-cias-
senior-apologist-strikes-again59215; Dylan Byers, “Ignatius is national
security go-to guy,” Politico, March 19, 2012,
https://politico.com/story/2012/03/ignatius-is-national-security-go-to-guy-
074164.

[592] David Ignatius, “The Georgia Strategy,” Denver Post, September 10,
2008, https://denverpost.com/2008/09/10/the-georgia-strategy.

[593] Heidi Tagliavini, et al., “Independent International Fact-Finding

Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, Report, Volume I–III,” 2009,
https://mpil.de/en/pub/publications/archive/independent_international_fact.
cfm.

[594] Andrew Cockburn, “Game On,” Harper’s, January 2015,

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/game-on.

[595] Peter Certo, “Stephen Hadley,” Militarist Monitor, May 29, 2017,
https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/stephen-hadley; Jim Lobe, “Pentagon
Office Home to Neocon Network,” Antiwar.com, August 7, 2003,
https://antiwar.com/ips/lobe080703.html.

[596] Barton Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York:
Penguin Press, 2008), 189.

[597] Hahn, 113.

[598] Ben Smith, “‘Invasion of Georgia’ a ‘3 a.m. moment,’” Politico,

August 9, 2008, https://politico.com/story/2008/08/invasion-of-georgia-a-3-
am-moment-012409.

[599] Susan Cornwell and Sue Pleming, “US urges Russia to pull forces out
of Georgia,” Reuters, August 8, 2008, https://reuters.com/article/uk-
georgia-ossetia-usa/u-s-tells-russia-to-pull-forces-out-of-georgia-
idUKN0850115420080809.

[600] Deborah Tedford, “Georgia-Russia Conflict Escalates Over

Separatists,” NPR News, August 8, 2008,
https://npr.org/2008/08/08/93410345/georgia-russia-conflict-escalates-over-
separatists; Staff, “South Ossettia leader says 1,400 killed in conflict,”
Independent, August 8, 2008,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/south-ossettia-leader-says-1-
400-killed-in-conflict-888487.html.

[601] Anne Barnard, “Georgia and Russia Nearing All-Out War,” New York
Times, August 9, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/08/10/world/europe/10georgia.html; Staff,
“Georgia makes a power play—and a big gamble,” AP, August 9, 2008,
https://nbcnews.com/id/wbna26105019.

[602] Peter Baker, “The Seduction of George W. Bush,” Foreign Policy,

November 6, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/11/06/the-seduction-of-
george-w-bush.

[603] Michael Schwirtz, et al., “Russia and Georgia Clash Over Separatist
Region,” New York Times, August 8, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/08/09/world/europe/09georgia.html; Anne
Barnard, “Georgia and Russia Nearing All-Out War,” New York Times,
August 9, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/08/10/world/europe/10georgia.html.

[604] C.J. Chivers, et al., “Georgia Offers Fresh Evidence on War’s Start,”
New York Times, September 15, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/09/16/world/europe/16georgia.html.

[605] C.J. Chivers and Ellen Barry, “Georgia Claims on Russia War Called
Into Question,” New York Times, November 6, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/11/07/world/europe/07georgia.html.

[606] C.J. Chivers, “Embracing Georgia, US Misread Signs of Rifts,” New

York Times, December 1, 2010,
https://nytimes.com/2010/12/02/world/europe/02WikiLeaks-georgia.html.

[607] Hans Mouritzen, “WikiLeaks, South Ossetia and the Russian ‘reset,’”
Open Democracy, April 4, 2011,
https://opendemocracy.net/en/odr/WikiLeaks-south-ossetia-and-russian-
reset.

[608] Ralf Beste, et al., “The West Begins to Doubt Georgian Leader,” Der
Spiegel, September 15, 2008, https://spiegel.de/international/world/did-
saakashvili-lie-the-west-begins-to-doubt-georgian-leader-a-578273.html.

[609] Heidi Tagliavini, et al., “Independent International Fact-Finding

Mission on the Conflict in Georgia, Report, Volume I–III,” 2009,
https://mpil.de/en/pub/publications/archive/independent_international_fact.
cfm; Staff, “Georgia ‘started unjustified war,’” BBC, September 30, 2009,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8281990.stm; Timothy Heritage, “Georgia
started war with Russia: EU-backed report,” Reuters, September 30, 2009,
https://reuters.com/article/us-georgia-russia-report-idustre58t4mo20090930.

[610] James Brooke, “Georgia’s David Attacks the Russian Goliath – And
Lives to Tell the Tale,” Voice of America, August 4, 2011,
https://blogs.voanews.com/russia-watch/2011/08/04/georgias-david-attacks-
the-russian-goliath-and-lives-to-tell-the-tale.

[611] Robert Wood, “Daily Press Briefing,” US State Department,

November 7, 2008, https://2001-
2009.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2008/nov/111653.htm.

[612] Mikhail Gorbachev, “Russia Never Wanted a War,” New York Times,
August 19, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/08/20/opinion/20gorbachev.html.
[613] Burns, 241–42.

[614] Kurt Volker, “Ukraine, MAP and the Georgia-Russia Conflict,” US

State Department, August 14, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08USNATO290_a.html.

[615] Press Release, “US, Ukraine Sign Charter on Strategic Partnership,”

US State Department, December 19, 2008, https://2001-
2009.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2008/dec/113367.htm.

[616] Niko Mchedlishvili and Matt Robinson, “Threat of war hangs over
Georgian energy routes,” Reuters, July 31, 2009,
https://reuters.com/article/georgia-war-energy/feature-threat-of-war-hangs-
over-georgian-energy-routes-idUSLU68069920090731.

[617] Hugh Macleod, “From Syrian fishing port to naval power base:
Russia moves into the Mediterranean,” Guardian, October 8, 2008,
https://theguardian.com/world/2008/oct/08/syria.russia.

[618] Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “George Friedman, ‘Europe:

Destined for Conflict?’” February 4, 2015, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=Wijd10BZS1w.

[619] George Friedman, “Syria, America and Putin’s Bluff,” Stratfor,

September 10, 2013, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/syria-america-
and-putins-bluff.
[620] John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,”
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-
crisis-west-s-fault.

[621] Ben Smith, “US pondered military use in Georgia,” Politico,

February 3, 2010, https://politico.com/story/2010/02/us-pondered-military-
use-in-georgia-032487; Staff, “Georgian parliamentarian slams Saakashvili
recollection of US role in August 2008 war,” Interfax, April 17, 2013,
https://russialist.org/georgian-parliamentarian-slams-saakashvili-
recollection-of-u-s-role-in-august-2008-war.

[622] “US-Russian Relations under Bush and Putin,” Interview of Steven

Pifer, SMU Center for Presidential History, September 28, 2021,
https://smu.edu/-/media/site/dedman/academics/institutescenters/cph/bush-
putin-project/transcripts/pifer-steven-final.pdf; Tweet by Steven Pifer to
author, January 18, 2023,
https://x.com/steven_pifer/status/1615765593382359040.

[623] Peter Baker, “The Seduction of George W. Bush,” Foreign Policy,

November 6, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/11/06/the-seduction-of-
george-w-bush.

[624] Ron Asmus, A Little War that Shook the World (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 186–87; Gideon Rachman, “Did Dick Cheney want to
start a war with Russia?” Financial Times, February 19, 2010,
https://ft.com/content/3189c20b-251d-3345-a475-0d9093a98567.
[625] Staff, “Russia: Will begin pullout from Georgia on Monday,” AP,
August 17, 2008, https://gainesville.com/story/news/2008/08/17/russia-will-
begin-pullout-from-georgia-on-monday/31575284007.

[626] Staff, “Russia says troops leave most of Georgia,” AP, August 21,
2008, https://nbcnews.com/id/wbna26329053.

[627] Condoleezza Rice, “Will America heed the wake-up call of Ukraine?”
Washington Post, March 7, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/condoleezza-rice-will-america-heed-
the-wake-up-call-of-ukraine/2014/03/07/cf087f74-a630-11e3-84d4-
e59b1709222c_story.html.

[628] Ambassador John Beyrle, “Human Rights Ombudsman Lukin on

Recognition, Russian Interests, Need For US Dialogue,” US State
Department, August 28, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW2586_a.html.

[629] Tabassum Zakaria, “Russia, NATO loom in Cheney’s Ukraine visit,”

Reuters, September 4, 2008,
https://web.archive.org/web/20180609130011/https://reuters.com/article/us-
georgia-ossetia/russia-nato-loom-in-cheneys-ukraine-visit-
idUSL272497420080904.

[630] Andrew Cockburn, “Game On,” Harper’s, January 2015,

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/game-on.
[631] Staff, “Deep and Abiding Interest,” DW, September 4, 2008,
https://dw.com/en/cheney-vows-to-support-georgia-slams-russia/a-
3617603; Damien McElroy, et al., “Dick Cheney to take fight against
Russia’s oil dominance to Azerbaijan,” Telegraph, September 2, 2008,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/2669248/Dick-
Cheney-to-take-fight-against-Russias-oil-dominance-to-Azerbaijan.html.

[632] Lada Yevgrashina, “Cheney to Rally US Allies in Russia’s Backyard,”

Reuters, September 2, 2008,
https://rferl.org/a/Cheney_To_Rally_US_Allies_In_Russias_Backyard/1195
949.html.

[633] “US, Saudi Arabia: Holding the Chechen Card,” Stratfor, August 14,
2008, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/us-saudi-arabia-holding-
chechen-card.

[634] Dan Bilefsky and Michael Schwirtz, “News Media Feel Limits to
Georgia’s Democracy,” New York Times, October 6, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/10/07/world/europe/07georgia.html.

[635] Staff, “Ex-Minister Says Georgian President Ordered Killings,”

RFERL, September 25, 2007, https://rferl.org/a/1078790.html.

[636] Sophia Kishkovsky, “Georgia: Ex-Minister Arrested After Assailing

President,” New York Times, September 28, 2007,
https://nytimes.com/2007/09/28/world/europe/28briefs-minister.html.
[637] Edita Badasyan, “In Georgia, nine witnesses in case against Irakli
Okruashvili recall their testimonies,” Caucasian Knot, January 9, 2013,
https://eng.kavkaz-uzel.eu/articles/24482; “‘Pressure on me took place in
forms of inhuman torture of my friends’ – Irakli Okruashvili,” Georgian
Journal, January 19, 2013, https://georgianjournal.ge/politics/21898-
pressure-on-me-took-place-in-forms-of-inhuman-torture-of-my-friends-
irakli-okruashvili.html.

[638] Misha Dzhindzhikhashvili, “Georgia Ex-Minister Retracts

Allegations,” AP, October 8, 2007,
https://oklahoman.com/story/news/2007/10/08/georgia-ex-minister-retracts-
allegations/61698016007.

[639] D’Arcy Doran, “Billionaire prominent in Georgian opposition dies in

Britain after alleging murder plot,” AP, February 13, 2008,
http://archive.boston.com/news/world/europe/articles/2008/02/14/russian_b
illionaire_dies_in_london_after_alleging_murder_plot; Staff, “Investigation
launched into alleged assassination plot of Georgian billionaire
Patarkatsishvili,” JAMnews, October 17, 2018, https://jam-
news.net/georgian-prosecutors-office-opens-case-into-alleged-
assassination-plot-of-georgian-billionaire-patarkatsishvili; Staff,
“Prosecution: Security Service Planned Patarkatsishvili Murder in 2007,”
Civil.ge, October 17, 2018, https://civil.ge/archives/259396.

[640] Ambassador John F. Tefft, “Why Patarkatsishvili Scares the GOG,”

US State Department, November 30, 2007, WikiLeaks,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07TBILISI3002_a.html.
[641] Nikolaj Nielsen, “EU condemns Georgia prison rape, torture,” EU
Observer, September 21, 2012, https://euobserver.com/world/117627.

[642] Matthew Chance, “Former Georgia prison guard: I witnessed abuse

for years,” CNN, September 23, 2012,
https://edition.cnn.com/2012/09/21/world/europe/georgia-
prison/index.html.

[643] Paul Rimple, “Saakashvili’s party loses as Georgian democracy takes

step forward,” Christian Science Monitor, October 2, 2012,
https://csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2012/1002/Saakashvili-s-party-loses-
as-Georgian-democracy-takes-step-forward.

[644] Giorgi Lomsadze, “Georgia Revokes Citizenship of Billionaire

Ivanishvili,” Eurasianet, October 11, 2011, https://eurasianet.org/georgia-
revokes-citizenship-of-billionaire-ivanishvili; Staff, “Saakashvili Restores
Georgian Citizenship For Rival Ivanishvili,” RFERL, October 16, 2012,
https://rferl.org/a/saakashvili-restores-georgian-citizenship-for-rival-
ivanishvili/24741347.html.

[645] Interview of Daniel Fried, PBS Frontline, June 21, 2017,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/daniel-fried.

[646] Keith Gessen, “The Quiet Americans Behind the US-Russia

Imbroglio,” New York Times Magazine, May 8, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/05/08/magazine/the-quiet-americans-behind-the-
us-russia-imbroglio.html.
[647] Thomas Graham, “Was the Collapse of US-Russia Relations
Inevitable?” The Nation, August 22, 2023,
https://thenation.com/article/archive/us-russia-putin-relations-nato.

[648] Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 171–207.

[649] See Chapter Two.

[650] Staff, “Moscow fingers warlord in school takeover,” AP, September 9,

2004, https://nbcnews.com/id/wbna5951331; Nick Paton Walsh, “Foreign
minister attacks Britain for granting asylum to Chechen,” Guardian,
September 9, 2004,
https://theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/10/chechnya.russia1.

[651] Thomas Graham, “Was the Collapse of US-Russia Relations

Inevitable?” The Nation, August 22, 2023,
https://thenation.com/article/archive/us-russia-putin-relations-nato.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter 4: Barack Obama

[1] David S. Cloud, “Wrong red button,” Politico, March 6, 2009,

https://politico.com/story/2009/03/video-wrong-red-button-019719.

[2] Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign

Policy, October 11, 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-
pacific-century.

[3] Oleg Shchedrov and Matt Spetalnick, “Obama, Medvedev to reset ties
with arms pact,” Reuters, April 1, 2009,
https://web.archive.org/web/20090406131738/http://reuters.com/article/idU
SL194925620090401.

[4] David Usborne, “US and Russia seek nuclear deal,” Independent, April
2, 2009, https://independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/us-and-russia-seek-
nuclear-deal-1659987.html.

[5] Ian Traynor, “Europe reacts to Obama dropping missile defence shield,”
Guardian, September 17, 2009,
https://theguardian.com/world/2009/sep/17/poland-czech-missile-defence-
shield.

[6] Christian Parenti, “With Friends Like These: On Pakistan,” The Nation,
April 30, 2013, https://thenation.com/article/friends-these-pakistan; Richard
Norton-Taylor, et al., “Convoy Attacks Trigger Race to Open New Afghan
Supply Lines,” Guardian, December 9, 2008,
https://theguardian.com/world/2008/dec/09/afghanistan-nato-supply-routes;
Horton, Fool’s Errand, 131.

[7] Hahn, 77.

[8] Barack Obama, A Promised Land (New York: Crown, 2020), 464.

[9] Peter Baker and Thom Shanker, “Obama Plans to Retain Gates at
Defense Department,” New York Times, November 25, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/11/26/us/politics/26gates.html; Richard A. Oppel
Jr., “Strikes in Pakistan Underscore Obama’s Options,” New York Times,
January 23, 2009, https://nytimes.com/2009/01/24/world/asia/24pstan.html;
Spencer Ackerman, “Victim of Obama’s first drone strike: ‘I am the living
example of what drones are,’” Guardian, January 23, 2016,
https://theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/23/drone-strike-victim-barack-
obama; Helene Cooper, “Putting Stamp on Afghan War, Obama Will Send
17,000 Troops,” New York Times, February 17, 2009,
https://nytimes.com/2009/02/18/washington/18web-troops.html.

[10] Michael Froman, “Email to John Podesta,” WikiLeaks, October 6,

2008,
https://web.archive.org/web/20170223020043/https://wikileaks.org/podesta
-emails/emailid/8190; Michael Froman, “Email to Barack Obama,”
WikiLeaks, October 6, 2008,
https://web.archive.org/web/20170222030238/https://wikileaks.org/podesta
-emails/emailid/15560.
[11] The post-Soviet Russian counterpart to NATO which includes
Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and
Uzbekistan.

[12] Their answer to the EU, which includes Russia, Armenia, Belarus,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan.

[13] Ulrich Kühn, “Medvedev’s Proposals for a New European Security

Order: A Starting Point or the End of the Story?” Connections, Vol. 9, No. 2
(Spring 2010), 1–16, https://jstor.org/stable/26326200.

[14] Staff, “Russia Unveils Proposal For European Security Treaty,”

RFERL, November 30, 2009,
https://rferl.org/a/Russia_Unveils_Proposal_For_European_Security_Treaty
/1891161.html.

[15] William Burns, “CSTO: Russia’s Counter to NATO,” US State

Department, March 14, 2007,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/07MOSCOW1105_a.html; Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, “America’s Pacific Century,” Foreign Policy, October
11, 2011, https://foreignpolicy.com/2011/10/11/americas-pacific-century.

[16] Ambassador John Beyrle, “Russian Analysts Complain US Has

Betrayed Russia’s Trust – Meeting With Codel Tauscher,” US State
Department, January 1, 2009,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/09MOSCOW2_a.html.
[17] Darwin BondGraham, “New START: Arms Affirmation Treaty,”
Antiwar.com, November 1, 2010,
https://original.antiwar.com/bondgraham/2010/10/31/new-start-arms-
affirmation-treaty.

[18] Shannon Bugos, “New START at a Glance,” Arms Control

Association, https://armscontrol.org/factsheets/NewSTART.

[19] Shannon Bugos, “Russia Suspends New START,” Arms Control

Association, March 2023, https://armscontrol.org/act/2023-03/news/russia-
suspends-new-start.

[20] Staff, “Obama tells Russia’s Medvedev more flexibility after election,”
Reuters, March 26, 2012, https://reuters.com/article/us-nuclear-summit-
obama-medvedev-idUSBRE82P0JI20120326.

[21] Ryan Browne, “US launches long-awaited European missile defense

shield,” CNN, May 12, 2016,
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/05/11/politics/nato-missile-defense-romania-
poland/index.html.

[22] Petar Komnenic, “Russia’s Deripaska sues Montenegro for lost

aluminium investment,” Reuters, December 7, 2016,
https://reuters.com/article/markets/commodities/russias-deripaska-sues-
montenegro-for-lost-aluminium-investment-idUSL5N1E2544.

[23] Alan J. Kuperman, “Lessons from Libya: How Not to Intervene,”

International Security, September 2013,
https://ciaotest.cc.columbia.edu/pbei/isp/0029207/f_0029207_23703.pdf.

[24] Alan J. Kuperman, “A Model Humanitarian Intervention? Reassessing

NATO’s Libya Campaign,” International Security, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Summer
2013), 105–36; Alan J. Kuperman, “America’s Little-Known Mission to
Support Al Qaeda’s Role in Libya,” The National Interest, August 13, 2019,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-little-known-mission-support-
al-qaedas-role-libya-73271.

[25] Annie Machon, Spies, Lies and Whistleblowers: MI5, MI6 and the
Shayler Affair (Leicestershire: Book Guild Ltd., 2005); Mark
Hollingsworth, “Secrets, lies and David Shayler,” Guardian, March 17,
2000, https://theguardian.com/comment/story/0,,181807,00.html.

[26] Scott Neuman, “US Ambassador To Libya, Three Other Americans

Killed In Benghazi Attack,” NPR News, September 12, 2012,
https://npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/09/12/160992840/u-s-
ambassador-to-libya-three-other-americans-killed-in-benghazi-attack.

[27] Horton, Enough Already, 155–73.

[28] Keith Gessen, “How Russia Went from Ally to Adversary,” The New
Yorker, June 12, 2023, https://newyorker.com/magazine/2023/06/19/how-
the-west-lost-the-peace-philipp-ther-book-review.

[29] David Sanger and Judith Miller, “Libya to Give Up Arms Programs,
Bush Announces,” New York Times, December 20, 2003,
https://nytimes.com/2003/12/20/world/libya-to-give-up-arms-programs-
bush-announces.html; Christopher Dickey, “How Gaddafi Friended Bush,
Blair, and Berlusconi,” Newsweek, March 6, 2011,
https://newsweek.com/how-gaddafi-friended-bush-blair-and-berlusconi-
66117.

[30] Gates, 530.

[31] Ewen MacAskill, “Robert Gates announces plan to step down as US

defence secretary next year,” Guardian, August 16, 2010,
https://theguardian.com/world/2010/aug/16/robert-gates-announces-
retirement-plan.

[32] David Jackson and Ken Dilanian, “Obama Scraps Bush Missile
Defense Plan,” USA Today, September 17, 2009,
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/obama-scraps-bush-missile-defense-
plan/story?id=8602322; Julian Barnes and Megan K. Stack, “Russia’s Putin
praises Obama’s missile defense decision,” Los Angeles Times, September
19, 2009, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-sep-19-fg-missile-
defense19-story.html.

[33] Glenn Kessler, “The GOP claim that Obama scrapped a missile defense
system as ‘a gift’ to Putin,” Washington Post, March 28, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/03/28/the-gop-
claim-that-obama-scrapped-a-missile-defense-system-as-a-gift-to-putin.

[34] Robert Gates, “A Better Missile Defense for a Safer Europe,” New
York Times, September 19, 2009,
https://nytimes.com/2009/09/20/opinion/20gates.html.

[35] Gates, Duty, 402.

[36] Darryl Cooper, “Thoughts on Ukraine,” Martyr Made, March 17,

2022, https://martyrmade.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-ukraine-remastered.
(Yes, the author is aware that the Party held a big Two Minutes Hate against
Cooper in September 2024, but it was based on misrepresentations of what
he said and baseless assumptions about what he must have really meant:
Darryl Cooper, “The True History of the Jonestown Cult, WWII, and How
Winston Churchill Ruined Europe,” The Tucker Carlson Show, September
2, 2024, https://tuckercarlson.com/tucker-show-darryl-cooper; Brian Stelter,
“White House condemns Tucker Carlson’s ‘Nazi propaganda’ interview as
‘disgusting and sadistic insult,’” CNN, September 5, 2024,
https://cnn.com/2024/09/05/media/white-house-condemns-tucker-carlson-
nazi-propaganda-interview/index.html; Darryl Cooper, “My response to the
mob,” Martyr Made, September 6, 2024,
https://subscribe.martyrmade.com/p/my-response-to-the-mob; Darryl
Cooper, “To the Perplexed,” Martyr Made, September 7, 2024,
https://subscribe.martyrmade.com/p/to-the-perplexed-waudio; Darryl
Cooper, “Fear and Loathing in the New Jerusalem, Part One,” Martyr
Made, March 19, 2015, https://martyrmade.com/podcast-parts/1-fear-and-
loathing-in-the-new-jerusalem; Interview with author, Darryl Cooper, Scott
Horton Show radio archive, September 12, 2024,
https://scotthorton.org/interviews/9-12-24-darryl-cooper-on-wwii-the-
holocaust-and-winston-churchill).
[37] Burns, 284–85.

[38] Elizabeth Alexander, “Building on the ‘Reset’ – The Vice President’s

Visit to Moscow,” Obama White House Archives, March 10, 2011,
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2011/03/10/building-reset-vice-
president-s-visit-moscow; Steve Gutterman, “Biden meets Putin, opposition
leaders in Moscow,” Reuters, March 10, 2011,
https://reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7293LQ.

[39] Nikolaus von Twickel, “Biden ‘Opposes’ 3rd Putin Term,” Moscow
Times, March 10, 2011, https://themoscowtimes.com/2011/03/10/biden-
opposes-3rd-putin-term-a5538.

[40] Michael R. Gordon, et al., “Vladimir Putin’s 20-Year March to War in

Ukraine – and How the West Mishandled It,” Wall Street Journal, April 1,
2022, https://wsj.com/articles/vladimir-putins-20-year-march-to-war-in-
ukraineand-how-the-west-mishandled-it-11648826461; Alan Cullison,
“Putin Blames US for Protests Under Fire, Premier Takes Jab at Clinton in
Sharp Escalation in Rhetoric, Gets Tougher on Opposition,” Wall Street
Journal, December 9, 2011,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702035013045770860811210835
76.

[41] Michael Schwirtz and David M. Herszenhorn, “Voters Watch Polls in

Russia, and Fraud Is What They See,” New York Times, December 5, 2011,
http://nytimes.com/2011/12/06/world/europe/russian-parliamentary-
elections-criticized-by-west.html.
[42] Julia Ioffe, “Snow Revolution,” The New Yorker, December 10, 2011,
https://newyorker.com/news/news-desk/snow-revolution.

[43] Tweet by Then-CIA Director John O. Brennan, October 9, 2020,

https://x.com/JohnBrennan/status/1314587438568833025; Royce
Kurmelovs and Katya Kazbek, “Who is Alexei Navalny? Behind the Myth
of the West’s Favorite Russian Opposition Figure,” Grayzone, January 28,
2021, https://thegrayzone.com/2021/01/28/alexei-navalny-myth-wests-
russian-opposition-figure.

[44] Ellen Barry and Michael Schwirtz, “Vast Rally in Moscow Is a

Challenge to Putin’s Power,” New York Times, December 24, 2011,
https://nytimes.com/2011/12/25/world/europe/tens-of-thousands-of-
protesters-gather-in-moscow-russia.html.

[45] Steve Gutterman and Gleb Bryanski, “Putin says US stoked Russian
protests,” Reuters, December 8, 2011,
https://web.archive.org/web/20180202010819/https://reuters.com/article/us-
russia/putin-says-u-s-stoked-russian-protests-idUSTRE7B610S20111208;
David M. Herszenhorn and Ellen Barry, “Putin Contends Clinton Incited
Unrest Over Vote,” New York Times, December 8, 2011,
https://nytimes.com/2011/12/09/world/europe/putin-accuses-clinton-of-
instigating-russian-protests.html.

[46] “The Central Election Commission recognized as invalid 90 percent of

complaints about the Duma elections,” Lenta.ru, February 4, 2012,
https://lenta.ru/news/2012/02/04/ninety.
[47] Andrew Kramer and David M. Herszenhorn, “Boosted by Putin,
Russia’s Middle Class Turns on Him,” New York Times, December 11,
2011, https://nytimes.com/2011/12/12/world/europe/huge-moscow-rally-
suggests-a-shift-in-public-mood.html.

[48] Will Englund, “Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny has strong showing in
Moscow mayoral race, despite loss,” Washington Post, September 9, 2013,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/kremlin-critic-alexei-navalny-has-strong-
showing-in-moscow-mayoral-race-despite-loss/2013/09/09/dc9504e4-1924-
11e3-a628-7e6dde8f889d_story.html.

[49] Michael Schwirtz, “Russian Liberals Growing Uneasy With

Alliances,” New York Times, January 28, 2012,
https://nytimes.com/2012/01/29/world/europe/russian-liberals-weigh-
alliance-with-nationalists.html.

[50] Ellen Barry and Michael Schwirtz, “After Election, Putin Faces
Challenges to Legitimacy,” New York Times, March 5, 2012,
http://nytimes.com/2012/03/06/world/europe/observers-detail-flaws-in-
russian-election.html.

[51] Susan Cornwell, “US pro-democracy groups pulling out of Russia,”

Reuters, December 14, 2012, https://reuters.com/article/russia-usa-
democracy/u-s-pro-democracy-groups-pulling-out-of-russia-
idUSL1E8NE7FF20121214.
[52] Grant F. Smith, Big Israel: How Israel’s Lobby Moves America
(Washington: Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, 2016); Ben
Freeman, “Foreign Funding of Think Tanks in America,” Center for
International Policy, January 2020,
https://static.wixstatic.com/ugd/3ba8a1_4f06e99f35d4485b801f8dbfe33b6a
3f.pdf.

[53] Kathy Lally, “McFaul leaves Moscow and two dramatic years in
relations between US and Russia,” Washington Post, February 26, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/europe/mcfaul-leaves-moscow-and-two-
dramatic-years-in-relations-between-us-and-russia/2014/02/26/bb360742-
9ef5-11e3-9ba6-800d1192d08b_story.html.

[54] Burns, 287.

[55] Olzhas Auyezov, “Ukraine-Russia gas deal: Tymoshenko’s biggest

bet,” Reuters, October 11, 2011, https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-
tymoshenko-gas-idUSTRE79A4AV20111011.

[56] Tom Parfitt, “‘I want to work a miracle,’” Guardian, February 6, 2006,
https://theguardian.com/world/2006/feb/02/ukraine.tomparfitt.

[57] Myroslava Gongadze, “Zbigniew Brzezinski on the US-Russia-

Ukraine Triangle,” Voice of America Ukrainian Service, October 12, 2009,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MBxH3sfpmEA.

[58] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “NATO and World Security,” New York Times,
August 19, 2009, https://nytimes.com/2009/08/20/opinion/20iht-
edbrzezinski.html.

[59] Staff, “Biden: US supports Ukraine’s NATO bid,” AP, July 21, 2009,
https://nbcnews.com/id/wbna32026748.

[60] Jeffrey Mankoff, “Ukraine’s Orange Revolution Referendum,” Council

on Foreign Relations, January 19, 2010, https://cfr.org/expert-
brief/ukraines-orange-revolution-referendum.

[61] Staff, “Ukraine drops NATO membership aim,” Reuters, May 27,
2010, https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-nato/ukraine-drops-nato-
membership-aim-idUSTRE64Q3S620100527.

[62] David Stern, “Ukraine’s parliament votes to abandon Nato ambitions,”

BBC, June 3, 2010, https://bbc.com/news/10229626.

[63] John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,”
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-
crisis-west-s-fault.

[64] John E. Herbst, “Ukraine on the Road to NATO: A Status Report,” US

State Department, February 15, 2006,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/06KIEV604_a.html.

[65] Charap and Colton, 84.

[66] Staff, “Moscow buys sea power with Ukraine gas deal,” London Times,
April 22, 2010, https://thetimes.co.uk/article/moscow-buys-sea-power-with-
ukraine-gas-deal-nnsp9rpxh7d; Staff, “Kremlin fills the void left by an
indifferent America and inept EU,” London Times, April 28, 2010,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/kremlin-fills-the-void-left-by-an-indifferent-
america-and-inept-eu-8nls7w3qbqw.

[67] Kit Klarenberg, “Hostile takeover: NATO’s annexation of

Montenegro,” Grayzone, November 22, 2023,
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/11/22/hostile-natos-annexation-montenegro.

[68] Jim Dobson, “Porto Montenegro Is Becoming The Ultimate

Superyacht Sanctuary Along The Adriatic Coast,” Forbes, July 22, 2018,
https://forbes.com/sites/jimdobson/2018/07/22/porto-montenegro-is-
becoming-the-ultimate-superyacht-sanctuary-along-the-adriatic-coast.

[69] Dušica Tomović, “Montenegro PM Accuses Opposition Over ‘Plot to

Kill Him,’” Balkan Insight, November 10, 2016,
https://balkaninsight.com/2016/11/10/djukanovic-accuses-pro-russian-
opposition-over-plot-to-kill-him-11-10-2016.

[70] Andrew Higgins, “Finger Pointed at Russians in Alleged Coup Plot in

Montenegro,” New York Times, November 26, 2016,
https://nytimes.com/2016/11/26/world/europe/finger-pointed-at-russians-in-
alleged-coup-plot-in-montenegro.html.

[71] Ben Farmer, “Russia plotted to overthrow Montenegro’s government

by assassinating Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic last year, according to
senior Whitehall sources,” Telegraph, February 19, 2017,
http://telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/18/russias-deadly-plot-overthrow-
montenegros-government-assassinating.

[72] Ben Farmer, “Reconstruction: The full incredible story behind Russia’s
deadly plot to stop Montenegro embracing the West,” Telegraph, February
18, 2017, http://telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/18/reconstruction-full-
incredible-story-behind-russias-deadly-plot.

[73] Cynthia Kroet, “Prosecutor: Russia behind attempted Montenegro

coup,” Politico Europe, February 20, 2017,
https://politico.eu/article/prosecutor-russia-behind-attempted-montenegro-
coup.

[74] Nebojša Redžić, “Prosecutor Katnić claims that he did not accuse
Serbia and Russia,” Voice of America, November 17, 2017,
https://glasamerike.net/a/tuzilac-katnic-tvrdi-da-nije-optuzivao-srbiju-i-
rusiju/4120399.html.

[75] Dušica Tomović, “Two eyes in the head,” Vreme, October 26, 2016,
https://vreme.com/vreme/dva-oka-u-glavi.

[76] Staff, “I signed a false statement, otherwise I’d be killed,” CDM, July
4, 2017, https://cdm.me/english/signed-false-statement-otherwise-id-killed.

[77] Eli Lake, “Montenegro Takes On Russia, America and a Former CIA
Officer,” Bloomberg News, August 14, 2018,
https://bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-08-14/montenegro-takes-on-
russia-america-and-a-former-cia-officer.
[78] Samir Kajosevic, “Montenegro Extradites ‘Coup Plot’ Witness
Sindjelic to Croatia,” Balkan Insight, October 30, 2019,
https://balkaninsight.com/2019/10/30/montenegro-extradites-coup-plot-
witness-sindjelic-to-croatia.

[79] “President Milo Djukanovic,” Organized Crime and Corruption

Reporting Project, December 31, 2015,
https://occrp.org/personoftheyear/2015.

[80] Leo Sisti, “The Montenegro connection,” The Center for Public
Integrity, June 2, 2009, https://publicintegrity.org/health/the-montenegro-
connection.

[81] Kit Klarenberg, “Hostile takeover: NATO’s annexation of

Montenegro,” Grayzone, November 22, 2023,
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/11/22/hostile-natos-annexation-montenegro.

[82] Staff, “Two Russian Agents Sentenced for Montenegrin Coup Plot,”
Voice of America, May 9, 2019, https://voanews.com/a/russians-others-
sentenced-in-2016-montenegro-failed-coup/4910829.html.

[83] Staff, “Montenegro overturns coup verdict for 2 Russians, 11 others,”

AP, February 5, 2021, https://apnews.com/general-news-
99f6088f797f46fefac4866931083d5f.

[84] Senator John McCain, “Russia threat is dead serious. Montenegro coup
and murder plot proves it,” USA Today, June 29, 2017,
https://usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/06/29/russian-hacks-john-mccain-
column/436354001.

[85] Gordon N. Bardos, “Montenegro and NATO’s Faustian Bargain,” The

Nation, August 10, 2018, https://thenation.com/article/archive/montenegro-
natos-faustian-bargain.

[86] Richard Hanania, “Russia as the ‘Great Satan’ in the Liberal

Imagination,” Richard Hanania’s Newsletter, January 26, 2022,
https://richardhanania.com/p/russia-as-the-great-satan-in-the.

[87] Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans’ Favorable Rating of Russia Sinks to

New Low of 9%,” Gallup, March 13, 2023,
https://news.gallup.com/poll/471872/americans-favorable-rating-russia-
sinks-new-low.aspx; Richard Wike, et al., “Views of Russia and Putin,”
Pew Research Center, May 8, 2024,
https://pewresearch.org/global/2024/05/08/views-of-russia-and-putin.

[88] Madison Park, “Russia’s lower house approves bill to ban US

adoption,” CNN, December 27, 2012,
https://cnn.com/2012/12/21/world/europe/russia-us-adoption-
ban/index.html.

[89] Benjamin Bidder, “The Case of Sergei Magnitsky,” Der Spiegel,

November 26, 2019, https://spiegel.de/international/world/the-case-of-
sergei-magnitsky-anti-corruption-champion-or-corrupt-anti-hero-a-
1297796.html.
[90] Interview with author, Kenneth Rapoza, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, March 31, 2016, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/33116-kenneth-
rapoza.

[91] Susan B. Glasser, “Investors Rally Around Putin, Discounting Alarm

of Critics,” Washington Post, February 26, 2004,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/02/26/investors-rally-
around-putin-discounting-alarm-of-critics/707267c4-7a0e-4599-a9fc-
0cecea328c62.

[92] Jay Nordlinger, “A Family in History,” National Review, January 22,

2018, https://nationalreview.com/2018/01/family-history-strange-odyssey-
browders.

[93] Clifford J. Levy, “Expelled by Kremlin, an investor fights back,” New

York Times, July 23, 2008, https://nytimes.com/2008/07/23/news/23iht-
23kremlin.14734905.html.

[94] See Chapter Two.

[95] Clifford J. Levy, “Expelled by Kremlin, an investor fights back,” New

York Times, July 23, 2008, https://nytimes.com/2008/07/23/news/23iht-
23kremlin.14734905.html.

[96] Clifford J. Levy, “Expelled by Kremlin, an investor fights back,” New

York Times, July 23, 2008, https://nytimes.com/2008/07/23/news/23iht-
23kremlin.14734905.html.
[97] Robert Parry, “A Blacklisted Film and the New Cold War,” Consortium
News, August 2, 2017, https://consortiumnews.com/2017/08/02/a-
blacklisted-film-and-the-new-cold-war.

[98] “Oversight of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and Attempts to

Influence US Elections: Lessons Learned from Current and Prior
Administrations (Day 2),” US Senate Judiciary Committee, July 27, 2017,
https://judiciary.senate.gov/meetings/oversight-of-the-foreign-agents-
registration-act-and-attempts-to-influence-us-elections-lessons-learned-
from-current-and-prior-administrations-day-2.

[99] Benjamin Bidder, “The Case of Sergei Magnitsky,” Der Spiegel,

November 26, 2019, https://spiegel.de/international/world/the-case-of-
sergei-magnitsky-anti-corruption-champion-or-corrupt-anti-hero-a-
1297796.html.

[100] “Magnitsky and Others vs. Russia,” European Court of Human

Rights, August 27, 2019, https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=001-195527.

[101] Benjamin Bidder, “The Case of Sergei Magnitsky,” Der Spiegel,

November 26, 2019, https://spiegel.de/international/world/the-case-of-
sergei-magnitsky-anti-corruption-champion-or-corrupt-anti-hero-a-
1297796.html; “Record of Evidence,” Interrogation of Sergey Magnitsky,
October 18, 2006, June 5, 2008, October 7, 2008,
https://100r.org/media/2017/10/Magnitsky-Testimonies-Oct-2006-June-
2008-Oct-2008.pdf.
[102] Editors, “Why Der Spiegel Stands Behind Its Magnitsky Reporting,”
Der Spiegel, December 12, 2019,
https://spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-responds-to-browder-
criticisms-of-magnitsky-story-a-1301716.html.

[103] Jason Bush, “Hijacking the Hermitage Fund,” Bloomberg News,

April 4, 2008, https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2008-04-04/hijacking-
the-hermitage-fundbusinessweek-business-news-stock-market-and-
financial-advice.

[104] Neil Buckley and Catherine Belton, “Hermitage in Russian fraud

claim,” Financial Times, April 3, 2008, https://ft.com/content/da0bbffe-
01b7-11dd-a323-000077b07658.

[105] Guy Chazan, “Hermitage Capital Management Runs Into Trouble in

Russia,” Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2008,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB120725601229787559.

[106] Clifford J. Levy, “An Investment Gets Trapped in Kremlin’s Vise,”

New York Times, July 24, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/07/24/world/europe/24kremlin.html.

[107] Editors, “Why Der Spiegel Stands Behind Its Magnitsky Reporting,”
Der Spiegel, December 12, 2019,
https://spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-responds-to-browder-
criticisms-of-magnitsky-story-a-1301716.html.
[108] Bill Browder, Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and
One Man’s Fight for Justice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2015), 233.

[109] Benjamin Bidder, “The Case of Sergei Magnitsky,” Der Spiegel,

November 26, 2019, https://spiegel.de/international/world/the-case-of-
sergei-magnitsky-anti-corruption-champion-or-corrupt-anti-hero-a-
1297796.html.

[110] Editors, “Why Der Spiegel Stands Behind Its Magnitsky Reporting,”
Der Spiegel, December 12, 2019,
https://spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-responds-to-browder-
criticisms-of-magnitsky-story-a-1301716.html.

[111] Lucy Komisar, “The Man Behind the Magnitsky Act,” 100 Reporters,
October 20, 2017, https://100r.org/2017/10/magnitsky.

[112] Alissa de Carbonnel, “Russian lawyer likely beaten to death: Kremlin

council,” Reuters, July 6, 2011, https://reuters.com/article/us-russia-lawyer-
death/russian-lawyer-likely-beaten-to-death-kremlin-council-
idUSTRE76521120110706.

[113] Benjamin Bidder, “The Case of Sergei Magnitsky,” Der Spiegel,

November 26, 2019, https://spiegel.de/international/world/the-case-of-
sergei-magnitsky-anti-corruption-champion-or-corrupt-anti-hero-a-
1297796.html.

[114] Robert C. Bux M.D., “Re: Forensic Review of Sergei Magnitsky

documents submitted by Hermitage Fund,” June 28, 2011,
https://s3.amazonaws.com/PHR_Reports/magnitsky-report-july2011.pdf.

[115] Benjamin Bidder, “The Case of Sergei Magnitsky,” Der Spiegel,

November 26, 2019, https://spiegel.de/international/world/the-case-of-
sergei-magnitsky-anti-corruption-champion-or-corrupt-anti-hero-a-
1297796.html.

[116] Nataliya Vasilyeva, “Official acquitted in Russian jail death case,” AP,
December 28, 2012, https://sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-official-
acquitted-in-russian-jail-death-case-2012dec28-story.html.

[117] Samuel Rubenfeld, “Browder Escapes Subpoena Attempt After ‘Daily

Show,’” Wall Street Journal, February 11, 2015,
https://wsj.com/articles/BL-252B-6212; Press Release, “William Browder
Ordered to Give Testimony Regarding Claims Made About Prevezon
Holdings Ltd,” Newswire, March 12, 2015,
https://newswire.com/news/william-browder-ordered-to-give-testimony-
regarding-claims-made.

[118] “Prevezon Holdings Ltd Settlement Stipulation,” US Department of

Justice, May 12, 2017, https://justice.gov/usao-sdny/press-
release/file/966166/dl.

[119] See Chapter Five.

[120] Robert Parry, “Guardians of the Magnitsky Myth,” Consortium News,

October 28, 2017, https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/28/guardians-of-
the-magnitsky-myth.
[121] Andrei Nekrasov, The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes, 2016,
https://archive.org/details/magnitsky-act-movie.

[122] See Chapter Three.

[123] Andrei Nekrasov, The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes, 2016,
https://archive.org/details/magnitsky-act-movie.

[124] Rosie Gray, “Bill Browder’s Testimony to the Senate Judiciary

Committee,” The Atlantic, July 25, 2017,
https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/bill-browders-testimony-to-
the-senate-judiciary-committee/534864.

[125] Henry Johnson, “Millionaire Tries to Stop Documentary Claiming to

Tell the True Story of Russia’s Missing $230 Million,” Foreign Policy, June
10, 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/10/millionaire-tries-to-shut-
down-screening-of-documentary-claiming-to-tell-the-true-story-of-russias-
missing-230-million-putin-sergei-magnitsky-bill-browder.

[126] Robert Parry, “A Blacklisted Film and the New Cold War,”
Consortium News, August 2, 2017,
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/08/02/a-blacklisted-film-and-the-new-
cold-war.

[127] Andrei Nekrasov, The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes, 2016,
https://archive.org/details/magnitsky-act-movie; Lucy Komisar, “Browder
commits identity theft! His ‘victim of police violence in Moscow 2007’ is a
1961 US Freedom Rider!” The Komisar Scoop, April 16, 2018,
https://thekomisarscoop.com/2018/04/browder-commits-identity-theft-his-
victim-of-police-violence-in-moscow-2007-is-a-1961-us-freedom-rider-2.

[128] Robert Parry, “A Blacklisted Film and the New Cold War,”
Consortium News, August 2, 2017,
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/08/02/a-blacklisted-film-and-the-new-
cold-war.

[129] Benjamin Bidder, “The Case of Sergei Magnitsky,” Der Spiegel,

November 26, 2019, https://spiegel.de/international/world/the-case-of-
sergei-magnitsky-anti-corruption-champion-or-corrupt-anti-hero-a-
1297796.html; “Karpov vs. Browder,” The High Court of Justice,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160823180734/https://bailii.org/ew/cases/E
WHC/QB/2013/3071.html.

[130] Editors, “Why Der Spiegel Stands Behind Its Magnitsky Reporting,”
Der Spiegel, December 12, 2019,
https://spiegel.de/international/world/spiegel-responds-to-browder-
criticisms-of-magnitsky-story-a-1301716.html.

[131] Benjamin Bidder, “The Case of Sergei Magnitsky,” Der Spiegel,

November 26, 2019, https://spiegel.de/international/world/the-case-of-
sergei-magnitsky-anti-corruption-champion-or-corrupt-anti-hero-a-
1297796.html.

[132] “Russell Tice, National Security Whistleblower,” National

Whistleblower Center, April 7, 2018,
https://whistleblowers.org/whistleblowers/russell-tice.

[133] Edward Loomis, NSA’s Transformation: An Executive Branch Black

Eye (Edward Loomis, 2014).

[134] “J. Kirk Wiebe Interview,” PBS Frontline, May 10, 2008,
https://ket.org/program/frontline/the-frontline-interview-j-kirk-wiebe.

[135] “Thomas Drake Biography,” Americans Who Tell the Truth,

https://americanswhotellthetruth.org/portraits/thomas-drake.

[136] James Bamford, “NSA Chief Denies Domestic Spying But

Whistleblowers Say Otherwise,” Wired, March 21, 2012,
https://wired.com/2012/03/nsa-whistleblower; Staff, “NSA Whistleblower
Explains How the US Government Is Spying on Every Single Electronic
Communication You Have,” ACLU, August 23, 2012,
https://aclu.org/news/national-security/video-nsa-whistleblower-explains-
how-us-government.

[137] James Bamford, The Puzzle Palace: Inside the National Security
Agency, America’s Most Secret Intelligence Organization (New York:
Penguin, 1983); James Bamford, Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-
Secret National Security Agency (New York: Anchor Books, 2002); James
Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the
Eavesdropping on America (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

[138] Glenn Greenwald, “NSA collecting phone records of millions of

Verizon customers daily,” Guardian, June 6, 2013,
https://theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-
court-order; Barton Gellman and Ashkan Soltani, “NSA infiltrates links to
Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide, Snowden documents say,”
Washington Post, October 30, 2013,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-infiltrates-links-to-
yahoo-google-data-centers-worldwide-snowden-documents-
say/2013/10/30/e51d661e-4166-11e3-8b74-d89d714ca4dd_story.html.

[139] Ewen MacAskill, et al., “The National Security Agency: surveillance

giant with eyes on America,” Guardian, June 7, 2013,
https://theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/national-security-agency-
surveillance.

[140] Glenn Greenwald, et al., “NSA shares raw intelligence including

Americans’ data with Israel,” Guardian, September 11, 2013,
https://theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/11/nsa-americans-personal-data-
israel-documents.

[141] “The Snowden Archive – Timeline of Revelations (2013–2018),”

Github.com, August 2024, https://github.com/iamcryptoki/snowden-
archive; “NSA Primary Sources,” Electronic Frontier Foundation,
https://eff.org/nsa-spying/nsadocs.

[142] The same guy who helped to plan the “Operation Storm” atrocity in
Croatia in 1995. See Chapter Two. Previously, as head of the National
Imagery and Mapping Agency, Clapper had also famously lied that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction (Mark Hosenball, “Will Clapper Nomination
Reopen the Saddam WMD Controversy?” Newsweek, June 6, 2010,
https://newsweek.com/will-clapper-nomination-reopen-saddam-wmd-
controversy-217378; “Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the
United States Regarding Weapons on Mass Destruction,” White House,
March 31, 2005, https://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/wmd/text/report.html) telling CNN, “I think we do
a very good job of satisfying all of our masters.” (David Ensor, “Secretive
map agency opens its doors,” CNN, December 13, 2002,
https://edition.cnn.com/2002/US/12/09/map.makers.) He also lied that those
weapons had been moved to Syria right before the invasion. (Douglas Jehl,
“Iraqis Removed Arms Material, US Aide Says,” New York Times, October
29, 2003, https://nytimes.com/2003/10/29/world/the-struggle-for-iraq-
weapons-search-iraqis-removed-arms-material-us-aide-says.html).

[143] Steven Nelson, “Lock Him Up? Lawmakers Renew Calls for James
Clapper Perjury Charges,” US News and World Report, November 17,
2016, https://usnews.com/news/articles/2016-11-17/lawmakers-resume-
calls-for-james-clapper-perjury-charges.

[144] Edward Jay Epstein, “Was Snowden’s Heist a Foreign Espionage

Operation?” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2014,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023048313045795424023906539
32.

[145] Matthew Lee, “NSA leaker Snowden’s passport revoked,” AP, June
23, 2013, https://apnews.com/general-news-
587786e6e63b4dc2b70c471606d7f584; Edward Snowden, Permanent
Record (New York: Metropolitan, 2019), 307–10.

[146] Interview with author, Glenn Greenwald, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, January 18, 2024, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/1-18-24-glenn-
greenwald-on-the-legacy-of-the-edward-snowden-leaks.

[147] Burns, 288.

[148] Mike Murphy, “This is what Edward Snowden says it will take for
him to return to the US,” MarketWatch, September 16, 2019,
https://marketwatch.com/story/this-is-what-edward-snowden-says-it-will-
take-for-him-to-return-to-the-us-2019-09-16.

[149] Kevin Gosztola, “Proposed Reform to US Espionage Act Would

Create Public Interest Defense,” Consortium News, October 12, 2020,
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/10/12/proposed-reform-to-us-espionage-
act-would-create-public-interest-defense.

[150] Snowden, 6–8, 135, 228–53, 325–33.

[151] Tweet by Edward Snowden, June 25, 2016,

https://x.com/Snowden/status/746671700247457792.

[152] Tweet by Michael McFaul, July 9, 2016,

https://x.com/mcfaul/status/751752731769999360.

[153] George Friedman, “Syria, America and Putin’s Bluff,” Stratfor,

September 10, 2013, https://worldview.stratfor.com/article/syria-america-
and-putins-bluff.

[154] Deborah Kotz, “Injury toll from Marathon bombs reduced to 264,”
Boston Globe, April 24, 2013, https://bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/health-
wellness/2013/04/23/number-injured-marathon-bombing-revised-
downward/NRpaz5mmvGquP7KMA6XsIK/story.html.

[155] Chelsea J. Carter and Greg Botelho, “‘Captured!’ Boston police

announce Marathon bombing suspect in custody,” CNN, April 19, 2013,
https://cnn.com/2013/04/19/us/boston-area-violence/index.html.

[156] John Miller, “Police believe Tsarnaev brothers killed officer for his
gun,” CBS News, April 23, 2013, https://cbsnews.com/news/police-believe-
tsarnaev-brothers-killed-officer-for-his-gun.

[157] Lt. Col. Eric A. Beene, et al., “US, Russia and the Global War on
Terror: ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ Into Battle?” Air University, March 2005,
https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA477122.pdf.

[158] Haroon Siddique, “Boston bombing suspect was put on terrorist

database 18 months ago,” Guardian, April 25, 2013,
https://theguardian.com/world/2013/apr/25/boston-bombing-suspect-
terrorist-database.

[159] “Unclassified Summary of Information Handling and Sharing Prior to

the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon Bombings,” combined Inspectors
General report, April 10, 2014,
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2014/s1404.pdf.
[160] Tom Winter, “Russia Warned US About Tsarnaev, But Spelling Issue
Let Him Escape,” NBC News, March 25, 2014,
https://nbcnews.com/storyline/boston-bombing-anniversary/russia-warned-
u-s-about-tsarnaev-spelling-issue-let-him-n60836.

[161] Eric Schmitt, et al., “Bombing Inquiry Turns to Motive and Russian
Trip,” New York Times, April 20, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/04/21/us/boston-marathon-bombings.html.

[162] “Unclassified Summary of Information Handling and Sharing Prior to

the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon Bombings,” combined Inspectors
General report, April 10, 2014,
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2014/s1404.pdf.

[163] “Unclassified Summary of Information Handling and Sharing Prior to

the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon Bombings,” combined Inspectors
General report, April 10, 2014,
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2014/s1404.pdf.

[164] Greg Miller, “CIA pushed to add Boston bomber to terror watch list,”
Washington Post, April 24, 2013,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-pushed-to-add-
boston-bomber-to-terror-watch-list/2013/04/24/cf02b43c-ad10-11e2-a8b9-
2a63d75b5459_story.html.

[165] Eric Schmitt, et al., “Bombing Inquiry Turns to Motive and Russian
Trip,” New York Times, April 20, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/04/21/us/boston-marathon-bombings.html.

[166] Tom Winter, “Russia Warned US About Tsarnaev, But Spelling Issue
Let Him Escape,” NBC News, March 25, 2014,
https://nbcnews.com/storyline/boston-bombing-anniversary/russia-warned-
u-s-about-tsarnaev-spelling-issue-let-him-n60836.

[167] “Unclassified Summary of Information Handling and Sharing Prior to

the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon Bombings,” combined Inspectors
General report, April 10, 2014,
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2014/s1404.pdf.

[168] “User Clip: Secretary Napolitano On Tsarnaev System Ping,” C-

SPAN, April 23, 2013, https://c-span.org/video/?c4672514/user-clip-
secretary-napolitano-tsarnaev-system-ping.

[169] “Unclassified Summary of Information Handling and Sharing Prior to

the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon Bombings,” combined Inspectors
General report, April 10, 2014,
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2014/s1404.pdf.

[170] Josh Gerstein, “FBI’s Mueller concedes slip-up on alleged Boston

bomber’s travel,” Politico, May 16, 2013, https://politico.com/blogs/under-
the-radar/2013/05/fbis-mueller-concedes-slip-up-on-alleged-boston-
bombers-travel-164151.

[171] Staff, “Congressional Report Confirms Boston Bomber Name

Misspelled in Security Database,” ABC News, March 26, 2014,
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/congressional-report-confirms-boston-
bomber-misspelled-security-database/story?id=23068330.

[172] Alan Cullison, “Dagestan Islamists Were Uneasy About Boston

Bombing Suspect,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2013,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873240597045784731608661088
32.

[173] Jamie Bologna, “Unanswered Questions About Tamerlan Tsarnaev,”

WBUR Radio Boston, June 15, 2017,
https://wbur.org/radioboston/2017/06/15/tsarnaev-mcphee-fbi.

[174] “Unclassified Summary of Information Handling and Sharing Prior to

the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon Bombings,” combined Inspectors
General report, April 10, 2014,
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2014/s1404.pdf.

[175] Scott Shane and Michael S. Schmidt, “FBI Did Not Tell Police in
Boston of Russian Tip,” New York Times, May 9, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/05/10/us/boston-police-werent-told-fbi-got-
warning-on-tsarnaev.html.

[176] “Unclassified Summary of Information Handling and Sharing Prior to

the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon Bombings,” combined Inspectors
General report, April 10, 2014,
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2014/s1404.pdf.
[177] Michael Cooper, et al., “Boston Suspects Are Seen as Self-Taught and
Fueled by Web,” New York Times, April 23, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/04/24/us/boston-marathon-bombing-
developments.html; Scott Wilson, et al., “Boston bombing suspect cites US
wars as motivation, officials say,” Washington Post, April 23, 2013,
https://washingtonpost.com/national/boston-bombing-suspect-cites-us-
wars-as-motivation-officials-say/2013/04/23/324b9cea-ac29-11e2-b6fd-
ba6f5f26d70e_story.html.

[178] Scott Shane and David M. Herszenhorn, “Agents Pore Over Suspect’s
Trip to Russia,” New York Times, April 28, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/04/29/us/tamerlan-tsarnaevs-contacts-on-russian-
trip-draw-scrutiny.html.

[179] Kirit Radia, “Lawmakers Traveling to Russia to Investigate Boston

Bombing,” ABC News, May 21, 2013,
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/05/lawmakers-traveling-to-
russia-to-investigate-boston-bombing; John Zaremba and Matt Stout,
“Jihadi told Russians about Tamerlan,” Boston Herald, May 4, 2013
(updated November 17, 2018), https://bostonherald.com/2013/05/04/jihadi-
told-russians-about-tamerlan.

[180] Michele McPhee, Mayhem: Unanswered Questions About the

Tsarnaev Brothers, the US Government and the Boston Marathon Bombing
(Lebanon: Steerforth Press, 2020), 122–24.
[181] Staff, “Feds Probe Boston Marathon Bombing Suspect’s Link to
Russian Militants,” ABC News, April 30, 2013,
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/feds-probe-boston-bomb-suspects-link-
russian-militants/story?id=19072494.

[182] Alan Cullison, “Dagestan Islamists Were Uneasy About Boston

Bombing Suspect,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2013,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873240597045784731608661088
32.

[183] Alan Cullison, “Dagestan Islamists Were Uneasy About Boston

Bombing Suspect,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2013,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873240597045784731608661088
32.

[184] Katharine Q. Seelye, “2nd Bombing Suspect Caught After Frenzied

Hunt Paralyzes Boston,” New York Times, April 19, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/boston-marathon-bombings.html.

[185] Michael S. Schmidt and Eric Schmitt, “Russia Didn’t Share All
Details on Boston Bombing Suspect, Report Says,” New York Times, April
9, 2014, https://nytimes.com/2014/04/10/us/russia-failed-to-share-details-
on-boston-marathon-bombing-suspect.html.

[186] Ellen Barry, “Suspect in Boston Bombing Talked Jihad in Russia,”

New York Times, May 9, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/05/10/world/europe/in-russia-marathon-bombing-
suspect-talked-jihad.html.

[187] McPhee, Mayhem, 107–10.

[188] Alan Cullison, “Dagestan Islamists Were Uneasy About Boston

Bombing Suspect,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2013,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB100014241278873240597045784731608661088
32.

[189] Ellen Barry, “Suspect in Boston Bombing Talked Jihad in Russia,”

New York Times, May 9, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/05/10/world/europe/in-russia-marathon-bombing-
suspect-talked-jihad.html.

[190] Staff, “The Road to Boston: Counterterrorism Challenges and

Lessons from the Marathon Bombings,” US House of Representatives
Committee on Homeland Security, March 2014,
https://irp.fas.org/congress/2014_rpt/boston.pdf.

[191] Rachel Paiste, “Tamerlan Tsarnaev Was Approached To Be An

Informant, Defense Says,” WBUR Boston, March 28, 2014,
https://wbur.org/news/2014/03/28/tamerlan-tsarnaev-fbi-informant.

[192] Ian Gallagher and Will Steward, “Was Boston bomber inspired by
Russia’s Bin Laden?” Daily Mail, April 20, 2013,
https://dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2312331/Was-Boston-bomber-inspired-
Doku-Umarov-Mother-claims-FBI-tracked-older-brother-years-told-
Moscow-links-Chechen-terrorists.html.

[193] Peter Weber, “6 gripping new details about the Boston bombing
endgame,” The Week, April 22, 2013,
https://theweek.com/articles/465278/6-gripping-new-details-about-boston-
bombing-endgame.

[194] McPhee, Mayhem, 11–19.

[195] McPhee, Mayhem, 15, 16.

[196] McPhee, Mayhem, 64.

[197] Masha Gessen, The Brothers: The Road to an American Tragedy

(New York: Riverhead Books, 2015), 255.

[198] Staff, “Could the Boston Marathon bombings have been prevented?”
CBS News, April 15, 2014, https://cbsnews.com/news/could-the-boston-
marathon-bombings-have-been-prevented.

[199] McPhee, Mayhem, vii.

[200] Michele McPhee, Maximum Harm: The Tsarnaev Brothers, The FBI,
and the Road to the Marathon Bombing (Lebanon: ForeEdge, 2017), 142,
143.

[201] Jamie Bologna, “Unanswered Questions About Tamerlan Tsarnaev,”

WBUR Radio Boston, June 15, 2017,
https://wbur.org/radioboston/2017/06/15/tsarnaev-mcphee-fbi.

[202] FBI 302, April 23, 2011, https://vault.fbi.gov/tamerlan-tsarnaev.

[203] Michele McPhee, “Tamerlan Tsarnaev: Terrorist. Murderer. Federal

Informant?” Boston Magazine, April 9, 2017,
https://bostonmagazine.com/news/2017/04/09/tamerlan-tsarnaev-fbi-
informant.

[204] “Unclassified Summary of Information Handling and Sharing Prior to

the April 15, 2013, Boston Marathon Bombings,” combined Inspectors
General report, April 10, 2014,
https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2014/s1404.pdf.

[205] Jamie Bologna, “Unanswered Questions About Tamerlan Tsarnaev,”

WBUR Radio Boston, June 15, 2017,
https://wbur.org/radioboston/2017/06/15/tsarnaev-mcphee-fbi.

[206] Jamie Bologna, “Unanswered Questions About Tamerlan Tsarnaev,”

WBUR Radio Boston, June 15, 2017,
https://wbur.org/radioboston/2017/06/15/tsarnaev-mcphee-fbi.

[207] Michael S. Schmidt and Eric Schmitt, “Russia Didn’t Share All
Details on Boston Bombing Suspect, Report Says,” New York Times, April
9, 2014, https://nytimes.com/2014/04/10/us/russia-failed-to-share-details-
on-boston-marathon-bombing-suspect.html.
[208] Michele McPhee, “Tamerlan Tsarnaev: Terrorist. Murderer. Federal
Informant?” Boston Magazine, April 9, 2017,
https://bostonmagazine.com/news/2017/04/09/tamerlan-tsarnaev-fbi-
informant.

[209] McPhee, Maximum Harm, 104–50.

[210] McPhee, Mayhem, 124–25.

[211] Tom Parfitt, “Boston bombs: the Canadian boxer and the terror
recruiter who ‘led Tsarnaev on path to jihad,’” Telegraph, April 28, 2013,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10024185/Boston-
bombs-the-Canadian-boxer-and-the-terror-recruiter-who-led-Tsarnaev-on-
path-to-jihad.html. Graham Fuller—former CIA officer, director of the
National Intelligence Council in the Ronald Reagan years and experienced
Central Asia hand—was tangentially related to the story in that his
daughter, Samantha Fuller, had been married to the Tsarnaevs’ uncle Ruslan
in the 1990s. This was probably just a coincidence. Laura Rozen, “Former
CIA officer: ‘Absurd’ to link uncle of Boston suspects, Agency,” Al-
Monitor, April 27, 2013, http://backchannel.al-
monitor.com/index.php/2013/04/5090/former-cia-officer-absurd-to-link-
uncle-of-boston-suspects-agency-over-daughters-brief-marriage. It was
strange, though, because his specialty had been using Muslims against
Russia; Labévière, 6.

[212] Trevor Aaronson, The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured
War on Terrorism (New York: IG, 2013).
[213] Eric Lichtblau, “Prosecutor in Terror Case Quits Agency,” New York
Times, May 17, 2005, https://nytimes.com/2005/05/17/politics/prosecutor-
in-terror-case-quits-agency.html.

[214] Editorial Board, “Commentary: Liberty City case sets low standard
for preemptive arrest,” Miami Herald, May 18, 2009,
https://mcclatchydc.com/opinion/article24538699.html.

[215] Joel Rose, “Fort Dix Trial May Be Tied To Informant’s Story,” NPR
News, November 14, 2008, https://npr.org/2008/11/14/96954400/fort-dix-
trial-may-be-tied-to-informants-story.

[216] Staff, “Feds: Informant key to foiling alleged JFK plot,” AP, June 4,
2007, https://nbcnews.com/id/wbna19025847.

[217] Hal Bernton, “Was FBI grooming Portland suspect for terror?” Seattle
Times, November 29, 2010, https://seattletimes.com/seattle-news/was-fbi-
grooming-portland-suspect-for-terror.

[218] Mark Arax, “The Agent Who Might Have Saved Hamid Hayat,” Los
Angeles Times, May 28, 2006, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-
may-28-tm-wedick22-story.html.

[219] Staff, “Pakistani Convicted In Subway Threat,” CBS News, March

24, 2006, https://cbsnews.com/news/pakistani-convicted-in-subway-threat;
Rozina Ali, “The ‘Herald Square Bomber’ Who Wasn’t,” New York Times
Magazine, April 15, 2021, https://nytimes.com/2021/04/15/magazine/fbi-
international-terrorism-informants.html.
[220] Erica Orden, “Najibullah Zazi, who plotted to bomb the New York
subway, gets a second chance,” CNN, September 28, 2019,
https://cnn.com/2019/05/01/us/najibullah-zazi-new-york-subway-bomb-
plot-sentencing/index.html.

[221] Amy Goodman, “Judge Says FBI Invented a Conspiracy in Fake

Bomb Plot, Orders Release of 3 Men,” Democracy Now!, July 31, 2023,
https://truthout.org/video/judge-says-fbi-invented-a-conspiracy-in-fake-
bomb-plot-orders-release-of-3-men.

[222] Ben Nuckols, “FBI: Md. bomb plot suspect knew about Oregon
sting,” AP, December 9, 2010, https://nbcnews.com/id/wbna40587513.

[223] Avi Selk, “‘Tear up Texas,’ undercover FBI agent told Islamic State
shooter before Garland attack,” Dallas Morning News, August 5, 2016,
https://dallasnews.com/news/crime/2016/08/05/tear-up-texas-undercover-
fbi-agent-told-islamic-state-shooter-before-garland-attack.

[224] Ian Cummings, “FBI undercover stings foil terrorist plots – but how
many are agency-created?” McClatchy, March 3, 2017,
https://mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/mcclatchys-
america/article135983268.html.

[225] McPhee, Mayhem, 11–19.

[226] Carol Cratty and Michael Martinez, “Man, 26, charged in plot to
bomb Pentagon using model airplane,” CNN, September 29, 2011,
https://cnn.com/2011/09/28/us/massachusetts-pentagon-plot-
arrest/index.html.

[227] Trevor Aaronson, “How the FBI in Boston May Have Pursued the
Wrong Terrorist,” Mother Jones, April 23, 2013,
https://motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/fbi-boston-tamerlan-tsarnaev-
sting-operations.

[228] Fatima Tlisova, “FBI Probes Exiled Chechen Rebel for Link to
Bombing Suspect,” Voice of America, May 15, 2013,
https://voanews.com/a/boston-marathon-bombing/1661874.html.

[229] Staff, “Daghestani Insurgency Denies Any Role In Boston

Bombings,” RFERL, August 22, 2013, https://rferl.org/a/daghestan-
insurgency-denies-any-role-in-boston-bombing/24964774.html.

[230] Alissa de Carbonnel and Stephanie Simon, “Special Report: The

radicalization of Tamerlan Tsarnaev,” Reuters, April 23, 2013,
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-explosions-radicalisation-special-
idUSBRE93M0CZ20130423.

[231] Mark Arsenault, “Dead suspect broke angrily with Muslim speakers,”
Boston Globe, April 22, 2013, https://boston.com/news/national-
news/2013/04/22/dead-suspect-broke-angrily-with-muslim-speakers.

[232] Scott Wilson, et al., “Boston bombing suspect cites US wars as

motivation, officials say,” Washington Post, April 23, 2013,
https://washingtonpost.com/national/boston-bombing-suspect-cites-us-
wars-as-motivation-officials-say/2013/04/23/324b9cea-ac29-11e2-b6fd-
ba6f5f26d70e_story.html.

[233] Eric Levenson, “Here’s the Note Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Wrote Inside the
Boat Where He Was Captured,” Boston Globe, March 10, 2015,
https://boston.com/news/local-news/2015/03/10/heres-the-note-dzhokhar-
tsarnaev-wrote-inside-the-boat-where-he-was-captured.

[234] McPhee, Mayhem, 83.

[235] See Chapter Two.

[236] Matt Spetalnick, et al., “US, Russian spies’ ‘trust deficit’ may have
clouded Boston case,” Reuters, April 25, 2013,
https://reuters.com/article/uk-usa-explosions-boston-distrust/u-s-russian-
spies-trust-deficit-may-have-clouded-boston-case-
idUKBRE93O1DW20130425.

[237] The same guy who had helped plan the “Operation Storm” atrocity in
Croatia in 1995. See Chapter Two. He also lied that Iraq had WMD, and
then lied that they had moved it all to Syria. Then he lied to Congress that
the NSA was not spying on Americans. See above. It gets worse. See below.

[238] Matt Spetalnick, et al., “US, Russian spies’ ‘trust deficit’ may have
clouded Boston case,” Reuters, April 25, 2013,
https://reuters.com/article/uk-usa-explosions-boston-distrust/u-s-russian-
spies-trust-deficit-may-have-clouded-boston-case-
idUKBRE93O1DW20130425.
[239] Staff, “Complete Inspire Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)
Magazine,” Public Intelligence, July 14, 2010,
http://info.publicintelligence.net/CompleteInspire.pdf.

[240] Staff, “FBI Feared Boston Bombers ‘Received Training’ And Aid
From Terror Group, Docs Say,” ABC News, May 21, 2014,
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/fbi-feared-boston-bombers-received-
training-aid-terror/story?id=23819429.

[241] Staff, “Could the Boston Bombers Have Been Stopped?” ABC News,
April 15, 2014, https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/boston-bombers-
stopped/story?id=23331603.

[242] Alexandra Field and Steve Almasy, “Did the Tsarnaev brothers have
help making Boston Marathon bombs?” CNN, March 5, 2015,
https://cnn.com/2015/03/05/us/boston-marathon-bombing-trial-
help/index.html.

[243] McPhee, Maximum Harm, 191–94.

[244] McPhee, Maximum Harm, 199–201.

[245] McPhee, Mayhem, 188–201.

[246] Michael S. Schmidt, “Deadly End to FBI Queries on Tsarnaev and a

Triple Killing,” New York Times, May 22, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/05/23/us/officer-involved-in-shooting-of-man-
tied-to-tsarnaev.html.
[247] McPhee, Mayhem, 171–76.

[248] Serge F. Kovaleski and Richard A. Oppel Jr., “In 2011 Murder
Inquiry, Hints of Missed Chance to Avert Boston Bombing,” New York
Times, July 10, 2013, https://nytimes.com/2013/07/11/us/boston-bombing-
suspect-is-said-to-be-linked-to-2011-triple-murder-case.html.

[249] McPhee, Mayhem, 99.

[250] Katharine Q. Seelye, “2nd Bombing Suspect Caught After Frenzied

Hunt Paralyzes Boston,” New York Times, April 19, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/boston-marathon-bombings.html.

[251] Svea Herbst-Bayliss and Stephanie Simon, “Gunfire heard in search

for Boston Marathon bomb suspect,” Reuters, April 19, 2013,
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-explosions-boston-shooting-
idUSBRE93I0GQ20130419.

[252] James Bovard, “Boston: Death Sentence for Looking out Window?”
JimBovard.com, April 22, 2013,
https://jimbovard.com/blog/2013/04/22/boston-death-sentence-for-looking-
out-window; Radley Balko, “Was the police response to the Boston
bombing really appropriate?” Washington Post, April 22, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/04/22/the-police-
response-to-the-boston-marathon-bombing.

[253] Brian Ross, et al., “Boston Bombing Day 5: Never-Before-Heard 911

Call That Ended It All,” ABC News, April 22, 2016,
https://abcnews.go.com/US/boston-bombing-day-heard-911-call-
ended/story?id=38375731.

[254] Katharine Q. Seelye, “2nd Bombing Suspect Caught After Frenzied

Hunt Paralyzes Boston,” New York Times, April 19, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/04/20/us/boston-marathon-bombings.html.

[255] Staff, “Islamist rebel says he ordered Russian bombing,” Reuters,

February 7, 2011, https://reuters.com/article/uk-russia-bomb-
umarov/islamist-rebel-says-he-ordered-russian-bombing-
idUKTRE7166JI20110208.

[256] Staff, “Putin Talks About Boston Bombings, Navalny, Berezovsky In

Q&A Session,” RFERL, April 25, 2013, https://rferl.org/a/putin-conducts-
annual-phone-in/24968071.html.

[257] “An interview with General Valery Zaluzhny, head of Ukraine’s

armed forces,” The Economist, December 15, 2022,
https://economist.com/zaluzhny-transcript.

[258] Andrew Kramer, “‘Where Is the Money?’ Military Graft Becomes a

Headache for Ukraine,” New York Times, September 4, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/09/04/world/europe/ukraine-military-spending-
corruption.html.

[259] Elena Chernenko and Alexander Gabuev, “‘The interests of the

Russian Federation and the United States in relation to Ukraine are
incompatible with each other,’” Kommersant, December 19, 2014,
https://kommersant.ru/doc/2636177.

[260] David J. Kramer, “If Ukraine wins against Russian aggression,

freedom wins,” Washington Post, March 17, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/if-ukraine-wins-against-russian-
aggression-freedom-wins/2014/03/17/8619f806-ae05-11e3-9627-
c65021d6d572_story.html.

[261] Peter Certo, “Carl Gershman,” Militarist Monitor, March 25, 2014,
https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/carl-gershman.

[262] Carl Gershman, “Former Soviet States Stand Up to Russia. Will the
US?” Washington Post, September 26, 2013,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/former-soviet-states-stand-up-to-
russia-will-the-us/2013/09/26/b5ad2be4-246a-11e3-b75d-
5b7f66349852_story.html.

[263] Staff, “Ukraine has no alternative but European integration –

Yanukovych,” Interfax-Ukraine, November 21, 2013,
https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/176156.html.

[264] “EU – Ukraine Association Agreement (2014),” Electronic Database

of Investment Treaties, 2014, https://edit.wti.org/document/show/3400de00-
caef-47c1-9863-fc982207040a.

[265] Elizabeth Piper, “Special Report: Why Ukraine Spurned the EU and
Embraced Russia,” Reuters, December 19, 2013,
https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-russia-deal-special-report/special-
report-why-ukraine-spurned-the-eu-and-embraced-russia-
idUSBRE9BI0DZ20131219.

[266] “EU and Ukraine – Draft EU Association Agreement approved by

Ukraine Government,” Import and Trade Remedies Blog, September 30,
2013, https://internationaltradecomplianceupdate.com/2013/09/30/eu-and-
ukraine-draft-eu-association-agreement-approved-by-ukraine-government.

[267] Andrew Cockburn, “Undelivered Goods,” Harper’s, August 13, 2015,

https://harpers.org/2015/08/undelivered-goods.

[268] Damien McElroy, “Ukraine Receives Half Price Gas and $15 Billion
to Stick With Russia,” Telegraph, December 17, 2013,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10523225/Ukraine-
receives-half-price-gas-and-15-billion-to-stick-with-Russia.html.

[269] See Chapter Three.

[270] “Free Trade Agreement Between Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and

Russian Federation: Agreement on the Establishment of the Common
Economic Zone,” September 19, 2003,
https://investmentpolicy.unctad.org/international-investment-
agreements/treaty-files/4731/download.

[271] Charap and Colton, 119; Lee Smith, “Ukraine’s Deadly Gamble,”
Tablet, February 25, 2022,
https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraines-deadly-gamble.
[272] Interview with author, Eric Margolis, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, January 27, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/012714-eric-
margolis; Hahn, 175.

[273] Jettie Word, et al., “Walking on the West Side: the World Bank and
the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict,” Oakland Institute, July 28, 2014,
https://oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/OurBiz_Brief_Uk
raine.pdf.

[274] Timothy Heritage and Richard Balmforth, “Russia Steals ‘Ukrainian

Bride’ at the Altar,” Reuters, November 22, 2013,
https://reuters.com/article/ukraine-eu-russia/russia-steals-ukrainian-bride-at-
the-altar-idINDEE9AL0DW20131122; Shaun Walker, “Ukraine’s EU trade
deal will be catastrophic, says Russia,” Guardian, September 22, 2013,
https://theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/22/ukraine-european-union-trade-
russia.

[275] Staff, “Ukraine drops EU plans and looks to Russia,” Al Jazeera,

November 21, 2013, https://aljazeera.com/news/2013/11/21/ukraine-drops-
eu-plans-and-looks-to-russia; Ian Traynor and Oksana Grytsenko, “Ukraine
suspends talks on EU trade pact as Putin wins tug of war,” Guardian,
November 21, 2013, https://theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/21/ukraine-
suspends-preparations-eu-trade-pact.

[276] Petro, 146; Hahn, 170–71; Staff, “Ukraine to resume preparing

agreement with EU when compensation for production drop found –
Boiko,” Interfax-Ukraine, November 21, 2013,
https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/176144.html.

[277] Staff, “Trading insults,” The Economist, August 24, 2013,

https://economist.com/europe/2013/08/24/trading-insults.

[278] James Marson, “Russia Bails Out Ukraine In Rebuke to US, Europe,”
Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2013,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023044038045792639633483239
66.

[279] David Kashi, “Is Russia’s Hold On Ukraine & Europe Dwindling?”
International Business Times, November 8, 2013,
https://ibtimes.com/russias-hold-ukraine-europe-dwindling-how-chevron-
cvx-may-unlock-energy-security-1460970.

[280] Pavel Polityuk and Richard Balmforth, “Ukraine signs $10 billion
shale gas deal with Chevron,” Reuters, November 5, 2013,
https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-chevron/ukraine-signs-10-billion-
shale-gas-deal-with-chevron-idUSBRE9A40ML20131105.

[281] Staff, “Ukraine wants trade agreements with EU and Russia,”

Euractiv, January 4, 2013, https://euractiv.com/section/economy-
jobs/news/ukraine-wants-trade-agreements-with-eu-and-russia.

[282] Jonathan Steele, “Ukraine’s protests are not about a yearning for
European values,” Guardian, December 12, 2013,
http://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/12/solution-to-ukraine-
crisi-political-not-economic; Will Englund and Kathy Lally, “Ukraine,
under pressure from Russia, puts brakes on EU deal,” Washington Post,
November 21, 2013, https://washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ukraine-
under-pressure-from-russia-puts-brakes-on-eu-deal/2013/11/21/46c50796-
52c9-11e3-9ee6-2580086d8254_story.html.

[283] “Threats in Ukraine: Coup, Fascism and War – And Western

Culpability,” Accuracy.org, February 20, 2014,
https://accuracy.org/release/threats-in-ukraine-coup-fascism-and-war-and-
western-culpability.

[284] Staff, “How the EU Lost Russia over Ukraine,” Der Spiegel,
November 24, 2014, https://spiegel.de/international/europe/war-in-ukraine-
a-result-of-misunderstandings-between-europe-and-russia-a-1004706.html.

[285] George Soros, “Sustaining Ukraine’s breakthrough: EU expertise and

markets are essential,” Guardian, February 27, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2014/feb/27/ukraine-eu-
expertise-markets-george-soros.

[286] Andrew Kramer, “Ukraine’s Premier Hails Russian Aid, Saying Crisis
Has Passed,” New York Times, December 18, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/12/19/world/europe/ukraine.html.

[287] “EU – Ukraine Association Agreement (2014),” Electronic Database

of Investment Treaties, 2014, https://edit.wti.org/document/show/3400de00-
caef-47c1-9863-fc982207040a.
[288] Keith Gessen, “The Quiet Americans Behind the US-Russia
Imbroglio,” New York Times Magazine, May 8, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/05/08/magazine/the-quiet-americans-behind-the-
us-russia-imbroglio.html.

[289] Ian Traynor and Oksana Grytsenko, “Ukraine suspends talks on EU

trade pact as Putin wins tug of war,” Guardian, November 21, 2013,
https://theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/21/ukraine-suspends-preparations-
eu-trade-pact.

[290] Hahn, 163–64; Tom Balmforth, “Out Of Ukrainian Protests, A New

Media Outlet Is Born,” RFERL, December 13, 2013,
https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-media-protests-hromadske-
euromaidan/25199816.html.

[291] Mustafa Nayyem Facebook post 1, November 21, 2013,

https://facebook.com/Mustafanayyem/posts/10201177280260151; Mustafa
Nayyem Facebook post 2, November 21, 2013,
https://facebook.com/Mustafanayyem/posts/10201178184682761; Staff,
“Mustafa Nayem, Ukrainian Journalist and Activist,” The Interview, France
24, January 16, 2014, https://france24.com/en/20140116-interview-mustafa-
nayem-ukrainian-journalist-activist-kiev-protests.

[292] Staff, “Huge Ukraine Rally over EU Agreement Delay,” BBC,

November 24, 2013, http://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25078952; Olga
Onuch and Gwendolyn Sasse, “The Maidan in Movement: Diversity and
the Cycles of Protest,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 68, No. 4 (March 2016),
573, https://researchgate.net/publication/299518223.

[293] Alexander J. Motyl, “Yanukovych Must Go,” Foreign Affairs,

December 11, 2013, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/eastern-europe-
caucasus/2013-12-11/yanukovych-must-go.

[294] Staff, “Ukraine’s president tries to calm tensions as clashes continue,”

Business News Europe, November 26, 2013, https://russialist.org/ukraines-
president-tries-to-calm-tensions-as-clashes-continue.

[295] “EuroMaidan rallies in Ukraine – Nov. 25 coverage,” Kyiv Post,

November 27, 2013,
https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/content/euromaidan/euromaidan-rallies-
in-ukraine-nov-25-coverage-332512.html.

[296] David Stern, “Ukraine police disperse EU-deal protesters,” BBC,

November 30, 2013, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-25164990.

[297] Staff, “EuroMaidan rallies on Dec. 1. The peaceful morning,” Kyiv

Post, December 1, 2013,
https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/euromaidan-
rallies-on-dec-1-12-am-to-2-pm-euromaidan-rallies-in-ukraine-
332752.html; Olga Onuch and Gwendolyn Sasse, “The Maidan in
Movement: Diversity and the Cycles of Protest,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol.
68, No. 4 (March 2016), 573,
https://researchgate.net/publication/299518223.
[298] Anders Åslund, “Euro revolution in Ukraine,” Kyiv Post, December
3, 2013, https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/anders-aslund-
euro-revolution-in-ukraine-332865.html.

[299] Hahn, 186–87.

[300] Shaun Walker, “Kiev anti-government protesters remain in control in

parts of city,” Guardian, December 2, 2013,
https://theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/02/kiev-anti-government-
protesters-viktor-yanukovych.

[301] Corey Flintoff and Robert Siegel, “Ukrainian President Withstands

No-Confidence Vote Amid Protests,” NPR News, December 3, 2013,
https://npr.org/2013/12/03/248568492/ukrainian-president-withstands-no-
confidence-vote-amid-protests.

[302] Jim Lobe, “All in the Neocon Family,” AlterNet, March 27, 2003,
https://alternet.org/2003/03/all_in_the_neocon_family.

[303] Victoria Nuland, “Terrorist Designations of the al-Nusrah Front as an

Alias for al-Qa’ida in Iraq,” US State Department, December 11, 2012,
https://2009-2017.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/12/201759.htm.

[304] Staff, “Ukraine Protests: Police Pull Back From Camp,” Sky News,
December 10, 2013, https://news.sky.com/story/ukraine-protests-police-
pull-back-from-camp-10425037.
[305] Staff, “Top US official visits protesters in Kiev as Obama admin. ups
pressure on Ukraine president Yanukovich,” CBS News, December 11,
2013, https://cbsnews.com/news/us-victoria-nuland-wades-into-ukraine-
turmoil-over-yanukovich.

[306] Staff, “John McCain Tells Ukraine Protesters: ‘We Are Here to
Support Your Just Cause,’” Guardian, December 15, 2013,
https://theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-ukraine-protests-
support-just-cause.

[307] Staff, “John McCain Tells Ukraine Protesters: ‘We Are Here to
Support Your Just Cause,’” Guardian, December 15, 2013,
https://theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/15/john-mccain-ukraine-protests-
support-just-cause.

[308] Brzezinski, 46.

[309] Barry Goldwater, With No Apologies: The Personal and Political

Memoirs of United States Senator Barry M. Goldwater (New York: William
Morrow and Company, 1979), 277–85.

[310] Defense Department spokesman Adm. John Kirby later confirmed

that number: Press Release, “Pentagon Press Secretary John F. Kirby Holds
a Press Briefing,” US Defense Department, April 6, 2022,
https://defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/2991964/pentagon-
press-secretary-john-f-kirby-holds-a-press-briefing, as did Deputy Assistant
Secretary of State Thomas Melia: “Statement of Thomas O. Melia Deputy
Assistant Secretary of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and
Labor,” US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, January 15, 2014,
https://foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Melia_Testimony4.pdf.

[311] “Remarks by Victoria Nuland at the US-Ukraine Foundation

Conference,” US State Department, December 13, 2013,
https://geneva.usmission.gov/2013/12/17/assistant-secretary-nuland-speaks-
at-u-s-ukraine-foundation-conference; Victoria Nuland, “Victoria Nuland at
‘Ukraine in Washington 2013’: Ukrainians deserve a government that
respects them,” December 13, 2013, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=xtMwcE9K_NA.

[312] William Jay Risch, “Heart of Europe, Heart of Darkness: Ukraine’s

Euromaidan and Its Enemies,” in The Unwanted Europeanness?
Understanding Division and Inclusion in Contemporary Europe (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2021), ed. Branislav Radeljić, 144–45.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684216.

[313] Matthias Gebauer, et al., “Berlin Alarmed by Aggressive NATO

Stance on Ukraine,” Der Spiegel, March 6, 2015,
http://spiegel.de/international/world/germany-concerned-about-aggressive-
nato-stance-on-ukraine-a-1022193.html.

[314] Keith Darden and Lucan Way, “Who are the protesters in Ukraine?”
Washington Post, February 12, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/02/12/who-are-
the-protesters-in-ukraine.
[315] Olga Onuch and Gwendolyn Sasse, “The Maidan in Movement:
Diversity and the Cycles of Protest,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 68, No. 4
(March 2016), 573, https://researchgate.net/publication/299518223.

[316] Max Fisher, “This One Map Helps Explain Ukraine’s Protests,”
Washington Post, December 9, 2013,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/12/09/this-one-map-
helps-explain-ukraines-protests.

[317] “‘Fuck the EU!’ (Original File) – Victoria Nuland phoning with
Geoffrey Pyatt,” FreiBILDfuerAlle, February 10, 2014,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=KIvRljAaNgg; “Ukraine Crisis: Transcript of
Leaked Nuland-Pyatt Call,” BBC, February 7, 2014,
https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26079957.

[318] Vladimir Matveyev, “Ukrainian party picks xenophobic candidate,”

Jewish Telegraphic Agency, May 25, 2009,
https://jta.org/2009/05/25/global/ukrainian-party-picks-xenophobic-
candidate.

[319] David M. Herszenhorn, “Ukraine’s Ultranationalists Show Surprising

Strength at Polls,” New York Times, November 8, 2012,
https://nytimes.com/2012/11/09/world/europe/ukraines-ultranationalists-do-
well-in-elections.html.

[320] Per Anders Rudling, “The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right – The
Case of VO Svoboda,” in Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson (eds.),
Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (London
and New York: Routledge, 2013), 228–55, http://academia.edu/2481420.

[321] Adam Taylor, “John McCain Went To Ukraine And Stood On Stage
With A Man Accused Of Being An Anti-Semitic Neo-Nazi,” AP, December
16, 2013, https://finance.yahoo.com/news/john-mccain-went-ukraine-stood-
202343813.html.

[322] Alina Pastukhova, “Tyahnybok: Nationalist, fearful of Russia, favors

NATO,” Kyiv Post, October 29, 2008,
https://kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/tyahnybok-nationalist-
fearful-of-russia-favors-nat-30697.html.

[323] De Ploeg, 47; William Taylor, “Yatsenyuk, Rising Politician,” US

State Department, July 3, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08KYIV1300_a.html.

[324] Peter Nicholas, “As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton Hosted at

Dinner a Ukrainian Donor to Family Foundation,” Wall Street Journal,
August 23, 2016, http://wsj.com/articles/as-secretary-of-state-hillary-
clinton-hosted-at-dinner-a-ukrainian-donor-to-family-foundation-
1471995857.

[325] Staff, “US blames Russia for leak of undiplomatic language from top
official,” AFP, February 6, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/06/us-russia-eu-victoria-nuland;
“limited hangout,” Urban Dictionary, July 8, 2020,
https://urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=limited%20hangout.

[326] Interview with author, Daniel McAdams, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, February 8, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/020914-daniel-
mcadams.

[327] Nicolas Revise and Jerome Rivet, “West presses Ukraine to heed
protesters’ demands,” AFP, December 5, 2013,
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/west-sides-ukraine-protesters-39-calls-reform-
140415798.html; Laura Smith-Spark, et al., “Ukraine government resigns,
parliament scraps anti-protest laws amid crisis,” CNN, January 28, 2014,
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/28/world/europe/ukraine-
protests/index.html; Simon Shuster, “Ukraine’s Prime Minister Resigns, but
Protesters Don’t Care,” Time, January 28, 2014,
https://world.time.com/2014/01/28/ukraines-prime-minister-resigns-but-
protesters-dont-care.

[328] Will Englund, “Ukraine president says he’ll name rival as prime
minister, but opposition demands more,” Washington Post, January 25,
2014, https://washingtonpost.com/world/ukraine-president-says-hell-name-
rival-as-prime-minister-but-opposition-demands-
more/2014/01/25/571f5e9c-860a-11e3-8742-668814928ae4_story.html;
“Klitschko Shuns ‘Poisoned Offer,’” DW, January 26, 2014,
https://dw.com/en/ukraine-opposition-shuns-yanukovych-power-share-
offer/a-17387381.
[329] Will Englund, “Ukraine president says he’ll name rival as prime
minister, but opposition demands more,” Washington Post, January 25,
2014, https://washingtonpost.com/world/ukraine-president-says-hell-name-
rival-as-prime-minister-but-opposition-demands-
more/2014/01/25/571f5e9c-860a-11e3-8742-668814928ae4_story.html.

[330] Dan Murphy, “A Piece of News That Should Have Vladimir Putin
Grinning,” Christian Science Monitor, May 11, 2014,
https://csmonitor.com/World/Security-Watch/Backchannels/2014/0304/A-
piece-of-news-that-should-have-Vladimir-Putin-grinning.

[331] Dan Murphy, “Amid US-Russia tussle over Ukraine, a leaked tape of
Victoria Nuland,” Christian Science Monitor, February 6, 2014,
https://csmonitor.com/World/Security-
Watch/Backchannels/2014/0206/Amid-US-Russia-tussle-over-Ukraine-a-
leaked-tape-of-Victoria-Nuland.

[332] Keith Gessen, “The Quiet Americans Behind the US-Russia

Imbroglio,” New York Times Magazine, May 8, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/05/08/magazine/the-quiet-americans-behind-the-
us-russia-imbroglio.html.

[333] Elise Labott, “Top US diplomat launches f-bomb on EU in leaked

recorded conversation,” CNN, February 6, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140208071645/http://security.blogs.cnn.com
/2014/02/06/top-u-s-diplomat-launches-f-bomb-on-eu-in-leaked-recorded-
conversation.
[334] Anne Gearan, “In recording of US diplomat, blunt talk on Ukraine,”
Washington Post, February 6, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-purported-recording-
of-us-diplomat-blunt-talk-on-ukraine/2014/02/06/518240a4-8f4b-11e3-
84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html.

[335] Carl Gershman, “Ukraine’s Success after 25 years,” National

Endowment for Democracy, September 14, 2016,
https://web.archive.org/web/20161212145839/https://ned.org/ukraines-
success-after-25-years.

[336] William J. Daugherty, Executive Secrets: Covert Action and the

Presidency (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 131.

[337] Oleh Rybachuk Profile, National Endowment for Democracy,

https://web.archive.org/web/20220509175621/https://ned.org/fellows/oleh-
rybachuk.

[338] See Chapter Three.

[339] “New Citizen (Centre UA),” Portfolios, Omidyar Network, March 10,
2012,
https://web.archive.org/web/20120310103804/http://omidyar.com/portfolio/
new-citizen-centre-ua.

[340] George Soros, “Sustaining Ukraine’s breakthrough: EU expertise and

markets are essential,” Guardian, February 27, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/business/economics-blog/2014/feb/27/ukraine-eu-
expertise-markets-george-soros.

[341] “Understanding Ukraine’s Euromaidan Protests,” Open Society

Foundation, May 2019,
https://opensocietyfoundations.org/explainers/understanding-ukraines-
euromaidan-protests.

[342] Mark Rachkevych, “Rybachuk: Democracy-promoting

nongovernmental organization faces ‘ridiculous’ investigation,” Kyiv Post,
February 10, 2014, https://kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-
politics/rybachuk-democracy-promoting-nongovernmental-organization-
faces-ridiculous-investigation-336583.html.

[343] Hahn, 164.

[344] Steve Weissman, “Meet the Americans Who Put Together the Coup in
Kiev,” Ron Paul Institute, March 25, 2014,
https://ronpaulinstitute.org/meet-the-americans-who-put-together-the-coup-
in-kiev.

[345] “Euromaidan Press Annual Report,” August 2015–2016,

https://euromaidanpress.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014/08/annualreport2016-1.pdf.

[346] Euromaidan Press, “Patrons, donors, and partners,”

https://euromaidanpress.com/about/partners.
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Renaissance Foundation, March 31, 2014,
https://drishtikone.com/content/files/2023/11/Ukraine-Working-Group-
2014-gs-ukraine-visitmarch-2014notes.pdf.

[348] Roman Olearchyk, “Ukraine: inside the pro-EU protest camp,”

Financial Times, December 14, 2013, https://blogs.ft.com/beyond-
brics/2013/12/14/ukraine-inside-the-pro-eu-protest-camp.

[349] Diane Francis, “In Ukraine, ‘how little has changed’ even after
Orange Revolution,” Financial Post, March 10, 2012,
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/03/10/in-ukraine-how-little-has-
changed-even-after-orange-revolution.

[350] Mustafa Nayyem, “Uprising in Ukraine: How It All Began,” Open

Societies Foundation, April 4, 2014,
http://opensocietyfoundations.org/voices/uprising-ukraine-how-it-all-began.

[351] “Omidyar Network Supports 15 Transparency and Accountability

Organizations with Grants Totaling $9.7m,” Omidyar Network, December
11, 2014, https://prnewswire.com/news-releases/omidyar-network-supports-
15-transparency-and-accountability-organizations-with-grants-totaling-
97m-300008325.html.

[352] Kit Klarenberg, “Anatomy of a Coup: How CIA Front Laid

Foundations for Ukraine War,” Kit’s Newsletter, July 1, 2022,
https://kitklarenberg.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-coup-how-cia-front-laid.
[353] Will Porter, “Ukraine’s NATO Bid Risks Even Worse US-Russia
Ties,” Consortium News, April 18, 2018,
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/18/ukraines-nato-bid-risks-even-
worse-u-s-russia-relations; Porter is this book’s editor.

[354] Kenneth Rapoza, “Look Who Funds Ukraine’s ‘Anti-Putin’ Internet

TV,” Forbes, April 27, 2016,
https://forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2016/04/27/look-who-funds-ukraines-
anti-putin-internet-tv.

[355] Wayne Sharpe and Josh Machleder, “Ukraine Media Project (U-
Media) Annual Report, October 1, 2012 – September 30, 2013,” December
2013, https://pdf.usaid.gov/pdf_docs/PA00SVFT.pdf.

[356] Robert Parry, “A Shadow US Foreign Policy,” Consortium News,

February 27, 2014, https://consortiumnews.com/2014/02/27/a-shadow-us-
foreign-policy.

[357] David J. Kramer, “Yanukovych should resign,” Kyiv Post, December

9, 2013, https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/ukraine-
president-should-resign-sanctions-warranted-if-more-violence-against-
protesters-press-333329.html.

[358] “Ihor Kolomoyskyy,” Forbes, April 4, 2023,

https://forbes.com/profile/ihor-kolomoyskyy.

[359] Graham Stack, “Ukraine seeks to reassert control over Ukrnafta with
new CEO,” BNE IntelliNews, February 25, 2011,
https://intellinews.com/ukraine-seeks-to-reassert-control-over-ukrnafta-
with-new-ceo-500015396/?archive=bne.

[360] Natalya Ryabinska, “Ukraine – Local Media on the Euromaidan

protests,” Cultures of History Forum, April 10, 2015, https://cultures-of-
history.uni-jena.de/focus/ukrainian-crisis/ukraine-local-media-on-the-
euromaidan-protests.

[361] Petro, 98.

[362] Staff, “Groups at the sharp end of Ukraine unrest,” BBC, February 1,
2014, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26001710; Simon Shuster,
“Right-Wing Thugs Are Hijacking Ukraine’s Liberal Uprising,” Time,
January 28, 2014, https://world.time.com/2014/01/28/ukraine-kiev-protests-
thugs; Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Insufficiently diverse: The problem of
nonviolent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–
2014,” Journal of Eurasian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (March 2, 2020),
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1879366520928363.

[363] “C14 a.k.a. Sich,” Terrorism Research & Analysis Consortium, 2017,
https://trackingterrorism.org/group/c14-aka-sich-ukraine. They claim it just
resembles the Ukrainian word for Sich (Січ), which means fort, and is
another name for the group. “A Fine Line: Defining Nationalism and Neo-
Nazism in Ukraine,” Hromadske, May 10, 2018,
https://en.hromadske.ua/posts/does-neo-nazism-exist-in-ukraine.
[364] Staff, “Police release earlier detained activists – lawyer,” 112
International, February 10, 2019,
https://web.archive.org/web/20190210092603/https://112.international/soci
ety/police-release-earlier-detained-activists-lawyer-36864.html.

[365] Anton Troianovski, “Why Vladimir Putin Invokes Nazis to Justify His
Invasion of Ukraine,” New York Times, March 17, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/03/17/world/europe/ukraine-putin-nazis.html;
Charlie Smart, “How the Russian Media Spread False Claims About
Ukrainian Nazis,” New York Times, July 2, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/02/world/europe/ukraine-nazis-
russia-media.html; Rachel Treisman, “Putin’s claim of fighting against
Ukraine ‘neo-Nazis’ distorts history, scholars say,” NPR News, March 1,
2022, https://npr.org/2022/03/01/1083677765/putin-denazify-ukraine-
russia-history.

[366] Alison Smale, “Tending Their Wounds, Vowing to Fight On,” New
York Times, April 5, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/04/06/world/europe/tending-their-wounds-
vowing-to-fight-on.html.

[367] Anthony Zurcher, “Why Harris moved from ‘joy’ to calling Trump ‘a
fascist,’” BBC, October 24, 2024,
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c1dp7xnyr51o.amp.

[368] Jonathan Capehart, “Trump’s MSG rally draws comparisons to 1939

pro-Nazi rally,” MSNBC, October 27, 2024,
https://www.msnbc.com/jonathan-capehart/watch/trump-s-msg-rally-draws-
comparisons-to-1939-pro-nazi-rally-222807621632.

[369] Brakkton Booker, “How Trump won one-fifth of Black men and
nearly half of Latino men,” Politico, November 7, 2024,
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/07/trump-black-latino-men-
working-class-00188185.

[370] Lev Golinkin, “The Heartbreaking Irony of ‘Winter on Fire,’” The

Nation, February 18, 2016, https://thenation.com/article/archive/the-
heartbreaking-irony-of-winter-on-fire.

[371] Jon Lee Anderson, “Maidan: Tonight Tomorrow,” The New Yorker,
May 27, 2014, https://newyorker.com/news/news-desk/maidan-tonight-
tomorrow.

[372] Hannah Thoburn, “For the Kremlin, Ukrainian Anti-Semitism Is a

Tool for Scaring Russians in Crimea,” Tablet, March 6, 2014,
https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/ukraines-wedge-issue.

[373] David M. Herszenhorn, “Ukraine’s Forces Move Against Protesters,

Dimming Hopes for Talks,” New York Times, December 9, 2013,
https://nytimes.com/2013/12/10/world/europe/ukraine-unrest.html.

[374] Staff, “Groups at the sharp end of Ukraine unrest,” BBC, February 1,
2014, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26001710.
[375] Alison Smale, “Tending Their Wounds, Vowing to Fight On,” New
York Times, April 5, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/04/06/world/europe/tending-their-wounds-
vowing-to-fight-on.html.

OceanofPDF.com
[376] Palash Ghosh, “Euromaidan: The Dark Shadows Of The Far-Right In
Ukraine Protests,” International Business Times, February 19, 2014.
https://ibtimes.com/euromaidan-dark-shadows-far-right-ukraine-protests-
1556654.

[377] Simon Shuster, “Right-Wing Thugs Are Hijacking Ukraine’s Liberal

Uprising,” Time, January 28, 2014,
https://world.time.com/2014/01/28/ukraine-kiev-protests-thugs.

[378] Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Insufficiently diverse: The problem of

nonviolent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–
2014,” Journal of Eurasian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (March 2, 2020),
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1879366520928363; Stratfor,
“Protesters In Lviv Raise The Stakes In Ukraine’s Crisis,” Forbes, February
20, 2014, https://forbes.com/sites/stratfor/2014/02/20/protesters-in-lviv-
raise-the-stakes-in-ukraines-crisis; Hahn, 194–95.

[379] Shaun Walker, “Kiev protesters occupy government building amid

uneasy truce,” Guardian, January 24, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/24/kiev-protesters-occupy-
government-building-truce-ukraine.

[380] Staff, “Far-right group at heart of Ukraine protests meet US senator,”

Channel 4, December 16, 2013, http://channel4.com/news/ukraine-mccain-
far-right-svoboda-anti-semitic-protests.

[381] De Ploeg, 30.

[382] Kapranovy Brothers, Maidan. X-files: A Journalist Investigation
(Kiev: Nora-Druk, 2017), 127–28; Cited in, Volodymyr Ishchenko,
“Insufficiently diverse: The problem of nonviolent leverage and
radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–2014,” Journal of
Eurasian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (March 2, 2020), 201–15.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1879366520928363.

[383] Colborne, 30.

[384] Hahn, 180–81.

[385] “The Bonus March,” USHistory.org, https://ushistory.org/us/48c.asp.

[386] Terence McArdle, “The veterans were desperate. Gen. MacArthur

ordered US troops to attack them,” Washington Post, July 28, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/07/28/the-veterans-
were-desperate-gen-macarthur-ordered-u-s-troops-to-attack-them.

[387] Mark Berman and Emily Wax-Thibodeaux, “Police keep using force
against peaceful protesters, prompting sustained criticism about tactics and
training,” Washington Post, June 4, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/national/police-keep-using-force-against-
peaceful-protesters-prompting-sustained-criticism-about-tactics-and-
training/2020/06/03/5d2f51d4-a5cf-11ea-bb20-ebf0921f3bbd_story.html;
“Police in riot gear break up protests at UCLA as hundreds are arrested at
campuses across US,” CBS News, May 2, 2024,
https://cbsnews.com/news/ucla-tense-scene-police-order-protesters-to-
leave-nationwide-pro-palestinian-protests; Jacqueline Rose and Eric
Levenson, “Buffalo protester Martin Gugino has a fractured skull and
cannot walk,” CNN, June 16, 2020, https://cnn.com/2020/06/16/us/martin-
gugino-protester-skull/index.html.

[388] Julian Pecquet, “Obama threatens ‘consequences’ for Ukraine

violence,” The Hill, February 19, 2014,
https://thehill.com/policy/international/198732-obama-threatens-
consequences-for-ukraine-violence.

[389] Maria Danilova, “Ukraine: Yanukovych ordered snipers to shoot,” AP,

April 3, 2014, https://apnews.com/general-news-
f5855b135cc741c68bcd72357c9e7833.

[390] Kirit Radia, “Inside Kiev’s Ukraine Hotel – the Makeshift Hospital
and Morgue,” ABC News, February 20, 2014,
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/02/inside-kievs-ukraina-
hotel-the-makeshift-hospital-and-morgue.

[391] Gabriel Gatehouse, “Snipers at Maidan: The untold story of a

massacre in Ukraine,” BBC Newsnight, February 12, 2015,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mJhJ6hks0Jg.

[392] Gabriel Gatehouse, “Snipers at Maidan: The untold story of a

massacre in Ukraine,” BBC Newsnight, February 12, 2015,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mJhJ6hks0Jg.
[393] Alison Smale, “Tending Their Wounds, Vowing to Fight On,” New
York Times, April 5, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/04/06/world/europe/tending-their-wounds-
vowing-to-fight-on.html.

[394] Simon Shuster, “Exclusive: Leader of Far-Right Ukrainian Militant

Group Talks Revolution With TIME,” Time, February 4, 2014,
https://time.com/4493/ukraine-dmitri-yarosh-kiev.

[395] Katya Gorchinskaya, “He Killed for the Maidan,” Foreign Policy,
February 26, 2016, https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/02/26/he-killed-for-the-
maidan.

[396] Gabriel Gatehouse, “Snipers at Maidan: The untold story of a

massacre in Ukraine,” BBC Newsnight, February 12, 2015,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mJhJ6hks0Jg.

[397] “Ukraine Maidan deaths: Who fired shots?” BBC, February 12, 2015,
https://bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-31435719.

[398] Gordon M. Hahn, “The Real Ukrainian ‘Snipers’ Massacre,’ February

20, 2014,” March 9, 2016, https://gordonhahn.com/2016/03/09/the-real-
snipers-massacre-ukraine-february-2014-updatedrevised-working-paper.

[399] De Ploeg, 36.

[400] Colborne, 31.

[401] Nick Paton Walsh, et al., “Truce declared in bloodied Ukraine, but
will it last through talks?” CNN, February 19, 2014,
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/19/world/europe/ukraine-
protests/index.html.

[402] Graham Stack, “What Triggered the Maidan Massacre?” BNE

IntelliNews, February 13, 2015, https://intellinews.com/kyiv-blog-what-
triggered-the-maidan-massacre-500444157/?archive=bne.

[403] Gordon M. Hahn, “The Real Ukrainian ‘Snipers’ Massacre,’ February

20, 2014,” March 9, 2016, https://gordonhahn.com/2016/03/09/the-real-
snipers-massacre-ukraine-february-2014-updatedrevised-working-paper.

[404] Gabriel Gatehouse, “Snipers at Maidan: The untold story of a

massacre in Ukraine,” BBC Newsnight, February 12, 2015,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mJhJ6hks0Jg.

[405] Konrad Schuller, “How did the bloodbath on the Maidan come
about?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 8, 2015,
https://faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/ukraine-die-hundertschaften-und-die-
dritte-kraft-13414018.html.

[406] Dan Peleschuk, “Ukrainian court sentences ex-police officers over

2014 Maidan shootings,” Reuters, October 18, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-court-sentences-ex-police-
officers-over-2014-maidan-shootings-2023-10-18.
[407] Gabriel Gatehouse, “Snipers at Maidan: The untold story of a
massacre in Ukraine,” BBC Newsnight, February 12, 2015,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mJhJ6hks0Jg.

[408] Gabriel Gatehouse, “Snipers at Maidan: The untold story of a

massacre in Ukraine,” BBC Newsnight, February 12, 2015,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mJhJ6hks0Jg.

[409] Gabriel Gatehouse, “Ukraine crisis: Sniper fires from Ukraine media
hotel,” BBC, February 20, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-
26284100.

[410] Gabriel Gatehouse, “Snipers at Maidan: The untold story of a

massacre in Ukraine,” BBC Newsnight, February 12, 2015,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=mJhJ6hks0Jg; “Video A,” Maidan, October
12, 2023, https://youtube.com/watch?v=1RNCNQpeTqI.

[411] Gabriel Gatehouse, Twitter Direct Messages to author, August 8–9,

2023 (slightly edited for grammar).

[412] Gabriel Gatehouse, “Ukraine crisis: Sniper fires from Ukraine media
hotel,” BBC, February 20, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-
26284100.

[413] Tweet by Steffen Dobbert, February 20, 2014,

https://x.com/steffendobbert/status/436423960574451712; Tweet by Paul
Waldie, February 20, 2014,
https://x.com/pwaldieGLOBE/status/436424673698807808.
[414] Staff, “Poroshenko says evidence shows Kremlin aide Surkov
directed snipers in Kiev,” Reuters, February 20, 2015,
https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-surkov-
idUSKBN0LO1B620150220.

[415] Maxim Tucker, “The politics of corruption in Kiev,” Politico Europe,

November 19, 2015, https://politico.eu/article/politics-of-corruption-kiev-
west-friendly-states.

[416] Serhiy Leshchenko, “Nalyvaichenko vs. Surkov – scenario for

Medvedchuk?” Ukrainska Pravda, April 16, 2015,
https://blogs.pravda.com.ua/authors/leschenko/552ee534b5a10.

[417] Valery Kalnysh, “Andrey Parubiy: Russian special forces ‘worked’ on

Maidan both on us and on Berkut,” RBC, February 18, 2015,
https://daily.rbc.ua/rus/show/andrey-parubiy-na-maydane-i-po-nam-i-po-
berkutu-rabotal—17022015132900; Gabriel Gatehouse, “Snipers at
Maidan: The untold story of a massacre in Ukraine,” BBC Newsnight,
February 12, 2015, https://youtube.com/watch?v=mJhJ6hks0Jg.

[418] Mike Eckel, “Russia, Ukraine feud over sniper carnage,” AP, March
8, 2014, https://apnews.com/general-news-
c88695ddc12e4568ae2741b6059af852.

[419] Maria Danilova, “Ukraine: Yanukovych ordered snipers to shoot,” AP,

April 3, 2014, https://apnews.com/general-news-
f5855b135cc741c68bcd72357c9e7833.
[420] Andrei Veselov, “‘Shoot at All Targets on Maidan’: New Evidence of
Georgian Snipers,” Sputnik, February 14, 2018,
https://sputniknews.com/20180214/ukraine-maidan-georgian-snipers-
evidence-1061632008.html.

[421] Gian Micalessin, “The Hidden Truth of Maidan – Three Snipers From
Georgia Confess,” GM News, November 21, 2017,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=3cSnrSnYItE.

[422] Anna Stephen, “The Square of Broken Hopes,” May 4, 2018,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=C-7xjDxFSQc.

[423] Staff, “Georgian snipers – Maidan testified at the General

Prosecutor’s Office of Belarus,” Strana, October 24, 2019,
https://strana.today/news/229688-hruzinskie-snajpery-majdana-dali-
pokazanija-v-belarusskoj-henprokuratura.html.

[424] Daniel Sandford, “Ukraine death toll rises as truce unravels,” BBC,
February 20, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/av/world-europe-26271824.

[425] Staff, “Estonia: Leaked Ashton Ukraine Conversation ‘Authentic,’”

RFERL, March 5, 2014, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-ashton-conversation-
leaked/25286848.html.

[426] “Interview with Organizer of Emergency Care for Maidan Protesters

about Rising Death Toll in Kiev,” CNN, February 20, 2014,
http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1402/20/nwsm.01.html.
[427] “Breaking: Estonian Foreign Minister Urmas Paet and Catherine
Ashton Discuss Ukraine Over the Phone,” March 5, 2014,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZEgJ0oo3OA8; Dana Ford, “Leaked call
raises questions about who was behind sniper attacks in Ukraine,” CNN,
March 6, 2014, https://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/05/world/europe/ukraine-
leaked-audio-recording/index.html.

[428] Staff, “Estonia: Leaked Ashton Ukraine Conversation ‘Authentic,’”

RFERL, March 5, 2014, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-ashton-conversation-
leaked/25286848.html.

[429] Barney Henderson, “Ukraine Crisis: US and Russia Hold Talks –

Live,” Telegraph, March 5, 2014,
http://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/10677370/Ukraine-
Russia-crisis-live.html.

[430] Alex Padalka, “Who were the Maidan snipers?” AFP, July 30, 2016,
https://theworld.org/stories/2016/07/30/who-were-maidan-snipers.

[431] Mike Eckel, “Russia, Ukraine feud over sniper carnage,” AP, March
8, 2014, https://apnews.com/general-news-
c88695ddc12e4568ae2741b6059af852.

[432] Valery Kalnysh, “Andrey Parubiy: Russian special forces ‘worked’ on

Maidan both on us and on Berkut,” RBC, February 18, 2015,
https://daily.rbc.ua/rus/show/andrey-parubiy-na-maydane-i-po-nam-i-po-
berkutu-rabotal—17022015132900.
[433] Mike Eckel, “Russia, Ukraine feud over sniper carnage,” AP, March
8, 2014, https://apnews.com/general-news-
c88695ddc12e4568ae2741b6059af852.

[434] Staff, “Ukraine Arrests Former Riot Police For Alleged Role In
Maidan Killings,” RFERL, June 24, 2016, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-
former-berkut-arrested-maidan-killings-2014/27817717.html.

[435] Steve Stecklow and Oleksandr Akymenko, “Special Report: Flaws

found in Ukraine’s probe of Maidan massacre,” Reuters, October 10, 2014,
https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-killings-probe-special-report/special-
report-flaws-found-in-ukraines-probe-of-maidan-massacre-
idUSKCN0HZ0UH20141010.

[436] Dan Peleschuk, “Ukrainian court sentences ex-police officers over

2014 Maidan shootings,” Reuters, October 18, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-court-sentences-ex-police-
officers-over-2014-maidan-shootings-2023-10-18.

[437] Ivan Katchanovski, “Buried trial verdict confirms false-flag Maidan

massacre in Ukraine,” Canadian Dimension, February 20, 2024,
https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/buried-trial-verdict-confirms-
false-flag-maidan-massacre-in-ukraine-2024; Ivan Katchanovski, “Maidan
Massacre Trial Verdict Selected Excerpts Confirming False-Flag Massacre
(English Google Translation),” 2023,
https://academia.edu/109357708/Maidan_Massacre_Trial_Verdict_Selected
_Excerpts_Confirming_False_Flag_Massacre_English_Google_Translation
_.

[438] Coilin O’Connor, “Winter On Fire Blazes Oscar Trail With Gripping
Account Of Ukraine’s Maidan Moment,” RFERL, January 15, 2016,
https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-winter-fire-oscar-documentary-
afineevsky/27490371.html.

[439] Hahn, 210.

[440] Phil Black, et al., “‘Sadness,’ uncertainty in Ukraine even after

landmark deal,” CNN, February 21, 2014,
https://cnn.com/2014/02/21/world/europe/ukraine-protests/index.html; Toby
Vogel, “Yanukovych signs transition deal with Ukraine opposition,”
Politico Europe, February 21, 2014, https://politico.eu/article/yanukovych-
signs-transition-deal-with-ukraine-opposition.

[441] Editorial Board, “Ukraine’s next chapter,” Washington Post, February

24, 2014, https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/ukraines-next-
chapter/2014/02/24/a26822be-9d87-11e3-a050-dc3322a94fa7_story.html.

[442] Transcript, Amanpour, CNN, February 26, 2014,

http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1402/26/ampr.01.html; Mick
Krever, “Putin phone call convinced Yanukovych to change attitude, says
Polish foreign minister,” CNN, February 26, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140307115403/http://amanpour.blogs.cnn.co
m/2014/02/26/vladimir-putin-viktor-yanukovych-radoslaw-sikorski-
ukraine-poland-russia.

[443] “Readout of President Obama’s Call with President Putin,” White

House, February 21, 2014, https://presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/readout-
president-obamas-call-with-president-putin-3.

[444] Valery Kalnysh, “Andrey Parubiy: Russian special forces ‘worked’ on

Maidan both on us and on Berkut,” RBC, February 18, 2015,
https://daily.rbc.ua/rus/show/andrey-parubiy-na-maydane-i-po-nam-i-po-
berkutu-rabotal—17022015132900.

[445] Staff, “If there is no demand for resignation, we will go on an assault

– centurion,” hromadske, February 21, 2014, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=4ys0FDfXQak.

[446] Staff, “Protesters threaten violence if Yanukovych doesn’t resign

now,” Kyiv Post, February 21, 2014,
https://kyivpost.com/article/content/euromaidan/protesters-threaten-
violence-if-yanukovych-doesnt-resign-now-337343.html.

[447] Staff, “If there is no demand for resignation, we will go on an assault

– centurion,” hromadske, February 21, 2014, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=4ys0FDfXQak; Graham Stack, “What triggered the Maidan massacre?”
BNE IntelliNews, February 13, 2015, https://intellinews.com/kyiv-blog-
what-triggered-the-maidan-massacre-500444157/?archive=bne; Konrad
Schuller, “How did the bloodbath on the Maidan come about?” Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, February 8, 2015,
https://faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/ukraine-die-hundertschaften-und-die-
dritte-kraft-13414018.html.

[448] Richard Balmforth, “In Ukraine turbulence, a lad from Lviv becomes
the toast of Kiev,” Reuters, February 25, 2014,
https://reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-crisis-hero-insight/in-ukraine-
turbulence-a-lad-from-lviv-becomes-the-toast-of-kiev-
idUKBREA1O0JL20140225.

[449] Konrad Schuller, “How did the bloodbath on the Maidan come
about?” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 8, 2015,
https://faz.net/aktuell/politik/ausland/ukraine-die-hundertschaften-und-die-
dritte-kraft-13414018.html.

[450] Andrew Higgins and Andrew Kramer, “Ukraine Leader Was Defeated
Even Before He Was Ousted,” New York Times, January 3, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/01/04/world/europe/ukraine-leader-was-defeated-
even-before-he-was-ousted.html.

[451] Sikorski, the former defense minister, admitted he knew about the
Bush administration’s illegal plot to torture al Qaeda suspects. Watch the
man insist: “We don’t apologize” for it, and complain, “I hope that in the
future our allies keep our secrets rather better.” Tim Sebastian, “When did
Sikorski know about CIA torture?” DW News Conflict Zone,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=qjosWra6Zgk.
[452] Adam Easton, “Poland’s Crucial Role as Yanukovych’s Rule
Crumbled,” BBC, February 25, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-
26342882.

[453] Photo of White Supremacist Banners at Kiev City Hall, February 21,
2014, https://i1.ytimg.com/vi/q-dHVZTtTxQ/maxresdefault.jpg.

[454] Anastasia Zanuda, “How Yanukovych left Ukraine: the versions from
the first mouth,” BBC Ukraine, February 22, 2017,
https://bbc.com/ukrainian/features-russian-39049755.

[455] Murray Brewster, “Canadian Embassy Used as Safe Haven During

Ukraine Uprising, Investigation Finds,” The Canadian Press, July 12, 2015,
https://cbc.ca/news/politics/canadian-embassy-used-as-safe-haven-during-
ukraine-uprising-investigation-finds-1.3148719.

[456] Olga Onuch and Gwendolyn Sasse, “The Maidan in Movement:

Diversity and the Cycles of Protest,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 68, No. 4
(March 2016), 573, https://researchgate.net/publication/299518223.

[457] Serhiy Kudelia, “When Numbers Are Not Enough: The Strategic Use
of Violence in Ukraine’s 2014 Revolution,” Comparative Politics, Vol. 50,
No. 4 (July 2018), 501–21, https://jstor.org/stable/26532701.

[458] Andrew Higgins, “Mystery Surrounds Death of Ukrainian Activist,”

New York Times, April 11, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/04/12/world/europe/mystery-surrounds-death-of-
fiery-ukrainian-activist.html.
[459] Oksana Kovalenko, “The centurion who changed the course of
history: It was necessary to push,” Ukrainska Pravda, February 24, 2014,
https://pravda.com.ua/articles/2014/02/24/7016048.

[460] Staff, “The Verkhovna Rada, the Presidential Administration, the

Cabinet of Ministers and the Ministry of Internal Affairs came under the
control of the Maidan,” Unian.net, February 22, 2014,
https://unian.net/politics/888104-verhovnaya-rada-administratsiya-
prezidenta-kabmin-i-mvd-pereshli-pod-kontrol-maydana.html.

[461] “Watch Yevhen Karas the leader of Ukraine’s neo-Nazi terror gang
C14’s,” War Diary Project, February 28, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=DOBntnuYCMA.

[462] James Jones, “The Battle For Ukraine,” PBS Frontline, May 27,
2014, https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/battle-for-ukraine.

[463] Olga Onuch and Gwendolyn Sasse, “The Maidan in Movement:

Diversity and the Cycles of Protest,” Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 68, No. 4
(March 2016), 573, https://researchgate.net/publication/299518223.

[464] Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Insufficiently diverse: The problem of

nonviolent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–
2014,” Journal of Eurasian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (March 2, 2020),
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1879366520928363.

[465] Volodymyr Ishchenko Archive at Jacobin,

https://jacobin.com/author/volodymyr-ishchenko.
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nonviolent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013–
2014,” Journal of Eurasian Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (March 2, 2020),
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1879366520928363.

[467] Colborne, 31.

[468] Press Release, “NewsGuard wins Pentagon-State Department contest

for detecting COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation,” Newsguard,
August 18, 2020, https://newsguardtech.com/press/newsguard-wins-
pentagon-state-department-contest-for-detecting-covid-19-misinformation-
and-disinformation; Matt Taibbi, “Newsguard Case Highlights the
Pentagon’s Censorship End-Around,” Racket News, October 25, 2023,
https://racket.news/p/newsguard-case-highlights-the-pentagons.

[469] Joe Lauria, “Evidence of US-Backed Coup in Kiev,” Consortium

News, December 29, 2022,
https://consortiumnews.com/2022/12/29/evidence-of-us-backed-coup-in-
kiev.

[470] Fred Weir, “Militaristic and anti-democratic, Ukraine’s far-right bides

its time,” Christian Science Monitor, April 15, 2019,
https://csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2019/0415/Militaristic-and-anti-
democratic-Ukraine-s-far-right-bides-its-time.

[471] Robert Parry, “Cheering a ‘Democratic’ Coup in Ukraine,”

Consortium News, December 10, 2019,
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/10/cheering-a-democratic-coup-in-
ukraine.

[472] Staff, “Ukraine: Speaker Oleksandr Turchynov named interim

president,” BBC, February 23, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-
26312008.

[473] Staff, “Profile: Petro Poroshenko,” Forbes, April 6, 2021,

https://forbes.com/profile/petro-poroshenko.

[474] Andrew Cockburn, “Undelivered Goods,” Harper’s, August 13, 2015,

https://harpers.org/2015/08/undelivered-goods.

[475] James Jones, “The Battle For Ukraine,” PBS Frontline, May 27,
2014, https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/battle-for-ukraine.

[476] De Ploeg, 208; See below.

[477] Anne Gearan, “In recording of US diplomat, blunt talk on Ukraine,”

Washington Post, February 6, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/in-purported-recording-
of-us-diplomat-blunt-talk-on-ukraine/2014/02/06/518240a4-8f4b-11e3-
84e1-27626c5ef5fb_story.html.

[478] Dan De Luce and Reid Standish, “What Will Ukraine Do Without
Uncle Joe?” Foreign Policy, October 30, 2016,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/30/what-will-ukraine-do-without-joe-
biden-putin-war-kiev-clinton-trump.
[479] Daisy Sindelar, “Was Yanukovych’s Ouster Constitutional?” RFERL,
February 23, 2014, https://rferl.org/a/was-yanukovychs-ouster-
constitutional/25274346.html.

[480] Staff, “Parliament Removes Yanukovych,” Kyiv Post, February 22,

2016, https://kyivpost.com/article/content/euromaidan/as-yanukovych-
flees-kyiv-parliament-takes-charge-337361.html.

[481] Staff, “Interim leader Turchynov stresses ‘European choice,’” BBC,

February 24, 2014, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26317912.

[482] Elena Chernenko and Alexander Gabuev, “‘The interests of the

Russian Federation and the United States in relation to Ukraine are
incompatible with each other,’” Kommersant, December 19, 2014,
https://kommersant.ru/doc/2636177; ‘неприкрытый’ has been translated
from Russian variously as ‘overt,’ ‘blatant,’ ‘undisguised’ or ‘naked.’

[483] Tweet by Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt, February 22, 2014,

https://x.com/USAmbPyatt/status/437308686810492929.

[484] Charap and Colton, 126.

[485] “Fact Sheet: US Support for Ukraine,” White House, September 18,
2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-
office/2014/09/18/fact-sheet-us-support-ukraine.

[486] Interview with author, Jeffrey Sachs, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, April 4, 2023, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/4-4-23-jeffery-
sachs-on-what-led-to-war-in-ukraine.

[487] Carla Marinucci, “Chevron redubs ship named for Bush aide,” San
Francisco Chronicle, May 5, 2001,
https://sfgate.com/politics/article/Chevron-redubs-ship-named-for-Bush-
aide-2922481.php.

[488] Condoleezza Rice, “Will America heed the wake-up call of Ukraine?”
Washington Post, March 7, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/condoleezza-rice-will-america-heed-
the-wake-up-call-of-ukraine/2014/03/07/cf087f74-a630-11e3-84d4-
e59b1709222c_story.html.

[489] Norman Podhoretz, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea

(New York: The Free Press, 1995); Justin Raimondo, “Trotsky, Strauss and
the Neocons,” Antiwar.com, June 13, 2003,
https://antiwar.com/justin/j061303.html; Jeet Heer, “Trotsky’s Ghost
Wandering the White House,” National Post, June 7, 2003,
https://archive.is/rDKEh; John B. Judis, “Trotskyism to Anachronism,”
Foreign Affairs, July/August 1995,
https://foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/1995-07-01/trotskyism-
anachronism.

[490] Justin Raimondo, “Coup in Kiev,” Antiwar.com, February 24, 2014,

https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2014/02/23/coup-in-kiev.
[491] Interview with author, Justin Raimondo, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, February 26, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/022614-
justin-raimondo.

[492] Interview with author, Pat Buchanan, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, March 5, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/030514-pat-
buchanan.

[493] John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,”
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-
crisis-west-s-fault.

[494] Staff, “Yanukovych signs order on last conscription and switching to

contract service army,” Interfax-Ukraine, October 14, 2013,
https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/yanukovych-
signs-order-on-last-conscription-and-switching-to-contract-service-army-
330496.html.

[495] Staff, “Ukraine reinstates conscription as crisis deepens,” BBC, May

2, 2014, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-27247428.

[496] Gideon Rose interview, “Crisis in Ukraine,” The Colbert Report,

February 24, 2014, https://cc.com/video/8067fc/the-colbert-report-crisis-in-
ukraine-gideon-rose.

[497] Kenneth Rapoza, “Ukraine Welcomes IMF Austerity Regime,”

Forbes, March 28, 2014,
https://forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2014/03/28/ukraine-welcomes-imf-
austerity-regime.

[498] Kenneth Rapoza, “Ukraine Welcomes IMF Austerity Regime,”

Forbes, March 28, 2014,
https://forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2014/03/28/ukraine-welcomes-imf-
austerity-regime.

[499] Sandrine Rastello, “Ukraine Premier Promises Economic Overhaul to

Win IMF Aid,” Bloomberg News, March 13, 2014,
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-03-13/ukraine-s-yatsenyuk-sees-
commitment-to-change-helping-imf-loan.

[500] Vice President Joe Biden, “Remarks by Vice President Joe Biden to
The Ukrainian Rada,” White House, December 9, 2015,
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/12/09/remarks-
vice-president-joe-biden-ukrainian-rada.

[501] De Ploeg, 74–79.

[502] Graham Stack, “Money laundering in Ukraine,” Journal of Money

Laundering Control, Vol. 18 (July 2015), 382–94,
https://researchgate.net/publication/281431366_Money_laundering_in_Ukr
aine; De Ploeg, 88–90.

[503] De Ploeg, 94–97; Maria Zartovskaya, “If you go, go. How Yatsenyuk
is persuaded to resign, and who will become the next prime minister,”
Ukrainska Pravda, March 6, 2016,
https://pravda.com.ua/articles/2016/03/6/7101127.

[504] Vice President Joe Biden, “Remarks by Vice President Joe Biden and
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko at a Bilateral Meeting,” US Embassy
Kiev, December 7, 2015, https://ua.usembassy.gov/remarks-vice-president-
joe-biden-ukrainian-president-petro-poroshenko-bilateral-meeting.

[505] Sergii Leshchenko, “The Media’s Role,” Journal of Democracy, Vol.

25, No. 3 (July 2014), 52–57, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/549496.

[506] Andrew Kramer, “Ukraine Turns to Its Oligarchs for Political Help,”
New York Times, March 2, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/03/03/world/europe/ukraine-turns-to-its-
oligarchs-for-political-help.html.

[507] “Association Agreement between the European Union and its

Member States, of the one part, and Ukraine, of the other part,” May 29,
2014, https://publications.europa.eu/resource/cellar/4589a50c-e6e3-11e3-
8cd4-01aa75ed71a1.0006.03/DOC_1; Laura Smith-Spark, et al., “Ukraine
Signs EU Deal that Sparked Months of Upheaval; Extends Cease-fire,”
CNN, June 27, 2014,
https://edition.cnn.com/2014/06/27/world/europe/ukraine-crisis.

[508] Danny Hakim, “Ukraine Faces Hurdles in Restoring Its Farming

Legacy,” New York Times, May 27, 2014,
http://nytimes.com/2014/05/28/business/ukraine-faces-hurdles-in-restoring-
its-farming-legacy.html.

[509] J.P. Sottile, “Corporate Interests Behind Ukraine Putsch,” Consortium

News, March 16, 2014, https://consortiumnews.com/2014/03/16/corporate-
interests-behind-ukraine-putsch; Jettie Word, et al., “Walking on the West
Side: the World Bank and the IMF in the Ukraine Conflict,” Oakland
Institute, July 28, 2014,
https://oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/OurBiz_Brief_Uk
raine.pdf; Elizabeth Fraser and Frédéric Mousseau, “The Corporate
Takeover of Ukrainian Agriculture,” Oakland Institute, December 2014,
https://oaklandinstitute.org/sites/oaklandinstitute.org/files/Brief_CorporateT
akeoverofUkraine_0.pdf; Luca Celada, “The truth about corporations taking
over Ukrainian agricultural lands,” Il Manifesto, June 1, 2022,
https://ilmanifesto.it/corporation-allarrembaggio-delle-terre-agricole-
ucraine.

[510] Staff, “Ukraine Votes To Abandon Neutrality, Set Sights On NATO,”

RFERL, December 23, 2014, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-parliament-
abandons-neutrality/26758725.html.

[511] Leonid Bershidsky, “Ukraine Is in Danger of Becoming a Failed

State,” Bloomberg News, November 6, 2015,
https://bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-06/unreformed-ukraine-is-
self-destructing.
[512] “Testimony of Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of
European and Eurasian Affairs Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Hearing: ‘Ukrainian Reforms Two Years after the Maidan Revolution and
the Russian Invasion,’” March 15, 2016,
https://foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/031516_Nuland_Testimony.pdf.

[513] Leonid Bershidsky, “Ukraine Is in Danger of Becoming a Failed

State,” Bloomberg News, November 6, 2015,
https://bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-11-06/unreformed-ukraine-is-
self-destructing.

[514] Timothy Heritage, “Putin says West may use NGOs to stir unrest in
Russia,” Reuters, April 7, 2014, https://reuters.com/article/us-russia-putin-
security/putin-says-west-may-use-ngos-to-stir-unrest-in-russia-
idUSBREA3619X20140407; He had previously been convinced to water
down his 2005 restrictions: Thomas Carothers, “The Backlash Against
Democracy Promotion,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2006,
https://foreignaffairs.com/united-states/backlash-against-democracy-
promotion.

[515] James Brooke, “Ukraine Protesters Warn Against Trade Pact with
Moscow,” Voice of America, December 15, 2013,
https://voanews.com/a/eu-suspends-work-on-trade-deal-with-
ukraine/1810652.html.

[516] Will Englund, “In Ukraine, Sens. McCain, Murphy address protesters,
promise support,” Washington Post, December 15, 2013,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/in-ukraine-us-sens-mccain-murphy-
address-protesters/2013/12/15/be72cffe-65b0-11e3-997b-
9213b17dac97_story.html.

[517] Senator Chris Murphy, “US Policy Toward Ukraine,” Washington

Journal, February 25, 2014, https://c-span.org/video/?317883-
4/washington-journal-developments-ukraine; Glenn Greenwald, “Who
Caused This War – The US’ Twisted Interference in Ukraine,” System
Update, March 23, 2023, https://youtube.com/watch?v=Vwjy7yIACDs.

[518] Ludovica Iaccino, “Ukraine Nazis: Is America Backing EuroMaidan

Extremists?” International Business Times, February 25, 2014,
https://ibtimes.co.uk/america-backing-neo-nazis-euromaidan-1437848.

[519] John-Paul Himka, Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: The

OUN and UPA’s Participation of the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry 1941–
1944 (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2021), 128; Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe,
Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist:
Fascism, Genocide, and Cult (Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2014), 58–59.

[520] Petro, 57–58.

[521] Stéphane Courtois, et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes,

Terror, Repression (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 98–107.

[522] Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, 53.

[523] Sheldon L. Richman, “War Communism to NEP: The Road from
Serfdom,” The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Winter 1981),
https://cdn.mises.org/5_1_5_0.pdf.

[524] Courtois, et al., 159–68; Conquest, 303; Slavko Nowytski, Harvest of

Despair: the 1933 Ukrainian Famine (1983), https://youtube.com/watch?
v=M_dnRA5NFhs.

[525] Gareth Jones, “Communists’ Five-Year Plan: How it is Working in

Russia,” The Western Mail, April 7, 1931,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/how_it_is_working.htm.

[526] Conquest, 89.

[527] Conquest, 118–19; Edward Hallett Carr, Socialism in One Country:

1924–1926, Vol. 1 (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 99.

[528] Gareth Jones, “Russia’s Future,” The Western Mail, April 8, 1931,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/russias_future.htm.

[529] Joseph Stalin, “Speech on Agrarian Policy,” December 27, 1929,

https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/111stalin.html.

[530] Moshe Lewin, Political Undercurrents in Soviet Economic Debate

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 176.

[531] Conquest, 89–93.

[532] Gareth Jones, “The Peasant on the Farm,” London Times, October 14,
1931, https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/peasant_on_the_farm.htm.

[533] Conquest, 223.

[534] Conquest, 117–43.

[535] Gareth Jones, “Communists’ Five-Year Plan: Forces Behind Stalin’s

Dictatorship,” The Western Mail, April 9, 1931,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/forces_behind_stalin.htm; Conquest,
235.

[536] Rupert Butler, Stalin’s Instruments of Terror: KGB, CHEKA, NKVD,

OGPU, from 1913 to 1953 (London: Amber Books, 2006), 40–41, 61.

[537] Conquest, 124–25, 170, 246–47.

[538] Conquest, 220.

[539] Gareth Jones, “Newspaper Articles Regarding Trips to Russia and

Ukraine 1930–1933,”
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/soviet_articles.htm.

[540] Gareth Jones, Experiences in Russia 1931: A Diary (Pittsburgh: Alton

Press, Inc., 1932),
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/experiences_in_russia_1931.htm.

[541] Gareth Jones, “Will there be Soup? Part One,” The Western Mail,
October 15, 1932,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/will_there_be_soup1.htm.

[542] Gareth Jones, “Will there be Soup? Part Two,” The Western Mail,
October 17, 1932,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/will_there_be_soup2.htm.

[543] Conquest, 223–27.

[544] Conquest, 243.

[545] Gareth Jones, “Famine grips Russia Millions Dying. Idle on Rise,
Says Briton,” Evening Post, March 19, 1933,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/millions_dying.htm.

[546] Gareth Jones, “Famine Rules Russia,” London Evening Standard,

March 31, 1933,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/famine_rules_russia.htm.

[547] Gareth Jones, “Seizure of Land and Slaughter of Livestock,” The

Western Mail, April 8, 1933,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/siezure_of_land.htm.

[548] Malcolm Muggeridge, “Famine in North Caucasus,” Manchester

Guardian, March 25, 1933,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/soviet_and_the_peasantry_1.htm;
Malcolm Muggeridge, “Hunger in the Ukraine,” Manchester Guardian,
March 27, 1933,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/soviet_and_the_peasantry_2.htm;
Malcolm Muggeridge, “Poor Harvest in Prospect,” Manchester Guardian,
March 28, 1933,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/soviet_and_the_peasantry_3.htm.

[549] Whiting Williams, “My Journey Through Famine-Stricken Russia,”

Answers, February 24, 1934,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/whiting_williams_1934.htm; Whiting
Williams, “Why Russia is Hungry!” Answers, March 3, 1934,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/williams_hungry.htm.

[550] 546 search results for “Holodomor” at JSTOR,

https://jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=Holodomor.

[551] Conquest, 249–59.

[552] Okay, well, I mean, after I realized it was a pun, I left it. So.

[553] Gareth Jones, “Famine Rules Russia,” London Evening Standard,

March 31, 1933,
https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/famine_rules_russia.htm.

[554] This is where that saying comes from.

[555] Walter Duranty, “Russians Hungry But Not Starving,” New York
Times, March 31, 1933,
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1933/03/31/99218053.pdf.

[556] Staff, “Foreign News: Russia,” Time, April 10, 1933,

https://garethjones.org/soviet_articles/duranty_rebuttal.htm.
[557] David D. Kirkpatrick, “Pulitzer Board Won’t Void 32 Award to Times
Writer,” New York Times, November 22, 2003,
https://nytimes.com/2003/11/22/us/pulitzer-board-won-t-void-32-award-to-
times-writer.html.

[558] Walter Duranty, “Soviet Advanced by Farm Victory,” New York

Times, January 1, 1931,
https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1931/01/01/96180501.pdf.

[559] Simon Sebag Montefiore, “Donald Rayfield: A Seditious and Sinister

Tribe—the war-torn history of Crimea’s Tatars,” Financial Times, August 8,
2024, https://ft.com/content/93b50116-0cc5-4a25-a48d-1ab6c58d6307.

[560] Arūnas Bubnys, et al., “The Baltic States: Auxiliaries and Waffen-SS
soldiers from Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania,” in Jochen Böhler and Robert
Gerwarth (eds), The Waffen-SS: A European History (Oxford: Oxford
Academic, 2016), https://academic.oup.com/book/1399/chapter-
abstract/140732828; Joseph Berger, “Some in Estonia Greeted Nazis in ’41
as Liberators,” New York Times, April 22, 1987,
https://nytimes.com/1987/04/22/world/some-in-estonia-greeted-nazis-in-41-
as-liberators.html.

[561] John Prados, Safe For Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA
(Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 70.

[562] Timothy Snyder, “A Fascist Hero in Democratic Kiev,” New York

Review of Books, February 24, 2010,
https://nybooks.com/daily/2010/02/24/a-fascist-hero-in-democratic-kiev.

[563] Himka, 136–37; Rossoliński-Liebe, 72–73.

[564] Petro, 60; Himka, 143–44; Rossoliński-Liebe, 167.

[565] Rossoliński-Liebe, 117–51.

[566] Rossoliński-Liebe, 139.

[567] Himka, 143; Rossoliński-Liebe, 166.

[568] Joe Conason, “To Catch a Nazi,” Village Voice, February 11, 1986,
https://villagevoice.com/2020/02/26/to-catch-a-nazi.

[569] Christopher Simpson, Blowback: The First Full Account of America’s

Recruitment of Nazis and Its Disastrous Effect on the Cold War, Our
Domestic and Foreign Policy (New York: Collier Books, 1989), 161.

[570] Volodymyr Martynets, Zhydivs’ka problema v Ukraїni (London:

Williams, Lea & Co., 1938), 10, 14–15, cited in Rudling, “The OUN, the
UPA and the Holocaust.”

[571] Iaroslav Orshan, “The Age of Nationalism,” in Al’manakh Avanhardi

(Paris: 1938), 41.

[572] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[573] Rossoliński-Liebe, 74–77; Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA
and the Holocaust: A Study in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The
Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies, No. 2107
(November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[574] Himka, 146.

[575] Petro, 60.

[576] Rossoliński-Liebe, 78.

[577] Rossoliński-Liebe, 79–80.

[578] Rossoliński-Liebe, 107.

[579] Rossoliński-Liebe, 83, 177.

[580] Rossoliński-Liebe, 168.

[581] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[582] Himka, 219.

[583] Himka, 225.

[584] Himka, 226.

[585] Rossoliński-Liebe, 193.

[586] Ksenya Kiebuzinski and Alexander Motyl (eds.), The Great West
Ukrainian Prison Massacre of 1941 – A Sourcebook (Amsterdam:
Amsterdam University Press, 2016),
https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/53241/9789048526
826.pdf; Staff, “The 1941 NKVD Prison Massacres in Western Ukraine,”
National World War II Museum, June 7, 2021,
https://nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/1941-nkvd-prison-massacres-
western-ukraine; Himka, 194–97; Kai Struve, Deutsche Herrschaft (Berlin:
De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), 219–21, 278–88, cited in Himka, 195. A
year before, the Soviet regime had slaughtered 22,000 Polish military and
civilian leaders in a mass execution in the Katyn Forest, a crime which
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D.
Roosevelt were well aware of and covered up, blaming the atrocity on the
Germans: “Records Relating to the Katyn Forest Massacre,” National
Archives, June 5, 2023, https://archives.gov/research/foreign-policy/katyn-
massacre; Staff, “Memos show US helped cover up Soviet massacre,” AP,
September 10, 2012, https://cbsnews.com/news/memos-show-us-helped-
cover-up-soviet-massacre.

[587] Himka, 203, 232, 255, 260–61; Simpson, 164.

[588] Marco Carynnyk, “Foes of our rebirth: Ukrainian nationalist
discussions about Jews, 1929–1947,” Nationalities Papers, Vol. 39, No. 3
(May 2011), 332–33,
https://researchgate.net/publication/233467822_Foes_of_our_rebirth_Ukrai
nian_nationalist_discussions_about_Jews_1929-1947; Rossoliński-Liebe,
215.

[589] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[590] Stepan Bandera, “Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood,” Samostiyna

Ukraina, June 30, 1941, https://en-academic.com/dic.nsf/enwiki/9105859.

[591] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160;
Himka, 208–09.

[592] Rossoliński-Liebe, 216.

[593] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Volume 1 (Munich: Institut für

Zeitgeschichte, 1925), 584; Petro, 62; Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of
Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge: Belknap
Press, 2008), 44–45.
[594] Rossoliński-Liebe, 246.

[595] CIA Report on Stepan Bandera, December 5, 1951,

https://cia.gov/readingroom/docs/BANDERA%2C%20STEFAN_0016.pdf;
Rossoliński-Liebe, 247.

[596] Himka, 227; Rossoliński-Liebe, 285.

[597] Richard Breitman, et al., US Intelligence and the Nazis (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2005), 250.

[598] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[599] Himka, 157–72, 191–94.

[600] Omer Bartov, “On Eastern Galicia’s Past & Present,” Daedalus, Fall
2007, https://amacad.org/publication/eastern-galicias-past-present.

[601] Marco Carynnyk, “The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Its

Attitude toward Germans and Jews: Iaroslav Stets’ko’s 1941 Zhyttiepys,”
Harvard Ukrainian Studies, January 1999,
https://researchgate.net/profile/Marco-
Carynnyk/publication/283606261_The_Organization_of_Ukrainian_Nation
alists_and_Its_Attitude_toward_Germans_and_Jews_Iaroslav_Stets%27ko
%27s_1941_Zhyttiepys/links/5728f1b308ae2efbfdb7ebf3/The-
Organization-of-Ukrainian-Nationalists-and-Its-Attitude-toward-Germans-
and-Jews-Iaroslav-Stetskos-1941-Zhyttiepys.pdf; Himka, 238, 241.

[602] Rossoliński-Liebe, 242.

[603] Thomas Sandkühler, “Endlösung” in Galizien: Der Judenmord in

Ostpolen und die Rettungsinitiativen von Berthold Beitz 1941–1944 (Bonn:
Dietz, 1996), 113; Karel C. Berkhoff and Marco Carynnyk, “The
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and Its Attitude toward Germans
and Jews: Iaroslav Stets’ko’s 1941 Zhyttiepys,” Harvard Ukrainian Studies,
Vol. 23, No. 3/4 (January 1999), 149–84,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41036794; Himka, 238, 241.

[604] Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “Survivor Testimonies and the Coming

to Terms with the Holocaust in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia: The Case of
the Ukrainian Nationalists,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 34,
No. 1 (September 16, 2019), 221–40,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0888325419831351; Himka,
301, 302.

[605] Himka, 13, 199, 201, 241–55.

[606] Rossoliński-Liebe, 205–13.

[607] Rossoliński-Liebe, 218–19.

[608] Breitman, et al.

[609] Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War
Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: National
Archives, 2012), https://archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf,
75.

[610] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[611] Himka, 256–85, 286–303.

[612] Alexander Kruglov, “Jewish Losses in Ukraine, 1941–1944,” in The

Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization, Ray Brandon and
Wendy Lower (eds.) (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 274.

[613] Himka, 217.

[614] Larry Luxner, “New center sheds light on previously unknown details
of Holocaust’s Babyn Yar massacre,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
September 29, 2020, https://jta.org/2020/09/29/global/new-center-sheds-
light-on-previously-unknown-details-of-holocausts-babyn-yar-massacre.

[615] Hahn, 39; Karel C. Berkhoff, “Dina Pronicheva’s Story of Surviving

the Babi Yar Massacre: German, Jewish, Soviet, Russian, and Ukrainian
Records,” in Brandon and Lower, 293, 301, 302–03, 309.

[616] Kruglov, 274–75.

[617] Jennifer Popowycz, “The ‘Holocaust by Bullets,’ in Ukraine,”
National World War II Museum, January 24, 2022,
https://nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/ukraine-holocaust.

[618] Brandon and Lower, 11.

[619] Rossoliński-Liebe, 241.

[620] Himka, 13.

[621] Himka, 308.

[622] Himka, 339–51.

[623] Himka, 321–33; Philip Friedman, “The Destruction of the Jews of

Lwów,” in Philip Friedman, Roads to Extinction: Essays on the Holocaust,
edited by Ada June Friedman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1980), 263.

[624] Jan Grabowski, Hunt for the Jews: Betrayal and Murder in German-
Occupied Poland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 101–20;
Himka, 333–37.

[625] Alexander Prusin and Gabriel N. Finder, “Collaboration in Eastern

Galicia: The Ukrainian police and the Holocaust,” East European Jewish
Affairs, Vol. 34, No. 2 (December 2004), 95–118,
https://researchgate.net/publication/233073604_Collaboration_in_Eastern_
Galicia_The_Ukrainian_police_and_the_Holocaust.
[626] Rossoliński-Liebe, 255.

[627] Conn Hallinan, “The Dark Side of the Ukraine Revolt,” Foreign
Policy in Focus, March 4, 2014, https://fpif.org/dark-side-ukraine-revolt.

[628] Omer Bartov, “On Eastern Galicia’s Past & Present,” Daedalus, Fall
2007, https://amacad.org/publication/eastern-galicias-past-present.

[629] Himka, 13; Rossoliński-Liebe, 241–42.

[630] Rob Gillies, “Zelenskyy speaks before Canadian Parliament in his

campaign to shore up support for Ukraine,” AP, September 22, 2023,
https://apnews.com/article/zelenskyy-trudeau-canada-ukraine-parliament-
b0f23d207592031cedb030292eb3ae01.

[631] “Research Starters: Worldwide Deaths in World War II,” National

World War II Museum, https://nationalww2museum.org/students-
teachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-worldwide-
deaths-world-war.

[632] Yaroslav Hunka, “Photo,” Combatant’s News, October 29, 2010,

https://komb-a-ingwar.blogspot.com/2010/10/blog-post_4610.html;
Yaroslav Hunka, “Photo,” Combatant’s News, October 31, 2010,
https://komb-a-ingwar.blogspot.com/2010/10/blog-post_31.html.

[633] Lev Golinkin, “Zelenskyy joins Canadian Parliament’s ovation to 98-

year-old veteran who fought with Nazis,” The Forward, September 24,
2023, https://forward.com/fast-forward/561927/zelenskyy-joins-canadian-
parliaments-ovation-to-98-year-old-veteran-who-fought-with-nazis.

[634] Yaroslav Hunka, “My Generation,” Combatant’s News, March 21,

2011, https://komb-a-ingwar.blogspot.com/2011/03/blog-post_21.html.

[635] Ellen Francis, “Polish official wants Canada to extradite Ukrainian

veteran of Nazi unit,” Washington Post, September 27, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/09/27/poland-ukrainian-nazi-
veteran-canada-extradition.

[636] Lev Golinkin, “Zelenskyy joins Canadian Parliament’s ovation to 98-

year-old veteran who fought with Nazis,” The Forward, September 24,
2023, https://forward.com/fast-forward/561927/zelenskyy-joins-canadian-
parliaments-ovation-to-98-year-old-veteran-who-fought-with-nazis.

[637] Chrystia Freeland, “My Ukraine,” Brookings Institution, May 12,

2015,
http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2015/myukraine.html.

[638] David Pugliese, “Chrystia Freeland’s granddad was indeed a Nazi

collaborator – so much for Russian disinformation,” Ottawa Citizen, March
8, 2017, https://ottawacitizen.com/news/national/defence-watch/chrystia-
freelands-granddad-was-indeed-a-nazi-collaborator-so-much-for-russian-
disinformation; Jeremy Appel, “Canada’s Future Prime Minister Needs to
Come Clean About Her Nazi Collaborationist Grandfather,” Tablet, May 12,
2022, https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/chrystia-freeland-needs-
to-come-clean-about-her-nazi-collaborationist-grandfather.

[639] Rossoliński-Liebe, 254–55.

[640] Alan Freeman, “Russia should stop calling my grandfather a Nazi,

says Canada’s foreign minister,” Washington Post, March 9, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/03/09/canadas-
foreign-minister-says-russia-is-spreading-disinformation-about-her-
grandfather.

[641] Freeland’s uncle, Chomiak’s son-in-law, is historian John-Paul

Himka, author of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Holocaust: The OUN and
UPA’s Participation of the Destruction of Ukrainian Jewry 1941–1944,
which is dedicated to her; John-Paul Himka, “Krakivski visti and the Jews,
1943: A Contribution to the History of Ukrainian-Jewish Relations during
the Second World War,” Journal of Ukrainian Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1–2
(1996); Robert Fife, “Freeland knew her grandfather was editor of Nazi
newspaper,” Toronto Globe and Mail, March 7, 2017,
https://theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/freeland-knew-her-grandfather-
was-editor-of-nazi-newspaper/article34236881.

[642] Max Blumenthal, “Canada’s honoring of Nazi vet exposes Ottawa’s

longstanding Ukraine policy,” Grayzone, September 26, 2023,
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/09/26/canadas-ukrainian-nazi-ottawas-policy;
Tweet by Max Blumenthal, May 7, 2023,
https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1655314116360151041.
[643] Rossoliński-Liebe, 316; Robert Scheinberg, “Canada knowingly
admitted SS members after World War II,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, June
5, 1997, https://jta.org/1997/06/05/lifestyle/canada-knowingly-admitted-ss-
members-after-world-war-ii.

[644] Prados, Safe, 70.

[645] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[646] Philip Friedman, “Ukrainian-Jewish Relations During the Nazi

Occupation,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, Vol. 12 (1959), 184,
https://degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110970449.358/html.

[647] Rossoliński-Liebe, 258–60.

[648] Himka, 352–56.

[649] Rossoliński-Liebe, 266–79.

[650] Colborne, 23.

[651] Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, “Survivor Testimonies and the Coming

to Terms with the Holocaust in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia: The Case of
the Ukrainian Nationalists,” East European Politics and Societies, Vol. 34,
No. 1 (September 16, 2019), 221–40,
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0888325419831351.
[652] Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War
Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: National
Archives, 2012), https://archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf,
75.

[653] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[654] Timothy Snyder, “A Fascist Hero in Democratic Kiev,” New York

Review of Books, February 24, 2010,
https://nybooks.com/daily/2010/02/24/a-fascist-hero-in-democratic-kiev.

[655] Timothy Snyder, The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine,

Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003),
169.

[656] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160;
Rossoliński-Liebe, 268.

[657] Breitman and Goda, Hitler’s Shadow, 75.

[658] Prados, Safe, 70; Breitman, et al., 250–25.

[659] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[660] Simpson, 162–63.

[661] Rossoliński-Liebe, 288.

[662] John Prados, The Ghosts of Langley: Into the Heart of the CIA (New
York: The New Press, 2017), 81; Prados, Safe, 70–71.

[663] Hahn, 41–42; Rossoliński-Liebe, 296–97, 316.

[664] Piotr Zychowicz, “The Polish Operation,” Institute of National

Remembrance, March 3, 2021, https://ipn.gov.pl/en/digital-
resources/articles/7150,The-Polish-Operation.html.

[665] Rossoliński-Liebe, 291.

[666] Rossoliński-Liebe, 291–93.

[667] Peter Nimitz, “Roots of the Donbas Wars,” Nemets, March 4, 2023,
https://nemets.substack.com/p/roots-of-the-Donbas-war.

[668] Konstantin Skorkin, “A Counter-Elite Takes Power: the New Leaders

of the Donbas,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 16,
2018, https://carnegiemoscow.org/commentary/75549.
[669] Carl Ogelsby, “The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt,” Covert Action
Quarterly, Fall 1990, https://aarclibrary.org/the-secret-treaty-of-fort-hunt-
an-article-by-carl-oglesby.

[670] Simpson, 40–42.

[671] Simpson, 43.

[672] Reinhard Gehlen, The Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard

Gehlen (New York: Popular Library, 1972), 122.

[673] Gehlen, 123.

[674] Carl Ogelsby, “The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt,” Covert Action
Quarterly, Fall 1990, https://aarclibrary.org/the-secret-treaty-of-fort-hunt-
an-article-by-carl-oglesby.

[675] Rossoliński-Liebe, 295–309.

[676] Simpson, 46.

[677] Kevin C. Ruffner, Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship
with Ukrainian Nationalists, Central Intelligence Agency, January 1, 1998,
https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/cold-war-allies-the-origins-of-cias-
relationship-with-ukrainian-nationalists.

[678] “NSC 50,” Report by Secretary of State Acheson and Secretary of

Defense Johnson to the National Security Council, July 1, 1949,
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945-50Intel/d384.
[679] John Prados, Presidents’ Secret Wars: CIA and Pentagon Covert
Operations from World War II Through the Persian Gulf (Chicago:
Elephant Paperbacks, 1986, 1996), 55.

[680] Simpson, 53.

[681] Rossoliński-Liebe, 310–11.

[682] Prados, Presidents’, 56.

[683] Joe Conason, “To Catch a Nazi,” Village Voice, February 11, 1986,
https://villagevoice.com/2020/02/26/to-catch-a-nazi; Reinhard Gehlen, The
Service: The Memoirs of General Reinhard Gehlen (New York: Popular
Library, 1972), 241.

[684] Carl Ogelsby, “The Secret Treaty of Fort Hunt,” Covert Action
Quarterly, Fall 1990, https://aarclibrary.org/the-secret-treaty-of-fort-hunt-
an-article-by-carl-oglesby; Rossoliński-Liebe, 252.

[685] Peter Grose, Operation Rollback, America’s Secret War Behind the
Iron Curtain (Boston: Mariner Books, 2001), 98.

[686] Rossoliński-Liebe, 321.

[687] Rossoliński-Liebe, 327, 331.

[688] Simpson, 163.

[689] Simpson, 166, 168.

[690] Rossoliński-Liebe, 332–33.

[691] Per Anders Rudling, “The OUN, the UPA and the Holocaust: A Study
in the Manufacture of Historical Myths,” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian
and East European Studies, No. 2107 (November 2011),
https://carlbeckpapers.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/cbp/article/view/164/160.

[692] Richard Breitman and Norman J.W. Goda, Hitler’s Shadow: Nazi War
Criminals, US Intelligence and the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: National
Archives, 2012) https://archives.gov/files/iwg/reports/hitlers-shadow.pdf.

[693] Breitman, et al., 252–55.

[694] Eric Lichtblau, The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe
Haven for Hitler’s Men (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014).

[695] Dave Davies, “How Thousands Of Nazis Were ‘Rewarded’ With Life
In The US,” NPR News, November 5, 2014,
https://npr.org/2014/11/05/361427276/how-thousands-of-nazis-were-
rewarded-with-life-in-the-u-s.

[696] Grose, 180–82.

[697] Kevin C. Ruffner, Cold War Allies: The Origins of CIA’s Relationship
with Ukrainian Nationalists, Central Intelligence Agency, January 1, 1998,
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[710] See above.

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[777] Rossoliński-Liebe, 492–99.

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News, November 7, 2024, https://foxnews.com/media/scientific-american-
editor-blast-f-ing-fascists-who-elected-donald-trump.

[813] Robert Beckhusen, “Ukrainian Election’s Real Losers – Far Right

Parties,” War Is Boring, October 26, 2014, https://medium.com/war-is-
boring/ukrainian-elections-real-losers-far-right-parties-94f4f7c0cdab.

[814] Joe Sommerlad, “Who are Ukraine’s neo-Nazi Azov Battalion?”

Independent, March 24, 2022,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-azov-battalion-
mariupol-neo-nazis-b2043022.html.

[815] Staff, “Azov Movement,” Mapping Militant Organizations, Stanford

University, August 2022, https://archive.is/aCFVJ.

[816] See below.

[817] Staff, “Azov Movement,” Mapping Militant Organizations, Stanford

University, August 2022, https://archive.is/aCFVJ.

[818] Hahn, 190.

[819] Staff, “Rada appoints Andriy Parubiy its speaker,” Interfax-Ukraine,
April 14, 2016, https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/337629.html.

[820] Staff, “Analysis: US Cozies Up to Kiev Government Including Far

Right,” NBC News, March 30, 2014,
https://nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/analysis-u-s-cozies-kiev-
government-including-far-right-n66061.

[821] “Resolution on the situation in Ukraine,” 2012/2889(RSP), EU

Parliament, December 13, 2012,
https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/summary.do?
id=1239823&t=e&l=en.

[822] “How the far-right took top posts in Ukraine’s power vacuum,”
Channel 4, March 5, 2014, https://channel4.com/news/svoboda-ministers-
ukraine-new-government-far-right.

[823] Staff, “US Cozies Up to Kiev Government Including Far Right,”

NBC News, March 30, 2014, https://nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-
crisis/analysis-u-s-cozies-kiev-government-including-far-right-n66061.

[824] Damien Sharkov, “Ukraine’s Parliament Fully Behind Joining NATO:

Speaker,” Newsweek, June 14, 2016, https://newsweek.com/ukraines-
parliament-fully-behind-joining-nato-speaker-470313.

[825] Staff, “Ukraine Parliament Speaker Signs New Electoral Code Long
Pushed For By The West,” RFERL, August 27, 2019,
https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-parliament-speaker-signs-new-electoral-code-
long-pushed-for-by-the-west/30132165.html.

[826] Marcus Lütticke, “Far-right millstone,” DW, March 26, 2014,

https://dw.com/en/far-right-weighs-on-ukraine-government/a-17519960.

[827] Simon Shuster, “Many Ukrainians Want Russia To Invade,” Time,

March 1, 2014, https://time.com/11005/many-ukrainians-want-russia-to-
invade; Roman Olearchyk, “Arseniy Yatseniuk poised to become Ukraine
prime minister,” Financial Times, February 26, 2014,
https://ft.com/content/88987cf8-9f12-11e3-8663-00144feab7de.

[828] Mustafa Nayyem, “Behind the scenes of the Right Sector,” Ukrainska
Pravda, April 1, 2014,
https://pravda.com.ua/rus/articles/2014/04/1/7020952.

[829] Oksana Grytsenko and Shaun Walker, “Ukraine’s new parliament sits
for first time,” Guardian, November 27, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/27/ukraine-new-parliament—war-
east-mps.

[830] David Stern, “Ukraine crisis: Tension over rise of nationalist Yarosh,”
BBC, April 8, 2015, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-32216738; Staff,
“Former leader of Right Sector becomes advisor to Commander-in-Chief of
Ukrainian Armed Forces,” UA Wire, November 3, 2021,
https://uawire.org/former-leader-of-right-sector-becomes-advisor-to-
commander-in-chief-of-ukrainian-armed-forces.
[831] Harriet Salem, “Who exactly is governing Ukraine?” Guardian,
March 4, 2014, https://theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/04/who-
governing-ukraine-olexander-turchynov.

[832] Press Release, “Environment Minister Andriy Mokhnyk held a

telephone conversation with his Russian counterpart,” Ukrainian
Government Portal, March 19, 2014,
https://kmu.gov.ua/en/news/247117920.

[833] Staff, “Agriculture minister declares almost Hr 339,000 income in

2013,” Interfax-Ukraine, April 1, 2014,
https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/content/ukraine-politics/agriculture-
minster-declares-almost-hr-339000-income-in-2013-341686.html.

[834] Guy Faulconbridge, et al., “Toppled ‘mafia’ president cost Ukraine up

to $100 billion, prosecutor says,” Reuters, April 30, 2014,
https://reuters.com/article/world/toppled-mafia-president-cost-ukraine-up-
to-100-billion-prosecutor-says-idUSBREA3T0KA.

[835] Serhiy Kvit, “Serhiy Kvit: The ideology of the EuroMaidan

Revolution,” Kyiv Post, March 24, 2014,
https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/opinion/op-ed/serhiy-kvit-the-ideology-
of-the-euromaidan-revolution-340665.html.

[836] Staff, “Azov Movement,” Mapping Militant Organizations, Stanford

University, August 2022, https://archive.is/aCFVJ.
[837] Sam Sokol, “Kiev regional police head accused of neo-Nazi ties,”
Jerusalem Post, November 12, 2014, http://jpost.com/Diaspora/Kiev-
regional-police-head-accused-of-neo-Nazi-ties-381559.

[838] Staff, “Cabinet appoints Troyan as deputy interior minister of

Ukraine,” Interfax-Ukraine, February 8, 2017,
https://kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/cabinet-appoints-troyan-deputy-
interior-minister-ukraine.html.

[839] Daria Zubkova, “National Police Deputy Head Troyan Resigns,”

Ukra News, November 5, 2021, https://ukranews.com/en/news/812359-
national-police-deputy-head-troyan-resigns.

[840] Cited in Per Anders Rudling, “The Return of the Ukrainian Far Right
– The Case of VO Svoboda,” in Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson (eds.),
Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (London
and New York: Routledge, 2013), 228–55, http://academia.edu/2481420.

[841] Paul Moreira, Ukraine: Masks of the Revolution, Notre Monde,

November 6, 2021, https://youtube.com/watch?v=VLXtWfTcLC4.

[842] David Broder, “The Far Right Wants to Take Over Europe, and She’s
Leading the Way,” New York Times, April 22, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/04/22/opinion/meloni-europe-elections.html;
Antony Paone and Leigh Thomas, “Far-right French presidential hopeful
promises ‘reconquest’ at rally,” Reuters, December 6, 2021,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/far-right-french-presidential-hopeful-
promises-reconquest-rally-2021-12-05; Francesc Badia i Dalmases and
Sergio Calderón, “Reconquering Europe? VOX and the extreme right in
Spain,” Open Democracy, March 27, 2019,
https://opendemocracy.net/en/democraciaabierta/reconquering-europe-vox-
and-extreme-right-spain; James Masters and Laura Perez-Maestro, “Spain’s
Vox party wins seats as far-right party surges for first time since Franco,”
CNN, December 3, 2018, https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/03/europe/spain-
far-right-vox-andalucia-intl/index.html; Ishaan Tharoor, “Right-wing
nationalists are marching into the future by rewriting the past,” Washington
Post, February 11, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/02/11/history-patriotism-right-
wing-politics.

[843] Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of

Authoritarianism (New York: Doubleday, 2020).

[844] Murray N. Rothbard, “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the

Intellectuals,” The Journal of Libertarian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Winter
1989), https://cdn.mises.org/9_1_5_0.pdf.

[845] Anne Applebaum, “Nationalism Is Exactly What Ukraine Needs,”

The New Republic, May 12, 2014,
https://newrepublic.com/article/117505/ukraines-only-hope-nationalism.

[846] Nataliya Vasilyeva, “15,000 Ukraine nationalists march for divisive

Bandera,” AP, January 1, 2014, https://apnews.com/international-news-
general-news-bbc1075c59c44076b6284dcb008ac6c7.
[847] Devansh Dutt, “Chief rabbi of Ukraine orders Jews to flee after recent
violent attacks on yeshiva students,” Your Jewish News, March 12, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140312203245/http://yourjewishnews.com/2
014/02/n31613.html.

[848] Sam Sokol, “Ukrainian Jews split on dangers of protest movement,”

Jerusalem Post, December 4, 2013, http://jpost.com/Jewish-World/Jewish-
Features/Ukrainian-Jews-split-on-dangers-of-protest-movement-333907.

[849] Brian Whelan, “Far-right group at heart of Ukraine protests meet US

senator,” Channel 4, December 16, 2013,
http://channel4.com/news/ukraine-mccain-far-right-svoboda-anti-semitic-
protests.

[850] Cnaan Liphshiz, “Hundreds march in Ukraine in annual tribute to

Nazi collaborator,” Times of Israel, January 4, 2021,
https://timesofisrael.com/hundreds-march-in-ukraine-in-annual-tribute-to-
nazi-collaborator; Cnaan Lipshiz, “Far-right protesters in Ukraine demand
Israel apologize for communism,” Jerusalem Post, January 8, 2021,
https://jpost.com/diaspora/antisemitism/far-right-protesters-in-ukraine-
demand-israel-apologize-for-communism-654711.

[851] Sam Sokol, “Kiev regional police head accused of neo-Nazi ties,”
Jerusalem Post, November 9, 2014, http://jpost.com/Diaspora/Russians-
accuse-Kiev-of-hiding-crimes-against-Jews-381252.
[852] Oleksandr Feldman, “Op-Ed: Ukraine protest movement must shun
anti-Semitic elements,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, January 15, 2014,
https://jta.org/2014/01/15/opinion/ukrainian-protest-movement-must-shun-
anti-semitic-elements.

[853] Christopher Miller, “In Ukraine, Ultranationalist Militia Strikes Fear

In Some Quarters,” RFERL, January 30, 2018, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-
azov-right-wing-militia-to-patrol-kyiv/29008036.html.

[854] “WJC: Ukrainian priests must stop glorifying Nazis,” Jewish

Telegraphic Agency, August 23, 2013, http://jta.org/2013/08/23/news-
opinion/world/wjc-ukrainian-priest-must-stop-glorifying-nazis.

[855] Efraim Zuroff, “Wiesenthal Center Condemns Initiative to Name

Kiev Streets for Ukrainian Nazi Collaborators Stefan Bandera and Roman
Shukhevych,” Simon Wiesenthal Center, July 5, 2017,
https://wiesenthal.com/about/news/wiesenthal-center-condemns-37.html.

[856] Staff, “WJC concerned by Ukraine’s decision to rename Kyiv

boulevard after ultra-nationalist complicit in murdering Jews during
Holocaust,” World Jewish Congress, July 8, 2016,
https://worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/wjc-concerned-by-ukraines-
decision-to-rename-kyiv-boulevard-after-ultra-nationalist-complicit-in-
murdering-jews-during-holocaust-7-1-2016.

[857] Daniel Rubin, et al., “Letter to President Petro Poroshenko,” National

Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry, January 23, 2017,
https://d2zhgehghqjuwb.cloudfront.net/accounts/10513/original/2017_01_2
3_Poroshenko_Kvasnovsky_Order_of_Freedom.pdf.

[858] Mark B. Levin, “Statement of Ukrainian Jewish Organizations on

Anti-Semitism,” National Coalition Supporting Eurasian Jewry (NCSEJ),
May 22, 2018, https://robly.com/archive?
id=17a4e5aba5a15e798f16c80277e534a5.

[859] Cnaan Liphshiz, “Report: Ukraine had more anti-Semitic incidents

than all former Soviet countries combined,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency,
January 28, 2018, https://jta.org/2018/01/28/israel/report-ukraine-had-more-
anti-semitic-incidents-than-all-former-soviet-countries-combined.

[860] Staff, “Ukraine Unveils Statue Honoring Nationalist Leader Behind

Regime That Killed Up to 50,000 Jews,” Haaretz, October 17, 2017,
https://haaretz.com/world-news/europe/2017-10-17/ty-article/ukraine-
unveils-statue-honoring-leader-who-killed-up-to-50-000-jews/0000017f-
db18-d856-a37f-ffd846110000.

[861] Jeffrey Veidlinger, “The Killing Fields of Ukraine,” Tablet, February

22, 2022, https://tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/killing-fields-
ukraine.

[862] James Angelos, “German far-right leader intentionally used banned

Nazi slogan, court rules,” Politico Europe, May 14, 2024,
https://politico.eu/article/german-far-right-leader-found-guilty-of-using-
banned-nazi-slogan-bjorn-hocke-afd-alternative-for-germany-thuringia.
[863] Petro, 75.

[864] Hahn, 147–48.

[865] Petro, 75–76.

[866] Hahn, 150.

[867] Palash Ghosh, “Watch Your Tongue: Language Controversy One Of

Fundamental Conflicts In Ukraine,” International Business Times, March 3,
2014, https://ibtimes.com/watch-your-tongue-language-controversy-one-
fundamental-conflicts-ukraine-1559069.

[868] Staff, “Ukrainian President Signs Controversial Language Bill Into

Law,” RFERL, September 26, 2017, https://rferl.org/a/ukrainian-
poroshenko-signs-controversial-language-bill-into-law/28757195.html.

[869] Staff, “Zhytomyr region bans movies, books, songs in Russian

language,” UNIAN, October 26, 2018, https://unian.info/society/10313430-
zhytomyr-region-bans-movies-books-songs-in-russian-language.html; Staff,
“Lviv region bans movies, books, songs in Russian until end of Russian
occupation,” UNIAN, September 19, 2018,
https://unian.info/society/10266729-lviv-region-bans-movies-books-songs-
in-russian-until-end-of-russian-occupation.html; Staff, “Russian music,
movies banned in public places in Ternopil region,” July 11, 2018,
https://ukrinform.net/rubric-society/2574636-russian-music-movies-
banned-in-public-places-in-ternopil-region.html.
[870] Staff, “Rada approves Ukrainian language TV quotas,” Kyiv Post,
May 23, 2017, https://kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/rada-approves-
ukrainian-language-tv-quotas.html; Staff, “Ukraine imposes language
quotas for radio playlists,” BBC, November 8, 2016,
https://bbc.com/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-37908828.

[871] See below.

[872] Kateryna Choursina, “Ukrainians Fight Police Over Recognitioin

[sic] of WWII Rebels,” Bloomberg News, October 14, 2014,
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-10-14/ukrainians-fight-police-
over-recognitioin-of-wwii-rebels.

[873] April Gordon, “Special Report 2020: A New Eurasian Far Right
Rising,” Freedom House, https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-
report/2020/new-eurasian-far-right-rising.

[874] Natalia Zinets and Alessandra Prentice, “US Warns Putin Against
Ukraine Grab Amid Break-up Fears,” Reuters, February 22, 2014,
https://reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-idINDEEA1M00520140223.

[875] Staff, “Crimean War, 1853–1856,” Encyclopedia Britannica, March

28, 2024, https://britannica.com/event/Crimean-War.

[876] Ludwig H. Dyck, “Sturgeon Catch 1942: The Siege of Sevastopol,”

WWII History Magazine, March 2005,
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/sturgeon-catch-1942-the-siege-
of-sevastopol; Robert Beckhusen, “Sevastopol’s Soviet Defenders Helped
Save Stalingrad,” War is Boring, June 10, 2017,
https://warisboring.com/sevastopols-red-army-defenders-helped-save-
stalingrad.

[877] Alan Yuhas and Raya Jalabi, “Ukraine crisis: why Russia sees Crimea
as its naval stronghold,” Guardian, March 7, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/07/ukraine-russia-crimea-naval-
base-tatars-explainer.

[878] “Meeting of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet,” February

19, 1954, https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/meeting-
presidium-supreme-soviet-union-soviet-socialist-republics.

[879] Mark Kramer, “Why Did Russia Give Away Crimea Sixty Years
Ago?” Cold War International History Project, No. 47,
https://wilsoncenter.org/publication/why-did-russia-give-away-crimea-
sixty-years-ago.

[880] Campana Aurélie, “Sürgün: The Crimean Tatars’ deportation and

exile,” Centre for History of Sciences Po, June 16, 2008,
https://sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-
resistance/fr/document/suerguen-crimean-tatars-deportation-and-exile.html.

[881] Staff, “All Ukrainian Population Census 2001,” State Statistics

Committee of Ukraine, 2001,
https://web.archive.org/web/20120618190710/http://2001.ukrcensus.gov.ua/
eng/results/general/estimate.
[882] Viktor Lyashchenko, “Crimean Autonomy 23 Years Later,” KIA
News, http://kianews.com.ua/page/krymskaya-avtonomiya-23-goda-
spustya-kak-sberegli-mir-i-ne-pustili-v-dom-voynu.

[883] Serge Schmemann, “Crimea Parliament Votes to Back Independence

From Ukraine,” New York Times, May 6, 1992,
https://nytimes.com/1992/05/06/world/crimea-parliament-votes-to-back-
independence-from-ukraine.html; Serge Schmemann, “Russia Votes to Void
Cession of Crimea to Ukraine,” New York Times, May 22, 1992,
http://nytimes.com/1992/05/22/world/russia-votes-to-void-cession-of-
crimea-to-ukraine.html.

[884] Phil Miller, “British intelligence predicted Ukraine war 30 years ago,”
Declassified UK, October 3, 2022, https://declassifieduk.org/british-
intelligence-predicted-ukraine-war-30-years-ago.

[885] Hahn, 132.

[886] Hahn, 133.

[887] Sarotte, 167.

[888] Interview with author, John Quigley, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, May 13, 2022, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/5-13-22-john-
quigley-on-the-russian-enclaves-of-eastern-europe; John Quigley, “I led
talks on Donbas and Crimea in the 90s. Here’s how the war should end,”
Responsible Statecraft, May 9, 2022,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/05/09/i-led-talks-on-the-donbas-and-
crimea-in-the-1990s-heres-how-the-war-should-end.

[889] Hahn, 135.

[890] Petro, 181.

[891] “Background Notes: Ukraine,” US State Department, June 1997,

https://1997-2001.state.gov/background_notes/ukraine_0697_bgn.html.

[892] Steven Erlanger, “Russia and Ukraine Settle Dispute Over Black Sea
Fleet,” New York Times, June 10, 1995,
https://nytimes.com/1995/06/10/world/russia-and-ukraine-settle-dispute-
over-black-sea-fleet.html; Mary Mycio, “Russia, Ukraine Report
Agreement on Black Sea Fleet,” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1997,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1997-05-29-mn-63737-story.html.

[893] Tyler Felgenhauer, “WWS Case Study: Ukraine, Russia, and the
Black Sea Fleet Accords,” Defense Technical Information Center, February
1999, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA360381.pdf.

[894] Editorial Board, “Ukraine’s next chapter,” Washington Post, February

24, 2014, https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/ukraines-next-
chapter/2014/02/24/a26822be-9d87-11e3-a050-dc3322a94fa7_story.html.

[895] Eugene Robinson, “Ukraine’s ultra-nationalists present a need for US

caution,” Washington Post, March 10, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-ukraines-ultra-
nationalists-present-a-need-for-us-caution/2014/03/10/2bdfd92a-a890-11e3-
8d62-419db477a0e6_story.html.

[896] “Three Former Ukrainian Presidents Seek Termination of Kharkiv

Agreements on Black Sea Fleet and Signature of Association Agreement
with EU,” Euromaidan Press, March 2, 2014,
https://euromaidanpress.com/2014/03/02/three-former-ukrainian-presidents-
seek-termination-of-kharkiv-agreements-on-black-sea-fleet-and-signature-
of-association-agreement-with-eu; “Kravchuk, Kuchma and Yushchenko
Call to Denounce Kharkiv Pact,” Kyiv Post, March 3, 2014,
http://kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/media-kravchuk-kuchma-and-
yuschenko-call-to-denounce-kharkiv-pact-338252.html; “The EU and
Russia: Before and Beyond the Crisis in Ukraine,” UK House of Commons
European Union Committee, February 10, 2015,
https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201415/ldselect/ldeucom/115/11508.
htm.

[897] Staff, “Russia ties Ukraine gas price relief to better terms for Black
Sea fleet,” Reuters, December 11, 2013, https://reuters.com/article/ukraine-
russia/russia-ties-ukraine-gas-price-relief-to-better-terms-for-black-sea-
fleet-idUSL1N0JQ25T20131211.

[898] Graham Allison, “A ‘Belgian Solution’ for Ukraine?” The National

Interest, March 15, 2014, https://nationalinterest.org/commentary/“belgian-
solution”-ukraine-10062.
[899] “The crimes of Euromaidan Nazis: The pogrom of Korsun on
February 20, 2014,” Ukraine-Human-Rights.org, August 14, 2014,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=loKajkXoTBU.

[900] Christo Grozev, “Crimea: The Road to Motherland (teaser),”

YouTube.com, March 8, 2015, https://youtube.com/watch?v=rCIGAE-
VvGI.

[901] De Ploeg, 116; Alissa de Carbonnel, “How the separatists delivered

Crimea to Moscow,” Reuters, March 13, 2014,
https://reuters.com/article/world/how-the-separatists-delivered-crimea-to-
moscow-idUSBREA2B13M.

[902] Aleksandar Vasovic and Gabriela Baczynska, “Acknowledging

defeat, Ukraine pulls troops from Crimea,” Reuters, March 24, 2014,
https://reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2N09J; Staff, “How Russia Invaded
Crimea,” War Is Boring, March 1, 2014, https://medium.com/war-is-
boring/how-russia-invaded-crimea-af7a59ff4ad8.

[903] “Russian marine kills Ukraine navy officer in Crimea, says ministry,”
Reuters, April 7, 2014, https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-military-
idUSBREA360GB20140407; Staff, “The brutally murdered Crimean Tatar
was the name of Resat Ametov. Three young children were orphaned,”
Censor.net, March 18, 2014, https://censor.net/ru/n276351.

[904] Heather Saul and Kim Sengupta, “Pro-Russian troops storm naval
base as Clinton warns of ‘aggression’ from Putin,” Independent, March 19,
2014, https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-crisis-
prorussian-troops-storm-naval-base-as-clinton-warns-of-aggression-from-
putin-9201317.html.

[905] Anastasia Moryleva, “Under Volgograd buried Ruslan Kazakov, who

died at the hands of a sniper in Simferopol,” Volgograd, March 24, 2014,
https://volgograd.kp.ru/online/news/1692759.

[906] Staff, “Crimea referendum: Voters ‘back Russia union,’” BBC, March
16, 2014, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-26606097.

[907] Staff, “Crimea exit poll: About 93% back Russia union,” BBC, March
16, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-26598832.

[908] Staff, “Despite Concerns about Governance, Ukrainians Want to

Remain One Country,” Pew Research Center, May 8, 2014,
https://pewresearch.org/global/2014/05/08/despite-concerns-about-
governance-ukrainians-want-to-remain-one-country; Kenneth Rapoza,
“One Year After Russia Annexed Crimea, Locals Prefer Moscow To Kiev,”
Forbes, March 20, 2015,
https://forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2015/03/20/one-year-after-russia-
annexed-crimea-locals-prefer-moscow-to-kiev; John O’Loughlin, et al., “To
Russia With Love,” Foreign Affairs, April 3, 2020,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2020-04-03/russia-love; Gerard
Toal, et al., “Six years and $20 billion in Russian investment later,
Crimeans are happy with Russian annexation,” Washington Post, March 18,
2020, https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/18/six-years-20-billion-
russian-investment-later-crimeans-are-happy-with-russian-annexation;
Staff, “Contemporary Media Use in Ukraine,” Gallup/Broadcasting Board
of Governors, June 2014, https://usagm.gov/wp-
content/media/2014/06/Ukraine-research-brief.pdf.

[909] Philip Shishkin, et al., “Crimean Tatars Appear to Boycott Voting,”

Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2014, https://wsj.com/articles/many-
crimean-tatars-boycott-voting-1394991154; Shaun Walker, “Crimean Tatars
divided between Russian and Ukrainian promises,” Guardian, March 17,
2015, https://theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/17/crimean-tatars-divided-
between-russian-and-ukrainian-promises.

[910] Petro, 183.

[911] Gwendolyn Sasse, “Terra Incognita – The Public Mood in Crimea,”

ZOiS Report, No. 3, November 2017,
https://academia.edu/41598187/zois_report_terra_incognita_the_public_mo
od_in_crimea.

[912] Rick Sterling, “Why Zelensky Will Not Take Back Crimea,”
Antiwar.com, April 4, 2023,
https://original.antiwar.com/Rick_Sterling/2023/04/03/why-zelensky-will-
not-take-back-crimea.

[913] Vladimir Putin, “Address by President of the Russian Federation,”

Kremlin, March 18, 2014,
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603.
[914] See Chapter Two.

[915] Vladimir Putin, “Address by President of the Russian Federation,”

Kremlin, March 18, 2014,
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/20603.

[916] Chelsea J. Carter, et al., “Obama warns Russia against Ukraine

intervention, says ‘there will be costs,’” CNN, February 28, 2014,
https://cnn.com/2014/02/28/world/europe/ukraine-politics/index.html.

[917] Charap and Colton, 128, 134.

[918] Testimony Victoria Nuland Assistant Secretary, Bureau of European

and Eurasian Affairs Statement Before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, “Ukraine – Countering Russian Intervention and Supporting a
Democratic State,” May 6, 2014, https://2009-
2017.state.gov/p/eur/rls/rm/2014/may/225674.htm.

[919] Hahn, 239–41.

[920] John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,”
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-
crisis-west-s-fault.

[921] “President Obama’s Interview with Fareed Zakaria,” CNN, February

1, 2015, https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/fzgps/date/2015-02-
01/segment/01.
[922] Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic, April 2016,
https://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-
doctrine/471525.

[923] Nicolas Camut, “Ukraine slams Obama for making ‘excuses’ over his
Russia policy,” Politico Europe, June 23, 2023,
https://politico.eu/article/ukraine-slams-us-barack-obama-for-excuses-over-
russia-policy-war.

[924] David A. Graham, “Why Putin Turned Against the US,” The Atlantic,
July 2, 2014, https://theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/michael-
mcfaul-what-turned-putin-against-the-us/373866.

[925] “Interview of John Brennan,” PBS Frontline, July 27, 2017,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/john-brennan.

[926] Keith Gessen, “The Quiet Americans Behind the US-Russia

Imbroglio,” New York Times Magazine, May 8, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/05/08/magazine/the-quiet-americans-behind-the-
us-russia-imbroglio.html.

[927] Stephanie Pezard and Ashley Rhoades, “What Provokes Putin’s

Russia?” RAND Corporation, January 2020,
https://rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/perspectives/PE300/PE338/RAND_
PE338.pdf.

[928] Daniel Treisman, “Why Putin Took Crimea,” Foreign Affairs,

May/June 2016, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2016-04-
18/why-russian-president-putin-took-crimea-from-ukraine.

[929] Isaac Chotiner, “Why John Mearsheimer Blames the US for the Crisis
in Ukraine,” The New Yorker, March 1, 2022,
https://newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-
for-the-crisis-in-ukraine.

[930] Fiona Hill, “Putin Has the US Right Where He Wants It,” New York
Times, January 24, 2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/01/24/opinion/russia-
ukraine-putin-biden.html.

[931] Tabassum Zakaria, “Russia, NATO loom in Cheney’s Ukraine visit,”

Reuters, September 4, 2008,
https://web.archive.org/web/20180609130011/https://reuters.com/article/us-
georgia-ossetia/russia-nato-loom-in-cheneys-ukraine-visit-
idUSL272497420080904.

[932] See Chapter Three.

[933] Chalmers Johnson, “Blowback,” The Nation, September 27, 2001,

https://thenation.com/article/blowback; James Risen, “Oh, What a Fine Plot
We Hatched. (And Here’s What to Do the Next Time),” New York Times,
June 18, 2000, http://nytimes.com/2000/06/18/weekinreview/word-for-
word-abc-s-coups-oh-what-fine-plot-we-hatched-here-s-what-next-
time.html; Donald Wilber, “Appendix E. Military Critique—Lessons
Learned from TPAJAX re Military Planning Aspect of Coup d’Etat,” in,
“CIA Clandestine Service History, Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran,
November 1952–August 1953,” CIA, March 1954,
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/ciacase/EXL.pdf; Chalmers Johnson,
Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire (New York:
Holt, 2001), 8.

[934] Horton, Fool’s Errand, 230–31.

[935] James Jones, “The Battle For Ukraine,” PBS Frontline, May 27,
2014, https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/battle-for-ukraine.

[936] Peter Baker, “In Cold War Echo, Obama Strategy Writes Off Putin,”
New York Times, April 19, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/04/20/world/europe/in-cold-war-echo-obama-
strategy-writes-off-putin.html.

[937] Katrina vanden Heuvel and Stephen F. Cohen, “Cold War Against
Russia – Without Debate,” The Nation, April 30, 2014,
http://thenation.com/article/179579/cold-war-against-russia-without-debate.

[938] Luke Johnson and Carl Schreck, “Obama’s New Security Strategy
Sharply Shifts Tone On Russia,” RFERL, February 6, 2015,
https://rferl.org/a/us-security—strategy-shifts-tone-on-
russia/26834320.html.

[939] Andrew Cockburn, “Game On,” Harper’s, January 2015,

https://harpers.org/archive/2015/01/game-on.
[940] Mark MacKinnon, “In Kharkiv, revolution meets a Russophile
resistance,” Globe and Mail, February 24, 2014,
https://theglobeandmail.com/news/world/globe-in-kharkiv-where-russia-is-
close-to-the-heart/article17076303.

[941] “Pro-Russia protesters seize eastern Ukraine state buildings,” France

24, March 6, 2014, https://france24.com/en/20140406-ukraine-russia-
donetsk-riots-buildings.

[942] James Jones, “The Battle For Ukraine,” PBS Frontline, May 27,
2014, https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/battle-for-ukraine.

[943] Adam Taylor, “The battle for Kiev may well be over, but is the battle
for Crimea about to begin?” Washington Post, February 22, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/02/22/the-battle-for-
kiev-may-well-be-over-but-is-the-battle-for-crimea-about-to-begin; Natalia
Zinets and Alessandra Prentice, “Ukraine sets European course after ouster
of Yanukovych,” Reuters, February 22, 2014, https://reuters.com/article/uk-
ukraine/ukraine-sets-european-course-after-ouster-of-Yanukovych-
idUKBREA1H0EM20140223.

[944] Shaun Walker, et al., “Ukraine: pro-Russia separatists set for victory
in eastern region referendum,” Guardian, May 12, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/may/11/eastern-ukraine-referendum-
donetsk-luhansk; Alexander Zhuchkovsky, 85 Days in Slavyansk (2022),
10–11, 47–50.
[945] Jacques Baud, “The Military Situation in the Ukraine,” Janata
Weekly, April 24, 2022, https://janataweekly.org/the-military-situation-in-
the-ukraine.

[946] Andrew Kramer, “Ukraine Sends Force to Stem Unrest in East,” New
York Times, April 15, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/04/16/world/europe/ukraine-russia.html.

[947] Steve Woehrel, “Ukraine’s Uncertain Future and US Policy,”

Congressional Research Service, September 21, 1994,
https://everycrsreport.com/files/19940921_94-
738_799b4c5c34e11ee98903b32d34aab8a5dc279117.pdf.

[948] Hahn, 124–29.

[949] Hahn, 122–23.

[950] Konstantin Skorkin, “A Counter-Elite Takes Power: the New Leaders

of the Donbas,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 16,
2018, https://carnegiemoscow.org/commentary/75549.

[951] Vladimir Socor, “Moscow Encourages Centrifugal Forces in South-

Eastern Ukraine,” Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor, Vol. 11,
No. 36 (February 25, 2014), https://jamestown.org/program/moscow-
encourages-centrifugal-forces-in-south-eastern-ukraine.

[952] Simon Shuster, “Many Ukrainians Want Russia To Invade,” Time,

March 1, 2014, https://time.com/11005/many-ukrainians-want-russia-to-
invade.

[953] Staff, “Pro-Russian Protest Leader In Eastern Ukraine Said Taken To

Kyiv,” RFERL, March 6, 2014, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-activist-donetsk-
detention/25288316.html.

[954] “Eastern Ukrainian region declares independence,” CBS News, April

7, 2014, https://cbsnews.com/pictures/eastern-ukrainian-region-declares-
independence.

[955] Matt Smith and Victoria Butenko, “Ukraine says it retakes building
seized by protesters,” CNN, April 7, 2014,
https://cnn.com/2014/04/07/world/europe/ukraine-crisis/index.html.

[956] “Maidan supporters and separatists clashed in Nikolaev. Putin lovers

forced to leave,” Ukrainska Pravda, April 7, 2014,
https://pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2014/04/7/7021682.

[957] Hahn, 252–53.

[958] Staff, “Ukrainian troops in control of Donetsk Oblast’s Kramatorsk

airfield, Ukrainian deputy prime minister says several hundred Russian
troops in Ukraine,” Kyiv Post, April 16, 2014,
https://kyivpost.com/post/9072.

[959] Hahn, 253; Jim Maceda, “Tour of Ukraine-Russia Border Finds No

Signs of Military Buildup,” NBC News, March 30, 2014,
https://nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/tour-ukraine-russia-border-
finds-no-signs-military-buildup-n67336.

[960] Hahn, 270–71.

[961] Zhuchkovsky, 25–28.

[962] Hahn, 254.

[963] Zhuchkovsky, 44–45.

[964] William Jay Risch, “Heart of Europe, Heart of Darkness: Ukraine’s

Euromaidan and Its Enemies,” in The Unwanted Europeanness?
Understanding Division and Inclusion in Contemporary Europe (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2021), ed. by Branislav Radeljić, 144–45,
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110684216.

[965] Von Uwe Klußmann and Matthias Schepp, “Moscow Moves to

Destabilize Eastern Ukraine,” Der Spiegel, March 18, 2014,
https://spiegel.de/international/europe/how-moscow-is-moving-to-
destablize-eastern-ukraine-a-959224.html; Keith Gessen, “Why not kill
them all?” London Review of Books, September 11, 2014,
https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n17/keith-gessen/why-not-kill-them-all.

[966] Interview of Victoria Nuland, Christiane Amanpour, CNN, April 21,

2014, https://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1404/21/ampr.01.html,
https://dissentradio.com/radio/nulandcnn1.mp3.
[967] Staff, “Deadline for Ukrainian Protesters Expires, but No
Crackdown,” ABC News, April 14, 2014,
https://abcnews.go.com/International/deadline-ukrainian-protesters-expires-
crackdown/story?id=23315532.

[968] Alec Luhn, “Russia issues warning after fatal clashes in Ukraine city
of Donetsk,” Guardian, March 14, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/14/russia-warning-fatal-clashes-
ukraine-donetsk-protect-compatriots.

[969] Hahn, 242–43.

[970] Alec Luhn, “Ukrainian troops begin military operation to ‘destroy

foreign invader,’” Guardian, April 15, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/15/ukrainian-troops-anti-terrorist-
operation-kiev.

[971] Keith Gessen, “Why not kill them all?” London Review of Books,
September 11, 2014, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n17/keith-gessen/why-
not-kill-them-all.

[972] “The views and opinions of South-Eastern regions residents of

Ukraine: April 2014,” Kiev International Institute of Sociology, April 2014,
https://kiis.com.ua/?lang=eng&cat=reports&id=302; Elise Giuliano, “The
Origins of Separatism: Popular Grievances in Donetsk and Luhansk,”
PONARS Eurasia, October 28, 2015, https://ponarseurasia.org/the-origins-
of-separatism-popular-grievances-in-donetsk-and-luhansk.
[973] Hahn, 264–66.

[974] Staff, “Rebels without a Cause: Russia’s Proxies in Eastern Ukraine,”

Crisis Group Europe Report 254, July 16, 2019,
https://crisisgroup.org/sites/default/files/254-rebels-without-a-
cause%20%281%29.pdf.

[975] Paul Robinson, “Rebels without a cause,” Irrussianality, July 18,

2019, https://irrussianality.wordpress.com/2019/07/18/rebels-without-a-
cause.

[976] Thomas Grove and Aleksandar Vasovic, “Ukraine’s pro-Russia

separatists reject diplomatic agreement to disarm,” Reuters, April 18, 2014,
https://reuters.com/article/uk-ukraine-crisis/ukraine-separatists-reject-
diplomatic-deal-to-disarm-idINKBN0D40C220140418; Zhuchkovsky, 56,
78.

[977] Igor Kossov, “A Putin Climb-Down on Ukraine?” Daily Beast, May

7, 2014, https://thedailybeast.com/a-putin-climb-down-on-ukraine.

[978] Adam Taylor, “Meet the ‘nobodies’ who said no to Putin,”

Washington Post, May 8, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/05/08/meet-the-
nobodies-who-said-no-to-putin; Staff, “Ukraine rebels snub Putin to press
ahead with referendum,” AFP,
https://straitstimes.com/world/europe/ukraine-rebels-snub-putin-to-press-
ahead-with-referendum; Zhuchkovsky, 141–42.
[979] Adam Taylor, “Meet the ‘nobodies’ who said no to Putin,”
Washington Post, May 8, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2014/05/08/meet-the-
nobodies-who-said-no-to-putin.

[980] Zhuchkovsky, 55.

[981] Staff, “East Ukraine separatists seek union with Russia,” BBC, May
12, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-27369980.

[982] “Borodai announced that he was leaving the post of prime minister of
the DPR,” RIA Novosti, August 7, 2014,
https://ria.ru/20140807/1019193894.html.

[983] Marc Bennetts, “Rebel leader Alexander Zakharchenko killed in

explosion in Ukraine,” Guardian, August 31, 2018,
https://theguardian.com/world/2018/aug/31/rebel-leader-alexander-
zakharchenko-killed-in-explosion-in-ukraine; Staff, “Inside Ukraine’s
assassination programme,” The Economist, September 5, 2023,
https://economist.com/europe/2023/09/05/inside-ukraines-assassination-
programme.

[984] “Why do some Ukrainians want to be part of Russia?” BBC, April 24,
2014, https://youtube.com/watch?v=0QGFZev_h7g.

[985] Anna Nemtsova, “In a city near Russia, a commander’s call to battle
is answered,” Washington Post, May 3, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/europe/in-a-city-near-russia-a-
commanders-call-to-battle-is-answered/2014/05/03/9b822cb0-d30b-11e3-
aae8-c2d44bd79778_story.html.

[986] “Audio evidence of Putin’s Adviser Glazyev involvement in war in

Ukraine (English translation),” UA Position, August 29, 2016,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=0w78QuxBUe0.

[987] De Ploeg, 125–26.

[988] Anton Zverev, “Ex-rebel leaders detail role played by Putin aide in
east Ukraine,” Reuters, May 11, 2017, https://reuters.com/article/us-
ukraine-crisis-russia-surkov-insight/ex-rebel-leaders-detail-role-played-by-
putin-aide-in-east-ukraine-idUSKBN1870TJ.

[989] Shaun Walker, et al., “Ukraine: pro-Russia separatists set for victory
in eastern region referendum,” Guardian, May 12, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/may/11/eastern-ukraine-referendum-
donetsk-luhansk.

[990] Keith Gessen, “Why not kill them all?” London Review of Books,
September 11, 2014, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n17/keith-gessen/why-
not-kill-them-all.

[991] David Ignatius, “Putin is winging it on Ukraine,” Washington Post,

May 8, 2014, https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/david-ignatius-putin-is-
winging-it-on-ukraine/2014/05/08/d14dac64-d6f0-11e3-95d3-
3bcd77cd4e11_story.html.
[992] Paul Moreira, Ukraine: Masks of the Revolution, Notre Monde,
November 6, 2021, https://youtube.com/watch?v=VLXtWfTcLC4.

[993] Hahn, 260.

[994] Paul Moreira, Ukraine: Masks of the Revolution, Notre Monde,

November 6, 2021, https://youtube.com/watch?v=VLXtWfTcLC4.

[995] Fergal Keane, “Russia sympathisers vent anger at Ukraine Odessa

deaths,” BBC, May 3, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-27268775.

[996] Sergei L. Loiko and Carol J. Williams, “Police say 42 killed in

Odessa in worst violence of Ukraine crisis,” Los Angeles Times, May 2,
2014, https://latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-wn-ukraine-russia-odessa-
clash-20140502-story.html.

[997] Sergei L. Loiko and Carol J. Williams, “Police say 42 killed in

Odessa in worst violence of Ukraine crisis,” Los Angeles Times, May 2,
2014, https://latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-wn-ukraine-russia-odessa-
clash-20140502-story.html.

[998] Hahn, 260.

[999] Tweet by Howard Amos, May 2, 2014,

https://x.com/howardamos/status/462245077918965760.

[1000] Paul Moreira, Ukraine: Masks of the Revolution, Notre Monde,

November 6, 2021, https://youtube.com/watch?v=VLXtWfTcLC4.
[1001] Christof Heyns, “End of visit statement of the Special Rapporteur on
extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions,” UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights, September 18, 2015,
https://ohchr.org/en/statements/2015/09/end-visit-statement-special-
rapporteur-extrajudicial-summary-or-arbitrary.

[1002] “The War in Ukraine,” Watchdog Media, April 13, 2019,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hyN3yWMFs8w.

[1003] Michael Winter, “Fire kills 31 in Odessa after pro-Russia clashes,”

USA Today, May 2, 2014,
https://usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/05/02/ukraine-odessa-
fire/8620829.

[1004] Yevhen Trofimenko, “ATO Popularly, Or why not Vladimir Putin

did not introduce troops,” [sic], Right Sector, May 2, 2014,
https://archive.is/y12mT; Hahn, 261.

[1005] Matilda Bogner, “7 years with no answers. What is lacking in the

investigations of the events in Odesa,” May 2, 2014,
https://ukraine.un.org/en/126054-7-years-no-answers-what-lacking-
investigations-events-odesa-2-may-2014; “Report of the International
Advisory Panel on its Review of the Investigations into the Events in Odesa
on 2 May 2014,” Council of Europe, November 4, 2015,
https://rm.coe.int/CoERMPublicCommonSearchServices/DisplayDCTMCo
ntent?documentId=090000168048610f.
[1006] Hahn, 264.

[1007] Alec Luhn and Oksana Grytsenko, “Ukraine fails to break stalemate
with pro-Russian protesters in east,” Guardian, April 11, 2014,
http://theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/11/ukraine-interim-prime-minister-
fail-break-stalemate-east.

[1008] Staff, “White House: Brennan was in Kiev this weekend,” USA
Today, April 14, 2014,
https://usatoday.com/story/theoval/2014/04/14/obama-john-brennan-kiev-
russia-ukraine-jay-carney/7705755.

[1009] Melik Kaylan, “Why CIA Director Brennan Visited Kiev: In

Ukraine The Covert War Has Begun,” Forbes, April 16, 2014,
https://forbes.com/sites/melikkaylan/2014/04/16/why-cia-director-brennan-
visited-kiev-in-ukraine-the-covert-war-has-begun.

[1010] Staff, “Ukraine says Donetsk ‘anti-terror operation’ under way,”

BBC, April 16, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-27035196.

[1011] “Ukraine crisis: Kiev launches ‘anti-terror operation’ in east,”

Guardian, April 15, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/15/ukraine-military-forces-russia-
live-blog.

[1012] Zach Dorfman, “Secret CIA training program in Ukraine helped

Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion,” Yahoo News, March 16, 2022,
https://news.yahoo.com/exclusive-secret-cia-training-program-in-ukraine-
helped-kyiv-prepare-for-russian-invasion-090052743.html.

[1013] Martin Lambeck and Alexander Rackow, “CIA & FBI Agents
Advise Kiev,” Bild, April 5, 2014,
https://bild.de/politik/ausland/nachrichtendienste-usa/dutzende-agenten-
von-cia-und-fbi-beraten-kiew-35807724.bild.html.

[1014] De Ploeg, 224–29.

[1015] Maggie Ybarra, “Obama orders Pentagon advisers to Ukraine to

fend off Putin-backed rebels,” Washington Times, July 22, 2014,
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jul/22/pentagon-team-dispatched-
to-ukraine-amid-crisis-wi.

[1016] Press Release, “Wales Summit Declaration,” NATO, September 5,

2014, https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_112964.htm.

[1017] Mark MacKinnon, “NATO to take part in joint exercises with

Ukrainian army,” Globe and Mail, September 3, 2014,
https://theglobeandmail.com/news/world/nato-to-take-part-in-joint-
exercises-with-ukrainian-army/article20332348; Staff, “US and Nato troops
begin Ukraine military exercise,” BBC, September 15, 2014,
https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-29204505.

[1018] Staff, “British Infantry In Ukraine Training Mission,” Sky News,

February 24, 2015, https://news.sky.com/story/british-infantry-in-ukraine-
training-mission-10370187; Murray Brewster, “Instructing Ukrainian troops
a wake-up call for Canadian soldiers,” Globe and Mail, January 7, 2016,
https://theglobeandmail.com/news/national/instructing-ukrainian-troops-a-
wake-up-call-for-canadian-trainers/article28048695.

[1019] Interview with author, Eric Margolis, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, April 24, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/042414-eric-
margolis.

[1020] Interview with author, Eric Margolis, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, June 6, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/060614-eric-
margolis.

[1021] See Chapter Five.

[1022] Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, “The Spy War: How the CIA
Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” New York Times, February 25, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/the-spy-war-how-the-cia-
secretly-helps-ukraine-fight-putin.html.

[1023] Interview with author, Eric Margolis, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, January 27, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/012714-eric-
margolis.

[1024] Lucian Kim, “Should Putin fear the man who ‘pulled the trigger of
war’ in Ukraine?” Reuters, November 26, 2014,
https://reuters.com/article/kim-strelkov-idUSL2N0TG1CM20141126.
[1025] Staff, “East Ukraine separatists seek union with Russia,” BBC, May
12, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-27369980.

[1026] Neil MacFarquhar, “Russia Keeps Its Distance After Ukraine

Secession Referendums,” New York Times, May 12, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/05/13/world/europe/ukraine.html.

[1027] Noah Sneider, “Pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine collect their dead and
ask, Where is Putin?” Al Jazeera America, May 30, 2014,
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/30/pro-russian-
rebelsinukrainecollecttheirdeadandaskwhereisputin.html; Zhuchkovsky, 19–
20, 34, 55, 57, 104, 136–37, 140–42, 202, 255.

[1028] Zhuchkovsky, 56.

[1029] “Chronology for Crimean Russians in Ukraine,” UN Refugee

Agency, March 14, 2023, https://refworld.org/docid/469f38ec2.html.

[1030] Gary Brecher, “The War Nerd: Everything you know about Crimea
is wrong(-er),” Pando.com, March 17, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140318031105/http://pando.com/2014/03/17
/the-war-nerd-everything-you-know-about-crimea-is-wrong-er.

[1031] Anthony H. Cordesman, “Russia and the ‘Color Revolution,’”

Center for Strategic and International Studies, May 28, 2014,
https://csis.org/analysis/russia-and-color-revolution.
[1032] “Joint Geneva Statement on Ukraine from April 17: The full text,”
Washington Post, April 17, 2014, https://washingtonpost.com/world/joint-
geneva-statement-on-ukraine-from-april-17-the-full-
text/2014/04/17/89bd0ac2-c654-11e3-9f37-7ce307c56815_story.html.

[1033] Staff, “Ukraine’s Poroshenko is sworn in and sets out peace plan,”
BBC, June 7, 2014, https://bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-27746346.

[1034] Petro, 212–13.

[1035] Daryna Shevchenko, “Poroshenko pledges to step up anti-terrorism

operation, bring success within ‘hours,’ not months,” Kyiv Post, May 26,
2014, https://kyivpost.com/post/10257.

[1036] Hahn, 256–57.

[1037] “Dmytro Yarosh: ‘The First Offensive of the War Took Place on
April 20, 2014,’” Censor.net, April 22, 2016,
https://censor.net/ru/resonance/385673/dmitro_yarosh_pershiyi_nastupalniy
i_byi_vyini_vdbuvsya_20_kvtnya_2014go_dobrovolts_atakuvali_blokpost;
Petro, 103.

[1038] Petro, 212–13.

[1039] Peter Leonard and Vladimir Isachenkov, “Insurgents in eastern

Ukraine declare independence,” AP, May 12, 2014,
https://apnews.com/general-news-4f4ade7d52f646118ab030b7c828d564.

[1040] Hahn, 260.

[1041] Staff, “A year in the struggle for status: life in the republics of
Donbas on the background of the conflict with Kiev,” TASS, May 11, 2015,
https://tass.ru/mezhdunarodnaya-panorama/1878693.

[1042] Staff, “Country Policy and Information Note, Ukraine: Military

service,” UK Home Office, April 2017,
https://refworld.org/reference/countryrep/ukho/2017/en/116582.

[1043] Maria Stromova, “Ukraine Enacts Compulsory Military Draft,”

NBC News, May 1, 2014, https://nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-
crisis/ukraine-enacts-compulsory-military-draft-n94906.

[1044] Ruslan Kotsaba, “Internet campaign ‘I refuse to mobilize,’” January

17, 2015, https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ve_AJRn-HJA.

[1045] Aric Toler, “Ukraine Arrests Journalist on Treason Charges for Calls
to Boycott Mobilization,” Global Voices, February 9, 2015,
https://globalvoices.org/2015/02/09/ukraine-journalist-treason-mobilization.

[1046] John Dalhuisen, “Ukraine’s spate of suspicious deaths must be

followed by credible investigations,” Amnesty International, April 17, 2015,
https://amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/04/ukraine-suspicious-deaths-need-
credible-investigations.

[1047] Staff, “The Court of Appeal dropped the charges against Kotsaba,
and he was released from custody,” Radio Svoboda, July 14, 2016,
https://radiosvoboda.org/a/news/27858251.html.
[1048] “Ukraine: Ruslan Kotsaba on trial again,” War Resisters’
International, October 4, 2021, https://wri-irg.org/en/programmes/rrtk/co-
action-alert/2021/ukraine-ruslan-kotsaba-trial-again.

[1049] “Out of Control: Ukraine’s Rogue Militias,” Vice, May 25, 2018,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=wMMXuKB0BoY.

[1050] Tweet by Andriy Parubiy, April 15, 2014,

https://x.com/andriyparubiy/status/456075805223706624; Staff, “For the
settlement of the situation in the South-East of the Ministry of Internal
Affairs creates special units for the protection of public order,” Arena, April
15, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160304212811/http://arena.in.ua/politka/186
488-Dlya-uregulirovaniya-situaciya-na-YUgo-Vostoke-MVD-sozdaet-
specpodrazdeleniya-po-ohrane-obshestvennogo-poryadka.html.

[1051] Shaun Walker, “Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and
may be its greatest threat,” Guardian, September 10, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukraine-
neo-nazis.

[1052] Hahn, 276.

[1053] Andrew Kramer, “Ukraine Sends Force to Stem Unrest in East,”

New York Times, April 15, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/04/16/world/europe/ukraine-russia.html.
[1054] Anastasia Bereza, “Andriy Biletsky. How the war turned the
political politician into the commander of the Azov battalion,” New Voice,
October 22, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20150119152837/http://nvua.net/publications/
Andrey-Bileckiy-Kak-voyna-prevratila-polituznika-v-komandira-batalona-
Azov—17031.html; Vyacheslav Likhachev, “The ‘Right Sector’ and Others:
The Behavior and Role of Radical Nationalists in the Ukrainian Political
Crisis of Late 2013–Early 2014,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies
Vol. 48, No. 2/3 (2015), 257–71. https://jstor.org/stable/48610452.

[1055] It does sound like a misdemeanor, at worst.

[1056] Andreas Umland, “Irregular Militias and Radical Nationalism in

Post-Euromaydan Ukraine: The Prehistory and Emergence of the ‘Azov’
Battalion in 2014,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 31, No. 1
(January 2019),
https://researchgate.net/publication/331360561_Irregular_Militias_and_Rad
ical_Nationalism_in_Post-
Euromaydan_Ukraine_The_Prehistory_and_Emergence_of_the_Azov_Batt
alion_in_2014.

[1057] Hahn, 248–49; “Right Sector storms Supreme Court of Ukraine,”

Extraordinary News, ICTV, April 7, 2014, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=jitMYO-xCc8.

[1058] Keith Gessen, “Why not kill them all?” London Review of Books,
September 11, 2014, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n17/keith-gessen/why-
not-kill-them-all.

[1059] Andreas Umland, “Irregular Militias and Radical Nationalism in

Post-Euromaydan Ukraine: The Prehistory and Emergence of the ‘Azov’
Battalion in 2014,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 31, No. 1
(January 2019),
https://researchgate.net/publication/331360561_Irregular_Militias_and_Rad
ical_Nationalism_in_Post-
Euromaydan_Ukraine_The_Prehistory_and_Emergence_of_the_Azov_Batt
alion_in_2014.

[1060] Colborne, 33–34.

[1061] Tweet by MilitaryLand.net, February 26, 2014,

https://x.com/Militarylandnet/status/1497607811596959744.

[1062] James Jones, “The Battle For Ukraine,” PBS Frontline, May 27,
2014, https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/battle-for-ukraine;
“Ukraine crisis: Kiev forces win back Mariupol,” BBC, June 13, 2014,
https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-27829773.

[1063] Colborne, 34.

[1064] “Decree of the President of Ukraine, About being awarded state

awards of Ukraine,” June 31, 2014,
https://president.gov.ua/documents/6312014-17512.
[1065] Staff, “Andriy Biletski,” Nackor.org, August 12, 2015,
https://web.archive.org/web/20180722155641/http://nackor.org/en/andrey-
bileckiy.

[1066] Nicolai N. Petro, The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek

Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2022), 111.

[1067] Interview with author, Daniel McAdams, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, June 16, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/061614-daniel-
mcadams.

[1068] Shaun Walker, “Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and
may be its greatest threat,” Guardian, September 10, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukraine-
neo-nazis; Guy Chazan and Roman Olearchyk, “Tide turns for Ukraine
forces in fight against pro-Russia rebels,” Financial Times, August 12,
2014, https://ft.com/content/d98edf62-1951-11e4-8730-00144feabdc0.

[1069] Andrew Kramer, “Ukraine Strategy Bets on Restraint by Russia,”

New York Times, August 9, 2014,
http://nytimes.com/2014/08/10/world/europe/ukraine.html.

[1070] James Jones, “The Battle For Ukraine,” PBS Frontline, May 27,
2014, https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/battle-for-ukraine.

[1071] David Stern, “Ukraine underplays role of far right in conflict,” BBC,
December 13, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-30414955.
[1072] Staff, “Azov Movement,” Mapping Militant Organizations, Stanford
University, August 2022, https://archive.is/aCFVJ.

[1073] “Wolfsangel,” Reporting Radicalism,

https://reportingradicalism.org/en/hate-symbols/movements/nazi-
symbols/wolfsangel.

[1074] Carlotta Gall and Ivor Prickett, “On the River at Night, Ambushing
Russians,” New York Times, November 21, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/11/21/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-
river.html; Staff, “Ukrainian Soldiers Seen Wearing Helmets With Nazi
Swastika and SS Symbols,” Haaretz, September 9, 2014,
https://haaretz.com/2014-09-09/ty-article/ukrainian-soldiers-seen-wearing-
nazi-symbols/0000017f-e17a-d568-ad7f-f37b64d50000; “German TV
Shows Nazi Symbols on Helmets of Ukraine Soldiers,” NBC News,
September 9, 2014, https://nbcnews.com/storyline/ukraine-crisis/german-tv-
shows-nazi-symbols-helmets-ukraine-soldiers-n198961.

[1075] “Cap, M1932 Service Dress Schirmmütze: General’s, Allgemeine-

SS,” Imperial War Museums,
https://iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/30092609.

[1076] Andrew Kramer, “Islamic Battalions, Stocked With Chechens, Aid

Ukraine in War With Rebels,” New York Times, July 7, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/07/08/world/europe/islamic-battalions-stocked-
with-chechens-aid-ukraine-in-war-with-rebels.html; Patrick Kingsley, “New
Zealand Massacre Highlights Global Reach of White Extremism,” New
York Times, March 15, 2019,
https://nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/asia/christchurch-mass-shooting-
extremism.html.

[1077] Tom Parfitt, “Ukraine Crisis: the Neo-Nazi Brigade Fighting Pro-
Russian Separatists,” Telegraph, August 11, 2014,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11025137/Ukraine-
crisis-the-neo-Nazi-brigade-fighting-pro-Russian-separatists.html.

[1078] Will Cathcart and Joseph Epstein, “Is America Training Neonazis in
Ukraine?” Daily Beast, July 4, 2015, https://thedailybeast.com/is-america-
training-neonazis-in-ukraine.

[1079] Leonid Bershidsky, “Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis Won’t Get US Money,”

Bloomberg News, June 12, 2015,
https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-06-12/ukraine-s-neo-nazis-
won-t-get-u-s-money.

[1080] James Carden, “Congress Has Removed a Ban on Funding Neo-

Nazis From Its Year-End Spending Bill,” The Nation, January 14, 2016,
https://thenation.com/article/politics/congress-has-removed-a-ban-on-
funding-neo-nazis-from-its-year-end-spending-bill; Sam Sokol, “US Lifts
Ban on Funding ‘Neo-Nazi’ Ukrainian Militia,” Jerusalem Post, January
18, 2016, https://jpost.com/Diaspora/US-lifts-ban-on-funding-neo-Nazi-
Ukrainian-militia-441884.
[1081] Will Cathcart and Joseph Epstein, “Is America Training Neonazis in
Ukraine?” Daily Beast, July 4, 2015, https://thedailybeast.com/is-america-
training-neonazis-in-ukraine.

[1082] Will Cathcart and Joseph Epstein, “How Many Neo-Nazis Is the US
Backing in Ukraine?” Daily Beast, April 14, 2017,
https://thedailybeast.com/how-many-neo-nazis-is-the-us-backing-in-
ukraine.

[1083] Alec Luhn, “Preparing for War With Ukraine’s Fascist Defenders of
Freedom,” Foreign Policy, August 30, 2014,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/08/30/preparing-for-war-with-ukraines-
fascist-defenders-of-freedom.

[1084] Rebecca Kheel, “Congress bans arms to Ukraine militia linked to

neo-Nazis,” The Hill, March 27, 2018,
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/380483-congress-bans-arms-to-
controversial-ukrainian-militia-linked-to-neo-nazis.

[1085] Ian Collier, “Ukraine: The Rise of The Right,” Sky News, January 3,
2015, http://features.sky.com/ross-kemp-ukraine.

[1086] Tom Parfitt, “Ukraine Crisis: the Neo-Nazi Brigade Fighting Pro-
Russian Separatists,” Telegraph, August 11, 2014,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11025137/Ukraine-
crisis-the-neo-Nazi-brigade-fighting-pro-Russian-separatists.html.
[1087] Alec Luhn, “The Draft Dodgers of Ukraine,” Foreign Policy,
February 18, 2015, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/18/the-draft-dodgers-
of-ukraine-russia-putin.

[1088] Shaun Walker, “Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and
may be its greatest threat,” Guardian, September 10, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukraine-
neo-nazis.

[1089] Shaun Walker, “Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and
may be its greatest threat,” Guardian, September 10, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukraine-
neo-nazis.

[1090] Oren Dorell, “Volunteer Ukrainian unit includes Nazis,” USA Today,
March 10, 2015, http://usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/03/10/ukraine-
azov-brigade-nazis-abuses-separatists/24664937.

[1091] Colborne, 118; See below.

[1092] Oleksiy Kuzmenko, “Far-Right Group Made Its Home in Ukraine’s

Major Western Military Training Hub,” IERES Occasional Papers, No. 11,
September 2021, Transnational History of the Far Right Series,
https://illiberalism.org/far-right-group-made-its-home-in-ukraines-major-
western-military-training-hub; Staff, “Western countries training far-right
extremists in Ukraine – report,” Jerusalem Post, October 19, 2021,
https://jpost.com/diaspora/western-countries-training-far-right-extremists-
in-ukraine-report-682411; Christy Somos, “Far-right extremists in
Ukrainian military bragged about Canadian training, report says,” CTV
News, October 20, 2021, https://ctvnews.ca/world/far-right-extremists-in-
ukrainian-military-bragged-about-canadian-training-report-says-1.5631304.

[1093] Xiaoli Li, “Canada’s Meeting With Ukraine’s Self-professed Nazi

Paramilitary,” Toronto City News, November 10, 2021,
https://toronto.citynews.ca/video/2021/11/10/canadas-meeting-with-
ukraines-self-professed-nazi-paramilitary.

[1094] Andriy Biletsky, “Ukrainian Social Nationalism,” Patriot of Ukraine

official website,
https://web.archive.org/web/20080409023834/http:/patriotukr.org.ua/index.
php?rub=stat&id=267.

[1095] “Social-National Assembly Program,” November 18, 2006,

https://web.archive.org/web/20140413045104/http://snaua.info/programa.

[1096] Simon Shuster and Billy Perigo, “Like, Share, Recruit: How a
White-Supremacist Militia Uses Facebook to Radicalize and Train New
Members,” Time, January 7, 2021, https://time.com/5926750/azov-far-right-
movement-facebook.

[1097] Staff, “Protesters Vow To Indefinitely Block Rail Lines To Eastern

Ukraine,” RFERL, January 28, 2017, https://rferl.org/a/ukrainian-
nationalist-protestrs-vow-indefinitely-block-rail-lines-eastern-
ukraine/28264370.html.
[1098] “Report on the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine 16 November
2015 to 15 February 2016,” UN Office of the High Commissioner for
Human Rights, March 2016,
https://web.archive.org/web/20220401092259/https://ohchr.org/sites/default
/files/Documents/Countries/UA/Ukraine_13th_HRMMU_Report_3March2
016.pdf.

[1099] Staff, “Breaking Bodies: Torture and Summary Executions in

Eastern Ukraine,” Amnesty International, May 2015,
https://amnesty.org/en/wp-
content/uploads/2021/05/EUR5016832015ENGLISH.pdf; Staff, “You
Don’t Exist,” Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, July 21,
2016, https://hrw.org/report/2016/07/21/you-dont-exist/arbitrary-detentions-
enforced-disappearances-and-torture-eastern; Staff, “Ukraine: Abuses and
War Crimes by the Aidar Volunteer Battalion in the North Luhansk
Region,” Amnesty International, September 8, 2014,
https://amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/eur500402014en.pdf;
Staff, “Eastern Ukraine: Humanitarian disaster looms as food aid blocked,”
Amnesty International, December 24, 2014,
http://amnesty.org/en/news/eastern-ukraine-humanitarian-disaster-looms-
food-aid-blocked.

[1100] Shaun Walker, “Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and
may be its greatest threat,” Guardian, September 10, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukraine-
neo-nazis.
[1101] Sophia Kishkovsky and Alison Smale, “Tatars, Foes of Russia in
Crimea, Block Shipments of Food,” New York Times, September 21, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/09/22/world/europe/tatars-block-land-route-into-
crimea-from-ukraine.html.

[1102] Oren Dorell, “Ukrainian Tatars blockade Russian-held Crimea,”

USA Today, September 22, 2015,
https://usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/09/22/ukrainian-tatars-
blockade-russian-held-crimea/72629660.

[1103] Paul Moreira, Ukraine: Masks of the Revolution, Notre Monde,

November 6, 2021, https://youtube.com/watch?v=VLXtWfTcLC4.

[1104] “Report on the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine 16 August to 15

November 2015,” UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,
December 9, 2015,
https://ohchr.org/sites/default/files/Documents/Countries/UA/12thOHCHRr
eportUkraine.pdf.

[1105] Staff, “Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians,” Human

Rights Watch, July 24, 2014, https://hrw.org/news/2014/07/24/ukraine-
unguided-rockets-killing-civilians.

[1106] Hahn, 282.

[1107] Staff, “Convicted for torture former combatant ‘Tornado’

Onishchenko went free,” Focus.ua, July 11, 2022,
https://focus.ua/uk/amp/ukraine/521825-osuzhdennyy-za-pytki-byvshiy-
kombat-tornado-onishchenko-vyshel-na-svobodu-eks-nardep.

[1108] Amanda Taub, “Pro-Kiev militias are fighting Putin, but has Ukraine
created a monster it can’t control?” Vox.com, February 20, 2015,
https://vox.com/2015/2/20/8072643/ukraine-volunteer-battalion-danger.

[1109] Josh Cohen, “Commentary: Ukraine’s neo-Nazi problem,” Reuters,

March 20, 2018, https://reuters.com/article/us-cohen-ukraine-
commentary/commentary-ukraines-neo-nazi-problem-idukkbn1gv2ty.

[1110] Sudarsan Raghavan, “Right-wing Azov Battalion Emerges as a

Controversial Defender of Ukraine,” Washington Post, April 6, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/06/ukraine-military-right-wing-
militias.

[1111] Scott Horton vs. Cathy Young, “Should the US Be Arming Ukraine
Against Russia?” Soho Forum/Reason magazine, June 23, 2022,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=7OH5grR7deQ.

OceanofPDF.com
[1112] Andri Biletsky, The Word of the White Leader (2013),
https://web.archive.org/web/20140924041340/http://rid.org.ua/knigarnya/A
B/slovo.pdf.

[1113] Valeriy Akimenko, “Ukraine’s Toughest Fight: The Challenge of

Military Reform,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February
22, 2018, https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/02/22/ukraine-s-toughest-
fight-challenge-of-military-reform-pub-75609.

[1114] Phil Miller, “Revealed: Russian neo-Nazi leader obtained UK

missiles in Ukraine,” Declassified UK, May 17, 2023,
https://declassifieduk.org/revealed-russian-neo-nazi-leader-obtained-uk-
missiles-in-ukraine.

[1115] “Azov Brigade,” MilitaryLand, September 1, 2024,

https://militaryland.net/ukraine/national-guard/azov-brigade.

[1116] Daria Zubkova, “AFU Wipe Out 72nd Brigade Of Russian Armed
Forces Near Bakhmut,” Ukrainian News Agency, May 10, 2023,
https://ukranews.com/en/news/931957-afu-wipe-out-72nd-brigade-of-
russian-armed-forces-near-bakhmut.

[1117] Colborne, 109–10; Azov Battalion Twitter Account, October 26,

2022, https://x.com/Polk_Azov/status/1585288556884512770; Alona
Mazurenko, “Special operations forces of Azov regiment become separate
assault brigade of Ground Forces and fight in Bakhmut,” Ukrainska Pravda,
January 26, 2023, https://pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/01/26/7386607;
Andriy Biletsky, Statement on Bakhmut, Telegram, May 9, 2023,
https://t.me/BiletskyAndriy/5117; Rebecca Rommen, “The crack Ukrainian
assault brigade sent to launch counterattacks around Avdiivka has a murky
past,” Business Insider, February 17, 2024,
https://businessinsider.in/international/news/the-crack-ukrainian-assault-
brigade-sent-to-launch-counterattacks-around-avdiivka-has-a-murky-
past/articleshow/107784877.cms; Andriy Biletsky, Statement on Avdiivka,
Telegram, March 13, 2024, https://t.me/s/ab3army; Rebecca Rommen, “The
crack Ukrainian assault brigade sent to launch counterattacks around
Avdiivka has a murky past,” Business Insider, February 17, 2024,
https://businessinsider.in/international/news/the-crack-ukrainian-assault-
brigade-sent-to-launch-counterattacks-around-avdiivka-has-a-murky-
past/articleshow/107784877.cms; Staff, “Biletsky about situation in
Avdiyivka axis: This campaign certainly most difficult, there are definitely
signs of stabilization now,” Interfax-Ukraine, March 22, 2024,
https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/975396.html.

[1118] Oleksiy Kuzmenko, “The Azov Regiment has not depoliticized,”

Atlantic Council, March 19, 2020,
https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/the-azov-regiment-has-not-
depoliticized.

[1119] Alexander Rubinstein, “Zelensky holds court with Ukraine’s most

notorious neo-Nazi,” Grayzone, August 16, 2023,
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/08/16/zelensky-ukraines-notorious-neo-nazi;
More on Biletsky’s threats against President Zelensky below.
[1120] Julia Struck, “‘Attacked a Superior Enemy and Won’ – Ukraine
Gains Ground in Kharkiv,” Kyiv Post, August 23, 2024,
https://kyivpost.com/post/37853.

[1121] Staff, “Zelensky awarded the 3rd Separate Mechanized Brigade with
the ‘For Courage and Bravery’ award,” UNN, August 24, 2024,
https://unn.ua/en/news/zelensky-awarded-the-3rd-separate-mechanized-
brigade-with-the-for-courage-and-bravery-award.

[1122] Andreas Umland, “Irregular Militias and Radical Nationalism in

Post-Euromaydan Ukraine: The Prehistory and Emergence of the ‘Azov’
Battalion in 2014,” Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 31, No. 1
(January 2019),
https://researchgate.net/publication/331360561_Irregular_Militias_and_Rad
ical_Nationalism_in_Post-
Euromaydan_Ukraine_The_Prehistory_and_Emergence_of_the_Azov_Batt
alion_in_2014.

[1123] Alexander Rubinstein, “Zelensky holds court with Ukraine’s most

notorious neo-Nazi,” Grayzone, August 16, 2023,
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/08/16/zelensky-ukraines-notorious-neo-nazi.

[1124] Cathy Young, “Heroes of Mariupol or Neo-Nazi Menace?” The

Bulwark, May 25, 2022, https://thebulwark.com/heroes-of-mariupol-or-neo-
nazi-menace.
[1125] Staff, “US Counts 108 Deaths in Custody in Iraq, Afghanistan,” Los
Angeles Times, March 17, 2005, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-
mar-17-fg-abuse17-story.html; Adam Goldman and Kathy Gannon, “Gul
Rahman’s death in the Salt Pit: A cautionary tale from CIA prison in
Afghanistan,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 28, 2010,
https://cleveland.com/world/2010/03/gul_rahman_death_in_the_salt_p.html
; The other Scott Horton (no relation), “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides,’”
Harper’s, March 2010, https://harpers.org/archive/2010/03/the-
guantanamo-suicides.

[1126] Cathy Young, “Liberty’s Paradoxes,” Reason, December 2001,

https://reason.com/2001/12/01/libertys-paradoxes-2; Cathy Young,
“Feminism and Iraq,” Reason, March 25, 2003,
https://reason.com/2003/03/25/feminism-and-iraq; Cathy Young,
“Unresolved,” Reason, February 26, 2003,
https://reason.com/2003/02/26/unresolved; Cathy Young, “A Silver Lining
in Iraq,” Reason, November 2, 2005, https://reason.com/2005/11/02/a-
silver-lining-in-iraq.

[1127] Lev Golinkin, “Neo-Nazis and the Far Right Are On the March in
Ukraine,” The Nation, February 22, 2019,
https://thenation.com/article/politics/neo-nazis-far-right-ukraine.

[1128] Amy Mackinnon, “Bellingcat Can Say What US Intelligence Can’t,”

Foreign Policy, December 17, 2020,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/17/bellingcat-can-say-what-u-s-
intelligence-cant; Aaron Maté, “NATO-backed network of Syria dirty war
propagandists identified,” Aaron Maté Substack, August 1, 2022,
https://mate.substack.com/p/nato-backed-network-of-syria-dirty; Aaron
Maté, “Elon Musk is right: Bellingcat is a Western ‘psy-op,’” Aaron Maté
Substack, May 18, 2023, https://mate.substack.com/p/elon-musk-is-right-
bellingcat-is; Kit Klarenberg, “Bellingcat funded by US and UK
intelligence contractors that aided extremists in Syria,” Grayzone, October
9, 2021, https://thegrayzone.com/2021/10/09/bellingcat-intelligence-
contractors-extremists-syria.

[1129] Michael Colborne, “Why Does No One Care That Neo-Nazis Are
Gaining Power In Ukraine?” The Forward, December 31, 2018,
https://forward.com/opinion/416751/why-does-no-one-care-that-neo-nazis-
are-gaining-power-in-ukraine.

[1130] Oleksiy Kuzmenko, “‘Defend the White Race’: American Extremists

Being Co-Opted by Ukraine’s Far-Right,” Bellingcat, February 15, 2019,
https://bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2019/02/15/defend-the-white-
race-american-extremists-being-co-opted-by-ukraines-far-right.

[1131] Michael Colborne, From the Fires of War: Ukraine’s Azov

Movement and the Global Far Right (Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2022), 9.

[1132] Christo Grozev, “The Remote Control Killers Behind Russia’s

Cruise Missile Strikes on Ukraine,” Bellingcat, October 24, 2022,
https://bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2022/10/24/the-remote-control-
killers-behind-russias-cruise-missile-strikes-on-ukraine.
[1133] Charlie Smart, “How the Russian Media Spread False Claims About
Ukrainian Nazis,” New York Times, July 2, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2022/07/02/world/europe/ukraine-nazis-
russia-media.html; Robert Farley, “The Facts on ‘De-Nazifying’ Ukraine,”
FactCheck.org, March 31, 2022, https://factcheck.org/2022/03/the-facts-on-
de-nazifying-ukraine; Rachel Treisman, “Putin’s claim of fighting against
Ukraine ‘neo-Nazis’ distorts history, scholars say,” NPR News, March 1,
2022, https://npr.org/2022/03/01/1083677765/putin-denazify-ukraine-
russia-history.

[1134] “Are we the baddies?” That Mitchell and Webb Look, September 14,
2006, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY.

[1135] Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines

Highlight Thorny Issues of History,” New York Times, June 5, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/06/05/world/europe/nazi-symbols-ukraine.html.

[1136] Colborne, 10.

[1137] Staff, “Ukraine’s Azov Regiment Opens Boot Camp For Kids,”
RFERL, November 10, 2015, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-azov-regiment-
military/27355932.html.

[1138] “Ukraine’s far-right children’s camp: ‘I want to bring up a warrior,’”

Guardian, September 5, 2017, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=jiBXmbkwiSw.
[1139] Staff, “Inside a Ukrainian nationalist camp training kids to kill,”
CBS News, November 12, 2018, https://cbsnews.com/news/ukrainian-
nationalist-camp-training-kids-to-kill.

[1140] Colborne, 31–32.

[1141] Staff, “Death toll in eastern Ukraine crosses 6,000, Zeid says, as UN
releases new report Ukraine human rights report,” UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights, March 2, 2015,
https://ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2015/03/death-toll-eastern-ukraine-
crosses-6000-zeid-says-un-releases-new-report.

[1142] Max Rose and Ali H. Soufan, “We Once Fought Jihadists. Now We
Battle White Supremacists,” New York Times, February 11, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/02/11/opinion/politics/white-supremacist-
terrorism.html.

[1143] Palash Ghosh, “Euromaidan: The Dark Shadows Of The Far-Right

In Ukraine Protests,” International Business Times, February 19, 2014,
https://ibtimes.com/euromaidan-dark-shadows-far-right-ukraine-protests-
1556654.

[1144] Adrien Nonjon, “Olena Semenyaka, The ‘First Lady’ of Ukrainian

Nationalism,” Illiberalism Studies Program Working Papers, September
2020, https://illiberalism.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Nonjon-Olena-
Semenyaka-The-First-Lady-of-Ukrainian-Nationalism.pdf.
[1145] Jordan Green, “The lost boys of Ukraine: How the war abroad
beckoned American white supremacists,” Triad City Beat, January 19,
2020, https://triad-city-beat.com/the-lost-boys-of-ukraine.

[1146] Facebook post by Olena Semenyaka, October 29, 2018,

https://facebook.com/olena.semenyaka/posts/2193069517369915;
Christopher Miller, “Azov, Ukraine’s Most Prominent Ultranationalist
Group, Sets Its Sights On US, Europe,” RFERL, November 14, 2018,
https://rferl.org/a/azov-ukraine-s-most-prominent-ultranationalist-group-
sets-its-sights-on-u-s-europe/29600564.html.

[1147] Christopher Miller, “Azov, Ukraine’s Most Prominent

Ultranationalist Group, Sets Its Sights On US, Europe,” RFERL, November
14, 2018, https://rferl.org/a/azov-ukraine-s-most-prominent-ultranationalist-
group-sets-its-sights-on-u-s-europe/29600564.html.

[1148] Christopher Miller, “Azov, Ukraine’s Most Prominent

Ultranationalist Group, Sets Its Sights On US, Europe,” RFERL, November
14, 2018, https://rferl.org/a/azov-ukraine-s-most-prominent-ultranationalist-
group-sets-its-sights-on-u-s-europe/29600564.html.

[1149] Tim Lister, “The Nexus Between Far-Right Extremists in the United
States and Ukraine,” CTC Sentinel, Vol. 13, No. 4 (April 2020),
https://ctc.usma.edu/the-nexus-between-far-right-extremists-in-the-united-
states-and-ukraine.
[1150] Christopher Miller, “Azov, Ukraine’s Most Prominent
Ultranationalist Group, Sets Its Sights On US, Europe,” RFERL, November
14, 2018, https://rferl.org/a/azov-ukraine-s-most-prominent-ultranationalist-
group-sets-its-sights-on-u-s-europe/29600564.html.

[1151] Kevin Rawlinson, “Neo-Nazi groups recruit Britons to fight in

Ukraine,” Guardian, March 2, 2018,
https://theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/02/neo-nazi-groups-recruit-
britons-to-fight-in-ukraine; Michael Moynihan, “The Swedish Neo-Nazis
‘Volunteers’ of Kiev,” Daily Beast, February 28, 2014,
https://thedailybeast.com/the-swedish-neo-nazis-volunteers-of-kiev; Dina
Newman, “Ukraine conflict: ‘White power’ warrior from Sweden,” BBC,
July 16, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-28329329.

[1152] Janet Reitman, “All-American Nazis,” Rolling Stone, May 2, 2018,

https://rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/all-american-nazis-628023.

[1153] Tom Parfitt, “Ukraine Crisis: the Neo-Nazi Brigade Fighting Pro-
Russian Separatists,” Telegraph, August 11, 2014,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11025137/Ukraine-
crisis-the-neo-Nazi-brigade-fighting-pro-Russian-separatists.html.

[1154] Dina Newman, “Ukraine conflict: ‘White power’ warrior from

Sweden,” BBC, July 16, 2014, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-
28329329.
[1155] JTA, “Brazilian neo-Nazis recruited to fight in Ukrainian civil war,”
Haaretz, January 12, 2017, https://haaretz.com/world-news/americas/2017-
01-12/ty-article/brazilian-neo-nazis-recruited-to-fight-in-ukraine/0000017f-
f097-d223-a97f-fddf70f30000; Marcus Moraes, “Brazilian Neo-Nazis Head
To Ukraine To Fight in Civil War,” The Forward, January 12, 2017,
https://forward.com/news/breaking-news/359770/brazilian-neo-nazis-head-
to-ukraine-to-fight-in-civil-war; Joe Leahy, “Brazil neo-Nazi claim
challenges myth of nation’s racial harmony,” Financial Times, January 10,
2017, https://ft.com/content/f9ee01ca-ce49-11e6-864f-20dcb35cede2.

[1156] Ali Soufan, “White Supremacy Extremism: The Transnational Rise

of the Violent White Supremacist Movement,” The Soufan Center,
September 2019, https://thesoufancenter.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/09/Report-by-The-Soufan-Center-White-Supremacy-
Extremism-The-Transnational-Rise-of-The-Violent-White-Supremacist-
Movement.pdf; “Germans join right-wing extremist Ukrainian battalion,”
Der Spiegel, November 11, 2017,
https://spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/ukraine-deutsche-soeldner-heuern-bei-
rechtsextremem-freiwilligenbataillon-an-a-1177400.html.

[1157] Kevin Rawlinson, “Neo-Nazi groups recruit Britons to fight in

Ukraine,” Guardian, March 1, 2018,
https://theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/02/neo-nazi-groups-recruit-
britons-to-fight-in-ukraine; “Britons join neo-Nazi militia in Ukraine,” The
Week, March 2, 2018, https://theweek.co.uk/92041/britons-join-neo-nazi-
militia-in-ukraine.
[1158] Phil Miller, “Russian neo-Nazi leader obtained UK missiles in
Ukraine,” Declassified UK, May 17, 2023,
https://declassifieduk.org/revealed-russian-neo-nazi-leader-obtained-uk-
missiles-in-ukraine.

[1159] Michael Colborne, “Croatia Key to Ukrainian Far-Right’s

International Ambitions,” Balkan Insight, July 18, 2019,
https://balkaninsight.com/2019/07/18/croatia-key-to-ukrainian-far-rights-
international-ambitions.

[1160] Rina Bassist, “Wiesenthal Center calls on French mayor to prevent

‘neo-Nazi’ gathering,” Jerusalem Post, January 8, 2016,
https://jpost.com/diaspora/wiesenthal-center-calls-on-french-mayor-to-
prevent-neo-nazi-gathering-440834.

[1161] Sam Sokol, “French mayor pledges to prevent gathering of

Ukrainian ‘neo-Nazi’ militia,” Jerusalem Post, January 13, 2016,
https://jpost.com/diaspora/french-mayor-pledges-to-prevent-gathering-of-
ukrainian-neo-nazi-militia-441441.

[1162] Tom O’Connor and Naveed Jamali, “A Year After 1/6, Ukraine’s
War Draws US Far-Right to Fight Russia, Train for Violence at Home,”
Newsweek, January 5, 2022, https://newsweek.com/ukraine-war-draws-us-
far-right-fight-russia-violence-home-1665027.

[1163] Tom O’Connor and Naveed Jamali, “A Year After 1/6, Ukraine’s
War Draws US Far-Right to Fight Russia, Train for Violence at Home,”
Newsweek, January 5, 2022, https://newsweek.com/ukraine-war-draws-us-
far-right-fight-russia-violence-home-1665027.

[1164] Tom O’Connor and Naveed Jamali, “A Year After 1/6, Ukraine’s
War Draws US Far-Right to Fight Russia, Train for Violence at Home,”
Newsweek, January 5, 2022, https://newsweek.com/ukraine-war-draws-us-
far-right-fight-russia-violence-home-1665027.

[1165] Ali Soufan, “White Supremacy Extremism: The Transnational Rise

of the Violent White Supremacist Movement,” The Soufan Center,
September 2019, https://thesoufancenter.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/09/Report-by-The-Soufan-Center-White-Supremacy-
Extremism-The-Transnational-Rise-of-The-Violent-White-Supremacist-
Movement.pdf.

[1166] John Wojcik, “From Charlottesville to Christchurch, Ukraine’s Azov

Battalion is training the world’s right-wing extremists,” People’s World,
March 24, 2022, https://peoplesworld.org/article/ignoring-the-influence-of-
the-extreme-right-in-ukraine-is-dangerous.

[1167] Brenton Tarrant, “The Great Replacement,” Observer+, March 15,

2019,
https://web.archive.org/web/20190315145113/https://observer.news/assets/
The-Great-Replacement.pdf; Tim Lister, “The Nexus Between Far-Right
Extremists in the United States and Ukraine,” CTC Sentinel, Vol. 13, No. 4
(April 2020), https://ctc.usma.edu/the-nexus-between-far-right-extremists-
in-the-united-states-and-ukraine; Colborne, 130–31.
[1168] Patrick Kingsley, “New Zealand Massacre Highlights Global Reach
of White Extremism,” New York Times, March 15, 2019,
https://nytimes.com/2019/03/15/world/asia/christchurch-mass-shooting-
extremism.html.

[1169] Colborne, 131.

[1170] Tweety Beneduce, “Campania, Neo-Nazi Cell Discovered: 4

Arrests,” Corriere del Mezzogiorno, November 15, 2022,
https://corrieredelmezzogiorno.corriere.it/napoli/cronaca/22_novembre_15/
campania-scoperta-cellula-neonazista-4-arresti-napoli-caserta-avellino-
28d08bb0-64b3-11ed-86e0-7bd3cb81bfd3.shtml; Alexander Rubinstein,
“Blowback: Italian Police Bust Azov-tied Nazi Cell Planning Terror
Attacks,” Grayzone, November 15, 2022,
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/11/15/blowback-italian-azov-tied-nazi-terror.

[1171] L.A. office FBI Special Agent Scott J. Bierwirth Affidavit, US

District Court for the Central District of California, October 20, 2018,
https://courthousenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RAM-rioting-
Rundo-et-al-COMPLAINT133873.pdf.

[1172] Christopher Miller, “Soldier of Misfortune,” BuzzFeed News, April

9, 2021, https://buzzfeednews.com/article/christopherm51/craig-lang-
ukraine-far-right-extremists-true-crime; Christopher Miller, “The DOJ Is
Investigating Americans For War Crimes Allegedly Committed While
Fighting With Far-Right Extremists In Ukraine,” BuzzFeed News, October
8, 2021, https://buzzfeednews.com/article/christopherm51/craig-lang-
ukraine-war-crimes-alleged.

[1173] Jared Kofsky, et al., “Army vet charged in Florida double murder
may remain at large in Ukraine,” ABC News, February 28, 2022,
https://abcnews.go.com/International/us-army-vet-charged-florida-double-
murder-remains/story?id=83066233.

[1174] Christopher Miller, “Azov, Ukraine’s Most Prominent

Ultranationalist Group, Sets Its Sights On US, Europe,” RFERL, November
14, 2018, https://rferl.org/a/azov-ukraine-s-most-prominent-ultranationalist-
group-sets-its-sights-on-u-s-europe/29600564.html.

[1175] Tom O’Connor and Naveed Jamali, “A Year After 1/6, Ukraine’s
War Draws US Far-Right to Fight Russia, Train for Violence at Home,”
Newsweek, January 5, 2022, https://newsweek.com/ukraine-war-draws-us-
far-right-fight-russia-violence-home-1665027.

[1176] Tom O’Connor and Naveed Jamali, “A Year After 1/6, Ukraine’s
War Draws US Far-Right to Fight Russia, Train for Violence at Home,”
Newsweek, January 5, 2022, https://newsweek.com/ukraine-war-draws-us-
far-right-fight-russia-violence-home-1665027.

[1177] Tim Lister, “The Nexus Between Right-Wing Extremists in the

United States and Ukraine,” Counterterrorism Center at West Point, April
2020, https://ctc.westpoint.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/CTC-
SENTINEL-042020.pdf.
[1178] Simon Shuster, “Inside A White Supremacist Militia in Ukraine,”
Time, January 8, 2021, https://youtube.com/watch?v=fy910FG46C4.

[1179] Phil Miller, “Russian neo-Nazi leader obtained UK missiles in

Ukraine,” Declassified UK, May 17, 2023,
https://declassifieduk.org/revealed-russian-neo-nazi-leader-obtained-uk-
missiles-in-ukraine.

[1180] Mansur Mirovalev, “Russian neo-Nazis get life in jail for 27

murders,” AP, July 11, 2011, https://sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-russian-
neo-nazis-get-life-in-jail-for-27-murders-2011jul11-story.html.

[1181] Tom O’Connor, “As Ukraine Rallies Nation to Defend from Russia,
Far-Right Joins the Fight,” Newsweek, March 2, 2022,
https://newsweek.com/ukraine-rallies-nation-defend-russia-far-right-joins-
fight-1684187.

[1182] Staff, “Yarosh: I can send several battalions to Kyiv and resolve the
government issue,” Euromaidan Press, October 18, 2014,
https://euromaidanpress.com/2014/10/18/yarosh-i-can-send-several-
battalions-to-kyiv-and-resolve-the-government-issue.

[1183] Roland Oliphant, “Far-Right group Pravy Sektor challenges Ukraine

government after shootout,” Telegraph, July 12, 2015,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11734520/Ukrainia
n-forces-surround-nationalist-militia-following-deadly-attack-in-western-
Ukraine.html.
[1184] Oleksiy Kuzmenko, “Ukraine Nationalists: Country Headed for
Coup,” Voice of America, July 13, 2015, https://voanews.com/a/ukraine-
nationalists-say-country-headed-for-coup/2860024.html.

[1185] Interfax Staff, “Defense Ministry: Yarosh to be Armed Forces

Commander in Chief’s Advisor,” Kyiv Post, April 6, 2015,
https://kyivpost.com/post/9538.

[1186] Lilia Ragutskaya, “Yarosh: If Zelensky Betrays Ukraine, He Will

Lose Not His Position, But His Life,” Obozrevatel, May 27, 2019,
https://incident.obozrevatel.com/ukr/crime/dmitro-yarosh-1-chastina-
intervyu.htm; See below.

[1187] Staff, “Together we will win: Yarosh became an adviser to the

Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” Perild, November
2, 2021, https://perild.com/2021/11/02/together-we-will-win-yarosh-
became-an-adviser-to-the-commander-in-chief-of-the-armed-forces-of-
ukraine.

[1188] Interview with author, Max Blumenthal, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, November 29, 2018, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/11-27-18-
max-blumenthal-on-u-s-funded-neo-nazism.

[1189] Elsa Court, “Attacks on Roma People Fuel Concerns About Far-
Right Groups in Ukraine,” Kyiv Post, July 3, 2018,
https://kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/attacks-on-roma-people-fuel-
concerns-about-far-right-groups-in-ukraine.html; Christopher Miller,
“Ukrainian Militia Behind Brutal Romany Attacks Getting State Funds,”
RFERL, June 14, 2018, https://rferl.org/a/ukrainian-militia-behind-brutal-
romany-attacks-getting-state-funds/29290844.html; Bernard Rorke, “Three
anti-Roma pogroms in Ukraine,” European Roma Rights Center, June 12,
2018, http://errc.org/news/anti-roma-pogroms-in-ukraine-on-c14-and-
tolerating-terror.

[1190] Staff, “Ukrainian Nationalists Disrupt Peace Presentation On War In

East,” RFERL, March 12, 2020, https://rferl.org/a/ukrainian-nationalists-
disrupt-peace-presentation-on-war-in-east/30484359.html.

[1191] Joshua Cohen, “Ukraine’s ultra-right militias are challenging the

government to a showdown,” Washington Post, June 15, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/06/15/ukraines-
ultra-right-militias-are-challenging-the-government-to-a-showdown.

[1192] Christopher Miller, “Ukrainian Nationalists Stage Torchlight March

In Kyiv As New Far-Right Party Is Born,” RFERL, October 14, 2016,
https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-nationalists-torchlight-march-azov-
party/28053936.html; Staff, “Nationalists Mark 75th Anniversary Of
Ukrainian Insurgent Army,” RFERL, October 14, 2017,
https://rferl.org/a/nationalists-mark-75th-anniversary-of-ukrainian-
insurgent-army/28794861.html; Staff, “Ukrainians Mark Holiday With
Nationalist March, Thanksgiving Prayer In Kyiv,” RFERL, October 14,
2018, https://rferl.org/a/nationalists-commemorate-creation-of-ukrainian-
insurgent-army/29543105.html.
[1193] Not to be confused with the group of high-level Nazi military
officers mentioned above.

[1194] See below.

[1195] Sam Sokol, “Kiev regional police head accused of neo-Nazi ties,”
Jerusalem Post, November 12, 2014, https://jpost.com/diaspora/kiev-
regional-police-head-accused-of-neo-nazi-ties-381559.

[1196] Jonah Fisher, “On patrol with the far-right National Militia,” BBC
Newsnight, April 3, 2018, https://youtube.com/watch?v=hE6b4ao8gAQ.

[1197] Staff, “Police open case over anti-Semitic slogans at far-right rally in
Odesa,” LB.ua, May 4, 2018,
https://en.lb.ua/news/2018/05/04/5968_police_open_case_over_antisemitic.
html.

[1198] “2018 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Ukraine,” US

State Department, https://state.gov/reports/2018-country-reports-on-human-
rights-practices/ukraine.

[1199] “2021 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Ukraine,” US

State Department, https://state.gov/reports/2021-country-reports-on-human-
rights-practices/ukraine.

[1200] Christopher Miller, “Police Break Silence After Video Shows Far-
Right Attack On Kyiv Roma,” RFERL, April 26, 2018,
https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-police-break-silence-after-video-shows-far-right-
attack-on-kyiv-roma/29194216.html.

[1201] “National Squads Destroyed the Roma Camp in Holosiivskyi Park,”

EuroMaydan, June 7, 2018, https://youtube.com/watch?v=X73xIGsQLvw.

[1202] Christopher Miller, “With Axes And Hammers, Far-Right Vigilantes

Destroy Another Romany Camp In Kyiv,” RFERL, June 8, 2018,
https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-far-right-vigilantes-destroy-another-romany-
camp-in-kyiv/29280336.html.

[1203] “Ukraine Roma Camp Attack Leaves One Dead,” BBC, June 24,
2018, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-44593995.

[1204] Alex Sturrock, “‘They Wanted to Kill Us’: Masked Neo-Fascists

Strike Fear Into Ukraine’s Roma,” Guardian, August 27, 2018,
https://theguardian.com/global-development/2018/aug/27/they-wanted-to-
kill-us-masked-neo-fascists-strike-fear-into-ukraines-roma.

[1205] Lev Golinkin, “The Ukrainian Far Right – and the Danger It Poses,”
The Nation, December 5, 2016, https://thenation.com/article/archive/the-
ukrainian-far-right-and-the-danger-it-poses.

[1206] “‘Azovites’ threatened physical violence to people’s deputies,”

Korrespondent.net, May 20, 2016,
https://korrespondent.net/ukraine/3685301-azovtsy-pryhrozyly-
fyzycheskoi-raspravoi-nardepam.
[1207] Joshua Cohen, “Ukraine’s ultra-right militias are challenging the
government to a showdown,” Washington Post, June 15, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/06/15/ukraines-
ultra-right-militias-are-challenging-the-government-to-a-showdown.

[1208] Staff, “Ukraine: Investigate, Punish Hate Crimes,” Human Rights

Watch, June 14, 2018, https://hrw.org/news/2018/06/14/ukraine-investigate-
punish-hate-crimes; Staff, “Joint Letter to Ukraine’s Minister of Interior
Affairs and Prosecutor General Concerning Radical Groups,” Human
Rights Watch, et al., June 14, 2018, https://hrw.org/news/2018/06/14/joint-
letter-ukraines-minister-interior-affairs-and-prosecutor-general-concerning.

[1209] John Dalhuisen, “Ukraine’s spate of suspicious deaths must be

followed by credible investigations,” Amnesty International, April 17, 2015,
https://amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/04/ukraine-suspicious-deaths-need-
credible-investigations.

[1210] Christopher Miller, “‘Banderite’ Rebrand: Ukrainian Police Declare

Admiration For Nazi Collaborators To Make A Point,” RFERL, February
13, 2019, https://rferl.org/a/banderite-rebrand-ukrainian-police-declare-
admiration-for-nazi-collaborators-to-make-a-point/29764110.html.

[1211] Josh Cohen, “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far-Right Violence
(And No, RT Didn’t Write This Headline),” Atlantic Council, June 20,
2018, https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-s-got-a-real-
problem-with-far-right-violence-and-no-rt-didn-t-write-this-headline.
[1212] Colborne, 88–91.

[1213] Staff, “Russian Police Detain Student Over Beheading Video,”

RFERL, August 15, 2007, https://rferl.org/a/1078162.html.

[1214] Colborne, 96–100.

[1215] Gabriela Baczynska, “Ultra-nationalist Ukrainian Battalion Gears

Up For More Fighting,” Reuters, March 25, 2015,
https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-azov/ultra-nationalist-ukrainian-
battalion-gears-up-for-more-fighting-idUSKBN0ML0XJ20150325.

[1216] Tweet by Christopher Miller of RFE/RL, October 25, 2018,

https://x.com/ChristopherJM/status/1055507370871271428.

[1217] Max Blumenthal, “John McCain and Paul Ryan Hold ‘Good
Meeting’ With Veteran Ukrainian Nazi Demagogue Andriy Parubiy,”
AlterNet, June 23, 2017, https://alternet.org/grayzone-project/john-mccain-
and-paul-ryan-hold-good-meeting-veteran-ukrainian-nazi-demagogue-
andriy.

[1218] Erin Mundahl, “Lithuania, Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova Stress

Importance of American Energy, Stopping Nord Stream 2,” Inside Sources,
June 28, 2018, http://insidesources.com/lithuania-ukraine-moldova-georgia-
stress-importance-of-american-energy-stopping-nord-stream-2.

[1219] Max Blumenthal, “Congress welcomes an actual fascist as Nazi

violence rages in Ukraine,” Grayzone, July 2, 2018,
https://thegrayzone.com/2018/07/02/video-congress-welcomes-an-actual-
fascist-as-nazi-violence-rages-in-ukraine.

[1220] Petro, 88.

[1221] “Reporters Michael Colborne and Oleksiy Kuzmenko Threatened

and Harassed,” Council of Europe, September 27, 2019,
https://fom.coe.int/en/alerte/detail/52442747; “Reporters Michael Colborne
and Oleksiy Kuzmenko Threatened and Harassed,” Response by the
Government of Ukraine, December 16, 2019, https://rm.coe.int/ukraine-
reply-en-reporters-michael-colborne-and-oleksiy-kuzmenko-
16dec/1680994779.

[1222] Keith Gessen, “Why not kill them all?” London Review of Books,
September 11, 2014, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n17/keith-gessen/why-
not-kill-them-all.

[1223] Staff, “Ukraine conflict: President Zelensky warns Russia: We will

defend ourselves,” BBC, February 23, 2022, https://bbc.com/news/world-
europe-60497510.

[1224] Diana Magnay and Tim Lister, “Air attack on pro-Russian

separatists in Luhansk kills 8, stuns residents,” CNN, June 3, 2014,
https://cnn.com/2014/06/03/world/europe/ukraine-luhansk-building-
attack/index.html; “Ukraine conflict: Air strikes ‘hit Luhansk targets,’”
BBC, July 14, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-28292338; Sabrina
Tavernise and Sergey Ponomarev, “Border Guards in Ukraine Abandon
Posts,” New York Times, June 4, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/06/05/world/europe/rebels-in-eastern-ukraine-
capture-government-posts.html.

[1225] Staff, “Ukraine: Unguided Rockets Killing Civilians,” Human

Rights Watch, July 24, 2014, https://hrw.org/news/2014/07/24/ukraine-
unguided-rockets-killing-civilians, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=yR6dX56amW4; Staff, “Ukraine: Forces must stop firing on civilians
after nine killed in Donetsk,” Amnesty International, October 1, 2014,
https://amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/10/ukraine-forces-must-stop-firing-
civilians-after-nine-killed-donetsk; Staff, “Ukraine: Shelling endangers
civilians in Lugansk,” International Committee of the Red Cross,
September 3, 2014,
https://icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/interview/2014/09-14803-ukraine-
lugansk-civilians-shelling.htm; John Reed, “Kiev anti-terror operation takes
toll on Slavyansk residents,” Financial Times, June 10, 2014,
https://ft.com/content/d8aa9386-f0b9-11e3-9e26-00144feabdc0; Keith
Gessen, “Why not kill them all?” London Review of Books, September 11,
2014, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n17/keith-gessen/why-not-kill-them-
all.

[1226] Andrew Roth, “Ukraine Used Cluster Bombs, Evidence Indicates,”

New York Times, October 20, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/10/21/world/ukraine-used-cluster-bombs-report-
charges.html; Staff, “Ukraine: Widespread Use of Cluster Munitions,”
Human Rights Watch, October 20, 2014,
https://hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-cluster-munitions;
Harriet Salem, “‘I Couldn’t Move for Five Minutes from Fear’: An
Investigation Into Cluster Bombs in Eastern Ukraine,” Vice, October 22,
2014, https://news.vice.com/article/i-couldnt-move-for-five-minutes-from-
fear-an-investigation-into-cluster-bombs-in-eastern-ukraine.

[1227] Keith Gessen, “Why not kill them all?” London Review of Books,
September 11, 2014, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n17/keith-gessen/why-
not-kill-them-all.

[1228] De Ploeg, 140–41.

[1229] Nils Muižnieks, “Eastern Ukraine: urgent need to guarantee freedom

of movement and humanitarian access,” Council of Europe, March 11,
2015, https://coe.int/en/web/commissioner/-/eastern-ukraine-urgent-need-
to-guarantee-freedom-of-movement-and-humanitarian-access.

[1230] Christof Heyns, “End of visit statement of the Special Rapporteur on

extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions,” UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights, September 18, 2015,
https://ohchr.org/en/statements/2015/09/end-visit-statement-special-
rapporteur-extrajudicial-summary-or-arbitrary.

[1231] Arlette Saenz, “Obama Praises Ukraine’s President-Elect, Offers US

Support,” ABC News, June 4, 2014,
https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2014/06/obama-praises-ukraines-
president-elect-offers-us-support.
[1232] “McCain to Sputnik: Ukraine’s Use of Cluster Bombs Is US’ Fault,”
Sputnik, February 5, 2015,
https://sputniknews.com/20150205/1017844947.html.

[1233] Diana Magnay and Laura Smith-Spark, “Misery in Ukraine as

deadly conflict drives civilians from homes,” CNN, September 2, 2014,
https://cnn.com/2014/09/02/world/europe/ukraine-crisis/index.html.

[1234] Staff, “Ukraine: The Line,” Crisis Group Europe Briefing Number
81, July 18, 2016, https://crisisgroup.org/sites/default/files/ukraine-the-
line.pdf.

[1235] Zhuchkovsky, 170–71.

[1236] “Conflict-related civilian casualties in Ukraine,” UN Office of the

High Commissioner for Human Rights, January 27, 2022,
https://ukraine.un.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/Conflict-
related%20civilian%20casualties%20as%20of%2031%20December%2020
21%20(rev%2027%20January%202022)%20corr%20EN_0.pdf.

[1237] Mark Warren, “Why the Best War Reporter in a Generation Had to
Suddenly Stop,” Esquire, September 14, 2015, https://esquire.com/news-
politics/a37838/end-of-war-1015.

[1238] C.J. Chivers and Noah Sneider, “Behind the Masks in Ukraine,
Many Faces of Rebellion,” New York Times, May 3, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/05/04/world/europe/behind-the-masks-in-ukraine-
many-faces-of-rebellion.html.
[1239] Jonathan Ferguson and N.R. Jenzen-Jones, “Raising Red Flags: An
Examination of Arms & Munitions in the Ongoing Conflict in Ukraine,
2014,” ARES Research Report No. 3, Armament Research Services,
November 18, 2014, https://armamentresearch.com/ares-research-report-no-
3-raising-red-flags-an-examination-of-arms-munitions-in-the-ongoing-
conflict-in-ukraine-2014.

[1240] “SIPRI Yearbook 2015 Summary: Armaments, Disarmament and

International Security,” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute
(SIPRI), October 1, 2015, https://sipri.org/sites/default/files/2016-03/YB-
15-Summary-EN.pdf.

[1241] Zhuchkovsky, 19, 30, 49, 63–65, 69–71, 145, 159–60, 226–30.

[1242] Keith Gessen, “Why not kill them all?” London Review of Books,
September 11, 2014, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n17/keith-gessen/why-
not-kill-them-all.

[1243] Staff, “Ukraine: The Line,” Crisis Group Europe Briefing Number
81, July 18, 2016, https://crisisgroup.org/sites/default/files/ukraine-the-
line.pdf.

[1244] Staff, “Rebels without a Cause: Russia’s Proxies in Eastern

Ukraine,” Crisis Group Europe Report 254, July 16, 2019,
https://crisisgroup.org/sites/default/files/254-rebels-without-a-
cause%20%281%29.pdf.
[1245] Staff, “OSCE SMM doesn’t confirm presence of Russian troops in
Donbas, sees only ‘fighters from outside the region’ – Zannier,” Interfax-
Ukraine, September 9, 2016,
https://en.interfax.com.ua/news/general/369129.html.

[1246] Amy Mackinnon, “Counting the Dead in Europe’s Forgotten War,”

Foreign Policy, October 25, 2018,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/10/25/counting-the-dead-in-europes-
forgotten-war-ukraine-conflict-Donbas-osce.

[1247] “Weekly updates on the security in Ukraine and OSCE SMM

activities,” UCMC, October 26, 2018, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=Wc6BHQRaHdI.

[1248] Jacques Baud, “Former NATO Military Analyst Blows the Whistle
on West’s Ukraine Invasion Narrative,” ScheerPost, April 9, 2022,
https://scheerpost.com/2022/04/09/former-nato-military-analyst-blows-the-
whistle-on-wests-ukraine-invasion-narrative.

[1249] Mark Memmott, “In Ukraine: Reports Of Soldiers Switching To

Pro-Russia Side,” NPR News, April 16, 2014,
https://npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/04/16/303646309/in-ukraine-
reports-of-soldiers-switching-to-pro-russia-side.

[1250] Mark Franchetti, “Pinned to the ground by blizzard of bullets,”

Sunday Times, June 8, 2014, https://archive.is/uEDRq.
[1251] Mark Franchetti, “The truth about the war in Donbas,” June 16,
2014, https://youtube.com/watch?v=YfHFupR3Md0.

[1252] Simon Shuster, “Meet the Cossack ‘Wolves’ Doing Russia’s Dirty
Work in Ukraine,” Time, May 12, 2014, https://time.com/95898/wolves-
hundred-ukraine-russia-cossack.

[1253] Samuel Charap and Scott Boston, “The West’s Weapons Won’t
Make Any Difference to Ukraine,” Foreign Policy, January 21, 2022,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/21/weapons-ukraine-russia-invasion-
military.

[1254] Viacheslav Shramovych, “Ukraine’s deadliest day: The battle of

Ilovaisk, August 2014,” BBC, August 29, 2019,
https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-49426724.

[1255] De Ploeg, 124.

[1256] Petro, 215.

[1257] See Chapter Two.

[1258] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Russia needs to be offered a ‘Finland option’

for Ukraine,” Financial Times, February 22, 2014,
https://ft.com/content/e855408c-9bf6-11e3-afe3-00144feab7de.

[1259] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Confronting Russian Chauvinism,” Speech to

the Woodrow Wilson Center, June 16, 2014, https://the-american-
interest.com/2014/06/27/confronting-russian-chauvinism.
[1260] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The West Should Arm Ukraine,” Atlantic
Council, July 2, 2014,
https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/brzezinski-the-west-should-
arm-ukraine.

[1261] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The West Should Arm Ukraine,” Atlantic

Council, July 2, 2014,
https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/brzezinski-the-west-should-
arm-ukraine.

[1262] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “What Obama Should Tell Americans About

Ukraine,” Politico magazine, May 2, 2014,
https://politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/what-obama-should-tell-
americans-about-ukraine-106277.

[1263] “Horton’s Law,” Urban Dictionary, June 28, 2019,

https://urbandictionary.com/define.php?
term=Horton%E2%80%99s%20Law.

[1264] Petro, 158.

[1265] Petro, 151.

[1266] Petro, 177.

[1267] Petro, 158–61.

[1268] De Ploeg, 106.

[1269] Peter Baker, “In Ukraine, Joe Biden Pushes a Message of
Democracy,” New York Times, December 8, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/12/09/world/europe/joe-biden-ukraine.html.

[1270] Charap and Colton, 153–54.

[1271] Press Release, “Wales Summit Declaration,” NATO, September 5,

2014, https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_112964.htm.

[1272] Hillary Clinton, “Speech on Donald Trump and National Security,”

Time, June 26, 2016, https://time.com/4355797/hillary-clinton-donald-
trump-foreign-policy-speech-transcript.

[1273] “Remarks by President Obama and President Poroshenko of Ukraine

After Bilateral Meeting,” White House, September 18, 2014,
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/18/remarks-
president-obama-and-president-poroshenko-ukraine-after-bilateral.

[1274] Sabrina Tavernise and Sergey Ponomarev, “Border Guards in

Ukraine Abandon Posts,” New York Times, June 4, 2014,
http://nytimes.com/2014/06/05/world/europe/rebels-in-eastern-ukraine-
capture-government-posts.html.

[1275] Laura Smith-Spark and Jim Acosta, “Obama vows to stand with
Ukraine as he meets President-elect in Poland,” CNN, June 4, 2014,
http://cnn.com/2014/06/04/politics/obama-europe.
[1276] Jennifer Steinhauer and David M. Herszenhorn, “Defying Obama,
Many in Congress Press to Arm Ukraine,” New York Times, June 11, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/06/12/world/europe/defying-obama-many-in-
congress-press-to-arm-ukraine.html; Peter Baker, “Obama Said to Resist
Growing Pressure From All Sides to Arm Ukraine,” New York Times, March
10, 2015, https://nytimes.com/2015/03/11/us/politics/obama-said-to-resist-
growing-pressure-from-all-sides-to-arm-ukraine.html.

[1277] Joshua Yaffa, “Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine,” The New
Yorker, October 17, 2022,
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/inside-the-us-effort-to-arm-
ukraine.

[1278] Matthias Gebauer, et al., “Berlin Alarmed by Aggressive NATO

Stance on Ukraine,” Der Spiegel, March 6, 2015,
http://spiegel.de/international/world/germany-concerned-about-aggressive-
nato-stance-on-ukraine-a-1022193.html.

[1279] Derek Chollet, The Long Game: How Obama Defied Washington
and Redefined America’s Role in the World (New York: PublicAffairs,
2016), 175.

[1280] Staff, “Obama pledges $5M in military aid to Ukraine,” AP, June 4,
2014, https://cbc.ca/news/world/obama-pledges-5m-in-military-aid-to-
ukraine-1.2664206.
[1281] Guy Chazan and Roman Olearchyk, “Tide turns for Ukraine forces
in fight against pro-Russia rebels,” Financial Times, August 12, 2014,
https://ft.com/content/d98edf62-1951-11e4-8730-00144feabdc0.

[1282] Cami McCormick, “Re-tooling an Army From Scratch, as It Fights a

War,” CBS News, February 1, 2016, https://cbsnews.com/news/us-ukraine-
army-re-tool-troops-training-russia-backed-rebels; Austin Ramzy, “The
base attacked in western Ukraine has been a hub for foreign militaries,”
New York Times, March 13, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/03/13/world/europe/yavoriv-military-base-
ukraine.html; Zach Dorfman, “CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may
take central role if Russia invades,” Yahoo News, January 13, 2022,
https://news.yahoo.com/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-may-take-
central-role-if-russia-invades-185258008.html.

[1283] Martin Lambeck and Alexander Rackow, “CIA & FBI Agents
Advise Kiev,” Bild, May 4, 2014,
https://bild.de/politik/ausland/nachrichtendienste-usa/dutzende-agenten-
von-cia-und-fbi-beraten-kiew-35807724.bild.html.

[1284] Guy Chazan and Roman Olearchyk, “Tide turns for Ukraine forces
in fight against pro-Russia rebels,” Financial Times, August 12, 2014,
https://ft.com/content/d98edf62-1951-11e4-8730-00144feabdc0.

[1285] “American Lethal Weapons Could Already Be on the Ukrainian

Front Line,” Atlantic Council, January 9, 2018,
https://medium.com/dfrlab/american-lethal-weapons-could-already-be-on-
the-ukrainian-front-line-9dc6fd98630d.

[1286] George Friedman, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “‘Europe:

Destined for Conflict?’” February 4, 2015, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=Wijd10BZS1w.

[1287] Mark Landler, Alter Egos: Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and the
Twilight Struggle Over American Power (New York: Random House,
2016), 282–83.

[1288] “Transcript of the MH17 judgment hearing,”

https://courtmh17.com/en/news/2022/transcript-of-the-mh17-judgment-
hearing.html.

[1289] Mary Ilyushina, “Dutch court convicts three of murder in MH17 jet
downing over Ukraine,” Washington Post, November 17, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/11/17/mh17-verdict-conviction-
flight.

[1290] “Life sentences for crashing flight MH17 and murdering the 298
occupants,” The Court of The Hague, November 17, 2022,
https://rechtspraak.nl/Organisatie-en-
contact/Organisatie/Rechtbanken/Rechtbank-Den-
Haag/Nieuws/Paginas/MH17.aspx.

[1291] Corey Flintoff, “The Russian Who Claims Credit For Fanning The
Flames In Ukraine,” NPR News, January 6, 2015,
https://npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/01/06/372872870/the-russian-who-
claims-credit-for-fanning-the-flames-in-ukraine.

[1292] T.H.J. Joustra, et al., “Crash of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17

Above, Ukraine, July 17, 2014,” Dutch Safety Board, October 2015,
https://onderzoeksraad.nl/wp-
content/uploads/2023/11/debcd724fe7breport_mh17_crash.pdf.

[1293] Ken Dilanian, “US: No link to Russian gov’t in plane downing,” AP,
July 22, 2014, https://apnews.com/general-news-
07a6800fa3df463eaee3246fc45cd0ed.

[1294] Vladimir Isachenkov, “Russian TV claims it has photo of downing

of MH17,” AP, November 15, 2014,
https://apnews.com/article/c9edc22e62a34f57ada44cb6bbec7b69.

[1295] Scott Locklin, “Can the Su-25 intercept and shoot down a 777?”
Locklin on Science, July 21, 2014,
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2014/07/21/can-the-su-25-intercept-and-
shoot-down-a-777.

[1296] Nathan Patin, “Tracking the Vehicle that Transported the MH17
Buk,” Bellingcat, June 30, 2015, https://bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-
europe/2015/06/30/low-loader.

[1297] “Militants partially seized the military part of the air defense,”
Ukrainska Pravda, June 29, 2014,
https://pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2014/06/29/7030482.
[1298] Von Hubert Gude and Fidelius Schmid, “German Intelligence
Claims Pro-Russian Separatists Downed MH17,” Der Spiegel, October 19,
2014, https://spiegel.de/international/europe/german-intelligence-blames-
pro-russian-separatists-for-mh17-downing-a-997972.html.

[1299] “President Obama Speaks on Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17,

Russia and Ukraine, and the Situation in Gaza,” White House, July 18,
2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2014/07/18/president-
obama-speaks-malaysia-airlines-flight-mh17-russia-and-ukraine-and-
situatio.

[1300] Shane Harris, “US Intelligence No Closer to Pinning MH17

Downing on Russia,” Foreign Policy, July 22, 2014,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2014/07/22/u-s-intelligence-no-closer-to-pinning-
mh17-downing-on-russia.

[1301] “MH17 plane crash: Kerry points finger at Russia,” BBC, July 21,
2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-28396862; Jason Miks, “Hillary
Clinton: Putin ‘bears responsibility’ in downing of MH17,” CNN, July 27,
2014, https://cnn.com/2014/07/25/world/europe/hillary-clinton-vladimir-
putin-mh17/index.html; Becky Anderson, “Ukraine President Calls MH17
Downing ‘Terrorist Act,’” CNN Connect the World, July 21, 2014,
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/ctw/date/2014-07-21/segment/01; Sen.
Richard Blumenthal, “Blumenthal Statement on Russian Involvement in
Downing of MH17,” July 20, 2014,
https://blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blumenthal-
statement-on-russian-involvement-in-downing-of-mh17; Mike Corder,
“MH17 inquiry: ‘Strong indications’ Putin OK’d missile supply,” AP,
February 8, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/politics-russia-government-
donetsk-netherlands-business-443d74853abceb3c9eab7770c7a1a6d2.

[1302] Hahn, 268–72; Andrew Higgins, et al., “Photos Link Masked Men in
East Ukraine to Russia,” New York Times, April 20, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/04/21/world/europe/photos-link-masked-men-in-
east-ukraine-to-russia.html; Michael Gordon and Andrew Kramer,
“Scrutiny Over Photos Said to Tie Russia Units to Ukraine,” New York
Times, April 22, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/04/23/world/europe/scrutiny-over-photos-said-to-
tie-russia-units-to-ukraine.html; Robert Mackey, “Sifting Ukrainian Fact
From Ukrainian Fiction,” New York Times, February 13, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/02/14/world/europe/sifting-ukrainian-fact-from-
ukrainian-fiction.html.

[1303] Viacheslav Shramovych, “Ukraine’s deadliest day: The battle of

Ilovaisk, August 2014,” BBC, August 29, 2019,
https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-49426724.

[1304] Hahn, 272–73.

[1305] Viacheslav Shramovych, “Ukraine’s deadliest day: The battle of

Ilovaisk, August 2014,” BBC, August 29, 2019,
https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-49426724.
[1306] Allison Quinn, “Vladimir Putin sent Russian mercenaries to ‘fight in
Syria and Ukraine,’” Telegraph, March 30, 2016,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/30/vladimir-putin-sent-russian-
mercenaries-to-fight-in-syria-and-uk.

[1307] Anne Applebaum, “War in Europe,” Slate, August 29, 2014,

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/08/vladimir-putins-troops-have-
invaded-ukraine-should-we-prepare-for-war-with-russia.html.

[1308] Tim Judah, “Ukraine: A Catastrophic Defeat,” New York Review of

Books, September 5, 2014, https://nybooks.com/online/2014/09/05/ukraine-
catastrophic-defeat.

[1309] Staff, “FACTBOX-Positions before Minsk summit on Ukraine,”

Reuters, September 5, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20150715103930/http://uk.reuters.com/article/
2015/02/10/ukraine-crisis-summit-idUKL5N0VK2C520150210.

[1310] Staff, “Ukraine crisis: Heavy bombardment in rebel-held Donetsk,”

BBC, November 9, 2014, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-29975341.

[1311] “Ukraine death toll may be far higher than known 5,000: U.N.,”
Reuters, January 23, 2015, https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-
un/ukraine-death-toll-may-be-far-higher-than-known-5000-u-n-
idUSKBN0KW13P20150123.

[1312] “Memorandum of 19 September 2014,” Peace Agreements

Database, September 19, 2014, https://peaceagreements.org/view/1362.
[1313] Staff, “Civilians killed and wounded in strike with cluster munitions
in Izvestkova Street in Luhansk city,” OSCE, February 3, 2015,
http://osce.org/ukraine-smm/138906; Carol J. Williams, “Cluster bombs
reported in Ukraine conflict as US rethinks lethal aid,” Los Angeles Times,
February 4, 2015, https://latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-ukraine-russia-
cluster-bombs-evacuations-20150204-story.html.

[1314] Charap and Colton, 18–20.

[1315] Alec Luhn and Oksana Grytsenko, “Ukrainian soldiers share horrors
of Debaltseve battle after stinging defeat,” Guardian, February 18, 2015,
https://theguardian.com/world/2015/feb/18/ukrainian-soldiers-share-
horrors-of-debaltseve-battle-after-stinging-defeat; David Stern, “Ukraine
crisis: Poroshenko bruised by army retreat,” BBC, February 20, 2015,
https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-31552773; Mehdi Chebil, “The fall of
Debaltseve, a strategic defeat for Ukraine,” France 24, January 18, 2015,
https://france24.com/en/20150218-ukraine-debaltseve-strategic-defeat-
rebel.

[1316] Mark Raczkiewycz, “Looking back at the Battle of Debaltseve,” The

Ukrainian Weekly, March 8, 2019, https://ukrweekly.com/uwwp/looking-
back-at-the-battle-of-debaltseve.

[1317] Elena Kostyuchenko, “We all knew what we were going to and what
could be,” Novaya Gazeta, March 2, 2015,
https://novayagazeta.ru/society/67490.html.
[1318] Maj. Amos C. Fox, “Battle of Debal’tseve: the Conventional Line of
Effort in Russia’s Hybrid War in Ukraine,”
https://benning.army.mil/armor/earmor/content/issues/2017/Winter/1Fox17.
pdf.

[1319] “Full text of the Minsk agreements,” RIA Novosti, February 12,
2015, https://ria.ru/20150212/1047311428.html.

[1320] Petro, 227.

[1321] Hahn, 284–85.

[1322] Staff, “Dmytro Yarosh: ‘Right Sector’ to fight until complete

liberation of Ukraine from Russian occupants,” Euromaidan Press,
February 14, 2015, https://euromaidanpress.com/2015/02/14/dmytro-
yarosh-right-sector-fight-complete-liberation-ukraine-russian-occupants.

[1323] Duncan Allan, “The Minsk Conundrum: Western Policy and

Russia’s War in Eastern Ukraine,” Chatham House, May 22, 2020,
https://chathamhouse.org/2020/05/minsk-conundrum-western-policy-and-
russias-war-eastern-ukraine-0/minsk-2-agreement.

[1324] Andrian Prokip, “Implementing the Minsk Agreements Would Pose

a Russian Trojan Horse for Ukraine, but There Is a Third Way,” Woodrow
Wilson Center, December 7, 2021, https://wilsoncenter.org/blog-
post/implementing-minsk-agreements-would-pose-russian-trojan-horse-
ukraine-there-third-way; Duncan Allan, “The Minsk Conundrum: Western
Policy and Russia’s War in Eastern Ukraine,” Chatham House, May 22,
2020, https://chathamhouse.org/2020/05/minsk-conundrum-western-policy-
and-russias-war-eastern-ukraine-0/minsk-2-agreement; Stephen Bryen,
“War looms as US and Kiev ignore Minsk II Protocols,” Asia Times,
February 21, 2022, https://asiatimes.com/2022/02/war-looms-as-us-and-
kiev-ignore-minsk-ii-protocols.

[1325] “Full Text of the Minsk Agreement,” Financial Times, February 12,
2015, https://ft.com/content/21b8f98e-b2a5-11e4-b234-00144feab7de.

[1326] Eugen Tomiuc, “Nuland: No Deadline For Ukraine Vote, Sanctions

To Stay Until Minsk Fulfilled,” RFERL, April 27, 2016,
https://rferl.org/a/nuland-ukraine-signs-of-reform/27701280.html.

[1327] “Unanimously Adopting Resolution 2202 (2015), Security Council

Calls on Parties to Implement Accords Aimed at Peaceful Settlement in
Eastern Ukraine,” UNSC, February 17, 2015,
https://press.un.org/en/2015/sc11785.doc.htm.

[1328] Dmytro Kaniewski, “Will Kyiv swallow the bitter pill?” DW,
October 2, 2015, https://dw.com/en/the-morel-plan-will-kyiv-swallow-the-
bitter-pill/a-18756951.

[1329] Staff, “Ukraine views ‘Morel’s plan’ as his personal opinion –

Poroshenko,” UNIAN, September 21, 2015,
https://unian.info/politics/1129284-ukraine-considers-morels-plan-as-his-
personal-opinion-poroshenko.html.
[1330] De Ploeg, 195–96; Staff, “Ukraine: The Line,” Crisis Group Europe
Briefing Number 81, July 18, 2016,
https://crisisgroup.org/sites/default/files/ukraine-the-line.pdf.

[1331] Charap and Colton, 143.

[1332] Staff, “Ukraine: The Line,” Crisis Group Europe Briefing Number
81, July 18, 2016, https://crisisgroup.org/sites/default/files/ukraine-the-
line.pdf.

[1333] Ivan Nechepurenko, “Putin Refused Poroshenko’s Offer to ‘Take

Donbas’ – Forbes,” Moscow Times, April 6, 2015,
https://themoscowtimes.com/2015/04/06/putin-refused-poroshenkos-offer-
to-take-Donbas-forbes-a45478.

[1334] David Samuels, “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s

Foreign-Policy Guru,” New York Times, May 5, 2016,
https://nytimes.com/2016/05/08/magazine/the-aspiring-novelist-who-
became-obamas-foreign-policy-guru.html.

[1335] Robert Kagan, “On Iraq, Short Memories,” Washington Post,

September 11, 2005,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2005/09/12/on-iraq-short-
memories/86b7c3ac-4a8c-4ce6-9baf-0651b5711aa9.

[1336] He is the guy who said about the Kosovo War in 1999 that Bill
Clinton “never considered that in fact, rather than [the Serbs] giving in or
even hunkering down, it would escalate to these massive proportions.” See
Chapter Two.

[1337] Robert Siegel, “As Tension Grows, Should US Offer ‘Lethal Aid’ To
Ukraine?” NPR News, February 2, 2015,
https://npr.org/2015/02/02/383346073/as-tension-grows-should-u-s-offer-
lethal-aid-to-ukraine.

[1338] Ivo Daalder, et al., “Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting

Russian Aggression,” Brookings Institution, February 1, 2015,
https://brookings.edu/research/preserving-ukraines-independence-resisting-
russian-aggression-what-the-united-states-and-nato-must-do.

[1339] Gabriela Baczynska, “Ultra-nationalist Ukrainian battalion gears up

for more fighting,” Reuters, March 25, 2015, https://reuters.com/article/us-
ukraine-crisis-azov/ultra-nationalist-ukrainian-battalion-gears-up-for-more-
fighting-idUSKBN0ML0XJ20150325.

[1340] Lev Golinkin, “Ukraine’s far-right menace,” Politico Europe,

September 1, 2015, https://politico.eu/article/ukraine-far-right-menace-
radical-militants-ultranationalists.

[1341] Hahn, 295.

[1342] David Stern, “Ukraine crisis: Deadly anti-autonomy protest outside

parliament,” BBC, August 31, 2015, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-
34105925.
[1343] Statement by International Renaissance Foundation spokeswoman to
author, August 15, 2016.

[1344] Elias Groll, “Turns Out You Can’t Trust Russian Hackers Anymore,”
Foreign Policy, August 22, 2016,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/22/turns-out-you-cant-trust-russian-
hackers-anymore.

[1345] George Soros, Letter to Petro Poroshenko and Arseniy Yatsenyuk,

December 23, 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20151006235223/http://cyber-
berkut.org/docs/Poroshenko,_Petro_and_Yatsenyuk,_Arseniy_23DEC14.pd
f.

[1346] George Soros, “A short and medium-term comprehensive strategy

for the new Ukraine,” March 12, 2015,
https://scribd.com/document/267364428/Soros-Ukraine-Strategy.

[1347] Staff, “Breakfast with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt,”

International Renaissance Foundation, March 31, 2014,
https://drishtikone.com/content/files/2023/11/Ukraine-Working-Group-
2014-gs-ukraine-visitmarch-2014notes.pdf.

[1348] Staff, “Strategic Advisory Group Meeting with GS,” International

Renaissance Foundation, Spring 2014,
https://drishtikone.com/content/files/2023/11/Ukraine-Working-Group-
2014-gs-ukraine-visitmarch-2014notes.pdf.
[1349] Staff, “Breakfast with US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt,”
International Renaissance Foundation, March 31, 2014,
https://drishtikone.com/content/files/2023/11/Ukraine-Working-Group-
2014-gs-ukraine-visitmarch-2014notes.pdf.

[1350] See Chapter Three.

[1351] Lee Fang and Zaid Jilani, “Hacked Emails Reveal NATO General
Plotting Against Obama on Russia Policy,” Intercept, July 1, 2016,
https://theintercept.com/2016/07/01/nato-general-emails.

[1352] Paul McLeary, “US Trainers To Deploy To Ukraine,” Defense News,

January 21, 2015,
http://defensenews.com/story/defense/land/army/2015/01/21/ukraine-us-
army-russia/22119315.

[1353] “Conflict-related civilian casualties in Ukraine,” UN Office of the

High Commissioner for Human Rights, January 27, 2022,
https://ukraine.un.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/Conflict-
related%20civilian%20casualties%20as%20of%2031%20December%2020
21%20(rev%2027%20January%202022)%20corr%20EN_0.pdf.

[1354] Vice President Joe Biden, “Remarks by Vice President Joe Biden to
the Ukrainian Rada,” White House, December 9, 2015,
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/12/09/remarks-
vice-president-joe-biden-ukrainian-rada.
[1355] President Petro Poroshenko, “On Internal and External Situation of
Ukraine in 2016,” Annual address of President to Verkhovna Rada,
September 7, 2016, https://thailand.mfa.gov.ua/en/news/50590-annual-
address-of-president-to-verkhovna-rada-on-internal-and-external-situation-
of-ukraine-in-2016.

[1356] Bill Gertz, “Russian Troop Movements Near Eastern Ukraine

Trigger Fears of Imminent Invasion,” Free Beacon, March 27, 2014,
https://freebeacon.com/national-security/russian-troop-movements-near-
eastern-ukraine-trigger-fears-of-imminent-invasion; Staff, “Top Ukrainian
general says Russian invasion imminent,” AFP, July 15, 2014,
https://firstpost.com/world/top-ukrainian-general-says-russian-invasion-
imminent-1619877.html; Paul D. Shinkman, “Report: Russia Invades
Ukraine, Prompts Emergency UN Meeting,” US News and World Report,
August 28, 2014, https://usnews.com/news/articles/2014/08/28/un-security-
council-to-meet-following-reports-of-russian-invasion-into-ukraine; Jeremy
Bender, “Former NATO commander: A new Russian offensive in eastern
Ukraine is ‘imminent,’” Business Insider, April 7, 2015,
https://businessinsider.com/new-russian-offensive-in-ukraine-is-imminent-
2015-4; Adam Entous and Julian Barnes, “Russian Buildup Stokes
Worries,” Wall Street Journal, March 28, 2014,
https://wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023037795045794658302942437
84; Paul Goble, “Moscow Readying a Massive Russian Invasion of
Ukraine, Golts Says,” The Interpreter, February 3, 2015,
https://interpretermag.com/moscow-readying-a-massive-russian-invasion-
of-ukraine-golts-says.
[1357] Matthias Gebauer, et al., “Berlin Alarmed by Aggressive NATO
Stance on Ukraine,” Der Spiegel, March 6, 2015,
http://spiegel.de/international/world/germany-concerned-about-aggressive-
nato-stance-on-ukraine-a-1022193.html.

[1358] “Testimony of Victoria Nuland, Assistant Secretary, Bureau of

European and Eurasian Affairs Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Hearing: ‘Ukrainian Reforms Two Years after the Maidan Revolution and
the Russian Invasion,’” March 15, 2016,
https://foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/031516_Nuland_Testimony.pdf.

[1359] “Conflict-related civilian casualties in Ukraine,” UN Office of the

High Commissioner for Human Rights, January 27, 2022,
https://ukraine.un.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/Conflict-
related%20civilian%20casualties%20as%20of%2031%20December%2020
21%20(rev%2027%20January%202022)%20corr%20EN_0.pdf.

[1360] “Article 33 – Individual responsibility, collective penalties, pillage,

reprisals,” Geneva Convention IV, August 12, 1949, https://ihl-
databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciv-1949/article-33.

[1361] Staff, “North Crimean Canal Fills With Water After Russian Forces
Destroyed Dam,” Moscow Times, March 4, 2022,
https://themoscowtimes.com/2022/03/04/north-crimean-canal-fills-with-
water-after-russian-forces-destroyed-dam-a76755.
[1362] Staff, “Ukraine halts canal water supply to Crimea,” TASS, April 26,
2014, https://tass.com/world/729666.

[1363] Olav Bing Orgland, “Water Wars: Drought by the Dnipro, the new
conflict between Russia and Ukraine,” SDAFA, April 7, 2021,
https://sdafa.co.uk/water-wars-drought-by-the-dnipro-the-new-conflict-
between-russia-and-ukraine.

[1364] Lily Hyde, “Crimea’s Water Troubles,” New Eastern Europe,

February 8, 2017, https://neweasterneurope.eu/2017/02/08/crimea-s-water-
troubles.

[1365] Sharon Udasin, “How a Ukrainian dam played a key role in tensions
with Russia,” The Hill, March 12, 2022,
https://thehill.com/policy/equilibrium-sustainability/597910-how-a-
ukrainian-dam-played-a-key-role-in-tensions-with.

[1366] Jason Beaubien, “Russia has achieved at least 1 of its war goals:
return Ukraine’s water to Crimea,” NPR News, June 13, 2022,
https://npr.org/2022/06/12/1104418128/russia-ukraine-crimea-water-canal.

[1367] Robert Parry, “How Ukraine’s Finance Chief Got Rich,” Consortium
News, November 10, 2015, https://consortiumnews.com/2015/11/10/how-
ukraines-finance-chief-got-rich.

[1368] Dan De Luce and Reid Standish, “What Will Ukraine Do Without
Uncle Joe?” Foreign Policy, October 30, 2016,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/30/what-will-ukraine-do-without-joe-
biden-putin-war-kiev-clinton-trump; “IMF signs off $17.5bn loan for
Ukraine in second attempt to stave off bankruptcy,” Reuters, March 11,
2015, https://reuters.com/article/ukraine-crisis-imf/imf-approves-17-5-
billion-loan-program-for-ukraine-idINW1N0VS03T20150311.

[1369] Andrew Scurria and Ian Talley, “Puerto Rico Oversight Board
Director Jaresko to Resign After Landmark Debt Deal Natalie Jaresko, who
restructured Ukraine’s debt before Puerto Rico’s, is resigning effective April
1,” Wall Street Journal, February 3, 2022, https://wsj.com/articles/puerto-
rico-boards-director-to-resign-after-landmark-debt-deal-11643904378.

[1370] Max Seddon, “Washington’s Man In Ukraine Can’t Stop His

Country’s Corrupt Cronies,” BuzzFeed News, October 21, 2015,
https://buzzfeednews.com/article/maxseddon/washingtons-man-in-ukraine-
cant-stop-his-countrys-corrupt-cr.

[1371] “A Year After Maidan, Ukraine is Still the Most Corrupt Country in
Europe,” Transparency International, December 3, 2014,
https://transparency.org/en/press/a-year-after-maidan-ukraine-is-still-the-
most-corrupt-country-in-europe.

[1372] Oliver Bullough, “Welcome to Ukraine, the most corrupt nation in

Europe,” Guardian, February 6, 2015,
https://theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/04/welcome-to-the-most-corrupt-
nation-in-europe-ukraine.
[1373] William Van Wagenen, “Salafis Throwing Bombs: How American
and British Planners Partnered With Al-Qaeda Affiliated Groups At the Start
of the Syrian Civil War,” Libertarian Institute, December 28, 2021,
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/salafis-throwing-bombs-how-
american-and-british-planners-partnered-with-al-qaeda-affiliated-groups-at-
the-start-of-the-syrian-civil-war; William Van Wagenen, “Creative Chaos:
How U.S. Planners Sparked the Anti-Government Protests of the So-Called
Arab Spring in Syria,” Libertarian Institute, January 31, 2022,
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/creative-chaos-how-u-s-planners-
sparked-the-anti-government-protests-of-the-so-called-arab-spring-in-syria;
Horton, Enough Already, 182–200.

[1374] William Van Wagenen, “There is No FSA, There is Only Al-Qaeda,”

Libertarian Institute, December 27, 2017,
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/no-fsa-al-qaeda.

[1375] Victoria Nuland, “Terrorist Designations of the al-Nusrah Front as

an Alias for al-Qa’ida in Iraq,” US State Department, December 11, 2012,
https://2009-2017.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/12/201759.htm.

[1376] For a more comprehensive explanation of the Syrian war and Iraq
War III, see Horton, Enough Already, 177–234.

[1377] Horton, Enough Already, 213–16.

[1378] “Leaked audio of John Kerry’s meeting with Syrian

revolutionaries/UN,” Angel North, October 4, 2016,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=e4phB-_pXDM; William Van Wagenen, “For
18 Months, as ISIS Advanced, the US Did Nothing to Stop Them,”
Libertarian Institute, September 2, 2022,
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/for-18-months-as-isis-advanced-the-
u-s-did-nothing-to-stop-them.

[1379] Staff, “Patterns of civilian harm from Russia’s military actions in

Syria (2015-2022),” Airwars, March 2022,
https://airwars.org/research/patterns-of-civilian-harm-from-russias-military-
actions-in-syria-2015-2022.

[1380] Samuel Oakford, “Death in the City: High Levels of Civilian Harm
in Modern Urban Warfare Resulting from Significant Explosive Weapons
Use,” Airwars, May 2018, https://airwars.org/wp-
content/uploads/2018/05/Airwars-Death-in-the-City-web.pdf; Interview
with author, Chris Woods, Scott Horton Show radio archive,
https://scotthorton.org/interviews/12-4-20-chris-woods-on-the-real-civilian-
death-toll-in-iraq.

[1381] Burns, 325, 327.

[1382] Horton, Enough Already, 189.

[1383] David Brennan, “US Syria Representative Says His Job Is to Make
the War a ‘Quagmire’ for Russia,” Newsweek, May 13, 2020,
https://newsweek.com/us-syria-representative-james-jeffrey-job-make-war-
quagmire-russia-1503702.
[1384] Horton, Enough Already, 219–22.

[1385] Kelsey Davenport and Julia Masterson, “The Joint Comprehensive

Plan of Action (JCPOA) at a Glance,” Arms Control Association,
https://armscontrol.org/factsheets/joint-comprehensive-plan-action-jcpoa-
glance.

[1386] Karl Vick, “Why the US Owed Iran That $400 Million,” Time,
August 5, 2016, https://time.com/4441046/400-million-iran-hostage-history.

[1387] Thomas L. Friedman, “Obama Makes His Case on Iran Nuclear

Deal,” New York Times, July 14, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/07/15/opinion/thomas-friedman-obama-makes-
his-case-on-iran-nuclear-deal.html; Trita Parsi, Losing An Enemy: Obama,
Iran and the Triumph of Diplomacy (Cambridge: Yale University Press,
2017), 309–10.

[1388] Carlotta Gall, “How Kosovo Was Turned Into Fertile Ground for
ISIS,” New York Times, May 21, 2016,
https://nytimes.com/2016/05/22/world/europe/how-the-saudis-turned-
kosovo-into-fertile-ground-for-isis.html.

[1389] “Public pulse analysis on prevention of violent extremism in

Kosovo,” UN Development Program, June 28, 2017,
https://undp.org/kosovo/publications/public-pulse-analysis-prevention-
violent-extremism-kosovo.
[1390] Marcin Mamon, “How a Chechen from Georgia Became a Feared
Leader of ISIS,” Intercept, July 13, 2015,
https://theintercept.com/2015/07/13/chechen-georgia-became-feared-leader-
isis.

[1391] Suhaib Anjarini, “Chechen jihadists in Syria: The case of Omar al-
Shishani,” May 1, 2014, http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/19615.

[1392] Mitchell Prothero, “‘Star pupil’: Pied piper of ISIS recruits was
trained by US,” Seattle Times, September 15, 2015,
https://seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-us-trained-pied-piper-of-chechen-
recruits-to-the-islamic-state-group; Mitchell Prothero, “How I met the man
who became the Islamic State’s military No. 1,” McClatchy, September 15,
2015, https://mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-
world/world/article35323065.html; Mitchell Prothero, “US training helped
mold top Islamic State military commander,” McClatchy, September 15,
2015, https://mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-
world/world/article35322882.html.

[1393] Eric Schmitt and Michael S. Schmidt, “Omar the Chechen, a Senior
Leader in ISIS, Dies After US Airstrike,” New York Times, March 15, 2016,
https://nytimes.com/2016/03/15/world/middleeast/omar-chechen-isis-killed-
us-airstrike-syria.html.

[1394] Thomas Grove and Mariam Karouny, “Militants from Russia’s

North Caucasus join ‘jihad’ in Syria,” Reuters, March 6, 2013,
https://reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-russia-militants/militants-from-
russias-north-caucasus-join-jihad-in-syria-idUSBRE9251BT20130306.

[1395] Marcin Mamon, “In Turkey, a Chechen Commander Makes Plans

for War in Syria,” Intercept, September 3, 2016,
https://theintercept.com/2016/09/03/in-turkey-a-chechen-commander-
makes-plans-for-war-in-syria.

[1396] Thomas Grove and Mariam Karouny, “Militants from Russia’s

North Caucasus join ‘jihad’ in Syria,” Reuters, March 6, 2013,
https://reuters.com/article/us-syria-crisis-russia-militants/militants-from-
russias-north-caucasus-join-jihad-in-syria-idUSBRE9251BT20130306.

[1397] Staff, “Russian President, Saudi Spy Chief Discussed Syria, Egypt,”
Al-Monitor, August 22, 2013,
https://web.archive.org/web/20130822222033/http://al-
monitor.com/pulse/politics/2013/08/saudi-russia-putin-bandar-meeting-
syria-egypt.html; Fred Weir, “Did the Saudis offer to pay Russia to back off
on Syria?” Christian Science Monitor, August 27, 2013,
https://csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2013/0827/Did-the-Saudis-offer-
to-pay-Russia-to-back-off-on-Syria; Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Saudis
offer Russia secret oil deal if it drops Syria,” Telegraph, August 27, 2013,
https://telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/10266957/Sa
udis-offer-Russia-secret-oil-deal-if-it-drops-Syria.html.

[1398] David Sanger and Anne Barnard, “Russia and the United States
Reach New Agreement on Syria Conflict,” New York Times, September 9,
2016, https://nytimes.com/2016/09/10/world/middleeast/syria-john-kerry-
ceasefire-deal-russia.html.

[1399] Gareth Porter, “How the Pentagon Sank the US-Russia Deal in Syria
– and the Ceasefire,” Antiwar.com, September 26, 2016,
https://original.antiwar.com/porter/2016/09/25/pentagon-sank-us-russia-
deal-syria-ceasefire; Gareth Porter, “US strikes on Syrian troops: Report
data contradicts ‘mistake’ claims,” Middle East Eye, December 7, 2016,
https://middleeasteye.net/news/us-strikes-syrian-troops-report-data-
contradicts-mistake-claims.

[1400] Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “How a 4-Hour Battle Between Russian

Mercenaries and US Commandos Unfolded in Syria,” New York Times,
May 24, 2018, https://nytimes.com/2018/05/24/world/middleeast/american-
commandos-russian-mercenaries-syria.html.

[1401] James Jeffrey, “US Air Support for Tikrit: The Right Decision,”
WINEP, March 26, 2015, https://washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/us-
air-support-tikrit-right-decision; Rod Nordland and Peter Baker, “Opening
New Iraq Front, US Strikes ISIS in Tikrit,” New York Times, March 25,
2015, https://nytimes.com/2015/03/26/world/middleeast/iraq-islamic-state-
tikrit-united-states-airstrikes.html; Helene Cooper, “A US Concession to
Reality in the Battle Against Islamic State,” New York Times, April 3, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/04/04/world/middleeast/a-us-concession-to-
reality-in-the-battle-against-islamic-state.html.
[1402] Staff, “Islamic State calls on members to carry out jihad in Russia,”
Reuters, August 1, 2016, https://reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-
russia/islamic-state-calls-on-members-to-carry-out-jihad-in-russia-
idUSKCN10B0WI.

[1403] Andrew Kramer, “Islamic Battalions, Stocked With Chechens, Aid

Ukraine in War With Rebels,” New York Times, July 7, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/07/08/world/europe/islamic-battalions-stocked-
with-chechens-aid-ukraine-in-war-with-rebels.html.

[1404] Aleksandar Vasovic, “Far-right group flexes during Ukraine

‘revolution,’” Seattle Times, January 3, 2005,
https://seattletimes.com/nation-world/far-right-group-flexes-during-ukraine-
revolution.

[1405] Andrew Kramer, “Islamic Battalions, Stocked With Chechens, Aid

Ukraine in War With Rebels,” New York Times, July 7, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/07/08/world/europe/islamic-battalions-stocked-
with-chechens-aid-ukraine-in-war-with-rebels.html.

[1406] Marcin Mamon, “In Midst of War, Ukraine Becomes Gateway for
Jihad,” Intercept, February 26, 2015,
https://theintercept.com/2015/02/26/midst-war-ukraine-becomes-gateway-
europe-jihad.

[1407] Shaun Walker, “‘We like partisan warfare.’ Chechens fighting in

Ukraine – on both sides,” Guardian, July 24, 2015,
https://theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/24/chechens-fighting-in-ukraine-on-
both-sides.

[1408] Andrew Higgins, “Mystery Surrounds Death of Ukrainian Activist,”

New York Times, April 11, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/04/12/world/europe/mystery-surrounds-death-of-
fiery-ukrainian-activist.html.

[1409] Marcin Mamon, “In Midst of War, Ukraine Becomes Gateway for
Jihad,” Intercept, February 26, 2015,
https://theintercept.com/2015/02/26/midst-war-ukraine-becomes-gateway-
europe-jihad.

[1410] Robert Parry, “Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists,” Consortium

News, July 7, 2015, https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/07/ukraine-
merges-nazis-and-islamists.

[1411] Marcin Mamon, “Isa Munayev’s War,” Intercept, February 27, 2015,
https://theintercept.com/2015/02/27/isa-munayevs-war.

[1412] Marcin Mamon, “The Making of a Christian Taliban in Ukraine,”

Intercept, March 18, 2015, https://theintercept.com/2015/03/18/ukraine-
part-3.

[1413] Elizabeth Piper and Sergiy Karazy, “Special Report: Ukraine

struggles to control maverick battalions,” Reuters, July 29, 2015,
https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-battalions-special-rep/special-
report-ukraine-struggles-to-control-maverick-battalions-
idUSKCN0Q30YT20150729.

[1414] Elena Chernenko and Alexander Gabuev, “‘The interests of the

Russian Federation and the United States in relation to Ukraine are
incompatible with each other,’” Kommersant, December 19, 2014,
http://kommersant.ru/doc/2636177 translated by Paul R. Grenier at
http://us-russia.org/2902-in-ukraine-us-interests-are-incompatible-with-the-
interests-of-the-russian-federation-stratfor-chief-george-friedman-on-the-
roots-of-the-ukraine-crisis.html; For a more comprehensive take on the
Syrian war and Iraq War III, see Horton, Enough Already, 177–234.

[1415] Petro, 81.

[1416] Richard Balmforth, “Yanukovych vows to keep Ukraine out of

NATO,” Reuters, January 7, 2010,
https://reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6062P3.

[1417] Kathleen Holzwart Sprehe, “Ukraine Says ‘No’ to NATO,” Pew

Global Attitudes Project, March 29, 2010,
https://pewresearch.org/global/2010/03/29/ukraine-says-no-to-nato.

[1418] Hahn, 158.

[1419] Staff, “Ukraine’s parliament votes to abandon Nato ambitions,”

BBC, June 3, 2010, https://bbc.com/news/10229626.

[1420] Hahn, 157.

[1421] Interview of Steven Pifer, “Understanding Ukraine’s Presidential
Shift,” Brookings Institution, February 8, 2010,
https://brookings.edu/articles/understanding-ukraines-presidential-shift.

[1422] Richard Sakwa, “The March of Folly Resumed: Russia, Ukraine and
the West,” Public Reading Rooms, March 10, 2022, https://prruk.org/the-
march-of-folly-resumed-russia-ukraine-and-the-west.

[1423] Interview of Richard Sakwa, “Biden’s Escalation With Russia Over

Ukraine Is a Terrible Idea,” Jacobin, January 26, 2022,
https://jacobin.com/2022/01/putin-nato-us-war-Donbas-minsk-2.

[1424] Amb. William Taylor, “Ukraine: NATO Information Campaign

Gains Momentum,” US State Department, June 11, 2008,
https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08KYIV1144_a.html.

[1425] Staff, “Ukraine Votes To Abandon Neutrality, Set Sights On NATO,”

RFERL, December 23, 2014, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-parliament-
abandons-neutrality/26758725.html.

[1426] John Reed, “Ukraine’s Ex-president Petro Poroshenko: ‘The Army is

Like My Child, and I Am Very Proud,’” Financial Times, May 20, 2022,
https://ft.com/content/39356ee4-a505-4391-a7a9-998252cb67ee.

[1427] “Budapest Memorandum of 1994,” Signed December 5, 1994,

https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/files/policymemos/files/2-23-
22_ukraine-the_budapest_memo.pdf.
[1428] “The North Atlantic Treaty,” NATO, April 4, 1949,
https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_17120.htm; Senator Rand Paul,
“NATO’s Article 5 does not override Congress’s war powers,” Responsible
Statecraft, June 22, 2023, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/22/natos-
article-5-does-not-override-congresss-war-powers.

[1429] Sarotte, 203–04.

[1430] Azmi Haroun and Erin Snodgrass, “Bill Clinton says he feels
‘terrible’ for pushing a 1994 agreement with Russia that resulted in Ukraine
giving up its nuclear weapons,” Business Insider, April 4, 2023,
https://businessinsider.com/bill-clinton-feels-terrible-convincing-ukraine-to-
give-up-nukes-2023-4.

[1431] Mitchell Reiss, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their

Nuclear Capabilities (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press,
1995), 126–27.

[1432] Cheryl Rofer, “Could Ukraine Have Retained Soviet Nuclear

Weapons?” Nuclear Diner, February 6, 2022,
https://nucleardiner.wordpress.com/2022/02/06/could-ukraine-have-
retained-soviet-nuclear-weapons.

[1433] Yuri Kostenko, Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament (Cambridge:

Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021), 28.

[1434] Mitchell Reiss, Bridled Ambition: Why Countries Constrain Their

Nuclear Capabilities (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press,
1995), 126–27.

[1435] Simon Pirani, “Ukraine’s Gas Sector,” Oxford Institute for Energy
Studies, June 2007,
https://web.archive.org/web/20080216014741/http://oxfordenergy.org/pdfs/
NG21.pdf; Ukraine Energy Policy Review 2006 (Paris: International Energy
Agency, 2006), 220–21, https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/010dab6e-
15a2-4165-bbc4-6a28ce869d76/EnergyPolicyReview2006Ukraine.pdf;
Staff, “Ukraine ‘stealing Europe’s gas,’” BBC, January 2, 2006,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4574630.stm.

[1436] Hahn, 188–89; “Budapest Memorandum of 1994,” Signed

December 5, 1994,
https://policymemos.hks.harvard.edu/files/policymemos/files/2-23-
22_ukraine-the_budapest_memo.pdf; “Helsinki Final Act,” OSCE, August
1, 1975, https://osce.org/files/f/documents/5/c/39501.pdf.

[1437] James Monroe, “December 2, 1823: Seventh Annual Message,”

Miller Center, https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-
speeches/december-2-1823-seventh-annual-message-monroe-doctrine.

[1438] Staff, “General Grant and the Fight to Remove Emperor Maximilian
from Mexico,” National Park Service, January 14, 2021,
https://nps.gov/articles/000/general-grant-and-the-fight-to-remove-emperor-
maximilian-from-mexico.htm.
[1439] “Zimmermann Telegram (1917),” National Archives,
https://archives.gov/milestone-documents/Zimmermann-telegram.

[1440] Woodrow Wilson, “Joint Address to Congress Leading to a

Declaration of War Against Germany (1917),” White House, April 2, 1917,
https://archives.gov/milestone-documents/address-to-congress-declaration-
of-war-against-germany.

[1441] Howard Jones, The Bay of Pigs (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008).

[1442] Ivan Eland, “On the 50th Anniversary of JFK’s Assassination, Let’s
Examine His True Legacy,” Independent Institute, November 13, 2013,
https://independent.org/news/article.asp?id=4789.

[1443] Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, “Why Are We in

Ukraine?” Harper’s, June 2023, https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-
are-we-in-ukraine.

[1444] Horton, Enough Already, 236–56.

[1445] Nino Bucci, “US warns Solomon Islands against China military base
as Australian MPs trade blame,” Guardian, April 23, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/23/us-warns-solomon-islands-
against-china-military-base-as-australian-mps-trade-blame.

[1446] Staff, “Read Putin’s UN General Assembly speech,” Washington

Post, September 28, 2015,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/09/28/read-putins-
u-n-general-assembly-speech.

[1447] Zach Dorfman, “In closer ties to Ukraine, US officials long saw
promise and peril,” Yahoo News, April 28, 2022,
https://news.yahoo.com/in-closer-ties-to-ukraine-us-officials-long-saw-
promise-and-peril-090006105.html.

[1448] Theodore Roosevelt, American Ideals, and Other Essays, Social and
Political (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 230.

[1449] Horton, Enough Already, 92–97.

[1450] Horton, Enough Already, 141–256.

[1451] “Who Is at Fault in Ukraine? Foreign Affairs’ Brain Trust Weighs

In,” Foreign Affairs, November 9, 2014,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-11-09/who-fault-ukraine.

[1452] Stephen M. Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell

University Press, 1987); John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power
Politics (New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Inc., 2001).

[1453] Interview with author, Stephen Walt, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, November 5, 2018, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/11-5-18-
stephen-walt-on-a-realist-foreign-policy.

[1454] Michael Hastings, “Inside Obama’s War Room,” Rolling Stone,

October 13, 2011, https://rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/inside-
obamas-war-room-238074.

[1455] Tweet by author, “28 Articles About How the Neoconservatives Lied
Us Into Iraq War II,” February 23, 2024,
https://x.com/scotthortonshow/status/1628868264120971264.

[1456] Benjamin H. Friedman and Justin Logan, “Why Washington Doesn’t

Debate Grand Strategy,” Strategic Studies Quarterly, Winter 2016,
https://css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/center-for-
securities-studies/resources/docs/AFRI_Friedman.pdf.

[1457] John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,”
Foreign Affairs, September/October 2014,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-08-18/why-ukraine-
crisis-west-s-fault.

[1458] Interview with author, John J. Mearsheimer, Scott Horton Show

radio archive, August 21, 2014, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/082114-
john-j-mearsheimer.

[1459] John J. Mearsheimer, “Don’t Arm Ukraine,” New York Times,

February 8, 2015, https://nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/dont-arm-
ukraine.html.

[1460] Juliane von Mittelstaedt and Erich Follath, “Interview with Henry
Kissinger, ‘Do We Achieve World Order Through Chaos or Insight?’” Der
Spiegel, November 13, 2014,
https://spiegel.de/international/world/interview-with-henry-kissinger-on-
state-of-global-politics-a-1002073.html.

[1461] Henry Kissinger, “To settle the Ukraine crisis, start at the end,”
Washington Post, March 5, 2014,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/henry-kissinger-to-settle-the-ukraine-
crisis-start-at-the-end/2014/03/05/46dad868-a496-11e3-8466-
d34c451760b9_story.html.

[1462] Stephen M. Walt, “Why Arming Kiev Is a Really, Really Bad Idea,”
Foreign Policy, February 9, 2015,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/09/how-not-to-save-ukraine-arming-
kiev-is-a-bad-idea.

[1463] Stephen M. Walt, “Why Arming Kiev Is a Really, Really Bad Idea,”
Foreign Policy, February 9, 2015,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/02/09/how-not-to-save-ukraine-arming-
kiev-is-a-bad-idea.

[1464] Brzezinski, 55, 74, 78.

[1465] Elena Chernenko and Alexander Gabuev, “‘The interests of the

Russian Federation and the United States in relation to Ukraine are
incompatible with each other,’” Kommersant, December 19, 2014,
https://kommersant.ru/doc/2636177.

[1466] Mackinder, 191.

[1467] George Friedman, Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “Europe:
Destined for Conflict?” February 4, 2015, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=Wijd10BZS1w.

[1468] Anatol Lieven, “For years, Putin didn’t invade Ukraine. What made
him finally snap in 2022?” Guardian, February 24, 2023,
https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/feb/24/vladimir-putin-invade-
ukraine-2022-russia.

[1469] Yossef Bodansky, “The Great Competition Over Energy Shoves and
Shapes the Emergence of the ‘New Caucasus,’” OilPrice.com, December
12, 2009, https://oilprice.com/Geopolitics/Europe/The-Great-Competition-
Over-Energy-Shoves-And-Shapes-The-Emergence-Of-The-New-
Caucasus.html.

[1470] Staff, “Obama: No ‘immediate plans’ to bring Ukraine, Georgia into

NATO,” CBS News, March 26, 2014, https://cbsnews.com/video/obama-
no-immediate-plans-to-bring-ukraine-georgia-into-nato; President Barack
Obama, “Remarks by President Obama to the People of Estonia,” White
House, September 3, 2014, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-
press-office/2014/09/03/remarks-president-obama-people-estonia.

[1471] National Security Strategy, Obama White House, February 6, 2015,

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2015_nationa
l_security_strategy_2.pdf; Carl Schreck and Luke Johnson, “Obama’s New
Security Strategy Sharply Shifts Tone On Russia,” RFERL, February 6,
2015, https://rferl.org/a/us-security—strategy-shifts-tone-on-
russia/26834320.html.

[1472] Mark Landler and Helene Cooper, “US Fortifying Europe’s East to
Deter Putin,” New York Times, February 1, 2016,
https://nytimes.com/2016/02/02/world/europe/us-fortifying-europes-east-to-
deter-putin.html; Louisa Brooke-Holland, “NATO’s military response to
Russia: November 2016 update,” UK House of Commons, November 3,
2016, https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-
7276/CBP-7276.pdf.

[1473] “BALTOPS 16,” NATO, https://sfn.nato.int/activities/current-and-

future/exercises/baltops-16.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter 5: Donald Trump

[1] MacKinnon, 16.

[2] Pamela Brown and Jeremy Herb, “The frantic scramble before Mueller
got the job,” CNN, December 7, 2018,
https://cnn.com/2018/12/06/politics/rosenstein-comey-firing-obstruction-
probe/index.html.

[3] Staff, “Trump Seeks Kissinger’s Advice On Relations With China,

Russia, Iran,” RFERL, November 18, 2016, https://rferl.org/a/trump-seeks-
kissinger-advice-relations-china-russia-iran-europe/28125432.html;
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, et al., “Henry Kissinger Pushed Trump to Work
With Russia to Box In China,” Daily Beast, July 31, 2018,
https://thedailybeast.com/henry-kissinger-pushed-trump-to-work-with-
russia-to-box-in-china.

[4] Ashley Parker, “Donald Trump Says NATO is ‘Obsolete,’ UN is

‘Political Game,’” New York Times, April 2, 2016,
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/politics/first-
draft/2016/04/02/donald-trump-tells-crowd-hed-be-fine-if-nato-broke-up.

[5] Eliot A. Cohen, et al., “Open Letter on Donald Trump from GOP
National Security Leaders,” War on the Rocks, March 2, 2016,
https://warontherocks.com/2016/03/open-letter-on-donald-trump-from-gop-
national-security-leaders.
[6] Matthew Kroenig, et al., “Trump Is Right on NATO Spending,” Foreign
Policy, March 7, 2024, https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/07/trump-nato-
europe-russia-defense-spending.

[7] Ali Vitali, “Trump Reverses on NATO: ‘It Is No Longer Obsolete,’”

NBC News, April 12, 2017, https://nbcnews.com/politics/white-
house/trump-reverses-nato-it-no-longer-obsolete-n745601.

[8] Andrew Kaczynski, et al., “80 times Trump talked about Putin,” CNN,
March 1, 2017, https://cnn.com/interactive/2017/03/politics/trump-putin-
russia-timeline.

[9] Marc Santora, “Trump Derides NATO as ‘Obsolete.’ Baltic Nations See
It Much Differently,” New York Times, July 10, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/07/10/world/europe/trump-nato-summit-latvia-
baltics.html.

[10] Seymour Hersh, “Military to Military,” London Review of Books,

January 7, 2016, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n01/seymour-m.-
hersh/military-to-military; “Who is to blame for the rise of ISIL? –
Interview of Gen. Michael T. Flynn,” Al Jazeera, July 29, 2015,
https://aljazeera.com/program/head-to-head/2015/7/29/who-is-to-blame-for-
the-rise-of-isil; Brad Hoff, “2012 Defense Intelligence Agency document:
West will facilitate rise of Islamic State ‘in order to isolate the Syrian
regime,’” Levant Report, May 19, 2015,
https://levantreport.com/2015/05/19/2012-defense-intelligence-agency-
document-west-will-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-
syrian-regime.

[11] Walead Farwana, “The History of the Islamic State,” Antiwar.com,

August 24, 2014,
https://original.antiwar.com/walead_farwana/2014/08/23/the-history-of-the-
islamic-state; Patrick Cockburn, The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the
New Sunni Revolution (New York: Verso, 2015).

[12] Ginger Gibson and Steve Holland, “Trump calls Obama, Clinton
Islamic State ‘co-founders,’ draws rebuke,” Reuters, August 12, 2016,
https://reuters.com/article/world/trump-calls-obama-clinton-islamic-state-
co-founders-draws-rebuke-idUSKCN10M1C9.

[13] “Interview with Donald Trump,” CNN Erin Burnett Outfront,

September 28, 2015,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160912084840/http://edition.cnn.com/TRAN
SCRIPTS/1509/28/ebo.01.html.

[14] Greg Jaffe and Adam Entous, “Trump ends covert CIA program to arm
anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow,” Washington Post,
July 19, 2017, https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-
ends-covert-cia-program-to-arm-anti-assad-rebels-in-syria-a-move-sought-
by-moscow/2017/07/19/b6821a62-6beb-11e7-96ab-
5f38140b38cc_story.html.

[15] See Chapter Four; Horton, Enough Already, 177–234.

[16] Michael Crowley, “Trump’s praise of Russia, Iran and Assad regime
riles GOP experts,” Politico, October 10, 2016,
https://politico.com/story/2016/10/trump-praise-russia-iran-assad-criticism-
229546; Steve Holland, “Trump says Clinton policy on Syria would lead to
World War Three,” Reuters, October 25, 2016,
https://reuters.com/article/world/exclusive-trump-says-clinton-policy-on-
syria-would-lead-to-world-war-three-idUSKCN12P2Q0; F. Brinley Bruton,
et al., “Trump Tells Rally Syria Refugees ‘Probably’ ISIS As Muslim
Protester Removed,” NBC News, January 9, 2016,
https://nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-tells-rally-syria-refugees-
probably-isis-muslim-protester-removed-n493316.

[17] “Joint Statement from the Department Of Homeland Security and

Office of the Director of National Intelligence on Election Security,”
ODNI/DHS, October 7, 2016, https://dhs.gov/news/2016/10/07/joint-
statement-department-homeland-security-and-office-director-national.

[18] Paul Sperry, “James Clapper, Mr. October Surprise,”

RealClearInvestigations, June 26, 2024,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/06/26/james_clapper_mr_o
ctober_surprise_how_obamas_intel_czar_rigged_2016_and_2020_debates_
against_trump_1040444.html.

[19] Paul Sperry, “James Clapper, Mr. October Surprise,”

RealClearInvestigations, June 26, 2024,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2024/06/26/james_clapper_mr_o
ctober_surprise_how_obamas_intel_czar_rigged_2016_and_2020_debates_
against_trump_1040444.html.

[20] Joe Stromberg, “The ‘Loss’ of China, McCarthy, Korea, and the New
Right,” Antiwar.com, August 31, 1999,
https://antiwar.com/stromberg/s083199.html.

[21] Felicia Sonmez, “Hillary Clinton compares Russian interference in

2016 to 9/11 attacks,” Washington Post, October 2, 2018,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-compares-russian-
interference-in-2016-to-911-attacks/2018/10/02/6197a226-c674-11e8-9b1c-
a90f1daae309_story.html.

[22] Ian Schwartz, “Friedman: Flynn Resignation Shows Russia Hacking

Was On Scale With 9/11, Pearl Harbor,” RealClearPolitics, February 14,
2017,
https://realclearpolitics.com/video/2017/02/14/friedman_flynn_resignation_
shows_russia_hacking_was_on_scale_with_911_pearl_harbor.html.

[23] Joseph A. Wulfsohn, “MSNBC Contributor: Trump’s Performance Will

‘Live in Infamy’ as Much as Pearl Harbor or Kristallnacht,” Mediaite, July
17, 2018, https://mediaite.com/tv/msnbc-contributor-trumps-performance-
will-live-in-infamy-as-much-as-pearl-harbor-or-kristallnacht.

[24] Christopher Steele Dossier,

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984/Trump-Intelligence-
Allegations.pdf.
[25] Paul Krugman, “Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate,” New York
Times, July 22, 2016, https://nytimes.com/2016/07/22/opinion/donald-
trump-the-siberian-candidate.html.

[26] Max Boot, “The Case for American Empire,” Weekly Standard,
October 15, 2001, https://washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/170364/the-
case-for-american-empire.

[27] Max Boot, “Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian asset,”
Washington Post, January 13, 2019,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/here-are-18-reasons-why-trump-
could-be-a-russian-asset/2019/01/13/45b1b250-174f-11e9-88fe-
f9f77a3bcb6c_story.html. He is not even from here, and never risked more
than a broken fingernail in his life, certainly not for America. Boot’s wife, a
former CIA and NSC official, was later arrested for representing South
Korea without registering under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.
“United States of America v. Sue Mi Terry,” US Justice Department, July
17, 2024, https://justice.gov/d9/2024-07/u.s._v._terry_indictment_0.pdf.

[28] Carroll Doherty, “Fast facts about Americans’ views on Russia amid
allegations of 2020 election Interference,” Pew Research Center, February
21, 2020, https://pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/02/21/fast-facts-about-
americans-views-on-russia-amid-allegations-of-2020-election-interference.

[29] “The Economist/YouGov Poll,” November 4–6, 2018,

https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/ylp5ygo
hjs/econTabReport.pdf.
[30] Peter Van Buren, “It Was All a Lie,” The American Conservative,
March 25, 2019, https://theamericanconservative.com/it-was-all-a-lie.

[31] Horton, Enough Already; I did root for him against Hillary, Biden and
Harris in the elections, however.

[32] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[33] Chris Kahn, “Despite report findings, almost half of Americans think
Trump colluded with Russia: Reuters/Ipsos poll,” Reuters, March 26, 2019,
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-poll/despite-report-findings-
almost-half-of-americans-think-trump-colluded-with-russia-reuters-ipsos-
poll-idUSKCN1R72S0.

[34] “2020 Vision: Intelligence and the US Presidential Election,” George

Washington University, November 7, 2019, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=iOJThbDmzZQ&t=3176s.

[35] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,

“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” US Department of Justice Oversight and
Review Division, December 2019, https://justice.gov/storage/120919-
examination.pdf.
[36] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to
Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[37] Kenneth P. Vogel and Isaac Arnsdorf, “DNC sought to hide details of
Clinton funding deal,” Politico, July 26, 2016,
https://politico.com/story/2016/07/dnc-leak-clinton-team-deflected-state-
cash-concerns-226191; Dylan Byers, “Donna Brazile out at CNN amid
leaks to Clinton campaign,” CNN, October 31, 2016,
https://money.cnn.com/2016/10/31/media/donna-brazile-cnn-
resignation/index.html; Jeff Stein, “Donna Brazile’s bombshell about the
DNC and Hillary Clinton, explained,” Vox.com, November 2, 2017,
https://vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16599036/donna-brazile-
hillary-clinton-sanders; Donna Brazil, “Inside Hillary Clinton’s Secret
Takeover of the DNC,” Politico, November 2, 2017,
https://politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/02/clinton-brazile-hacks-2016-
215774; Jonathan Martin and Alan Rappeport, “Debbie Wasserman Schultz
to Resign DNC Post,” New York Times, July 24, 2016,
https://nytimes.com/2016/07/25/us/politics/debbie-wasserman-schultz-dnc-
wikileaks-emails.html; Jeff Zeleny and Tal Kopan, “DNC CEO resigns in
wake of email controversy,” CNN, August 2, 2016,
https://edition.cnn.com/2016/08/02/politics/dnc-ceo-resigns-in-wake-of-
email-scandal/index.html.
[38] Jeremy Herb, “Mook suggests Russians leaked DNC emails to help
Trump,” Politico, July 24, 2016, https://politico.com/story/2016/07/robby-
mook-russians-emails-trump-226084.

[39] “Clinton campaign ‘hacked’ along with other Democratic groups,”

BBC, July 29, 2016, https://bbc.com/news/election-us-2016-36927523.

[40] John R. Bolton, “To Stop Iran’s Bomb, Bomb Iran,” New York Times,
March 26, 2015, https://nytimes.com/2015/03/26/opinion/to-stop-irans-
bomb-bomb-iran.html.

[41] Sean Davis, “In 2010 Fox Interview, John Bolton Confessed He Would
‘Absolutely’ Lie About National Security Matters,” The Federalist, January
29, 2020, https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/29/in-2010-fox-interview-john-
bolton-confessed-he-would-absolutely-lie-about-national-security-matters.

[42] Pamela Engel, “Trump secretary of state candidate says Russian

hacking reports might be ‘false flag,’” Business Insider, December 12,
2016, https://businessinsider.com/john-bolton-russian-hacking-false-flag-
2016-12.

[43] “Donald Trump on Russia & Missing Hillary Clinton emails,” C-

SPAN, July 27, 2016, https://youtube.com/watch?v=3kxG8uJUsWU.

[44] Dmitri Alperovitch, “Bears in the Midst: Intrusion into the Democratic
National Committee,” CrowdStrike, June 15, 2016,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160726214255/https://crowdstrike.com/blog/
bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-committee; Humorously, the
original link now contains a whole new post protesting the company’s
innocence in this plot to seize the White House: Editorial Team,
“CrowdStrike’s work with the Democratic National Committee: Setting the
record straight,” CrowdStrike, June 5, 2020,
https://crowdstrike.com/blog/bears-midst-intrusion-democratic-national-
committee.

[45] “Marble Framework,” CIA’s Vault 7 Leak, WikiLeaks.org,

https://wikileaks.org/ciav7p1/cms/page_14588467.html.

[46] Jeffrey Carr, “The DNC Breach and the Hijacking of Common Sense,”
Medium.com, June 19, 2016,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160726121630/https://medium.com/@jeffre
ycarr/the-dnc-breach-and-the-hijacking-of-common-sense-20e89dacfc2b;
Jeffrey Carr, “The Publicly Available Evidence Doesn’t Support Russian
Gov Hacking of 2016 Election,” Medium.com, July 9, 2016,
https://web.archive.org/web/20180121081512/https://medium.com/@jeffre
ycarr/the-publicly-available-evidence-doesnt-support-russian-gov-hacking-
of-2016-election-3ab928758a2f; Jeffrey Carr, “Fact-Checking That ‘Trump
& Putin’ Thing,” Medium.com, July 24, 2016,
https://web.archive.org/web/20160726135447/https://medium.com/@jeffre
ycarr/fact-checking-that-trump-putin-thing-8ed9fd850d40; Interview with
author, Jeffrey Carr, Scott Horton Show radio archive, July 25, 2016,
https://scotthorton.org/interviews/72516-jeffrey-carr.

[47] James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11
to the Eavesdropping on America (New York: Doubleday, 2008), 180–81.
(Bamford revealed Dishfire, Mainway, XKeyscore and many other later-
famous NSA programs almost five years before Edward Snowden’s leak to
Glenn Greenwald, et al., 149).

[48] Ramon Antonio Vargas, “Reality Winner says she leaked file on Russia
election hacking because ‘public was being lied to,’” Guardian, July 25,
2022, https://theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/25/reality-winner-leaked-
file-on-russia-election-hacking-because-public-was-being-lied-to.

[49] Matthew Cole, et al., “Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian

Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election,” Intercept, June 5, 2017,
https://theintercept.com/2017/06/05/top-secret-nsa-report-details-russian-
hacking-effort-days-before-2016-election.

[50] Ben Smith, “The Intercept Promised to Reveal Everything. Then Its
Own Scandal Hit,” New York Times, September 13, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/media/the-intercept-source-
reality-winner.html.

[51] Interview with author, Craig Murray, Scott Horton Show radio archive,
December 16, 2016, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/121316-craig-
murray-dnc-podesta-emails-leaked-by-americans-not-hacked-by-russia.

[52] “Interview of Shawn Henry,” US House of Representatives Permanent

Select Committee on Intelligence, December 5, 2017,
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2020/05/sh21.pdf.
[53] Sam Varghese, “CrowdStrike chief admits no proof that Russia
exfiltrated DNC emails,” IT Wire, May 13, 2020,
https://itwire.com/security/crowdstrike-chief-admits-no-proof-that-russia-
exfiltrated-dnc-emails.html.

[54] Adam Meyers, “Danger Close: Fancy Bear Tracking of Ukrainian Field
Artillery Units,” CrowdStrike, December 22, 2016,
https://crowdstrike.com/blog/danger-close-fancy-bear-tracking-ukrainian-
field-artillery-units.

[55] Oleksiy Kuzmenko and Pete Cobus, “Cyber Firm Rewrites Part of
Disputed Russian Hacking Report,” Voice of America, March 24, 2017,
https://voanews.com/a/cyber-firm-rewrites-part-disputed-russian-hacking-
report/3781411.html.

[56] “Dmitri Alperovitch,” The National Security Institute (NSI) at the

Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University,
https://nationalsecurity.gmu.edu/dmitri-alperovitch.

[57] Ray McGovern, “FBI Never Saw CrowdStrike Unredacted or Final

Report on Alleged Russian Hacking Because None was Produced,”
Consortium News, June 17, 2019,
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/06/17/fbi-never-saw-crowdstrike-
unredacted-or-final-report-on-alleged-russian-hacking-because-none-was-
produced; “Stone – de 123 DOJ Response To MTC CrowdStrike Reports,”
https://scribd.com/document/413428947/Stone-De-123-DOJ-Response-to-
MTC-Crowdstrike-Reports.
[58] Aaron Maté, “Russiagate Prober Durham Neglected DNC Hack Claim,
Despite Evidence It Too Was a Democrat Sham,” RealClearInvestigations,
June 6, 2023,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/06/06/what_durham_skipp
ed_903673.htm; “Interview of Shawn Henry,” US House of Representatives
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, December 5, 2017,
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2020/05/sh21.pdf.

[59] Matt Taibbi and UndeadFOIA, “Forget Collusion. Was ‘Interference’

Also Fake News?” Racket News, September 26, 2023,
https://racket.news/p/forget-collusion-was-interference; Anon, “FOIA Files:
Did Special Counsel Robert Mueller Rely on Clinton Campaign Operatives
to Point to Russia?” Racket News, August 13, 2024,
https://racket.news/p/foia-files-did-special-counsel-robert.

[60] Indictment, “USA v. Michael Sussmann,” US Department of Justice,

September 16, 2021, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/indictment-of-
michael-sussmann/a144a1b67111e832/full.pdf.

[61] See below.

[62] Erik Wemple, “The Media and the Steele Dossier” (series), Washington
Post, December 13, 2019–August 19, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/media-steele-dossier.

[63] The author sent Wemple a very nice email encouraging him to revisit
the question, and he did seem to seriously consider it. Email to author,
January 30, 2020.

[64] “USA v Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al.,” US Department of Justice,

July 13, 2018,
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/07/13/gru.indictment.pdf.

[65] Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb, “Email pointed Trump campaign to
WikiLeaks documents,” CNN, December 8, 2017,
https://cnn.com/2017/12/08/politics/email-effort-give-trump-campaign-
WikiLeaks-documents/index.html.

[66] Oliver Darcy, “CNN corrects story on email to Trumps about

WikiLeaks,” CNN, December 8, 2017,
https://money.cnn.com/2017/12/08/media/cnn-correction-email-
story/index.html.

[67] Stefania Maurizi, Secret Power: WikiLeaks and Its Enemies (New
York: Pluto Press, 2022).

[68] Stefania Maurizi, “Inside WikiLeaks: Working with the Publisher that
Changed the World,” Consortium News, July 19, 2018,
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/07/19/inside-WikiLeaks-working-with-
the-publisher-that-changed-the-world.

[69] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.
[70] “USA v Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al.,” US Department of Justice,
July 13, 2018,
https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2018/images/07/13/gru.indictment.pdf.

[71] Ellen Nakashima, “Russian government hackers penetrated DNC, stole

opposition research on Trump,” Washington Post, June 14, 2016,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/russian-government-
hackers-penetrated-dnc-stole-opposition-research-on-
trump/2016/06/14/cf006cb4-316e-11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b7a0_story.html.

[72] Robert Peston, “Assange on Peston on Sunday: ‘More Clinton leaks to

come,’” ITV, June 12, 2016, https://itv.com/news/update/2016-06-
12/assange-on-peston-on-sunday-more-clinton-leaks-to-come; Raffi
Khatchadourian, “What the Latest Mueller Indictment Reveals About
WikiLeaks’ Ties to Russia – and What It Doesn’t,” The New Yorker, July
24, 2018, https://newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-the-latest-mueller-
indictment-reveals-about-WikiLeaks-ties-to-russia-and-what-it-doesnt.

[73] Raffi Khatchadourian, “What the Latest Mueller Indictment Reveals

About WikiLeaks’ Ties to Russia – and What It Doesn’t,” The New Yorker,
July 24, 2018, https://newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-the-latest-
mueller-indictment-reveals-about-WikiLeaks-ties-to-russia-and-what-it-
doesnt.

[74] Staff, “What is WikiLeaks?” GCF Global,

https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/thenow/what-is-wikileaks/1.
[75] Raffi Khatchadourian, “What the Latest Mueller Indictment Reveals
About WikiLeaks’ Ties to Russia – and What It Doesn’t,” The New Yorker,
July 24, 2018, https://newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-the-latest-
mueller-indictment-reveals-about-WikiLeaks-ties-to-russia-and-what-it-
doesnt.

[76] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[77] “Interview of John Brennan,” PBS Frontline, July 27, 2017,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/john-brennan.

[78] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[79] The same guy who had helped plan the “Operation Storm” atrocity in
Croatia in 1995 (see Chapter Two), lied about Iraqi WMD in 2002–2003
(see Chapter Four), and lied to Congress that the NSA was not spying on
Americans (see Chapter Four).

[80] Katie Bo Williams, “Russian hacking of election infrastructure

‘curtailed’ after US statement,” The Hill, November 17, 2016,
https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/306538-russian-hacking-of-
election-infrastructure-curtailed-after-us-statement.

[81] Scott Horton, “Mueller Report: It Was All a Bunch of Nothing,”

Libertarian Institute, April 20, 2019,
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/mueller-report-released.

[82] Luke Harding and Dan Collyns, “Manafort held secret talks with
Assange in Ecuadorian embassy, sources say,” Guardian, November 27,
2018, https://theguardian.com/us-news/2018/nov/27/manafort-held-secret-
talks-with-assange-in-ecuadorian-embassy.

[83] Paul Farhi, “The Guardian offered a bombshell story about Paul
Manafort. It still hasn’t detonated,” Washington Post, December 4, 2018,
https://washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-guardian-offered-a-
bombshell-story-about-paul-manafort-it-still-hasnt-
detonated/2018/12/03/60e38182-f71c-11e8-863c-9e2f864d47e7_story.html.

[84] David Holley, “Hijack Suspect and Iraqi Met, Official Says,” Los
Angeles Times, October 27, 2001, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-
2001-oct-27-mn-62270-story.html.

[85] Staff, “CIA Questions Saddam’s Ties to Al Qaeda,” ABC News,

October 7, 2004, https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/IraqCoverage/story?
id=144396.

[86] See below.

[87] Sara Murray and Kate Sullivan, “Text messages show Roger Stone
discussing WikiLeaks plans days before hack,” CNN, November 23, 2018,
https://cnn.com/2018/11/14/politics/text-messages-roger-stone-wikileaks-
hack/index.html.

[88] Judy Maltz, “A Discreet Man for Sensitive Missions: Meet Isaac
Molho, Netanyahu’s Confidant Detained by Israeli Police,” Haaretz,
November 7, 2017, https://haaretz.com/israel-news/2017-11-07/ty-
article/premium/meet-isaac-molho-netanyahus-confidant-detained-by-
israeli-police/0000017f-dc78-db5a-a57f-dc7a5b5d0000.

[89] Andrew Blake, “John Podesta: It’s Roger Stone’s ‘time in the barrel,’”
Washington Times, January 25, 2019,
https://washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jan/25/john-podesta-its-roger-
stones-time-barrel.

[90] James Bamford, “The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel,” The
Nation, March 23, 2023, https://thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-
collusion.

[91] That may sound like an extraordinary claim. So here are 10 citations
for it: Jeff Stein, “Hillary Clinton’s campaign wants the Electoral College
briefed on Russian interference,” Vox.com, December 12, 2016,
https://vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/12/13922454/hillary-clinton-
electors-podesta; Dan Merica, “Clinton campaign backs intelligence
briefing for Electoral College electors,” CNN, December 13, 2016,
https://cnn.com/2016/12/12/politics/hillary-clinton-electoral-college-
electors/index.html; Kyle Cheney and Gabriel Debenedetti, “Electors
demand intelligence briefing before Electoral College vote,” Politico,
December 12, 2016, https://politico.com/story/2016/12/electors-
intelligence-briefing-trump-russia-232498; Joseph O’Sullivan, “Washington
state electors join movement seeking to deny Trump the presidency,”
Seattle Times, November 30, 2016, https://seattletimes.com/seattle-
news/politics/washington-state-electors-join-movement-seeking-to-deny-
trump-the-presidency; David Halperin, “Electoral College Can Stop Unfit
Trump – With Another Republican,” Republic Report, November 11, 2016,
https://republicreport.org/2016/electoral-college-can-stop-unfit-trump-with-
another-republican; Kyle Cheney, “Democratic presidential electors revolt
against Trump,” Politico, November 22, 2016,
https://politico.com/story/2016/11/democrats-electoral-college-faithless-
trump-231731; Christine Pelosi, “Bipartisan Electors Ask James Clapper:
Release Facts on Outside Interference in US Election,” December 12, 2016,
https://web.archive.org/web/20161213122605/https://extranewsfeed.com/bi
partisan-electors-ask-james-clapper-release-facts-on-outside-interference-
in-u-s-election-c1a3d11d5b7b?gi=ee2728428c2c; Lilly O’Donnell, “Meet
the ‘Hamilton Electors’ Hoping for an Electoral College Revolt,” The
Atlantic, November 21, 2016,
https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/meet-the-hamilton-electors-
hoping-for-an-electoral-college-revolt/508433; Matthew Rozsa, “Donald
Trump isn’t yet president, and the Hamilton Electors have one shot to make
sure he never is,” Salon.com, December 10, 2016,
https://salon.com/2016/12/10/donald-trump-isnt-yet-president-and-the-
hamilton-electors-have-one-shot-to-make-sure-he-never-is; Tweet by P. Bret
Chiafalo, December 10, 2016,
https://x.com/Hypnopaedia13/status/807792638791282688.

[92] Michael J. Morell, “I Ran the CIA. Now I’m Endorsing Hillary
Clinton,” New York Times, August 5, 2016,
https://nytimes.com/2016/08/05/opinion/campaign-stops/i-ran-the-cia-now-
im-endorsing-hillary-clinton.html.

[93] Paul Sperry, “Secret Report: How CIA’s Brennan Overruled Dissenting
Analysts Who Concluded Russia Favored Hillary,” RealClearInvestigations,
September 24, 2020,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/09/24/secret_report_how_c
ias_brennan_overruled_dissenting_analysts_who_thought_russia_favored_
hillary_125315.html.

[94] “Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016

Election,” Vol. 4, US Senate, August 2020,
https://intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume
4.pdf.

[95] Andrea Kendall-Taylor, et al., “Assessing Russian Activities and

Intentions in Recent US Elections,” Intelligence Community Assessment,
January 6, 2017,
https://intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.p
df.
[96] Andrea Kendall-Taylor, et al., “Assessing Russian Activities and
Intentions in Recent US Elections,” Intelligence Community Assessment,
January 6, 2017,
https://intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.p
df.

[97] Press Release, “US Sens. Johnson, Grassley: Release declassified

annex to intelligence community assessment that was based on the
debunked Steele Dossier,” WisPolitics, June 11, 2020,
https://wispolitics.com/2020/u-s-sens-johnson-grassley-release-declassified-
annex-to-intelligence-community-assessment-that-was-based-on-the-
debunked-steele-dossier.

[98] Colby Itkowitz, “Hillary Clinton: Trump is an ‘illegitimate president,’”

Washington Post, September 26, 2019,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-
president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html.

[99] Matthew Nussbaum, “The 14 biggest moments of the final debate,”

Politico, October 19, 2016, https://politico.com/story/2016/10/biggest-
moments-last-2016-debate-230018.

[100] Lauren Carroll, “Hillary Clinton blames high-up Russians for

WikiLeaks releases,” Politifact, October 20, 2016,
https://politifact.com/factchecks/2016/oct/19/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-
blames-russia-putin-wikileaks-rele; Eliza Collins, “Yes, 17 intelligence
agencies really did say Russia was behind hacking,” USA Today, October
21, 2016,
https://usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/10/21/17-
intelligence-agencies-russia-behind-hacking/92514592.

[101] Staff, “Corrections: June 29, 2017,” New York Times, June 29, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/06/29/pageoneplus/corrections-june-29-
2017.html.

[102] Paul Sperry, “Secret Report: How CIA’s Brennan Overruled

Dissenting Analysts Who Concluded Russia Favored Hillary,”
RealClearInvestigations, September 24, 2020,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/09/24/secret_report_how_c
ias_brennan_overruled_dissenting_analysts_who_thought_russia_favored_
hillary_125315.html.

[103] Matt Taibbi, et al., “CIA ‘Cooked The Intelligence’ To Hide That
Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump, In 2016, Sources Say,” Public,
February 15, 2024, https://public.substack.com/p/cia-cooked-the-
intelligence-to-hide.

[104] Mallory Shelbourne, “Schumer: Trump ‘really dumb’ for attacking

intelligence agencies,” The Hill, January 3, 2017,
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/312605-schumer-trump-being-
really-dumb-by-going-after-intelligence-community.

[105] Cristiano Lima, “CIA chief calls Trump Nazi Germany comparison
‘outrageous,’” Politico Europe, January 15, 2017,
https://politico.eu/article/cia-chief-calls-trump-nazi-germany-comparison-
outrageous.

[106] Shane Goldmacher and Matthew Nussbaum, “At CIA headquarters,

Trump boasts about himself, denies feud,” Politico, January 21, 2017,
https://politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-cia-langley-233971; Robin
Wright, “Trump’s Vainglorious Affront to the CIA,” The New Yorker,
January 22, 2017, https://newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trumps-
vainglorious-affront-to-the-c-i-a.

[107] Interview of John O. Brennan, PBS Frontline, July 27, 2017,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/john-brennan.

[108] Michael S. Schmidt, et al., “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated

Contacts With Russian Intelligence,” New York Times, February 14, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/02/14/us/politics/russia-intelligence-
communications-trump.html.

[109] Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman, “FBI Agent in Russia Inquiry
Saw Basis in Early 2017 to Doubt Dossier,” New York Times, July 17, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/07/17/us/politics/steele-dossier-peter-strzok.html.

[110] Staff, “FBI agent Peter Strzok ‘fired over anti-Trump texts,’” BBC,
August 13, 2018, https://bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45173015.

[111] More on the framing of Page below.

[112] Declassified notations by FBI agent Peter Strzok on New York Times
article, “Trump Campaign Aides Had Repeated Contacts With Russian
Intelligence,”
https://judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Annotated%20New%20York%2
0Times%20Article.pdf.

[113] Michael S. Schmidt, et al., “Comey Disputes New York Times Article
About Russia Investigation,” New York Times, June 8, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/06/08/us/politics/james-comey-new-york-times-
article-russia.html.

[114] Mark Moore, “Disgraced FBI agent had doubts about Mueller probe,”
New York Post, January 23, 2018, https://nypost.com/2018/01/23/disgraced-
fbi-agent-had-doubts-about-mueller-probe.

[115] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[116] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[117] Christopher Steele Dossier,

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984/Trump-Intelligence-
Allegations.pdf.

[118] Christopher Steele Dossier,

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984/Trump-Intelligence-
Allegations.pdf.

[119] Daniel Kreps, “Watch Stephen Colbert Visit ‘Trump Pee Pee Tape’
Hotel Room in Moscow,” Rolling Stone, July 21, 2017,
https://rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/watch-stephen-colbert-
visit-trump-pee-pee-tape-hotel-room-in-moscow-203782; Jonathan Chait,
“I’m a Peeliever and You Should Be, Too,” New York magazine, April 13,
2018, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/im-a-peeliever-and-you-
should-be-too.html; Naomi Fry, “When We Think About the Pee Tape,” The
New Yorker, April 18, 2018, https://newyorker.com/culture/culture-
desk/when-we-think-about-the-pee-tape.

[120] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[121] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,

“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” US Department of Justice Oversight and
Review Division, December 2019, https://justice.gov/storage/120919-
examination.pdf.
[122] “Ex-FBI Director James Comey’s Memos,”
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/4442900/Ex-FBI-Director-James-
Comey-s-memos.pdf.

[123] Evan Perez, et al., “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of
Russian efforts to compromise him,” CNN, January 12, 2017,
https://us.cnn.com/2017/01/10/politics/donald-trump-intelligence-report-
russia/index.html; Ken Bensinger, et al., “These Reports Allege Trump Has
Deep Ties To Russia,” BuzzFeed, January 10, 2017,
https://buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-
ties-to-russia.

[124] Jeff Gerth, “The press versus the president, part two,” Columbia
Journalism Review, January 30, 2023,
https://cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-2.php.

[125] Stephen Collinson, “James Comey hoped leak would lead to special
counsel on Russia,” CNN, June 8, 2017,
https://cnn.com/2017/06/08/politics/james-comey-testimony-donald-
trump/index.html.

[126] Jonathan Easley, “GOP report: Clapper told CNN host about Trump
dossier in 2017,” The Hill, April 27, 2018,
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/385278-gop-report-clapper-told-
cnn-host-about-trump-dossier-in-2017.
[127] George Khoury, Esq., “What Are the Penalties for Lying to
Congress?” Find Law, March 21, 2019,
https://findlaw.com/legalblogs/criminal-defense/what-are-the-penalties-for-
lying-to-congress.

[128] The same guy who helped to plan the “Operation Storm” atrocity in
Croatia in 1995. See Chapter Two. He also lied to Congress that the NSA
was not spying on Americans. See Chapter Four. Previously, as head of the
National Imagery and Mapping Agency, Clapper also famously lied that
Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (Mark Hosenball, “Will Clapper
Nomination Reopen the Saddam WMD Controversy?” Newsweek, June 6,
2010, https://newsweek.com/will-clapper-nomination-reopen-saddam-wmd-
controversy-217378; “Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the
United States Regarding Weapons on Mass Destruction,” White House,
March 31, 2005, https://georgewbush-
whitehouse.archives.gov/wmd/text/report.html) telling CNN, “I think we do
a very good job of satisfying all of our masters.” (David Ensor, “Secretive
map agency opens its doors,” CNN, December 13, 2002,
https://edition.cnn.com/2002/US/12/09/map.makers.) He also lied that those
weapons had been moved to Syria right before the invasion. (Douglas Jehl,
“Iraqis Removed Arms Material, US Aide Says,” New York Times, October
29, 2003, https://nytimes.com/2003/10/29/world/the-struggle-for-iraq-
weapons-search-iraqis-removed-arms-material-us-aide-says.html). At least
he discouraged Obama from invading Syria in 2013. (Jeffrey Goldberg,
“The Obama Doctrine,” The Atlantic, April 2016,
https://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-
doctrine/471525).

[129] Jack Shafer, “The Spies Who Came in to the TV Studio,” Politico,
February 6, 2018, https://politico.com/magazine/story/2018/02/06/john-
brennan-james-claper-michael-hayden-former-cia-media-216943.

[130] Jim Sciutto and Evan Perez, “US investigators corroborate some
aspects of the Russia dossier,” CNN, February 10, 2017,
https://cnn.com/2017/02/10/politics/russia-dossier-update/index.html; John
Sipher, “A Lot of the Steele Dossier Has Since Been Corroborated,” Slate,
September 11, 2017, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/09/a-lot-of-
the-steele-dossier-has-since-been-corroborated.html; Jack Moore, “Isn’t It
Strange How More of the Steele Dossier Keeps Checking Out?” GQ,
November 10, 2017, https://gq.com/story/trump-russia-steele-dossier-
update; Amy Knight, “Was This Russian General Murdered Over the Steele
Dossier?” Daily Beast, January 23, 2018, https://thedailybeast.com/was-
this-russian-general-murdered-over-the-steele-dossier; Nancy LeTourneau,
“What the Steele Dossier Got Right,” Washington Monthly, October 27,
2017, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/10/27/what-the-steele-dossier-
got-right; Erik Wemple, “Rachel Maddow rooted for the Steele dossier to be
true. Then it fell apart,” Washington Post, December 26, 2019,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/12/26/rachel-maddow-rooted-
steele-dossier-be-true-then-it-fell-apart; Greg Price, “What’s True in Trump-
Russia Dossier? Key Parts Proved Over Last Year,” Newsweek, May 17,
2018, https://newsweek.com/trump-russia-dossier-true-proven-929839;
David Rutz, “10 times the media declared the discredited Steele dossier was
not ‘disproven,’” Fox News, November 10, 2021,
https://foxnews.com/media/10-times-the-media-steele-dossier-disproven.

[131] Staff, “British ex-spy behind Trump dossier seen as a cool operator,”
CBS News, January 14, 2017, https://cbsnews.com/news/christopher-steele-
british-ex-spy-behind-donald-trump-dossier-seen-as-cool-operator.

[132] Greg Myre, “A Russian Word Americans Need To Know:

‘Kompromat,’” NPR News, January 11, 2017,
https://npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/01/11/509305088/a-russian-word-
americans-need-to-know-kompromat; Andrew Kramer, “The Master of
‘Kompromat’ Believed to Be Behind Trump Jr.’s Meeting,” New York
Times, July 17, 2017, https://nytimes.com/2017/07/17/world/europe/russia-
donald-trump-jr-kompromat-yuri-chaika.html.

[133] “Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016

US Election,” Vol. 4, US Senate, July 28, 2020,
https://intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume
4.pdf.

[134] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.
[135] John Solomon, “FBI’s spreadsheet puts a stake through the heart of
Steele’s dossier,” The Hill, July 16, 2019, https://thehill.com/opinion/white-
house/453384-fbis-spreadsheet-puts-a-stake-through-the-heart-of-steeles-
dossier.

[136] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,

“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” US Department of Justice Oversight and
Review Division, December 2019, https://justice.gov/storage/120919-
examination.pdf.

[137] Alan Cullison and Aruna Viswanatha, “Three Friends Chatting: How
the Steele Dossier Was Created,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2022,
https://wsj.com/articles/the-surprising-backstory-of-how-the-steele-dossier-
was-created-11652103582.

[138] John Solomon, “FBI’s Steele story falls apart: False intel and media
contacts were flagged before FISA,” The Hill, May 9, 2019,
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/442944-fbis-steele-story-falls-
apart-false-intel-and-media-contacts-were-flagged.

[139] “Nunes Memo, Letter from Rep. Devin Nunes to Donald F. McGahn
II,” February 2, 2018,
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4365340/Read-the-GOP-
memo.pdf.
[140] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,
“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” US Department of Justice Oversight and
Review Division, December 2019, https://justice.gov/storage/120919-
examination.pdf.

[141] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[142] Scott Shane, et al., “How a Sensational, Unverified Dossier Became a

Crisis for Donald Trump,” New York Times, January 11, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/01/11/us/politics/donald-trump-russia-
intelligence.html; Zeke Miller, et al., “Correction: Trump-Russia Probe
Story,” AP, February 3, 2018,
https://apnews.com/article/63c883156e314b68b86209d3b63890f5; Jeff
Gerth, “The press versus the president, part two,” Columbia Journalism
Review, January 30, 2023, https://cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-
versus-president-part-2.php.

[143] Rebecca Ballhaus, “Clinton Campaign, DNC Helped Fund Trump-

Russia Dossier,” Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2017,
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[144] Jill Colvin, “DNC, Clinton campaign agree to Steele dossier funding
fine,” AP, March 31, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-2022-
midterm-elections-business-elections-presidential-elections-
5468774d18e8c46f81b55e9260b13e93.

[145] Staff, “Anne Kristol and Matthew Continetti,” New York Times,
February 19, 2012, https://nytimes.com/2012/02/19/fashion/weddings/anne-
kristol-matthew-continetti-weddings.html; Steve Peoples and Zeke Miller,
“Neoconservative Website Washington Free Beacon Hired Fusion GPS,”
RealClearPolitics, October 28, 2017,
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washington_free_beacon_hired_fusion_gps_135394.html.

[146] Steve Peoples and Zeke Miller, “Trump dossier research triggered by
website with GOP ties,” AP, October 28, 2017,
https://apnews.com/article/3b1ce552d4d94cc98a071c4d5702dee5.

[147] “Interview of Michael Goldfarb,” Permanent Select Committee on

Intelligence, December 12, 2017,
https://dni.gov/files/HPSCI_Transcripts/2019-05-01-MichaelGo-MTR.pdf.

[148] Adam Entous, et al., “Clinton campaign, DNC paid for research that
led to Russia dossier,” Washington Post, October 24, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/clinton-campaign-dnc-
paid-for-research-that-led-to-russia-dossier/2017/10/24/226fabf0-b8e4-
11e7-a908-a3470754bbb9_story.html.
[149] Tweet by Maggie Haberman, October 24, 2017,
https://x.com/maggieNYT/status/922962880206647297.

[150] Peter Van Buren, “Christopher Steele: The Real Foreign Influence in
the 2016 Election?” The American Conservative, February 15, 2018,
https://theamericanconservative.com/christopher-steele-the-real-foreign-
influence-in-the-2016-election.

[151] Ken Dilanian, “Why Team Trump is wrong about Carter Page, the
dossier and that secret warrant,” NBC News, July 23, 2018,
https://nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/why-team-trump-wrong-about-
carter-page-dossier-secret-warrant-n893666.

[152] “Nunes Memo, Letter from Rep. Devin Nunes to Donald F. McGahn
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[153] Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman, “The Nunes memo is out. It’s a joke
and a sham,” Washington Post, February 2, 2018,
https://washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/02/02/the-nunes-
memo-is-out-its-a-joke-and-a-sham; John Sipher, “The smearing of
Christopher Steele,” Politico Europe, February 6, 2018,
https://politico.eu/article/devin-nunes-donald-trump-the-smearing-of-
christopher-steele; Kevin Drum, “Now We Know For Sure: Devin Nunes
Lied About Everything,” Mother Jones, July 24, 2018,
https://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/07/now-we-know-for-sure-
devin-nunes-lied-about-everything.

[154] Michael Isikoff, “US intel officials probe ties between Trump adviser
and Kremlin,” Yahoo News, September 23, 2016,
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adviser-and-kremlin-175046002.html.

[155] Peter Van Buren, “The Durham report unmasks the Deep State,” The
Spectator, May 17, 2023, https://thespectator.com/topic/durham-report-
unmasks-deep-state-fbi-media.

[156] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[157] Lawrence O’Donnell, The Last Word, July 23, 2018,

https://msnbc.com/transcripts/the-last-word/2018-07-23-msna1126901.

[158] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,

“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” US Department of Justice Oversight and
Review Division, December 2019, https://justice.gov/storage/120919-
examination.pdf.

[159] Aaron Blake, “Vindication for the Nunes memo?” Washington Post,
December 13, 2019,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/12/13/vindication-nunes-memo.

[160] “Interview of Andrew McCabe,” US House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, December 19, 2017,
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2020/05/am33.pdf.

[161] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[162] Sen. Chuck Grassley, “Debunked Anti-Trump Dossier Sub-Source

Who Sought to Traffic Classified Information Remained on FBI Payroll
until late 2020,” September 26, 2002,
https://grassley.senate.gov/news/news-releases/debunked-anti-trump-
dossier-sub-source-who-sought-to-traffic-classified-information-remained-
on-fbi-payroll-until-late-2020; Jake Gibson and Brooke Singman, “FBI paid
Igor Danchenko more than $200,000 to serve as confidential human
source,” Fox News, October 13, 2022, https://foxnews.com/politics/fbi-
paid-igor-danchenko-more-200000-serve-confidential-human-source.

[163] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.
[164] “Marc Andreessen claims nuclear test footage is fake,”
Reddit.com/r/samharris, August 6, 2023,
https://reddit.com/r/samharris/comments/15jve20/marc_andreessen_claims_
nuclear_test_footage_is; Akio Nakatani, Death Object: Exploding the
Nuclear Weapons Hoax, 2017, https://ia903201.us.archive.org/6/items/8d-
0de-2/8d0de2.pdf.

[165] Justin Vallejo and Phil Thomas, “Why some QAnon believers think
JFK Jr is still alive – and about to become vice president,” Independent,
January 18, 2022, https://independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-
politics/qanon-jfk-jr-alive-trump-b1995594.html.

[166] Mike Chiari, “Kyrie Irving Explains Flat Earth Stance, Says There Is
No Real Picture of Planet,” Bleacher Report, November 1, 2017,
https://bleacherreport.com/articles/2741935-kyrie-irving-explains-flat-
earth-stance-says-there-is-no-real-picture-of-earth.

[167] Demetri Sevastopulo, et al., “Donald Trump Jr welcomed offer of

Russian help to damage Clinton,” Financial Times, July 11, 2017,
https://ft.com/content/d517e576-65ea-11e7-8526-7b38dcaef614.

[168] Kelly McEvers, “Trump Stories: Collusion,” NPR News, February 8,

2018, https://npr.org/transcripts/584353948; Terry Gross, “Fusion GPS
Founders On Russian Efforts To Sow Discord: ‘They Have Succeeded,’”
NPR News, Fresh Air, November 26, 2019,
https://npr.org/2019/11/26/782908119/fusion-gps-founders-on-russian-
efforts-to-sow-discord-they-have-succeeded.
[169] Christopher Steele Dossier,
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984/Trump-Intelligence-
Allegations.pdf.

[170] Christopher Steele Dossier,

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984/Trump-Intelligence-
Allegations.pdf.

[171] Adam Goldman, “Barr Says CIA ‘Stayed in Its Lane’ in Examining
Russian Election Interference,” New York Times, December 18, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/12/18/us/politics/william-barr-cia-russia-
investigation.html.

[172] Interview with author, Daniel Lazare, Scott Horton Show radio
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daniel-lazare-on-what-trump-ukraine-is-really-about.

[173] Matt Taibbi, “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD,”

Racket News, March 23, 2019, https://racket.news/p/russiagate-is-wmd-
times-a-million.

[174] Staff, “Comey felt obliged to send letter to Congress,” AP, October
28, 2016, https://apnews.com/article/technology-entertainment-joe-biden-
campaign-2016-events-0747b3d1c5d84418b324de932e4f0965; Tom
McCarthy, “Comey: I was sure Clinton would win election when I reopened
email inquiry,” Guardian, April 13, 2018, https://theguardian.com/us-
news/2018/apr/13/james-comey-book-hillary-clinton-email-investigation.
[175] Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s
Doomed Campaign (New York: Crown, 2017).

[176] Jonathan Chait, “Why Liberals Should Support the War,” The New
Republic, October 10, 2002,
http://wadinet.de/news/iraq/nw785_liberals.htm; “The Liberal Case for
War,” On Point, WBUR, October 23, 2002,
https://wbur.org/onpoint/2002/10/23/the-liberal-case-for-war; Jonathan
Chait, “Blinded by Bush-Hatred,” Washington Post, May 8, 2003,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/05/08/blinded-by-bush-
hatred/e48bdcde-ee52-4f75-8b5c-0d188874a6ab; Jonathan Chait, “Iraq:
What I Got Wrong, and What I Still Believe,” New York magazine, March
19, 2013, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2013/03/iraq-what-i-got-wrong-
and-what-i-still-believe.html.

[177] Jonathan Chait, “What If Trump Has Been a Russian Asset Since
1987?” New York magazine, July 8, 2018,
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/07/trump-putin-russia-collusion.html.

[178] Chris Hayes, “Could Trump be a Russian intelligence asset?” All In,
July 9, 2018, https://msnbc.com/all-in/watch/could-trump-be-a-russian-
intelligence-asset-1273436739894.

[179] Willa Paskin, “Rachel Maddow’s Conspiracy Brain,” Slate, March 29,
2019, https://slate.com/culture/2019/03/rachel-maddow-mueller-report-
trump-barr.html.
[180] Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on
Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday,
2008).

[181] Jane Mayer, “Christopher Steele, the Man Behind the Trump
Dossier,” The New Yorker, March 12, 2018,
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/12/christopher-steele-the-man-
behind-the-trump-dossier.

[182] Erik Wemple, “How Politico’s Natasha Bertrand bootstrapped dossier

credulity into MSNBC gig,” Washington Post, February 28, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/02/28/how-politicos-natasha-
bertrand-bootstrapped-dossier-credulity-into-tv-gig.

[183] Rachel Maddow, “Key Dem points to evidence of collusion between

Russia, Team Trump,” MSNBC, March 23, 2017, https://msnbc.com/rachel-
maddow-show/key-dem-points-evidence-collusion-between-russia-team-
trump-msna974841.

[184] Rep. Adam Schiff, “Intelligence Committee Ranking Member Schiff

Opening Statement During Hearing on Russian Active Measures,” March
20, 2017, https://schiff.house.gov/news/press-releases/intelligence-
committee-ranking-member-schiff-opening-statement-during-hearing-on-
russian-active-measures.

[185] Scott Horton, Enough Already excerpt, “Iraq War II, Part 3: Lying Us
Into War,” Scott Horton Show Substack, February 10, 2023,
https://scotthortonshow.substack.com/p/iraq-war-ii-part-3-lying-us-into.

[186] Samuel Ashworth, “Mueller’s report is done. Is there still a point in

having a prayer candle with his image on it?” Washington Post, May 13,
2019, https://washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/muellers-report-is-
done-is-there-still-a-point-in-having-a-prayer-candle-with-his-image-on-
it/2019/05/10/f8aecd98-6506-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html; Claire
Galofaro, “Mueller’s fans venerate him – and nervously await report,” AP,
March 20, 2019,
https://apnews.com/article/370551cfc5334f3ba617c7e2bf77261a; Katherine
Miller, “The Robert Mueller Fan Club,” BuzzFeed News, February 1, 2019,
https://buzzfeednews.com/article/katherinemiller/robert-mueller-candles-
investigation.

[187] Aaronson, The Terror Factory.

[188] Robert S. Mueller, III, “Before the Senate Select Committee on

Intelligence of the United States Senate,” FBI, February 11, 2003,
https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/testimony/war-on-terrorism.

[189] Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, “Women of ‘SNL’ Sing ‘All I Want for
Christmas Is You’ to Robert Mueller,” Billboard, February 2, 2018,
https://billboard.com/culture/tv-film/snl-all-i-want-for-christmas-is-you-
mueller-8487684; Stephen Colbert, “Robert Mueller’s 12 Days Of
Christmas,” The Late Show, December 5, 2017, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=rrexj7-E4gA.
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https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4365340/Read-the-GOP-
memo.pdf.

[191] Matthew Mosk, “Durham probe offers fresh support for man who has
long denied being ‘Steele dossier’ source,” ABC News, November 11,
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long-denied/story?id=81119325.

[192] Paul Sperry, “Ex-DOJ Official and Wife Had Bigger Roles in Dossier
Than Known: Durham Report,” RealClearInvestigations, May 16, 2023,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2023/05/16/ex-
doj_official_and_wife_had_bigger_roles_in_dossier_than_known_durham_
report_899718.html.

[193] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[194] Scott Shane, “Trump Campaign Got Early Word Russia Had
Democrats’ Emails,” New York Times, October 30, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/10/30/us/politics/trump-russia-mueller-
indictment.html.

[195] See above.

[196] Sharon LaFraniere, et al., “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A
Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt,” New York Times,
December 30, 2017, https://nytimes.com/2017/12/30/us/politics/how-fbi-
russia-investigation-began-george-papadopoulos.html.

[197] Ellen Nakashima, et al., “FBI obtained FISA warrant to monitor

former Trump adviser Carter Page,” Washington Post, April 11, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/fbi-obtained-fisa-
warrant-to-monitor-former-trump-adviser-carter-
page/2017/04/11/620192ea-1e0e-11e7-ad74-3a742a6e93a7_story.html.

[198] James Comey, “No ‘treason.’ No coup. Just lies – and dumb lies at
that,” Washington Post, May 28, 2019,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/james-comey-no-treason-no-coup-
just-lies—and-dumb-lies-at-that/2019/05/28/45f8d802-8175-11e9-bce7-
40b4105f7ca0_story.html.

[199] Peter Strzok, “Crossfire Hurricane,” Federal Bureau of Investigation,

July 31, 2016, https://judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/JW-v-
DOJ-reply-02743.pdf.

[200] “Papadopoulos denies Downer drinks story,” SBS News, September

8, 2018, https://sbs.com.au/news/article/papadopoulos-denies-downer-
drinks-story/kv87vyxj9.

[201] Jacquelin Magnay, “I didn’t blab to Alexander Downer, says George

Papadopoulos,” The Australian, September 12, 2018,
https://theaustralian.com.au/nation/world/i-didnt-blab-to-alexander-downer-
says-george-papadopoulos/news-
story/fda6d0b3ac1d2e80f4645dabc6bd865b.

[202] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[203] Edmund DeMarche, “Mysterious Maltese professor denied making

offer to Papadopoulos, new docs show,” Fox News, September 2, 2020,
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[204] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
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[205] Sharon LaFraniere, et al., “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A

Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt,” New York Times,
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[206] Chris Frates, “Hillary Clinton deleted all email from personal server,”
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[207] “Interview of George Papadopoulos,” US House of Representatives

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[208] Kimberley A. Strassel, “The Curious Case of Mr. Downer,” Wall

Street Journal, May 31, 2018, https://wsj.com/articles/the-curious-case-of-
mr-downer-1527809075.

[209] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

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[210] FBI-AAA-EC-00007239 (Aug. 11, 2016 at 14:40:27); Special

Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence
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https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.
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Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt,” New York Times,
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russia-investigation-began-george-papadopoulos.html.

[212] Chuck Ross, “DNC Said Joseph Mifsud Could Be Dead—His

Adviser Pours Cold Water On The Theory,” Daily Caller, September 10,
2018, https://dailycaller.com/2018/09/10/joseph-mifsud-alive; Matthew
Vella, “Joseph Mifsud’s lawyer claims Russiagate’s Maltese professor was
Western spy,” Malta Today, November 11, 2019,
https://maltatoday.com.mt/news/world/98582/joseph_mifsuds_lawyer_clai
ms_russiagates_maltese_professor_was_western_spy.

[213] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,

“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” US Department of Justice Oversight and
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[214] David Lindsay, “Russiagate: Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud due in

US court today ‘living under an alias,’” Malta Independent, September 13,
2018,
https://web.archive.org/web/20181017104558/https://independent.com.mt/a
rticles/2018-09-13/local-news/Russiagate-Maltese-professor-Joseph-
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FBI’s Russia investigation,” Guardian, November 11, 2017,
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professor-linked-to-fbis-russia-investigation.

[216] Tweet by Defend Assange Campaign, March 22, 2018,

https://x.com/DefendAssange/status/976943598049558528.

[217] Daniel Lazare, “The Tale of a ‘Deep State Target,’” Consortium

News, April 4, 2019, https://consortiumnews.com/2019/04/04/the-tale-of-a-
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[218] Rowan Scarborough, “Joseph Mifsud identity called Trump-Russia

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[219] Tweet by Chris Blackburn, August 23, 2020,

https://x.com/cjbdingo25/status/1297457485767417856; Tweet by Chris
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[221] “Interview of George Papadopoulos,” US House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, October 25, 2018,
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[222] “Interview of George Papadopoulos,” US House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, October 25, 2018,
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l10.25.18-Interview-Transcript_Redacted.pdf.

[223] McCarthy supported Iraq War II: Andrew McCarthy, “Iraq Is The War
On Terror,” National Review, April 17, 2006,
https://nationalreview.com/2006/04/iraq-war-terror-andrew-c-mccarthy; But
he was good on this: Andrew McCarthy, “The FBI’s Trump-Russia
Investigation Was Formally Opened on False Pretenses,” National Review,
May 6, 2019, https://nationalreview.com/2019/05/fbi-trump-russia-
investigation-george-papadopoulos.

[224] Staff, “Dark Side: Secret Origins of Evidence in US Criminal Cases,”

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criminal-cases.
[225] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to
Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf; See next section.

[226] “Michael Tracey interviews George Papadopoulos,” Michael Tracey

YouTube channel, April 16, 2019, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=ZjGLCCP_lPg.

[227] “Interview of George Papadopoulos,” US House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, October 25, 2018,
https://justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Papadopoulos-
l10.25.18-Interview-Transcript_Redacted.pdf; “Michael Tracey interviews
George Papadopoulos,” Michael Tracey YouTube channel, April 16, 2019,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZjGLCCP_lPg.

[228] “Interview of George Papadopoulos,” US House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, October 25, 2018,
https://justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Papadopoulos-
l10.25.18-Interview-Transcript_Redacted.pdf.

[229] “Interview of George Papadopoulos,” US House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, October 25, 2018,
https://justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Papadopoulos-
l10.25.18-Interview-Transcript_Redacted.pdf.
[230] T.A. Frank, “The Surreal Life of George Papadopoulos,” Washington
Post, May 20, 2019,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/05/20/feature/the-
surreal-life-of-george-papadopoulos.

[231] di Paolo G. Brera, “Russiagate, mystery professor Joseph Mifsud

speaks out: ‘Dirt on Hillary Clinton? Nonsense,’” La Repubblica,
November 1, 2017,
https://repubblica.it/esteri/2017/11/01/news/russiagate_mystery_professor_j
oseph_mifsud_speaks_out_dirt_on_hillary_clinton_nonsense_-179948962.

[232] “Interview of George Papadopoulos,” US House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, October 25, 2018,
https://justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Papadopoulos-
l10.25.18-Interview-Transcript_Redacted.pdf; “Michael Tracey interviews
George Papadopoulos,” Michael Tracey YouTube channel, April 16, 2019,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZjGLCCP_lPg.

[233] Mark Mazzetti, “Excerpts From the New York Times Interview With
George Papadopoulos,” New York Times, September 7, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/09/07/us/politics/george-papadopoulos-interview-
trump.html.

[234] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
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https://washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/05/20/feature/the-
surreal-life-of-george-papadopoulos.

[236] Adam Goldman, et al., “FBI Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to

Meet With Trump Aide in 2016,” New York Times, May 2, 2019,
https://nytimes.com/2019/05/02/us/politics/fbi-government-investigator-
trump.html; Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to
Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
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[237] Chuck Ross, “A London Meeting Before The Election Aroused

George Papadopoulos’s Suspicions,” Daily Caller, March 25, 2018,
https://dailycaller.com/2018/03/25/george-papadopoulos-london-emails;
John Solomon, “The damning proof of innocence that FBI likely withheld
in Russian probe,” The Hill, March 14, 2019,
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innocence-that-fbi-likely-withheld-in-russian-probe.

[238] Adam Goldman, et al., “FBI Sent Investigator Posing as Assistant to

Meet With Trump Aide in 2016,” New York Times, May 2, 2019,
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[240] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
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[241] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
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https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[242] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
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[243] In late October 2024, it was revealed that an anonymous FBI

whistleblower had contacted Congress regarding accusations that Director
Comey had launched an “off the books . . . fishing expedition” using female
so-called “honey pot” informants against Papadopoulos. It was not clear if
this allegation was in direct regard to Putin’s alleged “niece” from the
dinner or others attached to the Trump campaign. It seemed this was worth
a footnote. Kerry Picket, “Whistleblower: James Comey had FBI ‘honey
pot’ spies infiltrate Trump’s 2016 campaign,” Washington Times, October
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[244] Robert Costa, et al., “Secret FBI source for Russia investigation met
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[245] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
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[246] Robert Costa, et al., “Secret intelligence source who aided Mueller
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[249] David Stockman, “No Joy In Never-Trumpville: Mighty Mueller Has

Struck Out,” Antiwar.com, April 26, 2019,
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[250] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
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[251] “Interview of Andrew McCabe,” US House of Representatives

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[252] Aaron Maté, “Five Trump-Russia ‘Collusion’ Corrections We Need

From the Media Now – Just for Starters,” RealClearInvestigations,
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russia_collusion_corrections_we_need_from_the_media_now_-
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[253] Eli Watkins, et al., “Clinton campaign, DNC helped fund dossier
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[254] Sharon LaFraniere, et al., “How the Russia Inquiry Began: A

Campaign Aide, Drinks and Talk of Political Dirt,” New York Times,
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[255] Paul R. Gregory, “Why Was The Steele Dossier Not Dismissed As A
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[256] Tuvana Şahintürk, “Bob Woodward says US wasted time on ‘garbage’

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[257] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

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[259] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
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[260] Maria Bartiromo, “Steven Schrage on relationship with Carter Page,

FBI informant Stefan Halper,” Sunday Morning Futures, Fox News, August
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[261] As head of MI6, Dearlove had infamously written to PM Blair in July

2002 in regards to the WMD pretext for Iraq War II that “intelligence and
facts were being fixed around the policy; Matthew Rycroft, “Iraq: Prime
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https://web.archive.org/web/20060108193238/http://timesonline.co.uk/articl
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[262] Steven P. Schrage, “The Spies Who Hijacked America,” Racket

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[263] “FBI Interview of Igor Danchenko,” Federal Bureau of Investigation,

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[264] Matthew Mosk and Mike Levine, “FBI believed Trump campaign
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https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fbi-believed-trump-campaign-aide-carter-
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[265] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,

“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
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[267] John Kruzel, “Judge blasts FBI over misleading info for surveillance
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[268] Ronn Blitzer, “Comey admits ‘I was wrong’ on FISA conduct,

remains defiant on dossier in tense interview,” Fox News, December 15,
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[269] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,

“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
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[270] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
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[271] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
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[272] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
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[273] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
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[274] Luke Harding, “Why Carter Page Was Worth Watching,” Politico,
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[275] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

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[276] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
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[277] Not that he was a Russian agent either. See below.

[278] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to
Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[279] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

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[280] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
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[281] Matt Zapotosky, “Rosenstein says, in hindsight, he would not have

signed application to surveil former Trump campaign adviser,” Washington
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[282] Alexandra Hutzler, “John Brennan Says Donald Trump Sees the
‘Walls Closing In’ and Feels ‘Increasingly Desperate’ Amid Mueller
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in on Trump,” CNN, December 19, 2018,
https://cnn.com/2018/12/19/opinions/walls-closing-in-on-trump-opinion-
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walls close in on Russia investigation?” MSNBC, September 20, 2018,
https://msnbc.com/deadline-white-house/watch/-under-siege-trump-ready-
to-blow-as-walls-close-in-on-russia-investigation-1325476931742; “Trump
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[283] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,

“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
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Stop’ Trump From Being President, Newly Released Text Messages
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[284] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
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https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[285] Ken Armstrong, et al., “Staffs of The New York Times and The
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[287] Maggie Haberman, et al., “Michael Flynn Resigns as National

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[288] Steven P. Schrage, “The Spies Who Hijacked America,” Racket

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america.

[289] Maria Bartiromo, “Steven Schrage on relationship with Carter Page,

FBI informant Stefan Halper,” Sunday Morning Futures, Fox News, August
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[290] David Ignatius, “Why did Obama dawdle on Russia’s hacking?”

Washington Post, January 12, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-did-obama-dawdle-on-russias-
hacking/2017/01/12/75f878a0-d90c-11e6-9a36-1d296534b31e_story.html.
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sanctions with Russian ambassador, despite denials, officials say,”
Washington Post, February 9, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/national-security-
adviser-flynn-discussed-sanctions-with-russian-ambassador-despite-denials-
officials-say/2017/02/09/f85b29d6-ee11-11e6-b4ff-
ac2cf509efe5_story.html.

[292] Transcripts of Calls Between Mike Flynn and Sergey Kislyak,

https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/6976-flynn-kislyak-
transcripts/cd9e96e708a9b0c8ba58/optimized/full.pdf.

[293] Catherine Herridge, “Attorney General William Barr on Michael

Flynn, Obamacare and coronavirus restrictions –Transcript,” CBS News,
May 12, 2020, https://cbsnews.com/news/attorney-general-william-barr-on-
michael-flynn-obamacare-and-coronavirus-restrictions-transcript.

[294] Michael Ray, “The Logan Act,” Encyclopedia Britannica, July 31,
2024, https://britannica.com/event/Logan-Act.

[295] Aaron Maté, “Five Trump-Russia ‘Collusion’ Corrections We Need

From the Media Now – Just for Starters,” RealClearInvestigations,
November 24, 2021,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/11/24/five_trump-
russia_collusion_corrections_we_need_from_the_media_now_-
_just_for_starters_804205.html.
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On Michael Flynn,” The Federalist, May 4, 2020,
https://thefederalist.com/2020/05/04/your-guide-to-the-obama-
administrations-hit-on-michael-flynn.

[297] Catherine Herridge, “Attorney General William Barr on Michael

Flynn, Obamacare and coronavirus restrictions –Transcript,” CBS News,
May 12, 2020, https://cbsnews.com/news/attorney-general-william-barr-on-
michael-flynn-obamacare-and-coronavirus-restrictions-transcript.

[298] Colin Kalmbacher, “Weeks Before Flynn’s Fateful FBI Interview,

Peter Strzok Derailed Attempt to Close the Case,” Law & Crime, April 30,
2020, https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/weeks-before-michael-flynn-
fateful-fbi-interview-peter-strzok-derailed-attempt-to-close-the-case.

[299] Spencer S. Hsu, et al., “Michael Flynn’s defense claims FBI notes
show agents tried to entrap the former national security adviser,”
Washington Post, April 30, 2020, https://washingtonpost.com/local/legal-
issues/michael-flynns-defense-claims-fbi-notes-show-agents-tried-to-
entrap-the-former-national-security-adviser/2020/04/29/fbbe0f30-8a67-
11ea-9dfd-990f9dcc71fc_story.html.

[300] Harvey Silverglate and Monika Greco, “The Remarkable Prosecution

Of Michael Flynn,” WGBH Boston, May 22, 2020,
https://wgbh.org/news/commentary/2020-05-22/the-remarkable-
prosecution-of-michael-flynn.
OceanofPDF.com
[301] Spencer S. Hsu, et al., “Michael Flynn’s defense claims FBI notes
show agents tried to entrap the former national security adviser,”
Washington Post, April 30, 2020, https://washingtonpost.com/local/legal-
issues/michael-flynns-defense-claims-fbi-notes-show-agents-tried-to-
entrap-the-former-national-security-adviser/2020/04/29/fbbe0f30-8a67-
11ea-9dfd-990f9dcc71fc_story.html.

[302] Staff, “Flynn charged with lying about bid to stop anti-Israel UN
resolution,” Times of Israel, December 1, 2017,
https://timesofisrael.com/flynn-charged-with-lying-about-bid-to-stop-anti-
israel-un-resolution.

[303] Brian Ross, “Troubling Anthrax Additive Found; Atta Met Iraqi,”
ABC News, October 29, 2001, https://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=92270;
Dylan Byers, “Fleischer: Ross’s news ‘too good to check,’” Politico, July
23, 2012, https://politico.com/blogs/media/2012/07/fleischer-rosss-news-
too-good-to-check-129800.

[304] “ABC News statement on Michael Flynn report,” ABC News,

December 2, 2017, https://abcnews.go.com/US/abc-news-statement-
michael-flynn-report/story?id=51536475.

[305] Brian Ross, et al., “Flynn prepared to testify that Trump directed him
to contact Russians about ISIS, confidant says,” ABC News, December 1,
2017, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/michael-flynn-charged-making-false-
statements-fbi-documents/story?id=50849354.
[306] Seymour Hersh, “Military to Military,” London Review of Books,
January 7, 2016, https://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n01/seymour-m.-
hersh/military-to-military; “Who is to blame for the rise of ISIL? –
Interview of Gen. Michael T. Flynn,” Al Jazeera, July 29, 2015,
https://aljazeera.com/program/head-to-head/2015/7/29/who-is-to-blame-for-
the-rise-of-isil; Brad Hoff, “2012 Defense Intelligence Agency document:
West will facilitate rise of Islamic State ‘in order to isolate the Syrian
regime,’” Levant Report, May 19, 2015,
https://levantreport.com/2015/05/19/2012-defense-intelligence-agency-
document-west-will-facilitate-rise-of-islamic-state-in-order-to-isolate-the-
syrian-regime.

[307] Daniel Larison, “Flynn’s Warped Worldview,” The American

Conservative, July 11, 2016, https://theamericanconservative.com/flynns-
warped-worldview.

[308] Michael Ledeen, “Faster, Please,” National Review, February 7, 2005,

https://nationalreview.com/2005/02/faster-please-michael-ledeen; John
Laughland, “Flirting with Fascism,” The American Conservative, June 30,
2003, https://theamericanconservative.com/flirting-with-fascism.

[309] Michael T. Flynn and Michael Ledeen, The Field of Fight: How We
Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (New York:
St. Martin’s Griffin, 2017).

[310] They did the man so wrong that the author would like to ignore this.
But no: Horton, Fool’s Errand, 178–90.
[311] Olivia Beavers, “House Intel report: McCabe said agents who
interviewed Flynn ‘didn’t think he was lying,’” The Hill, May 4, 2018,
https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/386323-house-intel-report-
comey-mccabe-testified-that-the-two-agents-who.

[312] “Case 1:17-cr-00232-EGS Document 129-8 Filed 10/24/19,” US

Department of Justice, October 24, 2019,
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.191592/gov.uscourt
s.dcd.191592.129.8_1.pdf.

[313] Rowan Scarborough, “FBI ambushed Michael Flynn, then

celebrated,” Washington Times, October 25, 2019,
https://washingtontimes.com/news/2019/oct/25/fbi-ambushed-michael-
flynn-then-celebrated.

[314] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[315] Karen Kwiatkowski, “Open Door Policy,” The American

Conservative, January 19, 2004, https://theamericanconservative.com/open-
door-policy; Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who was chief of staff to then-
Secretary of State Colin Powell, later said he believed Feith was an Israeli
agent of influence. Feith had been investigated by the FBI for passing
secrets to Israel numerous times and was forced to resign from Reagan’s
NSC over it in 1982. So that would make sense. Interview with author, Col.
Lawerence Wilkerson, Scott Horton Show radio archive, July 2, 2010,
https://scotthorton.org/interviews/antiwar-radio-lawrence-wilkerson-3;
Stephen Green, “Serving Two Flags: Neocons, Israel and the Bush
Administration,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2004,
https://wrmea.org/2004-may/serving-two-flags-neocons-israel-and-the-
bush-administration.html.

[316] “Michael Tracey interviews George Papadopoulos,” Michael Tracey

YouTube channel, April 16, 2019, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=ZjGLCCP_lPg.

[317] Josh Gerstein, et al., “Flynn pleads guilty to lying to the FBI,”
Politico, December 1, 2017, https://politico.com/story/2017/12/01/muellers-
office-announces-flynn-will-plead-guilty-274349.

[318] Andrew C. McCarthy, “Something seems rotten in Flynn’s case—and

maybe others, too,” The Hill, April 30, 2020,
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/495366-something-seems-rotten-in-
flynns-case-and-maybe-others-too.

[319] Margot Cleveland, “Robert Mueller’s Case Against Michael Flynn Is

About To Implode,” The Federalist, April 27, 2020,
https://thefederalist.com/2020/04/27/robert-muellers-case-against-michael-
flynn-is-about-to-implode.

[320] Chuck Ross, “Here’s What Prompted Michael Flynn To Register As

An Agent Of Turkey,” Daily Caller, March 31, 2017,
https://dailycaller.com/2017/03/31/heres-what-prompted-michael-flynn-to-
register-as-an-agent-of-turkey.

[321] Deanna Paul, “A judge implied that Flynn was a ‘traitor’ who
committed ‘treason.’ What does that actually mean?” Washington Post,
December 20, 2018, https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/20/judge-
implied-flynn-was-traitor-who-committed-treason-what-does-that-actually-
mean.

[322] Jeff Gerth, “The press versus the president, part two,” Columbia
Journalism Review, January 30, 2023,
https://cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-2.php;
Frida Ghitis, “The walls are closing in on Trump,” CNN, December 19,
2018, https://cnn.com/2018/12/19/opinions/walls-closing-in-on-trump-
opinion-ghitis/index.html; Alex Shephard, “With Michael Flynn’s guilty
plea, the walls are closing in on Donald Trump,” The New Republic,
December 1, 2017, https://newrepublic.com/article/146071/michael-flynns-
guilty-plea-walls-closing-donald-trump.

[323] Spencer S. Hsu, et al., “Justice Dept. moves to drop case against
Michael Flynn,” Washington Post, May 7, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/local/legal-issues/justice-dept-moves-to-void-
michael-flynns-conviction-in-muellers-russia-probe/2020/05/07/9bd7885e-
679d-11ea-b313-df458622c2cc_story.html.

[324] Eric Tucker, “Court appears reluctant to order dismissal of Flynn

case,” AP, June 12, 2020,
https://apnews.com/article/e929d3e3235f988c574265b14722ac92.

[325] Eric Tucker, “Trump pardons Flynn despite guilty plea in Russia
probe,” AP, November 26, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-
pardon-michael-flynn-russia-aeef585b08ba6f2c763c8c37bfd678ed.

[326] Scott Wiper, Flynn: Deliver the Truth. Whatever the Cost, Aquidneck
Island Productions, 2024, https://flynnmovie.com.

[327] Luke Harding, et al., “Michael Flynn: new evidence spy chiefs had
concerns about Russian ties,” Guardian, March 31, 2017,
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/31/michael-flynn-new-evidence-
spy-chiefs-had-concerns-about-russian-ties.

[328] Gordon Corera, “A Russian honeytrap for Gen Flynn? Not me. . .,”
BBC, May 12, 2017, https://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-39863781.

[329] Svetlana Lokhova, The Spy Who Changed History: The Untold Story
of How the Soviet Union Stole America’s Top Secrets (New York: Pegasus
Books, 2019).

[330] Tweet by Dr. Dena Grayson, April 16, 2017,

https://x.com/DrDenaGrayson/status/853627928235487233; Tweet by
Malcolm Nance, April 1, 2017,
https://x.com/MalcolmNance/status/848108731896352768.

[331] Christopher Andrews, “Impulsive General Misha shoots himself in

the foot,” Sunday Times, February 19, 2017,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/impulsive-general-misha-shoots-himself-in-
the-foot-l7gfpbghr.

[332] Carol E. Lee, “Mike Flynn Didn’t Report 2014 Interaction With
Russian-British National,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2017,
https://wsj.com/articles/mike-flynn-didnt-report-2014-interaction-with-
russian-british-national-1489809842.

[333] Luke Harding, et al., “Michael Flynn: new evidence spy chiefs had
concerns about Russian ties,” Guardian, March 31, 2017,
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/31/michael-flynn-new-evidence-
spy-chiefs-had-concerns-about-russian-ties.

[334] “Interview of David J. Kramer,” US House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, December 19, 2017,
https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedfiles/david_kramer_testimony_dec_
19_2017.pdf.

[335] Svetlana Lokhova, Spygate Exposed: The Conspiracy to Topple

President Trump (Independently published, 2020); Gordon Corera, “A
Russian honeytrap for Gen Flynn? Not me. . .,” BBC, May 12, 2017,
https://bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-39863781.

[336] Staff, “Woman enjoined from suing scholar again,” Virginia Lawyers
Weekly, December 15, 2022,
https://valawyersweekly.com/2022/12/15/woman-enjoined-from-suing-
scholar-again.
[337] Agent Stephen M. Somma, “Meeting with CHS to Discuss Crossfire
Hurricane,” FBI, August 15, 2016,
https://justthenews.com/sites/default/files/2021-
02/Halper%20Source%20Documents_final.pdf.

[338] Tony Allen-Mills, “Svetlana Lokhova: I’m a mum under siege, not
Mata Hari,” Sunday Times, May 27, 2018,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/svetlana-lokhova-im-a-mum-under-siege-not-
mata-hari-bkggndttq; Aaron Hanscom, “Svetlana Lokhova: I Was Smeared
as Flynn’s Honeypot,” RealClearPolitics, July 6, 2020,
https://realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/07/06/svetlana_lokhova_i_was_sm
eared_as_flynns_honeypot.html.

[339] Svetlana Lokhova v. Stefan A. Halper, Dow Jones and Company

[Wall Street Journal], The New York Times Company, WP Company LLC
[Washington Post] and NBC-Universal Media LLC [MSNBC] defendants,
US District Court For the Eastern District of Virginia, May 23, 2019,
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.vaed.442627/gov.uscou
rts.vaed.442627.1.0_5.pdf; Staff, “Woman enjoined from suing scholar
again,” Virginia Lawyers Weekly, December 15, 2022,
https://valawyersweekly.com/2022/12/15/woman-enjoined-from-suing-
scholar-again.

[340] Josh Gerstein, “Appeals court rejects academic’s libel suit over claims
of affair with Flynn,” Politico, April, 15, 2021,
https://politico.com/news/2021/04/15/appeals-court-rejects-libel-suit-affair-
flynn-481868.
[341] “Special Counsel Mueller Investigation Records Part 14,”
https://vault.fbi.gov/special-counsel-mueller-investigation-records/special-
counsel-mueller-investigation-records-part-14/view.

[342] Luke Harding, et al., “British spies were first to spot Trump team’s
links with Russia,” Guardian, April 13, 2017, https://theguardian.com/uk-
news/2017/apr/13/british-spies-first-to-spot-trump-team-links-russia.

[343] Matt Taibbi, “It’s official: Russiagate is this generation’s WMD,”

Racket News, March 23, 2019, https://racket.news/p/russiagate-is-wmd-
times-a-million.

[344] Jim Sciutto, et al., “British intelligence passed Trump associates’

communications with Russians on to US counterparts,” CNN, April 14,
2017, https://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/13/politics/trump-russia-british-
intelligence/index.html.

[345] “Interview of John Brennan,” PBS Frontline, July 27, 2017,

https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/john-brennan.

[346] Michael Shellenberger, et al., “CIA Had Foreign Allies Spy On

Trump Team, Triggering Russia Collusion Hoax, Sources Say,” Public,
February 13, 2024, https://public.substack.com/p/cia-had-foreign-allies-spy-
on-trump.

[347] Matt Taibbi, “Explaining Russiagate Exposé,” Racket News,

February 14, 2024, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRszPj1WKA.
[348] “US Code, Title 50, Chapter 36, Section 1809: Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, ‘Criminal Sanctions,’” US House of Representatives,
1978, https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?
path=/prelim@title50/chapter36&edition=prelim.

[349] Elena Chernenko and Nikolai Sergeev, “Living without a trace,”

Kommersant, September 10, 2019, https://kommersant.ru/doc/4087921.

[350] Greg Miller, et al., “Obama’s secret struggle to punish Russia for
Putin’s election assault,” Washington Post, June 23, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/world/national-security/obama-
putin-election-hacking.

[351] Julian Barnes, et al., “CIA Informant Extracted From Russia Had Sent
Secrets to US for Decades,” New York Times, September 9, 2019,
https://nytimes.com/2019/09/09/us/politics/cia-informant-russia.html.

[352] Jim Sciutto, “US extracted top spy from inside Russia in 2017,”
CNN, September 9, 2019,
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/09/09/politics/russia-us-spy-
extracted/index.html; See below.

[353] Ken Dilanian and Tatyana Chistikova, “Possible Russian spy for CIA
now living in Washington area,” NBC News, September 9, 2019,
https://nbcnews.com/news/us-news/possible-ex-russian-spy-cia-living-
washington-area-n1051741.

[354] See below.

[355] Brittany Bernstein, “Durham: Tech Exec Working with Clinton-Tied
Lawyer Spied on Trump Tower, White House,” Yahoo News, February 13,
2022, https://yahoo.com/video/durham-tech-exec-working-clinton-
145141701.html; See below.

[356] Matt Taibbi and UndeadFOIA, “Forget Collusion. Was ‘Interference’

Also Fake News?” Racket News, September 26, 2023,
https://racket.news/p/forget-collusion-was-interference; Anon, “FOIA Files:
Did Special Counsel Robert Mueller Rely on Clinton Campaign Operatives
to Point to Russia?” Racket News, August 13, 2024,
https://racket.news/p/foia-files-did-special-counsel-robert.

[357] Jill Colvin, “DNC, Clinton campaign agree to Steele dossier funding
fine,” AP, March 31, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-2022-
midterm-elections-business-elections-presidential-elections-
5468774d18e8c46f81b55e9260b13e93.

[358] “Nunes Memo, Letter from Rep. Devin Nunes to Donald F. McGahn
II,” February 2, 2018,
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4365340/Read-the-GOP-
memo.pdf.

[359] Brooke Singman, “DNI declassifies Brennan notes, CIA memo on

Hillary Clinton ‘stirring up’ scandal between Trump, Russia,” Fox News,
October 6, 2020, https://foxnews.com/politics/dni-brennan-notes-cia-
memo-clinton; John O. Brennan, Handwritten Briefing Notes for President
Barack Obama, July 28, 2016,
https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2020/10/ENCLOS
URE_1__Brennan_Notes__U.pdf.

[360] Charlie Savage, et al., “How Barr’s Quest to Find Flaws in the Russia
Inquiry Unraveled,” New York Times, January 26, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/01/26/us/politics/durham-trump-russia-barr.html.

[361] Aaron Maté, “Unchastened by Russiagate, the NY Times doubles

down to dismiss Durham,” Aaron Maté Substack, February 15, 2023,
https://mate.substack.com/p/unchastened-by-russiagate-the-ny.

[362] Criminal Referral by CIA Assistant Director for Counterintelligence

to FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director of the FBI’s
Counterintelligence Division Peter Strzok, September 7, 2016,
https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2020/10/67e5fad5
-ENCLOSURE_2__DCIA_Memo_09-07-16__U.pdf.

[363] Brooke Singman, “DNI declassifies Brennan notes, CIA memo on

Hillary Clinton ‘stirring up’ scandal between Trump, Russia,” Fox News,
October 6, 2020, https://foxnews.com/politics/dni-brennan-notes-cia-
memo-clinton.

[364] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.
[365] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to
Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[366] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[367] Amber Phillips, “Clinton campaign manager: Russians leaked

Democrats’ emails to help Donald Trump,” Washington Post, July 24, 2016,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/07/24/clinton-
campaign-manager-russians-leaked-democrats-emails-to-help-donald-
trump.

[368] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[369] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.
[370] Isaac Stanley-Becker, “A spin doctor with ties to Russia allegedly fed
the Steele dossier before fighting to discredit it,” Washington Post,
November 6, 2021, https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/11/06/charles-
dolan-steele-dossier-igor-danchenko-indictment.

[371] Adam Goldman, “Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to

Steele Dossier,” New York Times, November 4, 2021,
https://nytimes.com/2021/11/04/us/politics/igor-danchenko-arrested-steele-
dossier.html.

[372] Paul Farhi, “The Washington Post corrects, removes parts of two
stories regarding the Steele dossier,” Washington Post, November 12, 2021,
https://washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/media-washington-post-steele-
dossier/2021/11/12/f7c9b770-43d5-11ec-a88e-2aa4632af69b_story.html.

[373] “United States of America v. Igor Y. Danchenko,” US District Court

for the Eastern District of Virginia, November 3, 2021,
https://justice.gov/sco/press-release/file/1446386/download; Rosalind S.
Helderman and Tom Hamburger, “Sergei Millian: High-level access to
Trump or unwitting bystander?” Washington Post, November 12, 2021,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/who-is-sergei-
millian/2017/03/29/379846a8-0f53-11e7-9d5a-a83e627dc120_story.html;
Alan Cullison and Aruna Viswanatha, “Three Friends Chatting: How the
Steele Dossier Was Created,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2022,
https://wsj.com/articles/the-surprising-backstory-of-how-the-steele-dossier-
was-created-11652103582; Paul Sperry, “Danchenko Indictment: How
Dossier Non-Source Sergei Millian Was Framed,” RealClearInvestigations,
November 10, 2021,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/11/10/danchenko_indictme
nt_how_dossier_non-source_sergei_millian_was_framed_803079.html.

[374] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,

“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” US Department of Justice Oversight and
Review Division, December 2019, https://justice.gov/storage/120919-
examination.pdf.

[375] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[376] “United States of America v. Igor Y. Danchenko,” US District Court

for the Eastern District of Virginia, November 3, 2021,
https://justice.gov/sco/press-release/file/1446386/download.

[377] Brooke Singman, “DNI declassifies Brennan notes, CIA memo on

Hillary Clinton ‘stirring up’ scandal between Trump, Russia,” Fox News,
October 6, 2020, https://foxnews.com/politics/dni-brennan-notes-cia-
memo-clinton.

[378] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,

“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” US Department of Justice Oversight and
Review Division, December 2019, https://justice.gov/storage/120919-
examination.pdf.

[379] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[380] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[381] John Solomon, “The biggest loser of the Durham indictments: James
Comey’s FBI,” Just the News, November 6, 2021,
https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/biggest-
loser-durham-indictments-james-comeys-fbi.

[382] Rowan Scarborough, “Democratic lawyer Michael Sussman [sic]

took debunked Russia Alfa Bank conspiracy to CIA,” Washington Times,
May 8, 2020, https://washingtontimes.com/news/2020/may/8/michael-
sussman-took-debunked-russia-alfa-bank-con.

[383] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.
[384] Jerry Dunleavy, “FBI agent at Sussmann trial says he rejected Alfa-
Bank claims within days,” Washington Examiner, May 17, 2022,
https://washingtonexaminer.com/news/76426/fbi-agent-at-sussmann-trial-
says-he-rejected-alfa-bank-claims-within-days.

[385] Marshall Cohen, “Hillary Clinton personally approved plan to share

Trump-Russia allegation with the press in 2016, campaign manager says,”
CNN, May 20, 2022, https://cnn.com/2022/05/20/politics/hillary-clinton-
robby-mook-fbi/index.html.

[386] Tweet by Hillary Clinton, August 16, 2016,

https://x.com/HillaryClinton/status/765554761231892480; Tweet by Hillary
Clinton, October 7, 2016,
https://x.com/HillaryClinton/status/784564986953728000; Tweet by Hillary
Clinton, October 31, 2016,
https://x.com/HillaryClinton/status/793250312119263233; Tweet by Hillary
Clinton, October 31, 2016,
https://x.com/HillaryClinton/status/793234169576947712; Tweet by Hillary
Clinton, October 31, 2016
https://x.com/HillaryClinton/status/793163559475838976.

[387] Franklin Foer, “Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?”

Slate, October 31, 2016,
http://slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/10/was_a_ser
ver_registered_to_the_trump_organization_communicating_with_russia.ht
ml.
[388] Dexter Filkins, “Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank
and the Trump Campaign?” The New Yorker, October 8, 2018,
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/15/was-there-a-connection-
between-a-russian-bank-and-the-trump-campaign.

[389] Indictment, “USA v. Michael Sussmann,” US Department of Justice,

September 16, 2021, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/indictment-of-
michael-sussmann/a144a1b67111e832/full.pdf; Special Counsel John
Durham, “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and
Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns,” US
Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[390] Eric Lichtblau and Steven Lee Myers, “Investigating Donald Trump,
FBI Sees No Clear Link to Russia,” New York Times, October 31, 2016,
https://nytimes.com/2016/11/01/us/politics/fbi-russia-election-donald-
trump.html.

[391] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[392] Jeff Gerth, “The press versus the president, part one,” Columbia
Journalism Review, January 30, 2023,
https://cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php.
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September 16, 2021, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/indictment-of-
michael-sussmann/a144a1b67111e832/full.pdf.

[394] Indictment, “USA v. Michael Sussmann,” US Department of Justice,

September 16, 2021, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/indictment-of-
michael-sussmann/a144a1b67111e832/full.pdf.

[395] Indictment, “USA v. Michael Sussmann,” US Department of Justice,

September 16, 2021, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/indictment-of-
michael-sussmann/a144a1b67111e832/full.pdf.

[396] Indictment, “USA v. Michael Sussmann,” US Department of Justice,

September 16, 2021, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/indictment-of-
michael-sussmann/a144a1b67111e832/full.pdf.

[397] Indictment, “USA v. Michael Sussmann,” US Department of Justice,

September 16, 2021, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/indictment-of-
michael-sussmann/a144a1b67111e832/full.pdf; Margot Cleveland,
“Researcher Tells Durham He Saw Holes In The Alfa Bank Hoax Before
Democrats Shopped It To The FBI,” The Federalist, March 14, 2022,
https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/14/exclusive-researcher-tells-durham-he-
saw-holes-in-the-alfa-bank-hoax-before-democrats-shopped-it-to-the-fbi.

[398] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[399] Jeff Gerth, “The press versus the president, part one,” Columbia
Journalism Review, January 30, 2023,
https://cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php.

[400] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[401] “Memorandum in Opposition Re Sussmann Motion in Limine by

USA,” US District Court for the District of Columbia, May 15, 2022,
https://scribd.com/document/570091923/70-Memorandum-in-Opposition-
Re-Sussmann-Motion-in-Limine-by-USA; Technofog, “CIA Bombshell:
The Sussmann data was ‘user created,’” Techno Fog, April 16, 2022,
https://technofog.substack.com/p/cia-bombshell-the-sussmann-data-was.

[402] Indictment, “USA v. Michael Sussmann,” US Department of Justice,

September 16, 2021, https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/indictment-of-
michael-sussmann/a144a1b67111e832/full.pdf; Special Counsel John
Durham, “Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and
Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns,” US
Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.
[403] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to
Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[404] Adam Goldman and Michael S. Schmidt, “Rod Rosenstein Suggested

Secretly Recording Trump and Discussed 25th Amendment,” New York
Times, September 21, 2018, https://nytimes.com/2018/09/21/us/politics/rod-
rosenstein-wear-wire-25th-amendment.html; Dan Mangan, “Justice
Department officials discussed if Trump could be removed as president via
25th Amendment after firing FBI Director James Comey: Andrew
McCabe,” CNBC, February 14, 2019, https://cnbc.com/2019/02/14/andrew-
mccabe-doj-officials-discussed-using-25th-amendment-to-remove-
trump.html.

[405] Casey Quackenbush, “Read the Full Transcript of Former FBI Deputy
Director Andrew McCabe’s 60 Minutes Interview,” Time, February 18,
2019, https://time.com/5531604/andrew-mccabe-60-minutes-interview-
transcript.

[406] Adam Goldman, et al., “FBI Opened Inquiry Into Whether Trump
Was Secretly Working on Behalf of Russia,” New York Times, January 11,
2019, https://nytimes.com/2019/01/11/us/politics/fbi-trump-russia-
inquiry.html.

[407] Pamela Brown and Jeremy Herb, “The frantic scramble before
Mueller got the job,” CNN, December 7, 2018,
https://cnn.com/2018/12/06/politics/rosenstein-comey-firing-obstruction-
probe/index.html.

[408] Bob Woodward, Fear, 171–72.

[409] Pamela Brown and Jeremy Herb, “The frantic scramble before
Mueller got the job,” CNN, December 7, 2018,
https://cnn.com/2018/12/06/politics/rosenstein-comey-firing-obstruction-
probe/index.html.

[410] Jeff Gerth, “The press versus the president, part one,” Columbia
Journalism Review, January 30, 2023,
https://cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php.

[411] Adam Entous, et al., “Sessions met with Russian envoy twice last
year, encounters he later did not disclose,” Washington Post, March 1, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/sessions-spoke-twice-
with-russian-ambassador-during-trumps-presidential-campaign-justice-
officials-say/2017/03/01/77205eda-feac-11e6-99b4-
9e613afeb09f_story.html; Julia Ioffe, “Why Did Jeff Sessions Really Meet
With Sergey Kislyak?” The Atlantic, June 13, 2017,
https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/why-did-jeff-sessions-
really-meet-sergey-kislyak/530091.

[412] Mark Landler and Eric Lichtblau, “Jeff Sessions Recuses Himself
From Russia Inquiry,” New York Times, March 2, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/03/02/us/politics/jeff-sessions-russia-trump-
investigation-democrats.html.

[413] Ken Armstrong, et al., “Staffs of The New York Times and The
Washington Post,” 2018 Pulitzer Prize Winners,
https://pulitzer.org/winners/staffs-new-york-times-and-washington-post.

[414] Julia Ioffe, “Why Did Jeff Sessions Really Meet With Sergey
Kislyak?” The Atlantic, June 13, 2017,
https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/why-did-jeff-sessions-
really-meet-sergey-kislyak/530091.

[415] Manu Raju and Evan Perez, “First on CNN: AG Sessions did not
disclose Russia meetings in security clearance form, DOJ says,” CNN, May
25, 2017, https://cnn.com/2017/05/24/politics/jeff-sessions-russian-
officials-meetings/index.html.

[416] Attorney General Jeff Sessions, “Appointment of Special Counsel to

Investigate Russian Interference with the 2016 Presidential Election and
Related Matters,” US Department of Justice, May 17, 2017,
https://justice.gov/archives/opa/press-release/file/967231/dl.

[417] Evan Perez, “FBI email: Sessions wasn’t required to disclose foreign
contacts for security clearance,” CNN, December 11, 2017,
https://cnn.com/2017/12/10/politics/jeff-sessions-fbi-russian-
contacts/index.html; Rebecca R. Ruiz, “Sessions Was Advised Not to
Disclose Russia Meetings on Security Forms,” New York Times, May 24,
2017, https://nytimes.com/2017/05/24/us/politics/jeff-sessions-russia.html.

[418] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[419] “Sen. Kamala Harris Goes After Atty. Gen Jeff Sessions,” Los
Angeles Times, June 13, 2017, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=mK_HmEFxCpI.

[420] Scott Detrow, “Sen. Harris’ Russia Probe Questioning Gets Her
Noticed Nationally,” NPR News, June 26, 2017,
https://npr.org/2017/06/26/534365551/sen-harris-russia-probe-questioning-
gets-her-noticed-nationally.

[421] See below.

[422] USA v. Viktor Borisovich Netyksho, et al., US District Court for the
District of Columbia, July 13, 2018,
https://justice.gov/file/1080281/download; Matt Apuzzo and Sharon
LaFraniere, “13 Russians Indicted as Mueller Reveals Effort to Aid Trump
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https://nytimes.com/2018/02/16/us/politics/russians-indicted-mueller-
election-interference.html.
[423] Katie Benner and Sharon LaFraniere, “Justice Dept. Moves to Drop
Charges Against Russian Firms Filed by Mueller,” New York Times, March
16, 2020, https://nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/politics/concord-case-russian-
interference.html.

[424] Colin Kalmbacher, “The Russians Try to Call Mueller’s Bluff, File
Request to View Secret Grand Jury Info,” Law & Crime, May 14, 2018,
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/the-russians-call-out-mueller-file-
request-to-view-secret-grand-jury-instruction.

[425] Katie Benner and Sharon LaFraniere, “Justice Dept. Moves to Drop
Charges Against Russian Firms Filed by Mueller,” New York Times, March
16, 2020, https://nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/politics/concord-case-russian-
interference.html.

[426] Matt Taibbi, “Twitter Files: Why Twitter Let the Intelligence
Community In,” Racket News, January 3, 2023,
https://racket.news/p/twitter-files-why-twitter-let-the.

[427] Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times, June 2, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html.

[428] Scott Shane, “The Fake Americans Russia Created to Influence the
Election,” New York Times, September 7, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitter-
election.html; Scott Shane and Mark Mazzetti, “The Plot to Subvert an
Election,” New York Times, November 20, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/20/us/politics/russia-interference-
election-trump-clinton.html.

[429] Ken Dilanian and Ben Popken, “Russia favored Trump, targeted
African-Americans with election meddling, reports say,” NBC News,
December 17, 2018, https://nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/russia-
favored-trump-targeted-african-americans-election-meddling-reports-say-
n948731.

[430] Thomas Grove, “Kremlin Caterer Accused in US Election Meddling

Has History of Dishing Dark Arts,” Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2018,
https://wsj.com/articles/kremlin-caterer-accused-in-u-s-election-meddling-
has-history-of-dishing-dark-arts-1518823765.

[431] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[432] Staff, “Russia’s Prigozhin admits interfering in US elections,”

Reuters, November 7, 2022, https://reuters.com/world/us/russias-prigozhin-
admits-interfering-us-elections-2022-11-07.

[433] Gareth Porter, “33 Trillion Reasons Why The New York Times Gets It
Wrong on Russia-gate,” Consortium News, November 5, 2018,
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/11/02/33-trillion-more-reasons-why-the-
new-york-times-gets-it-wrong-on-russia-gate.
[434] Paul Sperry, “Team Biden Flogs Russian ‘Interference’ in US Vote,
No Matter What Its Intel Agencies Say,” RealClearInvestigations, May 7,
2021,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/05/07/team_biden_flogs_ru
ssian_interference_in_us_vote_no_matter_what_its_intel_agencies_say_77
6083.html.

[435] Oliver Roeder, “Why We’re Sharing 3 Million Russian Troll Tweets,”
538, July 31, 2018, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-were-sharing-
3-million-russian-troll-tweets.

[436] Gareth Porter, “The Shaky Case That Russia Manipulated Social
Media to Tip the 2016 Election,” Consortium News, October 10, 2018,
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/10/10/the-shaky-case-that-russia-
manipulated-social-media-to-tip-the-2016-election.

[437] Gregory Eady, et al., “Exposure to the Russian Internet Research

Agency foreign influence campaign on Twitter in the 2016 US election and
its relationship to attitudes and voting behavior,” Nature Communications,
Vol. 14, No. 62 (January 9, 2023), https://nature.com/articles/s41467-022-
35576-9.

[438] Staff, “Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for
President, Releases Statement,” WTOE 5 News (satire), July 8, 2016,
https://web.archive.org/web/20161115024211/http://wtoe5news.com/us-
election/pope-francis-shocks-world-endorses-donald-trump-for-president-
releases-
statement/https://web.archive.org/web/20161115024211/http://wtoe5news.c
om/us-election/pope-francis-shocks-world-endorses-donald-trump-for-
president-releases-statement.

[439] Staff, “ISIS Leader Calls for American Muslim Voters to Support
Hillary Clinton,” World News Daily Report (hoax site), October 11, 2016,
https://web.archive.org/web/20161014101327/http://worldnewsdailyreport.
com/isis-leader-calls-for-american-muslim-voters-to-support-hillary-
clinton.

[440] Alexander Smith and Vladimir Banic, “Fake News: How a Partying
Macedonian Teen Earns Thousands Publishing Lies,” NBC News,
December 8, 2016, https://nbcnews.com/news/world/fake-news-how-
partying-macedonian-teen-earns-thousands-publishing-lies-n692451; Craig
Silverman and Lawrence Alexander, “How Teens In The Balkans Are
Duping Trump Supporters With Fake News,” BuzzFeed News, November
3, 2016, https://buzzfeednews.com/article/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-
became-a-global-hub-for-pro-trump-misinfo; Dan Tynan, “How Facebook
powers money machines for obscure political ‘news’ sites,” Guardian,
August 24, 2016,
https://theguardian.com/technology/2016/aug/24/facebook-clickbait-
political-news-sites-us-election-trump; Mike Wendling, “The (almost)
complete history of ‘fake news,’” BBC, January 21, 2018,
https://bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42724320.

[441] Philip Bump, “That sophisticated, specific Russian 2016 voter

targeting effort doesn’t seem to exist,” Washington Post, January 9, 2019,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/09/that-sophisticated-specific-
russian-voter-targeting-effort-doesnt-seem-exist.

[442] Kenzi Abou-Sabe, et al., “What Did Ex-Trump Aide Paul Manafort
Really Do in Ukraine?” NBC News, June 27, 2017,
https://nbcnews.com/news/us-news/what-did-ex-trump-aide-paul-manafort-
really-do-ukraine-n775431.

[443] “Clinton Foundation,” Olena Pinchuk Foundation,

https://olenapinchuk.foundation/eng/news/clinton.html; Peter Nicholas, “As
Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton Hosted at Dinner a Ukrainian Donor to
Family Foundation,” Wall Street Journal, August 23, 2016,
https://wsj.com/articles/as-secretary-of-state-hillary-clinton-hosted-at-
dinner-a-ukrainian-donor-to-family-foundation-1471995857; Amy Chozick
and Steve Eder, “Foundation Ties Bedevil Hillary Clinton’s Presidential
Campaign,” New York Times, August 20, 2016,
https://nytimes.com/2016/08/21/us/politics/hillary-clinton-presidential-
campaign-charity.html.

[444] Sharon LaFraniere, “Trial of High-Powered Lawyer Gregory Craig

Exposes Seamy Side of Washington’s Elite,” New York Times, August 26,
2019, https://nytimes.com/2019/08/26/us/politics/gregory-craig-trial.html.

[445] John Solomon, “Key figure that Mueller report linked to Russia was a
State Department intel source,” The Hill, June 6, 2019,
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/447394-key-figure-that-mueller-
report-linked-to-russia-was-a-state-department.
[446] Sharon LaFraniere, et al., “Manafort Accused of Sharing Trump
Polling Data With Russian Associate,” New York Times, January 8, 2019,
https://nytimes.com/2019/01/08/us/politics/manafort-trump-campaign-data-
kilimnik.html.

[447] “Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016

Election,” Vol. 5, US Senate, August 18, 2020,
https://intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5
.pdf; Max Boot, “Even if the Steele dossier is discredited, there’s plenty of
evidence of Trump’s collusion with Russia,” Washington Post, November
18, 2021, https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/11/18/even-if-steele-
dossier-is-discredited-theres-plenty-evidence-trumps-collusion-with-russia.

[448] Sue Halpern, “Why Would Paul Manafort Share Polling Data with
Russia?” The New Yorker, January 10, 2019,
https://newyorker.com/news/news-desk/why-would-paul-manafort-share-
polling-data-with-russia.

[449] Margot Cleveland, “11 Key Things Inside The House Interview With
Spygate Figure Bruce Ohr,” The Federalist, March 11, 2019,
https://thefederalist.com/2019/03/11/11-key-things-inside-house-interview-
spygate-figure-bruce-ohr.

[450] Byron York, “Emails show 2016 links among Steele, Ohr, Simpson –
with Russian oligarch in background,” Washington Examiner, August 8,
2018, https://washingtonexaminer.com/news/emails-show-2016-links-
among-steele-ohr-simpson-with-russian-oligarch-in-background; Kenneth
P. Vogel and Matthew Rosenberg, “Agents Tried to Flip Russian Oligarchs.
The Fallout Spread to Trump,” New York Times, September 1, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/09/01/us/politics/deripaska-ohr-steele-fbi.html.

[451] Kenneth P. Vogel and Matthew Rosenberg, “Agents Tried to Flip

Russian Oligarchs. The Fallout Spread to Trump,” New York Times,
September 1, 2018, https://nytimes.com/2018/09/01/us/politics/deripaska-
ohr-steele-fbi.html.

[452] Tom Hamburger, et al., “Manafort offered to give Russian billionaire

‘private briefings’ on 2016 campaign,” Washington Post, September 20,
2017, https://washingtonpost.com/politics/manafort-offered-to-give-russian-
billionaire-private-briefings-on-2016-campaign/2017/09/20/399bba1a-
9d48-11e7-8ea1-ed975285475e_story.html.

[453] Spriha Srivastava and Natasha Turak, “Oleg Deripaska calls

allegations over ties with Paul Manafort ‘very absurd,’” CNBC, March 17,
2019, https://cnbc.com/2019/03/18/oleg-deripaska-calls-allegations-over-
ties-with-manafort-very-absurd.html.

[454] Simon Shuster, “Russian Ex-Spy Pressured Manafort Over Debts to

an Oligarch,” Time, December 29, 2018, https://time.com/5490169/paul-
manafort-victor-boyarkin-debts.

[455] Philip Bump, “There’s still little evidence that Russia’s 2016 social
media efforts did much of anything,” Washington Post, December 28, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/12/28/theres-still-little-
evidence-that-russias-2016-social-media-efforts-did-much-of-anything;
Philip Bump, “That sophisticated, specific Russian 2016 voter targeting
effort doesn’t seem to exist,” Washington Post, January 9, 2019,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/01/09/that-sophisticated-specific-
russian-voter-targeting-effort-doesnt-seem-exist.

[456] Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern, “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage

Trump backfire,” Politico, January 11, 2017,
https://politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-
233446.

[457] Andrew Kramer, et al., “Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for
Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief,” New York Times, August 14, 2016,
https://nytimes.com/2016/08/15/us/politics/what-is-the-black-ledger.html.

[458] Roman Olearchyk, “Ukraine’s leaders campaign against ‘pro-Putin’

Trump,” Financial Times, August 28, 2016,
https://ft.com/content/c98078d0-6ae7-11e6-a0b1-d87a9fea034f.

[459] Konstantin Kilimnik, “Email to State Department,” August 22, 2016,

https://scribd.com/document/413787915/Kilim-Nik-Aug-222016-Email-
Schultz.

[460] John Solomon, “FBI, warned early and often that Manafort file might
be fake, used it anyway,” The Hill, July 19, 2019,
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/449206-fbi-warned-early-and-
often-that-manafort-file-might-be-fake-used-it-anyway.
[461] Kenneth P. Vogel and David Stern, “Ukrainian efforts to sabotage
Trump backfire,” Politico, January 11, 2017,
https://politico.com/story/2017/01/ukraine-sabotage-trump-backfire-
233446.

[462] Lisa Bryant, “New Ukrainian President Meets EU Leaders in

Brussels,” Voice of America, February 28, 2010,
https://voanews.com/a/new-ukraine-president-meets-with-eu-leaders-in-
brussels-85808367/169812.html.

[463] Patrick Bet-David, “Political Consultant Paul Manafort,” PBD

Podcast, April 28, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=GtiUVm3Z4eo.

[464] Reporter Biography, Kenneth P. Vogel, New York Times, 2024,

https://nytimes.com/by/kenneth-p-vogel.

[465] Reporter Biography, David L. Stern, Washington Post, 2024,

https://washingtonpost.com/people/david-l-stern.

[466] See above.

[467] David Smith, “Fiona Hill: stop ‘fictional narrative’ of Ukraine

meddling in US election,” Guardian, November 21, 2019,
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2019/nov/21/trump-impeachment-inquiry-
fiona-hill-david-holmes-testimony.

[468] Jack Gillum, et al., “AP Exclusive: Manafort firm received Ukraine
ledger payout,” AP, April 12, 2017,
https://apnews.com/article/20cfc75c82eb4a67b94e624e97207e23.

[469] Miles Parks and Ryan Lucas, “Paul Manafort, Former Trump
Campaign Chairman, Sentenced To Just Under 4 Years,” NPR News, March
7, 2019, https://npr.org/2019/03/07/701045248/paul-manafort-former-
trump-campaign-chairman-sentenced-to-just-under-4-years.

[470] John Solomon, “FBI, warned early and often that Manafort file might
be fake, used it anyway,” The Hill, July 19, 2019,
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/449206-fbi-warned-early-and-
often-that-manafort-file-might-be-fake-used-it-anyway.

[471] Christopher Steele Dossier,

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984/Trump-Intelligence-
Allegations.pdf.

[472] Greg Gordon and Peter Stone, “Sources: Mueller has evidence Cohen
was in Prague in 2016, confirming part of dossier,” McClatchy, April 18,
2019, https://mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-
house/article208870264.html; Peter Stone and Greg Gordon, “Cell signal
puts Cohen outside Prague around time of purported Russian meeting,”
McClatchy, April 18, 2019,
https://mcclatchydc.com/news/investigations/article219016820.html.

[473] Kevin G. Hall, “Mueller report states Cohen was not in Prague. It is
silent on whether a Cohen device pinged there,” McClatchy, April 18, 2019,
https://mcclatchydc.com/news/investigations/article229424084.html.
[474] Alan Cullison and Aruna Viswanatha, “Three Friends Chatting: How
the Steele Dossier Was Created,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2022,
https://wsj.com/articles/the-surprising-backstory-of-how-the-steele-dossier-
was-created-11652103582.

[475] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[476] Jonathan Alter and Maxwell Tani, “Is the Michael Cohen ‘Prague’
Story True?” Daily Beast, December 30, 2018, https://thedailybeast.com/is-
the-michael-cohen-prague-story-true.

[477] Jeff Gerth, “The press versus the president, part one,” Columbia
Journalism Review, January 30, 2023,
https://cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php.

[478] Tom Hamburger, et al., “Inside Trump’s financial ties to Russia and
his unusual flattery of Vladimir Putin,” Washington Post, June 17, 2016,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/inside-trumps-financial-ties-to-russia-
and-his-unusual-flattery-of-vladimir-putin/2016/06/17/dbdcaac8-31a6-
11e6-8ff7-7b6c1998b7a0_story.html.

[479] Marshall Cohen and Tal Yellin, “How Trump Tower Moscow fits into
Russian interference,” CNN, December 1, 2018,
https://cnn.com/interactive/2018/politics/trump-tower-moscow-
timeline/index.html.

[480] “It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia – Season 4 Ep. 10: Pepe Silvia
Highlight,” FXX, August 7, 2020, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=1NBfZcNU4O0.

[481] Bonnie Berkowitz, et al., “Here’s what we learned about Team

Trump’s ties to Russian interests,” Washington Post, March 31, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/trump-russia.

[482] Katelyn Polantz, “Felix Sater was informant for feds on mob and bin
Laden, docs reveal,” CNN, August 23, 2019,
https://cnn.com/2019/08/23/politics/felix-sater/index.html.

[483] Erica Orden, et al., “Michael Cohen pleads guilty, says he lied about
Trump’s knowledge of Moscow project,” CNN, November 29, 2018,
https://cnn.com/2018/11/29/politics/michael-cohen-guilty-plea-misleading-
congress/index.html.

[484] Leonid Bershidsky, “Trump’s Low-Level Russian Connection,”

Bloomberg News, July 11, 2017,
https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-07-11/trump-s-low-level-
russian-connection; See Chapter Four.

[485] Ken Dilanian, et al., “Former Soviet Counterintelligence Officer at

Meeting With Donald Trump Jr. and Russian Lawyer,” NBC News, July 14,
2017, https://nbcnews.com/news/us-news/russian-lawyer-brought-ex-
soviet-counter-intelligence-officer-trump-team-n782851.

[486] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[487] Dartunorro Clark, “Steve Bannon calls Trump Tower Russian meeting
‘treasonous’ in new book,” NBC News, January 3, 2018,
https://nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/steve-bannon-calls-trump-tower-
russian-meeting-treasonous-new-book-n834286.

[488] Mark Hosenball, “Trump, Clinton camps both offered slice of dossier
firm’s work: sources,” Reuters, November 9, 2017,
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-russia-fusion/trump-clinton-camps-
both-offered-slice-of-dossier-firms-work-sources-idUSKBN1D937W;
Catherine Herridge, et al., “Fusion GPS official met with Russian operative
before and after Trump Jr. sit-down,” Fox News, November 9, 2017,
https://foxnews.com/politics/fusion-gps-official-met-with-russian-
operative-before-and-after-trump-jr-sit-down.

[489] Carl Bernstein, et al., “Cohen claims Trump knew in advance of 2016
Trump Tower meeting,” CNN, July 27, 2018,
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/26/politics/michael-cohen-donald-trump-
june-2016-meeting-knowledge/index.html.
[490] Staff, “Lanny Davis Admits He Lied About Being Source for CNN
Trump Tower Story,” Daily Beast, August 28, 2018,
https://thedailybeast.com/lanny-davis-admits-he-lied-about-being-source-
for-cnn-trump-tower-story.

[491] “Sen. Brakey Argues for Restraint with Russia,” Clip Of Republican
National Committee Platform Hearings, Part 1, C-SPAN, July 12, 2016,
https://c-span.org/video/?c4610664/user-clip-sen-brakey-argues-restraint-
russia.

[492] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[493] Byron York, “What really happened with the GOP platform and
Russia,” Washington Examiner, November 26, 2017,
https://washingtonexaminer.com/byron-york-what-really-happened-with-
the-gop-platform-and-russia.

[494] The former Israeli military prison guard (Prisoners, 2008, 28–29)
most famous for a preposterous tall tale he told in 2002 in The New Yorker
about Saddam Hussein’s supposed alliance with al Qaeda (“The Great
Terror,” The New Yorker, March 25, 2002,
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2002/03/25/the-great-terror), and for Slate
about Iraq’s pretended germ weapons program (“Aflatoxin,” Slate, October
3, 2002, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/10/aflatoxin.html), to help
get the center-left, neo-liberal set on board for attacking Iraq and ruthlessly
smearing journalists and academics who dared cross Israel as anti-Semites:
David Klion, “Jeffrey Goldberg Doesn’t Speak for the Jews,” Jewish
Currents, August 2, 2018, https://jewishcurrents.org/jeffrey-goldberg-
doesnt-speak-for-the-jews, and who was promoted to editor of The Atlantic
for his deadly sins.

[495] Jeffrey Goldberg, “It’s Official: Hillary Clinton Is Running Against

Vladimir Putin,” The Atlantic, July 21, 2016,
https://theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/07/clinton-trump-putin-
nato/492332.

[496] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[497] Anonymous, “The YYYcampaignYYY,” PropOrNot, November 25,

2016, https://propornot.com/p/the-yyycampaignyyy.html.

[498] Craig Timberg, “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’
during election, experts say,” Washington Post, November 24, 2016,
https://washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-
helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-
say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html.
[499] Tweet by Sheera Frenkel, November 25, 2016,
https://x.com/sheeraf/status/802230504086851584.

[500] Staff, “Annual Report, 2022 Honor roll of contributors,” Atlantic

Council, May 10, 2023, https://atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-
reports/report/2022-honor-roll-of-contributors.

[501] Yves Smith, “PropOrNot – Setting Up the Atlantic Council for

Lawsuits,” Naked Capitalism, May 25, 2018,
https://nakedcapitalism.com/2018/05/propornot-setting-atlantic-council-
lawsuits.html.

[502] Michael Weiss, “Break the Stalemate! A Blueprint For a Military

Intervention in Syria,” The New Republic, February 8, 2012,
https://newrepublic.com/article/100599/syrian-intervention-humanitarian-
alawite-assad-crisis; Dan Wright, “Neoconservative Michael Weiss Says He
Knows More Than All The Generals About Syria,” Shadowproof, October
27, 2016, https://shadowproof.com/2016/10/27/neoconservative-michael-
weiss-says-knows-generals-syria.

[503] Daisuke Wakabayashi, “As Google Fights Fake News, Voices on the
Margins Raise Alarm,” New York Times, September 26, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/09/26/technology/google-search-bias-
claims.html.

[504] Andre Damon and David North, “Google’s new search protocol is
restricting access to 13 leading socialist, progressive and anti-war web
sites,” World Socialist Website, August 2, 2017,
https://wsws.org/en/articles/2017/08/02/pers-a02.html.

[505] Staff, “Trump/Russia – Stories about the Trump team’s possible

involvement with Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election,”
Media Matters, 2015–2024, https://mediamatters.org/trumprussia.

[506] “David Cay Johnston: As Jeff Sessions Scandal Brews, We Need a

Public Probe of Trump’s Ties to Russia,” Democracy Now!, March 2, 2017,
https://democracynow.org/2017/3/2/david_cay_johnston_as_jeff_sessions.

[507] Joe Conason, “‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ is not a hoax,” AlterNet,

September 9, 2024, https://alternet.org/russia-russia-russia.

[508] James Risen, “Is Donald Trump a Traitor?” Intercept, February 16,
2018, https://theintercept.com/2018/02/16/trump-russia-election-hacking-
investigation; Glenn Greenwald was an exception. “Beyond BuzzFeed: The
10 Worst, Most Embarrassing US Media Failures on the Trump-Russia
Story,” Intercept, January 20, 2019,
https://theintercept.com/2019/01/20/beyond-buzzfeed-the-10-worst-most-
embarrassing-u-s-media-failures-on-the-trumprussia-story.

[509] Staff, “Our Anti-Imperialist Heritage: Murray N. Rothbard on War,”

Reason, February 1973, https://antiwar.com/orig/rothbard_on_war.html.

[510] Ron Paul, A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce and

Honest Friendship (Lake Jackson: Foundation for a Rational Economic
Education, 2007); Ron Paul archive at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and
Prosperity, https://ronpaulinstitute.org/author/ron-paul; The author is
editorial director of Antiwar.com and is close with the Ron Paul Institute.

[511] Gareth Porter, “The Real Motive Behind the FBI Plan to Investigate
Trump as a Russian Agent,” Consortium News, February 13, 2019,
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/02/13/the-real-motive-behind-the-fbi-
plan-to-investigate-trump-as-a-russian-agent.

[512] Clint Watts and Andrew Weisburd, “How Russia Dominates Your
Twitter Feed to Promote Lies (And, Trump, Too),” Daily Beast, August 6,
2018, https://thedailybeast.com/how-russia-dominates-your-twitter-feed-to-
promote-lies-and-trump-too; Natasha Bertrand, “A new website named after
a Founding Father is tracking Russian propaganda in real time,” Business
Insider, August 2, 2017, https://businessinsider.com/russian-propaganda-
website-tracker-2017-8.

[513] “Nunes Memo, Letter from Rep. Devin Nunes to Donald F. McGahn
II,” February 2, 2018,
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4365340/Read-the-GOP-
memo.pdf.

[514] Matt Taibbi, “Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New
King of Media Fraud,” Racket News, January 27, 2023,
https://racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton.

[515] Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz, et al.,

“Review of Four FISA Applications and Other Aspects of the FBI’s
Crossfire Hurricane Investigation,” US Department of Justice Oversight and
Review Division, December 2019, https://justice.gov/storage/120919-
examination.pdf.

[516] Matt Taibbi, “America Needs Truth and Reconciliation on

Russiagate,” Racket News, January 12, 2023, https://racket.news/p/america-
needs-truth-and-reconciliation; Tweet thread by Andrew Lowenthal,
“Twitter Files #20,” April 25, 2023,
https://x.com/NAffects/status/1650954036009398277.

[517] Matt Orfalea, “MSNBC Repeats Hamilton 68 Lies 279 Times in 11

Minutes,” 0rf, April 25, 2023, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=eKCkeCXIHTc.

[518] Jacob Siegel, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,”

Tablet, March 28, 2023, https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-
understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation.

[519] Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “After Florida School

Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced,” New York Times, February 19,
2018, https://nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russian-bots-school-
shooting.html; Anne Applebaum, “After the Parkland shooting, pro-Russian
bots are pushing false-flag allegations again,” Washington Post, February
16, 2018, https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/after-the-parkland-shooting-
pro-russian-bots-are-pushing-false-flag-allegations-
again/2018/02/16/46c3a674-1356-11e8-9065-e55346f6de81_story.html;
Erin Griffith, “Pro-Gun Russian Bots Flood Twitter After Parkland
Shooting,” Wired, February 15, 2018, https://wired.com/story/pro-gun-
russian-bots-flood-twitter-after-parkland-shooting.

[520] Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, “After Florida School

Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced,” New York Times, February 19,
2018, https://nytimes.com/2018/02/19/technology/russian-bots-school-
shooting.html.

[521] Miriam Elder and Charlie Warzel, “Stop Blaming Russian Bots For
Everything,” BuzzFeed, February 28, 2018,
https://buzzfeed.com/miriamelder/stop-blaming-russian-bots-for-
everything.

[522] Miriam Elder and Charlie Warzel, “Stop Blaming Russian Bots For
Everything,” BuzzFeed, February 28, 2018,
https://buzzfeed.com/miriamelder/stop-blaming-russian-bots-for-
everything.

[523] Watts is such a great FBI agent he literally co-wrote an article

demanding US material support for bin Laden’s men in Syria since their
enemies were Shi’ites: Clint Watts, et al., “The Good and Bad of Ahrar al-
Sham,” Foreign Affairs, January 23, 2014,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/syria/2014-01-23/good-and-bad-ahrar-al-
sham.

[524] Matt Taibbi, “Move Over, Jayson Blair: Meet Hamilton 68, the New
King of Media Fraud,” Racket News, January 27, 2023,
https://racket.news/p/move-over-jayson-blair-meet-hamilton; Matt Taibbi,
“Responding to Hamilton 68,” Racket News, January 28, 2023,
https://racket.news/p/responding-to-hamilton-68.

[525] Kurt Wagner, “Twitter has a new head of policy communications

from the National Security Council,” Vox.com, June 7, 2017,
https://vox.com/2017/6/7/15757702/twitter-policy-safety-communications-
emily-horne-national-security-council.

[526] Jacob Siegel, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,”

Tablet, March 28, 2023, https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-
understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation.

[527] Tweet by Emily Horne, March 30, 2022,

https://x.com/emilyhorne46/status/1509326890707963905.

[528] Jacob Siegel, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,”

Tablet, March 28, 2023, https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-
understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation.

[529] Tweet thread by Andrew Lowenthal, “Twitter Files #20,” April 25,
2023, https://x.com/NAffects/status/1650954036009398277; Andrew
Lowenthal, “An Insider’s Guide to ‘Anti-Disinformation,’” Racket News,
April 25, 2023, https://racket.news/p/an-insiders-guide-to-anti-
disinformation.

[530] Tweet by Michael Shellenberger, December 19, 2022,

https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1604895371360374784.
[531] Susan Schmidt, et al., “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex:
The Top 50 Organizations to Know,” Racket News, May 10, 2023,
https://racket.news/p/report-on-the-censorship-industrial-74b.

[532] James Rushmore, “FOIA Files: The University of Washington,”

Racket News, August 12, 2024, https://racket.news/p/foia-files-university-
of-washington.

[533] James Rushmore, “FOIA Files: Clemson University,” Racket News,

July 11, 2024, https://racket.news/p/foia-files-clemson-university.

[534] Michael Shellenberger, “What Censorship Leaders Are Hiding,”

Public, June 5, 2023, https://public.news/p/what-censorship-leaders-are-
hiding.

[535] Aaron Maté, “FBI helps Ukraine censor Twitter users and obtain their
info, including journalists,” Grayzone, June 7, 2023,
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/06/07/fbi-ukraine-twitter-users-including-
journalists.

[536] “State of Missouri v. Joseph R. Biden Jr. et al.,” US District Court for
the Western District of Louisiana, July 4, 2023,
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscou
rts.lawd.189520.294.0.pdf.

[537] “The FBI’s Collaboration With a Compromised Ukrainian

Intelligence Agency to Censor American Speech,” Select Subcommittee on
the Weaponization of the Federal Government, July 10, 2023,
https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-
judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/fbi-sbu-staff-report-7.10.23-
sm.pdf.

[538] Matt Taibbi, “Is the FBI Helping Ukraine’s Secret Service Censor
Americans?” Racket News, July 11, 2023, https://racket.news/p/is-the-fbi-
helping-ukraines-secret.

[539] Lee Fang, “How The FBI Helps Ukrainian Intelligence Hunt
‘Disinformation’ On Social Media,” April 28, 2023,
https://leefang.com/p/how-the-fbi-helps-ukrainian-intelligence.

[540] Matt Taibbi, “Is the FBI Helping Ukraine’s Secret Service Censor
Americans?” Racket News, July 11, 2023, https://racket.news/p/is-the-fbi-
helping-ukraines-secret.

[541] Many Tweets by people believing that, May 2023,

https://x.com/search?q=taibbi%20irs%20identity.

[542] Matt Taibbi, “Are Authorities Using the Internet to Sap Our Instinct
for Freedom?” Racket News, July 14, 2023, https://racket.news/p/are-
authorities-using-the-internet; Matt Taibbi, “Twitter and ‘Other Government
Agencies,’” Twitter, December 24, 2022,
https://x.com/mtaibbi/status/1606701397109796866; Matt Taibbi, “Twitter
Files Thread: The Spies Who Loved Twitter,” Racket News, December 25,
2022, https://racket.news/p/twitter-files-thread-the-spies-who.
[543] Jacob Siegel, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,”
Tablet, March 28, 2023, https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-
understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformation.

[544] Rep. Jim Jordan, Tweet thread, July 27, 2023,

https://x.com/Jim_Jordan/status/1684595375875760128.

[545] Bob Greenslade, “The Bill of Rights Broken-Down into Declaratory

and Restrictive Clauses,” Tenth Amendment Center, December 15, 2010,
https://blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2010/12/the-bill-of-rights-broken-
down-into-declaratory-and-restrictive-clauses.

[546] Jackson Walker, “Zuckerberg admits Meta caved to Biden admin

demands to censor COVID-related content,” CBS News, August 27, 2024,
https://cbsaustin.com/news/nation-world/zuckerberg-admits-meta-caved-to-
biden-admin-demands-to-censor-covid-related-content-mark-zuckerberg-
facebook-instagram-social-media-covid-19-pandemic-censorship-white-
house-house-judiciary-committee; See below.

[547] Mark Sherman, “Supreme Court seems favorable to Biden

administration over efforts to combat social media posts,” Chicago Tribune,
March 21, 2024, https://chicagotribune.com/2024/03/17/supreme-court-
seems-favorable-to-biden-administration-over-efforts-to-combat-social-
media-posts.

[548] Alan MacLeod, “The Federal Bureau of Tweets,” MintPress News,

June 21, 2022, https://mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number-
spooks-secret-agents.

[549] Alan MacLeod, “The Federal Bureau of Tweets,” MintPress News,

June 21, 2022, https://mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number-
spooks-secret-agents.

[550] Eric Lipton, et al., “Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks,”
New York Times, September 6, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/09/07/us/politics/foreign-powers-buy-influence-
at-think-tanks.html.

[551] Thomas Grove and Alan Cullison, “Ukraine Company’s Campaign to

Burnish Its Image Stretched Beyond Hunter Biden,” Wall Street Journal,
November 7, 2019, https://wsj.com/articles/ukraine-companys-campaign-
to-burnish-its-image-stretched-beyond-hunter-biden-11573154199; “Honor
Roll of Contributors,” Atlantic Council, 2019,
https://atlanticcouncil.org/about/donate/honor-roll-of-contributors-2019.

[552] “Presidents of Ukrainian World Congress and Atlantic Council

officially signed Memorandum of Agreement,” January 2, 2016,
https://ukrainianworldcongress.org/news.php/news/1316.

[553] Staff, “Disclosing networks of state-linked information operations,”

Twitter, February 23, 2021,
https://blog.x.com/en_us/topics/company/2021/disclosing-networks-of-
state-linked-information-operations-.
[554] Tyler Hummel, “CIA Agent Joins Facebook’s Info Crusade,” Leaders,
July 3, 2023, https://leaders.com/news/tech/cia-agent-joins-facebooks-info-
crusade; Alan MacLeod, “National Security Search Engine,” MintPress
News, July 25, 2022, https://mintpressnews.com/national-security-search-
engine-google-ranks-cia-agents/281490.

[555] Joseph Menn, “Strong ties bind spy agencies and Silicon Valley,”
Reuters, July 3, 2013, https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-security-
siliconvalley/strong-ties-bind-spy-agencies-and-silicon-valley-
idUSBRE96214I20130703; Ellen Mitchell, “How Silicon Valley’s Palantir
wired Washington,” Politico, October 14, 2016,
https://politico.com/story/2016/08/palantir-defense-contracts-lobbyists-
226969.

[556] Zach Dorfman, “How Silicon Valley Became a Den of Spies,”

Politico, July 27, 2018,
https://politico.com/magazine/story/2018/07/27/silicon-valley-spies-china-
russia-219071.

[557] Alan MacLeod, “The Federal Bureau of Tweets,” MintPress News,

June 21, 2022, https://mintpressnews.com/twitter-hiring-alarming-number-
spooks-secret-agents.

[558] Alan MacLeod, “The NATO to TikTok Pipeline,” MintPress News,

April 29, 2022, https://mintpressnews.com/nato-tiktok-pipeline-why-tiktok-
employing-national-security-agents/280336.
[559] Alan MacLeod, “Jessica Ashooh: The Taming of Reddit and the
National Security State Plant Tabbed to Do It,” MintPress News, June 11,
2021, https://mintpressnews.com/jessica-ashooh-reddit-national-security-
state-plant/277639.

[560] Twitter thread by @NameRedacted, December 18, 2022,

https://x.com/NameRedacted247/status/1604641866342756352; Tweet
thread by @NameRedacted247, August 4, 2023,
https://x.com/NameRedacted247/status/1687358111235932161.

[561] Michael Shellenberger, “The Censorship Industrial Complex US

Government Support For Domestic Censorship And Disinformation
Campaigns, 2016 – 2022,” Testimony by Michael Shellenberger to The
House Select Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government,
March 9, 2023, https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-
judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/shellenberger-testimony.pdf.

[562] Judge Terry A. Doughty, “Memorandum Ruling on Request for

Preliminary Injunction,” US District Court for the Western District of
Louisiana, July 4, 2023,
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscou
rts.lawd.189520.293.0_1.pdf.

[563] Horton, Fool’s Errand, 143–202.

[564] Jacob Siegel, “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,”

Tablet, March 28, 2023, https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-
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[565] Horton, Enough Already, 178–234.

[566] Matt Taibbi, “Note to Philip Bump,” Racket News, August 24, 2024,
https://racket.news/p/note-to-philip-bump.

[567] Philip Bump, “When we talk about Russian meddling, what do we

actually mean?” Washington Post, February 13, 2018,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/02/13/when-we-talk-
about-russian-meddling-what-do-we-actually-mean.

[568] They lie right in the headline about their lies too. There is nothing
“minor” about bearing false witness against American citizens, calling them
traitors serving foreign nations, when that was nothing but official US
disinformation the whole time. And note the date, they did not even admit
what lies they had told until almost six years had passed, long after Watts
admitted he was lying, and not until they were forced to by the reporting of
the great journalist Matt Taibbi. WashPostPR, “The Post issues minor
corrections in coverage of Hamilton 68,” Washington Post, May 18, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/pr/2023/05/18/post-issues-minor-corrections-
coverage-hamilton-68.

[569] New Knowledge About Page,

https://web.archive.org/web/20181217144223/https:/www.newknowledge.c
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https://statesman.com/story/business/technology/2019/02/15/who-is-
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cybersecurity-world/5974403007.

[570] Craig Timberg, et al., “Secret campaign to use Russian-inspired

tactics in 2017 Ala. election stirs anxiety for Democrats,” Washington Post,
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anxiety-for-democrats/2019/01/06/58803f26-0400-11e9-8186-
4ec26a485713_story.html; Duncan Riley, “Reid Hoffman apologizes for
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[571] Scott Shane and Alan Blinder, “Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate
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[572] Craig Silverman, “A NY Times Reporter Spoke At An Event

Organized By Alabama Dirty Tricksters,” BuzzFeed News, December 27,
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tricksters-invited-a-new-york-times-reporter.

[573] Brian Lyman, “Russian invasion? Roy Moore sees spike in Twitter
followers from land of Putin,” Montgomery Advertiser, October 16, 2017,
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7/10/16/roy-moores-twitter-account-gets-influx-russian-language-
followers/768758001; Joe Tacopino, “Roy Moore flooded with fake
Russian Twitter followers,” New York Post, October 16, 2017,
https://nypost.com/2017/10/16/roy-moore-flooded-with-fake-russian-
twitter-followers; Denise Clifton, “Pro-Russia Propagandists Are Pushing
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pushing-for-roy-moore-to-win; Michael Seale, “Roy Moore Sees Surge In
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[574] Jonathan Martin and Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “Roy Moore Is Accused of
Sexual Misconduct by a Fifth Woman,” New York Times, November 13,
2017, https://nytimes.com/2017/11/13/us/politics/roy-moore-alabama-
senate.html; “Roy Moore Pursued Young Girls For Their ‘Purity’ And
Because After Vietnam War It Was Hard To Get A Date, Pastor Says,”
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young-girls-their-purity-and-vietnam-war-719654.

[575] Matthew Bloch, et al., “Alabama Election Results: Doug Jones

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[576] Brian Lyman, “Senate poll: Roy Moore holds 8 point lead over Doug
Jones,” Montgomery Advertiser, October 12, 2017,
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[577] Craig Silverman, “A NY Times Reporter Spoke At An Event

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tricksters-invited-a-new-york-times-reporter.

[578] Craig Timberg and Tony Romm, “New report on Russian

disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the operation’s scale and
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disinformation-prepared-senate-shows-operations-scale-sweep.

[579] Paul D. Thacker, “Whistleblower: Insider Details How ‘New

Knowledge’ Cybersecurity Firm Created Disinformation in American
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[580] Horton, Enough Already, 199.

[581] Staff, “Tulsi Gabbard’s Foreign Policy,” Council on Foreign

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[582] Miriam Elder and Charlie Warzel, “Stop Blaming Russian Bots For
Everything,” BuzzFeed, February 28, 2018,
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[583] Clint Watts, et al., “The Good and Bad of Ahrar al-Sham,” Foreign
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[584] Glenn Greenwald, “NBC News, to Claim Russia Supports Tulsi

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[585] Scott Shane and Alan Blinder, “Secret Experiment in Alabama Senate
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[586] Dan Merica, “Hillary Clinton suggests Russians are ‘grooming’ Tulsi
Gabbard for third-party run,” CNN, October 21, 2019,
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[587] Eric Bradner, “Dem. congresswoman quits DNC post, endorses

Bernie Sanders,” CNN, February 28, 2016,
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[589] Dan Merica, “Tulsi Gabbard sues Hillary Clinton for defamation over
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lawsuit/index.html.

[590] Dan Merica, “Hillary Clinton suggests Russians are ‘grooming’ Tulsi
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[591] Aleks Phillips, “Jill Stein’s Ties to Vladimir Putin Explained,”

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vladimir-putin-explained-1842620.

[592] Robert Windrem, “Russians launched pro-Jill Stein social media blitz
to help Trump win election, reports say,” NBC News, December 22, 2018,
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stein-social-media-blitz-help-trump-n951166.

[593] Robert Windrem and Ben Popken, “Russia’s propaganda machine

discovers 2020 Democratic candidate Tulsi Gabbard,” NBC News,
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propaganda-machine-discovers-2020-democratic-candidate-tulsi-gabbard-
n964261.

[594] Hunter DeRensis, “Are the Democrats Ready for Tulsi Gabbard?”
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41592.

[595] Hunter DeRensis, “Heroic Tulsi Gabbard Will Run on Her Sensible
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16, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190207015724/https://russia-
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[596] Charles Bausman, “Why This Site Is the Very Opposite of Hateful – A
Christian Letter to My Hometown of Lancaster, Pennsylvania,” Russia
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pennsylvania/ri31075.

[597] Ben Collins, “Too Racist for Russian Propaganda?” Daily Beast,
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propaganda.

[598] Not that she is good on everything.

[599] “Jill Stein on Her Green Party Presidential Bid,” C-SPAN,

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5/jill-stein-green-party-presidential-bid.

[600] Hunter DeRensis article archive, Libertarian Institute,

https://libertarianinstitute.org/author/hderensis.

OceanofPDF.com
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Hogwash,” New York Times, August 16, 2018,
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collusion-security-clearance.html.

[602] Alex Lockie, “Putin’s soccer ball gift to Trump may be bugged, or
worse – and the US may never know,” Business Insider, July 17, 2018,
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[603] Tweet by Senator Lindsey Graham, July 16, 2018,

https://x.com/LindseyGrahamSC/status/1018891400245600257.

[604] Vernon Silver, “Putin’s Soccer Ball for Trump Had Transmitter Chip,
Logo Indicates,” Bloomberg News, July 25, 2018,
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[605] Sharon LaFraniere and Adam Goldman, “Maria Butina, Suspected

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[606] Betsy Swan, “Maria Butina Agrees to Cooperate With US,” Daily
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[608] Spencer S. Hsu, “Judge orders Butina to remain in jail, lashes out at
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russian-agent-maria-butina-to-remain-in-jail-lashes-out-at-both-sides-for-
mistakes/2018/09/10/79f0b248-b500-11e8-a7b5-adaaa5b2a57f_story.html;
Alberto Luperon, “Judge Owns DOJ: It Took Me 5 Mins to Figure Out
Maria Butina’s Sex Messages Were Jokes,” Law & Crime, September 10,
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to-figure-out-maria-butinas-sex-messages-were-jokes.

[609] Kadhim Shubber, “Alleged Russian spy tried to offer sex for job, say
prosecutors,” Financial Times, July 18, 2018,
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[610] Sara Murray, “Special counsel briefly interviewed Maria Butina,

sources say,” CNN, March 27, 2019,
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[611] Sara Murray, “How the case against Maria Butina began to crumble,”
CNN, April 26, 2019, https://cnn.com/2019/04/25/politics/maria-butina-
case/index.html.
[612] David Smith, “Russian spy Maria Butina pleads guilty to conspiracy
against US,” Guardian, December 13, 2018, https://theguardian.com/us-
news/2018/dec/13/russian-spy-maria-butina-pleads-guilty-conspiracy.

[613] Lara Seligman and Andrew Desiderio, “Russian spy unit suspected of
directed-energy attacks on US personnel,” Politico, May 10, 2021,
https://politico.com/news/2021/05/10/russia-gru-directed-energy-486640;
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diplomats in Cuba, China,” NBC News, September 11, 2018,
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mystery-attacks-diplomats-cuba-china-n908141.

[614] Carl Bernstein, “The CIA and the Media,” Rolling Stone, October 20,
1977, https://carlbernstein.com/the-cia-and-the-media-rolling-stone-10-20-
1977.

[615] Jason Study, “Acoustic Signals and Physiological Effects on US

Diplomats in Cuba,” August 2024,
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syndrome; Mindy Weisberger, “Mysterious Sounds Recorded at Cuba
Embassy Were . . . Crickets,” Live Science, January 7, 2019,
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Declassified State Department Report Says Microwaves Didn’t Cause
‘Havana Syndrome,’” BuzzFeed News, September 30, 2021,
https://buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/havana-syndrome-jason-
crickets; Dan Vergano, “Scientists Are Slamming A Report Saying
Microwave Attacks Could Have Caused ‘Havana Syndrome’ In US
Diplomats,” BuzzFeed News, December 7, 2020,
https://buzzfeednews.com/article/danvergano/microwave-attacks-havana-
syndrome-diplomats; Ken Dilanian and Josh Lederman, “CIA says ‘Havana
Syndrome’ not result of sustained campaign by hostile power,” NBC News,
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havana-syndrome-not-result-sustained-global-campaign-hostile-rcna12838.

[616] Cheryl Rofer, “Claims of Microwave Attacks Are Scientifically

Implausible,” Foreign Policy, May 10, 2021,
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scientifically-implausible; Sarah Kaplan and Joel Achenbach, “Scientists
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Washington Post, September 6, 2018,
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zap-theory-that-microwave-weapon-injured-cuba-
diplomats/2018/09/06/aa51dcd0-b142-11e8-9a6a-
565d92a3585d_story.html; “Emotional trauma and fear most likely cause of
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[617] Shane Harris and John Hudson, “‘Havana syndrome’ not caused by
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microwave attacks since 90s,” Guardian, May 2, 2021,
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microwave-attacks-since-90s; Dr. Robert Bartholomew, et al., “Emotional
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[619] Matt Orfalea, “Havana Syndrome,” 0rf, December 3, 2022,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=V31E5tDtn3w.

[620] Leighton Chan, MD, et al., “Clinical, Biomarker, and Research Tests
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of Medicine, Vol. 110, No. 12 (November 24, 2017),
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_Anomalous_Health_Incidents.pdf; Staff, “IC Targeting and Collection
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Incidents,” Office of the Director of National Intelligence, March 1, 2023,
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ction_Efforts_Point_Away_From_Adversary_Involvement_in_Anomalous_
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[621] Michael Weiss and Elizabeth O’Bagy, “Why Arming the Rebels Isn’t
Enough,” The Atlantic, June 14, 2013,
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rebels-isnt-enough/276889; Max Blumenthal, “How neocon Michael Weiss
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[622] Michael Weiss, et al., “Unraveling Havana Syndrome: New evidence

links the GRU’s assassination Unit 29155 to mysterious attacks on US
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[623] Johanna McGeary, “The FBI Spy It took 15 years to discover,” Time,
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years-to-discover-one-of-the-most-damaging-cases-of-espionage-in-u-s-
history-an-inside-look-at-the-secret-life-and-final-capture-of-robert-
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[624] Lindsay Whitehurst, “Former FBI agent Robert Hanssen, who was
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[625] Juliet Eilperin and Adam Entous, “Russian operation hacked a

Vermont utility, showing risk to US electrical grid security, officials say,”
Washington Post, December 31, 2016,
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vermont/2016/12/30/8fc90cc4-ceec-11e6-b8a2-8c2a61b0436f_story.html.

[626] Kalev Leetaru, “‘Fake News’ And How The Washington Post
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news-and-how-the-washington-post-rewrote-its-story-on-russian-hacking-
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[627] Ellen Nakashima and Juliet Eilperin, “Russian government hackers

do not appear to have targeted Vermont utility, say people close to
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hackers-do-not-appear-to-have-targeted-vermont-utility-say-people-close-
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76f69a399dd5_story.html.

[628] Kalev Leetaru, “‘Fake News’ And How The Washington Post
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[629] Shane Ryan, “Has Rachel Maddow Entered Her Infowars Period?”
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maddow/has-rachel-maddow-entered-her-infowars-period.

[630] Fortune Editors and AP, “C-SPAN Was Briefly Interrupted by a

Russian News Network,” Fortune, January 12, 2017,
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[631] Erik Wemple, “C-SPAN: No, we weren’t hacked,” Washington Post,

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[632] “The Rachel Maddow Show, Transcript,” MSNBC, January 12, 2017,
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Detained Shooting Suspect,” NPR News, November 13, 2018,
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guard-who-detained-suspected-shooter.

[634] Nicholas Kulish, “After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives
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finances.html.

[635] Sam Levin, “Did Russia fake black activism on Facebook to sow
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[636] Žilvinas Švedkauskas, et al., “Russia’s disinformation campaigns are

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[637] William J. Aceves, “Virtual Hatred: How Russia Tried to Start a Race
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[639] Sheera Frenkel, “A Freelance Writer Learns He Was Working for the
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[640] Ben Norton, “Serious questions remain about shady ‘PeaceData’

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[641] Greg Miller and Greg Jaffe, “Trump revealed highly classified
information to Russian foreign minister and ambassador,” Washington Post,
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[642] “Re: Congrats!” Email from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to

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[643] Ahmet S. Yayla and Colin P. Clarke, “Turkey’s Double Standard:

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actions-contradict.html.

[644] Greg Myre, “US, Russia Working On A Plan To Coordinate Bombing

In Syria,” NPR News, July 14, 2016,
https://npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/07/14/486005012/u-s-russia-
working-on-a-plan-to-coordinate-bombing-in-syria; Samuel Oakford,
“Russia’s three years of war in Syria brings victory close for regime,”
Airwars.org, September 18, 2018, https://airwars.org/news/russia-three-
years-of-war.

[645] Barbara Starr and Catherine E. Shoichet, “Russian plane crash: US

intel suggests ISIS bomb brought down jet,” CNN, November 4, 2015,
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/04/africa/russian-plane-crash-egypt-
sinai/index.html; Jason Hanna, et al., “ISIS publishes photo of what it says
is bomb that downed Russian plane,” CNN, November 19, 2015,
https://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/18/middleeast/metrojet-crash-dabiq-
claim/index.html.

[646] “Editor’s Note,” CNN, June 23, 2017,

https://cnn.com/2017/06/23/politics/editors-note/index.html.

[647] Brian Stelter, “Three journalists leaving CNN after retracted article,”
CNN, June 27, 2017, https://money.cnn.com/2017/06/26/media/cnn-
announcement-retracted-article/index.html.
[648] Rachel Maddow, “US Officials Still Assessing Russia 2016 Hack,”
MSNBC, June 22, 2017, https://youtube.com/watch?v=BrnmwndVnT0.

[649] Patrick Marley and Jason Stein, “Russians tried to hack election
systems of 21 states in 2016, officials say,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel,
September 22, 2017, https://usatoday.com/story/news/nation-
now/2017/09/22/wisconsin-one-20-states-targeted-russian-hacking-
elections-systems-2016/694719001.

[650] Glenn Greenwald, “Yet Another Major Russia Story Falls Apart. Is
Skepticism Permissible Yet?” Intercept, September 28, 2017,
https://theintercept.com/2017/09/28/yet-another-major-russia-story-falls-
apart-is-skepticism-permissible-yet.

[651] Alex Padilla, “Information Provided by DHS Regarding Russian

Scanning was Incorrect,” California Secretary of State’s Office, September
27, 2017, https://sos.ca.gov/administration/news-releases-and-
advisories/2017-news-releases-and-advisories/dhs-incorrectly-notified-
california-secretary-state-about-russian-scanning.

[652] Scott Bauer, “Homeland Security now says Wisconsin elections not
targeted,” AP, September 26, 2017,
https://apnews.com/article/10a0080e8fcb4908ae4a852e8c03194d.

[653] Mark Landler and Stephen Castle, “‘No One’ Protected British
Democracy From Russia, UK Report Concludes,” New York Times, July 21,
2020, https://nytimes.com/2020/07/21/world/europe/uk-russia-report-brexit-
interference.html.

[654] Mark Scott and Laurens Cerulus, “Russian groups targeted EU

election with fake news, says European Commission,” Politico Europe,
June 14, 2019, https://politico.eu/article/european-commission-
disinformation-report-russia-fake-news.

[655] Staff, “UK says there is no evidence of Russian meddling in Brexit

vote,” Reuters, July 22, 2020, https://reuters.com/article/us-britain-russia-
idUSKCN24N0MZ; Michael Schwirtz, “German Election Mystery: Why
No Russian Meddling?” New York Times, September 21, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/09/21/world/europe/german-election-russia.html.

[656] Kysia Hekster and Joost Schellevis, “American billionaire sponsors

‘yes’ campaign Ukraine referendum,” NOS News, January 22, 2016,
https://nos.nl/artikel/2082091-amerikaanse-miljardair-sponsort-ja-
campagne-oekraine-referendum.

[657] Andrew Higgins, “Fake News, Fake Ukrainians: How a Group of

Russians Tilted a Dutch Vote,” New York Times, February 16, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/02/16/world/europe/russia-ukraine-fake-news-
dutch-vote.html.

[658] De Ploeg, 309–10.

[659] Patrick Wintour and Nicola Slawson, “Boris Johnson: Russia has
ability to disrupt UK politics with hacking,” Guardian, March 12, 2017,
https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/12/british-democracy-at-risk-
from-russian-hackers-says-gchq.

[660] Luke Harding, “Is Donald Trump’s Dark Russian Secret Hiding in
Deutsche Bank’s Vaults?” Newsweek, December 21, 2017,
https://newsweek.com/2017/12/29/donald-trump-russia-secret-deutsche-
bank-753780.html.

[661] David Enrich, “No, There Isn’t Evidence That Trump Owes Money to
Russia,” New York Times, October 13, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/10/13/technology/no-there-isnt-evidence-that-
trump-owes-money-to-russia.html.

[662] Julian Borger, “Rex Tillerson: an appointment that confirms Putin’s

US election win,” Guardian, December 13, 2016,
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/11/rex-tillerson-secretary-of-
state-trump-russia-putin; Henry Meyer and Ilya Arkhipov, “Russia
Applauds Trump Dream Team as Exxon CEO Eyed for State,” Bloomberg
News, December 11, 2016, https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-
11/putin-awaits-fantastic-trump-team-as-exxon-ally-may-head-state.

[663] Bonnie Berkowitz, et al., “Here’s what we learned about Team

Trump’s ties to Russian interests,” Washington Post, March 31, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/trump-russia.

[664] Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (New
York: Penguin, 2012).
[665] Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American
Dynasty (New York: Holt, Reinhart and Winston, 1976), 133–34.

[666] John Cassidy, “Rex Tillerson Gets Fired the Day After He Criticized
Russia,” The New Yorker, March 13, 2018,
https://newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/rex-tillerson-gets-fired-the-
day-after-he-criticized-russia; Aaron Blake, “Did Trump fire Tillerson
because he was too anti-Russia?” Washington Post, March 13, 2018,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/03/13/did-trump-fire-
tillerson-because-he-was-too-anti-russia.

[667] Andrew Fink, “The founder of the financial pyramid Roman

Vasilenko is in London, the leadership is in custody in St. Petersburg for
fraud with 15 billion rubles,” RusCrime, February 22, 2022,
https://ruscrime.com/the-founder-of-the-financial-pyramid-roman-
vasilenko-is-in-london-the-leadership-is-in-custody-in-st-petersburg-for-
fraud-with-15-billion-rubles-shareholders.

[668] Rachel Weiner, “GOP operative found guilty of funneling Russian

money to Donald Trump,” Washington Post, November 17, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/17/benton-trump-russian-
vasilenko-guilty.

[669] Daphne Ewing-Chow, “For Yuri Vanetik, Wine Has Turned Business
Into A Cultural Experience,” Forbes, October 14, 2022,
https://forbes.com/sites/daphneewingchow/2022/10/14/for-yuri-vanetik-
wine-has-turned-business-into-a-cultural-experience.
[670] Yuri Vanetik’s website, September 2024, https://yurivanetik.net.

[671] Kevin G. Hall, et al., “Master of selfies with GOP pols, Soviet emigre
has a confounding past,” McClatchy, February 1, 2018,
https://mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article197764899.html.

[672] Note that Gordon and Stone were the same two who had published a
discredited series on Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen’s alleged secret trips
to Prague. See above.

[673] Angela Hart, “Gavin Newsom returns money from a controversial

GOP donor,” Sacramento Bee, January 16, 2019,
https://sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-
alert/article212416434.html.

[674] Kevin G. Hall and Ben Wieder, “GOP fundraiser adds to work as
foreign agent,” McClatchy, March 23, 2018,
https://mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/article206303354.html.

[675] Kevin G. Hall and Ben Wieder, “Two controversial GOP fundraisers
duking it out in court,” McClatchy, January 7, 2019,
https://mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-
world/national/article205215779.html.

[676] Yuri Vanetik, “Russiagate’s Collateral Victims,” Wall Street Journal,

April 11, 2019, https://wsj.com/articles/russiagates-collateral-victims-
11555022432.
[677] Alexander Kuziv and Pavlo Rud, “Agrarian Party – Village defenders
or lobbyists of agricultural holdings?” Ukrainska Pravda,
https://pravda.com.ua/cdn/graphics/2017/08/agrarna_partija_zahysnyky_sel
a_chy_lobisty_agroholdyngiv.

[678] Kevin G. Hall, et al., “GOP fundraiser is everywhere on social media,

secretive as a foreign agent,” McClatchy, March 6, 2018,
https://mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/world/article203663079.html.

[679] Kevin G. Hall and Ben Wieder, “GOP fundraiser adds to work as
foreign agent,” McClatchy, March 23, 2018,
https://mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/article206303354.html.

[680] Yuri Vanetik, “Russiagate’s Collateral Victims,” Wall Street Journal,

April 11, 2019, https://wsj.com/articles/russiagates-collateral-victims-
11555022432.

[681] Yuri Vanetik, “Lessons Learned As A Target of A Media

Disinformation Campaign,” Yuri Vanetik, December 30, 2020,
https://yurivanetik.net/lessons-learned-media-disinformation.

[682] Jeff Gerth, “The press versus the president, part four,” Columbia
Journalism Review, January 30, 2023,
https://cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-4.php.

[683] Matt Taibbi, “We’re in a permanent coup,” Racket News, October 11,
2019, https://racket.news/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup.
[684] Tweet by Matt Taibbi, December 13, 2019,
https://x.com/mtaibbi/status/1205610508134555648; Tweet by Matt Taibbi,
December 13, 2019, https://x.com/mtaibbi/status/1205835695471955973.

[685] Tweet by Ariel Kaminer, November 14, 2017,

https://x.com/arielkaminer/status/930498080046272512; Tweet by Matt
Mittenthal, November 14, 2017,
https://x.com/mattmittenthal/status/930503643962527744.

[686] Jason Leopold, et al., “Secret Finding: 60 Russian Payments ‘To

Finance Election Campaign Of 2016,’” BuzzFeed, November 14, 2017,
https://buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/secret-finding-60-russian-payments-to-
finance-election.

[687] Philip Bump, “The lure of the Russian smoking gun,” Washington
Post, November 14, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/14/the-lure-of-the-
russian-smoking-gun.

[688] Peter Baker, “For Trump and the System, Mueller’s Report Is a
Turning Point and a Test,” New York Times, March 22, 2019,
https://nytimes.com/2019/03/22/us/politics/donald-trump-mueller-
report.html.

[689] Woodward, Fear, 171–72.

[690] “Interview of James Clapper,” US House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, July 17, 2017,
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2020/05/jc7.pdf; Jeremy Herb,
“House releases transcripts of closed-door Russia probe interviews,” CNN,
May 7, 2020, https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/07/politics/house-transcript-
russia-interview/index.html; Zachary Evans, “James Clapper Said He
‘Never Saw Direct Empirical Evidence’ of Trump-Russia Collusion in FBI
Interview,” Yahoo News, May 8, 2020, https://news.yahoo.com/former-dni-
james-clapper-interview-230517504.html.

[691] “Interview of Susan Rice,” US House of Representatives Permanent

Select Committee on Intelligence, September 8, 2017,
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2020/05/sr44.pdf.

[692] “Interview of Susan Rice,” US House of Representatives Permanent

Select Committee on Intelligence, September 8, 2017,
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2020/05/sr44.pdf.

[693] “Interview of Benjamin Rhodes,” US House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, October 25, 2017,
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2020/05/br43.pdf.

[694] “Interview of Samantha Power,” US House of Representatives

Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, October 25, 2017,
https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2020/05/sp40.pdf.

[695] Editorial Board, “All the Adam Schiff Transcripts,” Wall Street
Journal, May 12, 2020, https://wsj.com/articles/all-the-adam-schiff-
transcripts-11589326164.
[696] Oh, Jason. Two in a row? Come on now, man. Jason Leopold and
Anthony Cormier, “President Trump Directed His Attorney Michael Cohen
To Lie To Congress About The Moscow Tower Project,” BuzzFeed News,
January 17, 2019, https://buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/trump-
russia-cohen-moscow-tower-mueller-investigation.

[697] Michael M. Grynbaum, “BuzzFeed News Faces Scrutiny After

Mueller Denies a Dramatic Trump Report,” New York Times, January 19,
2019, https://nytimes.com/2019/01/19/business/media/buzzfeed-news-
trump-michael-cohen-mueller.html.

[698] Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, et al., “Report On The

Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election
Volume I of II,” US Department of Justice, March 2019,
https://justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/download.

[699] Aaronson, The Terror Factory.

[700] Ellen Nakashima, “Senate committee unanimously endorses spy

agencies’ finding that Russia interfered in 2016 presidential race in bid to
help Trump,” Washington Post, April 21, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/senate-committee-
unanimously-endorses-spy-agencies-finding-that-russia-interfered-in-2016-
presidential-race-in-bid-to-help-trump/2020/04/21/975ca51a-83d2-11ea-
ae26-989cfce1c7c7_story.html.
[701] “Russian Active Measures Campaigns and Interference in the 2016
Election,” Vol. 4, US Senate,
https://intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Report_Volume
4.pdf.

[702] Adam Goldman, et al., “Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is

Meddling to Re-elect Trump,” New York Times, February 20, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/02/20/us/politics/russian-interference-trump-
democrats.html; Jim Acosta, et al., “Russia is looking to help Trump win in
2020, election security official told lawmakers,” CNN, February 21, 2020,
https://cnn.com/2020/02/20/politics/trump-russia-intelligence-
2020/index.html; Shane Harris, et al., “Bernie Sanders briefed by US
officials that Russia is trying to help his presidential campaign,”
Washington Post, February 21, 2020, https://washingtonpost.com/national-
security/bernie-sanders-briefed-by-us-officials-that-russia-is-trying-to-help-
his-presidential-campaign/2020/02/21/5ad396a6-54bd-11ea-929a-
64efa7482a77_story.html.

[703] Leslie Stahl, “Fiona Hill warns about Russian political meddling in
60 Minutes interview,” CBS 60 Minutes, March 8, 2020,
https://cbsnews.com/news/fiona-hill-russia-advisor-president-trump-
impeachment-lesley-stahl-60-minutes-2020-03-08.

[704] About 18,000,000 search results for “Russia supports Sanders 2020,”
Google, September 2023, https://google.com/search?
q=russia+supports+sanders+2020.
[705] Mark Moore, “Sanders: Trump’s response to Russian meddling is a
‘horror show,’” New York Post, February 18, 2018,
https://nypost.com/2018/02/18/sanders-trumps-response-to-russian-
meddling-is-a-horror-show.

[706] Julian Barnes and Sydney Ember, “Russia Is Said to Be Interfering to

Aid Sanders in Democratic Primaries,” New York Times, February 21, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/02/21/us/politics/bernie-sanders-russia.html.

[707] Deb Riechmann, “Trump says he was not told that Russia was
helping Sanders,” AP, February 23, 2020,
https://apnews.com/article/politics-latin-america-ap-top-news-donald-
trump-michael-pence-ef77c30ba74643f72d6fa60f7ca123c4.

[708] Mike M. Ahlers, “Russian company seeks to buy US uranium mining

operations,” CNN, September 25, 2010,
https://web.archive.org/web/20161018182419/http://cnn.com/2010/US/09/2
4/russia.uranium.company.

[709] Jo Becker and Don Van Natta Jr., “After Mining Deal, Financier
Donated to Clinton,” New York Times, January 31, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/01/31/us/politics/31donor.html; Amy Chozick,
“New Book, ‘Clinton Cash,’ Questions Foreign Donations to Foundation,”
New York Times, April 19, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/04/20/us/politics/new-book-clinton-cash-
questions-foreign-donations-to-foundation.html; Wilson Andrews,
“Donations to the Clinton Foundation, and a Russian Uranium Takeover,”
New York Times, April 22, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/23/us/clinton-foundation-
donations-uranium-investors.html; Jo Becker and Mike McIntire, “Cash
Flowed to Clinton Foundation Amid Russian Uranium Deal,” New York
Times, April 23, 2015, https://nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-
clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-
company.html.

[710] Jo Becker and Mike McIntire, “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation

Amid Russian Uranium Deal,” New York Times, April 23, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-
russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html.

[711] Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “The facts behind Trump’s repeated claim
about Hillary Clinton’s role in the Russian uranium deal,” Washington Post,
October 26, 2016, https://washingtonpost.com/news/fact-
checker/wp/2016/10/26/the-facts-behind-trumps-repeated-claim-about-
hillary-clintons-role-in-the-russian-uranium-deal.

[712] Rachel Maddow, “When it comes to conspiracy theories, Republicans

are now 0-for-4,” MSNBC, March 9, 2018, https://msnbc.com/rachel-
maddow-show/when-it-comes-conspiracy-theories-republicans-are-now-0-
4-msna1076671.

[713] Staff, “Median individual income in United States of America,” US

Census, 2024, https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA.
[714] Zachary Fryer-Biggs, “The Hillary Clinton Russia Uranium One
Conspiracy Theory Doesn’t Make Any Sense,” Newsweek, October 27,
2017, https://newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-uranium-conspiracy-theory-
distraction-trump-russia-694525; Jack Caporal, “Are You Well-Paid?
Compare Your Salary to the Average US Income,” Motley Fool, February 1,
2023, https://fool.com/the-ascent/research/average-us-income.

[715] Special Counsel John Durham, “Report on Matters Related to

Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016
Presidential Campaigns,” US Department of Justice, May 12, 2023,
https://justice.gov/storage/durhamreport.pdf.

[716] Glenn Thrush and Gabriel Debenedetti, “Clinton: I used private email
account for ‘convenience,’” Politico, March 10, 2015,
https://politico.com/story/2015/03/hillary-clinton-email-press-conference-
115947.

[717] Laura Meckler, “Bill Clinton Still Doesn’t Use Email,” Wall Street
Journal, March 10, 2015, https://wsj.com/articles/BL-WB-53676.

[718] Paul Waldman, “Democrats strike a blow against GOP efforts to

shield Trump,” Washington Post, March 8, 2018,
https://washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/03/08/democrats-
strike-a-blow-against-gop-efforts-to-shield-trump; Matt Kwong, “Trump is
hyping a uranium scandal about Hillary Clinton. Here’s why some
observers call it ‘bogus,’” CBC News, November 4, 2017,
https://cbc.ca/news/world/trump-bogus-clinton-uranium-one-deal-
conspiracy-1.4383957.

[719] Shaun Walker and Lauren Gambino, “Obama set to hit Russia with
further sanctions before leaving office,” Guardian, December 29, 2016,
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2016/dec/28/obama-poised-to-hit-russia-
with-further-sanctions-before-leaving-office; Lauren Gambino, “Trump
administration hits 24 Russians with sanctions over ‘malign activity,’”
Guardian, April 6, 2018, https://theguardian.com/us-
news/2018/apr/06/trump-russia-sanctions-election-meddling-latest.

[720] Keith Gessen, “The Quiet Americans Behind the US-Russia

Imbroglio,” New York Times Magazine, May 8, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/05/08/magazine/the-quiet-americans-behind-the-
us-russia-imbroglio.html.

[721] Donald Wrye, Amerika, ABC, February 6, 1987,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KU49MR19CcA.

[722] Pamela Brown and Jeremy Herb, “The frantic scramble before
Mueller got the job,” CNN, December 7, 2018,
https://cnn.com/2018/12/06/politics/rosenstein-comey-firing-obstruction-
probe/index.html.

[723] Julie Pace, “Trump wary of Russian deal; new advisers urge tougher
stand,” AP, March 4, 2017,
https://apnews.com/article/8bf076a9e5314c19a28f79dbc5d967fe; In 2016,
President Obama tried to work with Russia against ISIS and was overruled
by the military too. See Chapter Four.

[724] Press Release, “Montenegro joins NATO as 29th Ally,” NATO, June
5, 2017, https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_144647.htm.

[725] Press Release, “North Macedonia joins NATO as 30th Ally,” NATO,
March 27, 2020, https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_174589.htm.

[726] Video, “Trump: I’m not pro-Russia, I just want our country safe,”
Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox News, September 10, 2020,
https://foxnews.com/video/5810471499001.

[727] Jonathan Lemire and Deb Reichmann, “1,000 more US troops to

Poland as Trump and Duda discuss NATO’s eastern flank,” AP, June 24,
2020, https://militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2020/06/24/1000-more-
us-troops-to-poland-as-trump-and-duda-discuss-natos-eastern-flank.

[728] Lukas Milevski, “Developments in Baltic Defense since Trump Took

Office,” Foreign Policy Research Institute, April 17, 2018,
https://fpri.org/article/2018/04/developments-in-baltic-defense-since-trump-
took-office; Jari Tanner, “US allocates $175 million in military aid to
Baltics in 2020,” AP, December 23, 2019,
https://militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2019/12/23/us-allocates-
175-million-in-military-aid-to-baltics-in-2020.

[729] Josh Rogin, “Trump administration approves lethal arms sales to

Ukraine,” Washington Post, December 20, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/12/20/trump-
administration-approves-lethal-arms-sales-to-ukraine.

[730] Joe Gould, “US State Dept. clears $600M deal with Ukraine for
patrol boats, guns and sensors,” Defense News, June 17, 2020,
https://defensenews.com/congress/2020/06/17/us-selling-ukraine-600m-in-
patrol-boats-guns-and-sensors.

[731] Staff, “Ukraine gets US military aid, including Javelin anti-tank

missiles,” Reuters, June 17, 2020, https://reuters.com/article/us-security-
ukraine-us-idUSKBN23O140.

[732] See Chapter Four.

[733] John Hudson, “How Russia Hawks Are Selling Trump On Sending
Weapons To Ukraine,” BuzzFeed News, November 21, 2017,
https://buzzfeednews.com/article/johnhudson/how-russia-hawks-are-
selling-trump-on-sending-weapons-to.

[734] Josh Lederman, “US agrees to send lethal weapons to Ukraine,

angering Russia,” AP, December 23, 2017,
https://apnews.com/article/71fd3f8ee74f488fb788accf1e7978e4.

[735] Eli Clifton, “Trump’s Choice of Bolton Satisfies His Biggest Donor,”
LobeLog, March 24, 2018, https://lobelog.com/trumps-choice-of-bolton-
satisfies-his-biggest-donor.
[736] Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, “The Spy War: How the CIA
Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” New York Times, February 25, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/the-spy-war-how-the-cia-
secretly-helps-ukraine-fight-putin.html.

[737] Serbia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria and Yemen.
See above; Enough Already; Antiwar.com.

[738] Adrián Osvaldo Ravier and Peter Lewin, “The Subprime Crisis,”
Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics, Vol. 15, No. 1 (Spring 2012),
https://mises.org/quarterly-journal-austrian-economics/subprime-crisis.

[739] Staff, “2000s: ‘Apprentice’ Helps Donald Trump Finally Launch A

White House Bid,” NBC News, July 6, 2016, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=TSVPDrR8GyQ.

[740] Tom Winter, “Trump’s DHS chief Kirstjen Nielsen: ‘Let me be clear.
It was the Russians,’” NBC News, July 31, 2018,
https://nbcnews.com/politics/elections/trump-s-dhs-chief-kirstjen-nielsen-
let-me-be-clear-n896191.

[741] “Novichok nerve agent use in Salisbury: UK government response,

March to April 2018,” Foreign & Commonwealth Office, Prime Minister’s
Office, 10 Downing Street, Home Office, and Ministry of Defence, March
14, 2018, https://gov.uk/government/news/novichok-nerve-agent-use-in-
salisbury-uk-government-response; “OPCW Issues Report on Technical
Assistance Requested by the United Kingdom – Incident in Salisbury UK,”
OPCW, April 12, 2018, https://opcw.org/media-centre/news/2018/04/opcw-
issues-report-technical-assistance-requested-united-kingdom.

[742] James Masters, “Ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal discharged from

Salisbury hospital after poisoning,” CNN, May 18, 2018,
https://cnn.com/2018/05/18/europe/sergei-skripal-discharged-
intl/index.html.

[743] “Yulia Skripal: ‘Assassination attempt turned my life upside down,’”

Al Jazeera English, May 24, 2018, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=rjRunF_zrrA; Ellen Barry, “Yulia Skripal Describes ‘Extremely Painful’
Recovery From Poisoning,” New York Times, May 23, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/05/23/world/europe/uk-yulia-skripal-
poisoning.html.

[744] Steven Morris and Kevin Rawlinson, “Novichok victim found

substance disguised as perfume in sealed box,” Guardian, July 24, 2018,
https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/jul/24/novichok-victim-ill-within-
15-minutes-says-partner-charlie-rowley.

[745] Richard Pérez-Peña, “Britain Expels 23 Russian Diplomats Over Ex-

Spy’s Poisoning,” New York Times, March 14, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/03/14/world/europe/uk-russia-spy-punitive-
measures.html.

[746] Zamira Rahim, “Salisbury attack: Novichok bottle was not recovered
for more than three months, police say,” Independent, September 25, 2019,
https://independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/salisbury-attack-novichok-bottle-
perfume-sergei-skripal-russia-a9120576.html.

[747] Staff, “Russian spy: Salisbury attack was ‘brazen and reckless,’”
BBC, March 8, 2018, https://bbc.com/news/uk-43326734.

[748] Jake Kanter, “Putin will have broken a huge rule of the spy game if he
was behind the poisoning of ex-agent Sergei Skripal,” Business Insider,
March 8, 2018, https://businessinsider.com/sergei-skripal-poisoning-russia-
spy-swap-deals-at-risk-2018-3.

[749] Staff, “It’s the Russians, says chemist who uncovered existence of
‘Novichok,’” AFP, March 14, 2018, https://france24.com/en/20180314-its-
russians-says-chemist-who-uncovered-existence-novichok.

[750] Martin Fricker, “Haunting CCTV shows ex-spy Sergei Skripal and
daughter driving into town hours before being found poisoned,” Mirror,
March 16, 2018, https://mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/haunting-cctv-shows-
ex-spy-12201157.

[751] Gordon Corera, “Russian spy: Salisbury attack was ‘brazen and
reckless,’” BBC, March 8, 2018, https://bbc.com/news/uk-43326734.

[752] “OPCW Spokesperson’s Statement on Amount of Nerve Agent Used

in Salisbury,” OPCW, May 4, 2018, https://opcw.org/media-
centre/news/2018/05/opcw-spokespersons-statement-amount-nerve-agent-
used-salisbury.
[753] “Full Investigation Must Swiftly Identify, Apprehend Perpetrators,
Security Council Hears during Heated Discussion on Salisbury Chemical
Attack,” UNSC, April 5, 2018,
https://press.un.org/en/2018/sc13279.doc.htm.

[754] Staff, “Russian spy: Salisbury diners told to wash possessions,” BBC,
March 11, 2018, https://bbc.com/news/uk-43362673.

[755] Amir Vera, et al., “Novichok poisoning: Murder probe opened after
UK woman dies,” CNN, July 9, 2018, https://cnn.com/2018/07/08/uk/uk-
woman-dies-after-being-exposed-to-soviet-era-nerve-agent-authorities-
say/index.html.

[756] Steven Morris and Caroline Bannock, “Novichok victim: ‘We’re

being kept in the dark,’” Guardian, June 21, 2019,
https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/jun/21/novichok-victim-partner-
kept-in-the-dark-charlie-rowley-dawn-sturgess.

[757] Andy Coulson, “Nick Bailey on being poisoned, losing everything

and finding peace,” Crisis, What Crisis? June 25, 2021, Series 4, Episode
25, https://crisiswhatcrisis.com/podcasts/nick-bailey-on-being-poisoned-
losing-everything-and-finding-peace.

[758] “Summary of the Report on Activities Carried Out in Support of a

Request of Technical Assistance by the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland,” OPCW, April 12, 2018,
https://opcw.org/sites/default/files/documents/S_series/2018/en/s-1612-
2018_e_.pdf.

[759] Robert Mendick, et al., “Poisoned Russian spy Sergei Skripal was
close to consultant who was linked to the Trump dossier,” Telegraph, March
7, 2018, https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/07/poisoned-russian-spy-
sergei-skripal-close-consultant-linked.

[760] Lizzie Dearden, “Sergei Skripal: Former double agent may have been
poisoned with nerve agent over ‘freelance’ spying, sources say,”
Independent, March 8, 2018,
https://independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/sergei-skripal-freelance-spying-
targeted-russian-spy-double-agent-poisoning-nerve-agent-salisbury-
a8246686.html.

[761] Bernard, “NHS Doctor: ‘No Patients Have Experienced Symptoms

Of Nerve Agent Poisoning In Salisbury,’” Moon of Alabama, March 19,
2018, https://moonofalabama.org/2018/03/no-patients-have-experienced-
symptoms-of-nerve-agent-poisoning-in-salisbury.html.

[762] Richard Pérez-Peña and Ellen Barry, “UK Charges 2 Men in

Novichok Poisoning, Saying They’re Russian Agents,” New York Times,
September 5, 2018, https://nytimes.com/2018/09/05/world/europe/russia-
uk-novichok-skripal.html.

[763] Mark Nicol, “Novichok suspects’ drug-fuelled night of ‘cannabis and

prostitutes’ at £75-a-night East London hotel just hours before Salisbury
attack,” Daily Mail, September 16, 2018,
https://dailymail.co.uk/news/russia/article-6172497/Novichok-suspects-
drug-fuelled-night-cannabis-prostitutes-75-night-London-hotel.html.

[764] Rob Slane, “Summing up the Official Claims in the Salisbury

Poisonings: Weighed in the Balances and Found Wanting,” The Blogmire,
January 9, 2019,
https://web.archive.org/web/20190114225024/http://theblogmire.com/sum
ming-up-the-official-claims-in-the-salisbury-poisonings-weighed-in-the-
balances-and-found-wanting.

[765] Staff, “Suspect Indeed: Odd Moments From RT’s Interview With The
Novichok ‘Lads,’” RFERL, September 13, 2018, https://rferl.org/a/suspect-
indeed-odd-moments-from-rt-s-interview-with-novichok-
suspects/29488278.html; Andrew Higgins, “Tragedy? Farce? Confusion?
The Method Behind That Russian Poisoning Interview,” New York Times,
September 18, 2018, https://nytimes.com/2018/09/18/world/europe/skripal-
poisoning-russia.html.

[766] Margarita Simonyan, “RT editor-in-chief’s exclusive interview with

Skripal case suspects Petrov & Boshirov,” RT, September 13, 2018,
https://rt.com/news/438356-rt-petrov-boshirov-full-interview.

[767] Owen Matthews, “Has Vladimir Putin Lost Control of Russia’s

Assassins?” Newsweek, March 12, 2018, https://newsweek.com/vladimir-
putin-lost-control-russia-assassins-840598.
[768] Vil S. Mirzayanov, State Secrets: An Insider’s Chronicle of the
Russian Chemical Weapons Program (Parker: Outskirts Press, 2008).

[769] Staff, “It’s the Russians, says chemist who uncovered existence of
‘Novichok,’” AFP, March 14, 2018, https://france24.com/en/20180314-its-
russians-says-chemist-who-uncovered-existence-novichok.

[770] Thomas Grove, “Puzzle in Hit on Russian Spy: How Did Attackers
Get the Nerve Agent?” Wall Street Journal, March 16, 2018,
https://wsj.com/articles/puzzle-in-hit-on-russian-spy-how-did-attackers-get-
the-nerve-agent-1521192600.

[771] “The scientist who developed ‘Novichok’: ‘Doses ranged from 20

grams to several kilos,’” The Bell, March 20, 2018, https://en.thebell.io/the-
scientist-who-developed-novichok-doses-ranged-from-20-grams-to-several-
kilos; Roman Shleinov, “Novichok has already killed,” Novaya Gazeta,
March 22, 2018, https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2018/03/22/75896-rezhim-
novichka.

[772] Interview with author, David B. Collum, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, March 30, 2018, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/3-30-18-david-
collum-on-the-poisoning-of-a-russian-ex-spy-in-london-and-austrian-
business-cycle.

[773] David B. Collum, “2018 Year in Review,” Peak Prosperity, December

21, 2018, https://peakprosperity.com/blog/114645/2018-year-review-part-2.
[774] Gareth Davies, “Guests of two-star London hotel where Salisbury
suspects stayed discover Novichok was found in bedroom,” Telegraph,
September 5, 2018, https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/05/guests-two-
star-london-hotel-salisbury-suspects-stayed-told.

[775] Ellen Barry and David Sanger, “Poisoned Door Handle Hints at High-
Level Plot to Kill Spy, UK Officials Say,” New York Times, April 1, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/04/01/world/europe/russia-sergei-skripal-uk-spy-
poisoning.html.

[776] Gareth Porter, “Another Dodgy British Dossier: the Skripal Case,”
Consortium News, April 21, 2018,
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/21/another-dodgy-british-dossier-the-
skripal-case.

[777] Rob Slane, “Summing up the Official Claims in the Salisbury

Poisonings: Weighed in the Balances and Found Wanting,” The Blogmire,
January 9, 2019,
https://web.archive.org/web/20190114225024/http://theblogmire.com/sum
ming-up-the-official-claims-in-the-salisbury-poisonings-weighed-in-the-
balances-and-found-wanting.

[778] Ewen MacAskill, “Russia tested nerve agent on door handles before
Skripal attack, UK dossier claims,” Guardian, April 13, 2018,
https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/13/russia-tested-nerve-agent-on-
door-handles-before-skripal-attack-uk-dossier-claims.
[779] Gareth Porter, “Another Dodgy British Dossier: the Skripal Case,”
Consortium News, April 21, 2018,
https://consortiumnews.com/2018/04/21/another-dodgy-british-dossier-the-
skripal-case.

[780] Julian Barnes and Adam Goldman, “Gina Haspel Relies on Spy Skills
to Connect With Trump. He Doesn’t Always Listen,” New York Times, April
16, 2019, https://nytimes.com/2019/04/16/us/politics/gina-haspel-
trump.html.

[781] Nick Pisa, “Putin’s Youngest Victim: Schoolboy, 12, on how he was
exposed to deadly poison after Russian spy Sergei Skripal gave him bread
to feed ducks in Salisbury,” The Sun, March 28, 2018,
https://thesun.co.uk/news/5916870/schoolboy-salisbury-nerve-agent-attack;
Alan Selby, “Three children taken to hospital after poisoned Sergei Skripal
handed them bread to feed ducks,” Mirror, March 24, 2018,
https://mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/three-children-taken-hospital-after-
12245559; Steven Morris and Caroline Bannock, “No children or ducks
harmed by novichok, say health officials,” Guardian, April 18, 2019,
https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/apr/18/no-children-ducks-harmed-
novichok-attack-wiltshire-health-officials.

[782] Phil Miller, “British army’s chief nursing officer first adult to help
double agent Sergei Skripal,” Morning Star Online, January 21, 2019,
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/british-army%E2%80%99s-chief-
nursing-officer-first-adult-to-help-double-agent-sergei-skripal.
[783] Lizzie Dearden, “Sergei Skripal: Former double agent may have been
poisoned with nerve agent over ‘freelance’ spying, sources say,”
Independent, March 8, 2018,
https://independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/sergei-skripal-freelance-spying-
targeted-russian-spy-double-agent-poisoning-nerve-agent-salisbury-
a8246686.html; Staff, “Russian spy: Salisbury attack was ‘brazen and
reckless,’” BBC, March 8, 2018, https://bbc.com/news/uk-43326734.

[784] Staff, “Novichok scientist Vil Mirzayanov warns of ‘irreversible’

damage caused by weapon,” ITV News, April 10, 2018,
https://itv.com/news/2018-04-10/scientist-vil-mirzayanov-warns-of-
irreversible-damage-caused-by-novichok.

[785] Pavel Borisov, “A hundred grand and hundreds of betrayed agents,”

Meduza, March 6, 2018, https://meduza.io/en/feature/2018/03/06/a-
hundred-grand-and-hundreds-of-betrayed-agents.

[786] “Treasury Designates Russian Oligarchs, Officials, and Entities in

Response to Worldwide Malign Activity,” US Treasury Department, April
6, 2018, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm0338.

[787] “Treasury Sanctions Russian Cyber Actors for Interference with the
2016 US Elections and Malicious Cyber-Attacks,” US Treasury
Department, March 15, 2018, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-
releases/sm0312.
[788] “Treasury Sanctions Russian Federal Security Service Enablers,” US
Treasury Department, June 11, 2018, https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-
releases/sm0410.

[789] Gardiner Harris, “US to Issue New Sanctions on Russia Over

Skripals’ Poisoning,” New York Times, August 8, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/08/08/world/europe/sanctions-russia-poisoning-
spy-trump-putin.html.

[790] Staff, “US imposes fresh sanctions for Russian cyber-related activity,”
Reuters, August 21, 2018, https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-
sanctions-treasury/u-s-imposes-fresh-sanctions-for-russian-cyber-related-
activity-idUSKCN1L61FB.

[791] Matthew Choi, “US blacklists Russian entities tied to election

meddling,” Politico, September 20, 2018,
https://politico.com/story/2018/09/20/trump-blacklists-russian-entities-
meddling-833012.

[792] Kyle Anzalone and Will Porter, “Dangerous Game: How the
Wreckage of Russiagate Ignited a New Cold War,” Libertarian Institute,
July 1, 2020, https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/dangerous-game-how-
the-wreckage-of-russiagate-ignited-a-new-cold-war.

[793] Greg Jaffe, et al., “Trump, a reluctant hawk, has battled his top aides
on Russia and lost,” Washington Post, April 15, 2018,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-a-reluctant-
hawk-has-battled-his-top-aides-on-russia-and-lost/2018/04/15/a91e850a-
3f1b-11e8-974f-aacd97698cef_story.html.

[794] Staff, “Alexey Navalny,” Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows

Program, 2010, https://worldfellows.yale.edu/person/alexey-navalny.

[795] Tweet by John O. Brennan, October 9, 2020,

https://x.com/JohnBrennan/status/1314587438568833025.

[796] Staff, “‘We found no cholinesterase inhibitors in Navalny’s blood’:

Omsk’s chief toxicologist comments on statement from Berlin’s Charite,”
RT, August 24, 2020, https://rt.com/russia/498928-omsk-doctors-
cholinesterase-navalny; Staff, “Therapist about the diagnosis of Alexei
Navalny: Hypoglycemic coma does not occur so abruptly,” Rosbalt, August
21, 2020, https://rosbalt.ru/piter/2020/08/21/1859760.html.

[797] Ben Aris, “Doctors deny Navalny poisoned, but refuse to let him
leave,” BNE IntelliNews, August 21, 2020, https://intellinews.com/doctors-
deny-navalny-poisoned-but-refuse-to-let-him-leave-190208.

[798] Aruna Viswanatha, et al., “Putin Didn’t Directly Order Alexei

Navalny’s February Death, US Spy Agencies Find,” Wall Street Journal,
April 27, 2024, https://wsj.com/world/russia/alexei-navalny-death-us-
intelligence-71bc95b0; Staff, “HUR Chief Budanov Says Seems Navalny
Died of Detached Blood Clot,” Kyiv Post, February 26, 2024,
https://kyivpost.com/post/28630.
[799] Peter Baker, “Navalny’s Death Raises Tensions Between US and
Russia,” New York Times, February 16, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/02/16/world/europe/biden-putin-navalny.html.

[800] Ann M. Simmons, “What Another Six Years of Putin May Bring for
Russia and the World,” Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2024,
https://wsj.com/world/russia/what-another-six-years-of-putin-may-bring-
for-russia-and-the-world-d044d47b?mod=hp_lead_pos2.

[801] Royce Kurmelovs and Katya Kazbek, “Who is Alexei Navalny?

Behind the myth of the West’s favorite Russian opposition figure,”
Grayzone, January 28, 2021, https://thegrayzone.com/2021/01/28/alexei-
navalny-myth-wests-russian-opposition-figure.

[802] Marek Minar, “Navalny Cockroach Video,” April 5, 2021,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=hT0tCSaWZ9Q; Shaun Walker, “Interview:
Alexei Navalny on Putin’s Russia: ‘All autocratic regimes come to an
end,’” Guardian, April 29, 2017,
https://theguardian.com/world/2017/apr/29/alexei-navalny-on-putins-russia-
all-autocratic-regimes-come-to-an-end; Anatoly Karlin, “Navalny’s Petty
Racism,” February 18, 2012, https://akarlin.com/navalny-petty-racist.

[803] Roni Greenfield, “Navalny’s Policy Shift on Crimea May Be Too

Little, Too Late,” Moscow Times, March 7, 2023,
https://themoscowtimes.com/2023/03/07/navalnys-policy-shift-on-crimea-
may-be-too-little-too-late-a80396.
[804] Vladyslav Faraponov, “What Does Aleksey Navalny Really Think
About Ukraine, Crimea And Donbas?” Ukraine World, January 21, 2021,
https://ukraineworld.org/en/articles/opinions/what-does-aleksey-navalny-
really-think-about-ukraine-crimea-and-donbas.

[805] Aaron Maté, “In Navalny poisoning, rush to judgment threatens new
Russia-NATO crisis,” Grayzone, September 6, 2020,
https://thegrayzone.com/2020/09/06/in-navalny-poisoning-rush-to-
judgment-threatens-new-russia-nato-crisis.

[806] Katrin Bennhold and Michael Schwirtz, “Navalny, Awake and Alert,
Plans to Return to Russia, German Official Says,” New York Times,
September 14, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/09/14/world/europe/navalny-novichok.html;
Michael Schwirtz, “Nerve Agent Was Used to Poison Navalny, Chemical
Weapons Body Confirms,” New York Times, October 6, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/10/06/world/europe/navalny-opcw-russia-
novichok.html.

[807] “FSB Team of Chemical Weapon Experts Implicated in Alexey

Navalny Novichok Poisoning,” Bellingcat, December 14, 2020,
https://bellingcat.com/news/uk-and-europe/2020/12/14/fsb-team-of-
chemical-weapon-experts-implicated-in-alexey-navalny-novichok-
poisoning; “Call Between Alexey Navalny and FSB Officer Konstantin
Kudryavtsev,” Bellingcat, December 21, 2020, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=gwvA49ZXnf8.
[808] “Upskilling to Upscale: Unleashing the Capacity of Civil Society to
Counter Disinformation,” Institute for Statecraft Integrity Initiative, June
2018,
https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Upskilling_to_Upscale:_Unleashin
g_the_Capacity_of_Civil_Society_to_Counter_Disinformation.

[809] Michael Schwirtz, “Russian Officers Were Near Navalny When He

Was Poisoned, Report Says,” New York Times, December 14, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/12/14/world/europe/navalny-russian-officers-
poisoned.html.

[810] Bernard, “Navalny Gets Skripaled,” Moon of Alabama, September 2,

2020, https://moonofalabama.org/2020/09/navalny-gets-skripaled.html;
Bernard, “The Back And Forth About Navalny’s ‘Poisoning,’” Moon of
Alabama, August 25, 2020, https://moonofalabama.org/2020/08/the-back-
and-forth-about-navalnys-poisoning-.html.

[811] John Daniszewski, “Poison Hidden in a Letter May Have Killed

Rebel in Chechnya,” Los Angeles Times, May 1, 2002,
https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-may-01-fg-poison1-story.html.

[812] Staff, “Navalny Links Kremlin to Trump Campaign Aide Paul

Manafort,” Moscow Times, February 8, 2018,
https://themoscowtimes.com/2018/02/08/navalny-claims-proof-kremlins-
ties-to-trump-campaign-aide-paul-manafort-a60442.
[813] Anton Troianovski and Peter Baker, “Biden Says ‘Putin Is
Responsible’ After Report of Navalny’s Death,” New York Times, February
16, 2024, https://nytimes.com/live/2024/02/16/world/aleksei-navalny.

[814] Caitlin Yilek, “Biden blames Putin for Alexey Navalny’s reported
death in Russian prison,” CBS News, February 16, 2024,
https://cbsnews.com/news/biden-alexey-navalny-death; David J. Kramer,
“Putin’s latest victim: Aleksei Navalny,” George W. Bush Center, February
16, 2024, https://bushcenter.org/publications/aleksei-navalny-putins-latest-
victim; Anne Applebaum, “Why Russia Killed Navalny,” The Atlantic,
February 16, 2024, https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/navalny-
death-russia-prison/677485; Anne McElvoy and Peter Snowdon, “Navalny
was ‘murdered’ on Putin’s direct orders, key opposition figure alleges,”
Politico Europe, May 22, 2024, https://politico.eu/article/alexei-navalny-
murdered-orders-vladimir-putin-russia-leonid-volkov.

[815] Staff, “HUR Chief Budanov Says Seems Navalny Died of Detached
Blood Clot,” Kyiv Post, February 26, 2024,
https://kyivpost.com/post/28630.

[816] Aruna Viswanatha, et al., “Putin Didn’t Directly Order Alexei

Navalny’s February Death, US Spy Agencies Find,” Wall Street Journal,
April 27, 2024, https://wsj.com/world/russia/alexei-navalny-death-us-
intelligence-71bc95b0.

[817] Anton Troianovski and Valeriya Safronova, “Aleksei Navalny, Fiery

Putin Critic, Is Handed a New, 9-Year Prison Sentence,” New York Times,
March 22, 2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/03/22/world/europe/russia-
navalny-prison.html; Staff, “Kremlin Critic Alexei Navalny Convicted of
Extremism and Sentenced to 19 Years in Prison,” Time, August 4, 2023,
https://time.com/6301990/alexei-navalny-convicted-sentenced.

[818] Dmitry Adamsky, “Cross-Domain Coercion: The Current Russian Art

of Strategy,” Proliferation Papers, No. 54, November 2015,
https://ifri.org/sites/default/files/atoms/files/pp54adamsky.pdf; Molly K.
McKew, “The Gerasimov Doctrine,” Politico Magazine,
September/October 2017,
https://politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/05/gerasimov-doctrine-russia-
foreign-policy-215538; Martin Murphy, “Understanding Russia’s Concept
for Total War in Europe,” Heritage Foundation, September 12, 2016,
https://heritage.org/defense/report/understanding-russias-concept-total-war-
europe; Tetyana Malyarenko and Borys Kormych, “The Barbarism of
Hybrid Warfare,” Woodrow Wilson Center, March 17, 2022,
https://wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/barbarism-hybrid-warfare; V. Morris,
“Grading Gerasimov: Evaluating Russian Nonlinear War Through Modern
Chinese Doctrine,” Small Wars Journal, September 17, 2015,
https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/grading-gerasimov-evaluating-russian-
nonlinear-war-through-modern-chinese-doctrine; Mason Clark and
Catherine Harris, “Russia in Review: The Gerasimov Doctrine Is Here To
Stay,” Institute for the Study of War, October 30, 2018,
https://iswresearch.org/2018/10/russia-in-review-gerasimov-doctrine-
is.html; Robert Coalson, “Top Russian General Lays Bare Putin’s Plan for
Ukraine,” Huffington Post, September 2, 2014,
https://huffpost.com/entry/valery-gerasimov-putin-ukraine_b_5748480;
Staff, “Valery Gerasimov: The ‘military man from head to toe’ tasked by
Russia to win the Ukraine war,” First Post, January 12, 2023,
https://firstpost.com/explainers/valery-gerasimov-russia-ukraine-war-new-
commander-11974472.html.

[819] Mark Galeotti, “The ‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ and Russian Non-Linear

War,” In Moscow’s Shadows, July 6, 2014,
https://inmoscowsshadows.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/the-gerasimov-
doctrine-and-russian-non-linear-war.

[820] Valery Gerasimov, “The Value of Science is in the Foresight,”

Translation in Military Review, January–February 2016,
https://armyupress.army.mil/Portals/7/military-
review/Archives/English/MilitaryReview_20160228_art001.pdf.

[821] Roger N. McDermott, “Does Russia Have a Gerasimov Doctrine?”

Parameters, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2016),
https://press.armywarcollege.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=2827&context=parameters.

[822] Lieutenant General Vincent R. Stewart, US MC Director Defense

Intelligence Agency, “Russia Military Power: Building a Military to
Support Great Power Aspirations,” Defense Intelligence Agency, 2017,
https://dia.mil/Portals/110/Images/News/Military_Powers_Publications/Rus
sia_Military_Power_Report_2017.pdf.
[823] Molly K. McKew, “The Gerasimov Doctrine,” Politico Magazine,
September/October 2017,
https://politico.com/magazine/story/2017/09/05/gerasimov-doctrine-russia-
foreign-policy-215538.

[824] Martin Murphy, “Understanding Russia’s Concept for Total War in

Europe,” Heritage Foundation, September 12, 2016,
https://heritage.org/defense/report/understanding-russias-concept-total-war-
europe.

[825] Henry Foy, “Valery Gerasimov, the general with a doctrine for
Russia,” Financial Times, September 15, 2017,
https://ft.com/content/7e14a438-989b-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b.

[826] Mark Galeotti, “I’m Sorry for Creating the ‘Gerasimov Doctrine,’”
Foreign Policy, March 5, 2018, https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/05/im-
sorry-for-creating-the-gerasimov-doctrine; Mark Galeotti, “The mythical
‘Gerasimov Doctrine’ and the language of threat,” Critical Studies on
Security, Vol. 7, No. 2 (February 27, 2018),
https://tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21624887.2018.1441623.

[827] Roger McDermott, “Gerasimov Calls for New Strategy to Counter

Color Revolution,” Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor, Vol. 13,
No. 46 (March 8, 2016), https://jamestown.org/program/gerasimov-calls-
for-new-strategy-to-counter-color-revolution.
[828] Staff, “Nagorno-Karabakh: New Opening, or More Peril?” Crisis
Group, July 4, 2016, https://crisisgroup.org/europe-central-
asia/caucasus/azerbaijan/nagorno-karabakh-new-opening-or-more-peril.

[829] Staff, “Kerry Calls For ‘Ultimate Resolution’ Of Nagorno-Karabakh

Conflict,” RFERL, March 31, 2016, https://rferl.org/a/azerbaijan-kerry-
karabakh-armenia-conflict-resolution/27645930.html.

[830] Justin Raimondo, “Nagorno-Karabakh: The April Fool’s War,”

Antiwar.com, April 4, 2016,
https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/04/03/nagorno-karabakh-april-
fools-war.

[831] Justin Raimondo, “Hey There, Heydar!” Antiwar.com, June 21, 1999,
https://antiwar.com/justin/j062199.html.

[832] Staff, “Civil Society and Media in Armenia,” USAID, January 2019,
https://usaidlearninglab.org/system/files/resource/files/usaid_armenia_drg_
civil_society_and_media_evidence_review_-_final_2019-02-12.pdf.

[833] Staff, “Breaking: Serge Sarkisian Resigns as Prime Minister,” The

Armenian Weekly, April 23, 2018,
https://armenianweekly.com/2018/04/23/breaking-serge-sarkisian-resigns-
as-prime-minister.

[834] Karlen Aslanian, “Huge Crowds Keep Up Pressure On Armenian

PM,” RFERL, April 22, 2018, https://azatutyun.am/a/29185545.html.
[835] David Brennan, “Why You Should Care About the Escalating
Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict,” Newsweek, September 29, 2020,
https://newsweek.com/why-you-should-care-about-escalating-nagorno-
karabakh-conflict-1534912.

[836] John Pike, “Nagorno-Karabakh/Republic of Artsakh,” Global

Security, July 21, 2024,
https://globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/nagorno-karabakh.htm.

[837] Gabriel Gavin, “We can’t rely on Russia to protect us anymore,

Armenian PM says,” Politico Europe, September 13, 2023,
https://politico.eu/article/we-cant-rely-russia-protect-us-anymore-nikol-
pashinyan-armenia-pm.

[838] Rob Garver, “US Troops’ Arrival in Armenia for Training Riles
Russia,” Voice of America, September 11, 2023, https://voanews.com/a/us-
troops-arrival-in-armenia-for-training-riles-russia/7264316.html.

[839] See Chapter Six.

[840] Michael O’Hanlon, “Saddam’s Bomb,” Slate, September 18, 2002,

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2002/09/how-close-is-iraq-to-having-a-
nuclear-weapon.html.

[841] Michael O’Hanlon, Beyond Nato: A New Security Architecture for

Eastern Europe (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 2017), 2–3,
https://brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/full-text_-beyond-
nato.pdf.
[842] Staff, “Russia says US, Ukraine reject its UN proposal for Eastern
Ukraine: TASS,” Reuters, September 18, 2017,
https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-russia-peacekeepers-
iduskcn1bt0p5.

[843] James Sherr, “Proposal a Classic Putin Gambit,” Chatham House,

October 16, 2017, https://chathamhouse.org/2017/10/donbas-peacekeepers-
proposal-classic-putin-gambit.

[844] Robbie Gramer, “Trump, Tillerson Tap Russia Hawk Volker for
Ukraine Envoy,” Foreign Policy, July 7, 2017,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/07/trump-taps-russia-hawk-volker-for-
ukraine-envoy-putin-russia-kremlin-kiev-nato-europe-tillerson.

[845] Patricia Zengerle, “US doesn’t want to be ‘handcuffed’ to Ukraine

agreement,” Reuters, June 14, 2017, https://reuters.com/article/world/us-
doesnt-want-to-be-handcuffed-to-ukraine-agreement-idUSKBN1952QH.

[846] “Fact Sheet: NATO-Ukraine relations,” NATO, February 2022,

https://nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2022/2/pdf/220214-
factsheet_NATO-Ukraine_Relations_.pdf.

[847] “Nuclear Posture Review 2018,” US Defense Department, February

2018, https://media.defense.gov/2018/Feb/02/2001872886/-1/-1/1/2018-
nuclear-posture-review-final-report.pdf.

[848] “Instant global strike: why the enemy should be afraid of the latest
Sarmat missile,” TV Zvezda, May 7, 2016,
https://tvzvezda.ru/news/201605070850-p0pm.htm; “Russia’s New ICBM
Sarmat Can Penetrate Defense Shield, Wipe Out Texas,” Sputnik, May 8,
2016, https://sputniknews.com/20160508/russia-ballistic-missile-sarmat-
1039258053.html.

[849] Mark Trevelyan, “Russia tests nuclear-capable missile that Putin calls
world’s best,” Reuters, April 20, 2022,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/russia-tests-new-intercontinental-ballistic-
missile-2022-04-20.

[850] Blake Stilwell, “The World’s Most Powerful Nuclear Missile Is a

Russian ICBM Nicknamed ‘Satan,’” Military.com, April 14, 2022,
https://military.com/history/worlds-most-powerful-nuclear-missile-russian-
icbm-nicknamed-satan.html.

[851] Mark Trevelyan, “Russia tests nuclear-capable missile that Putin calls
world’s best,” Reuters, April 20, 2022,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/russia-tests-new-intercontinental-ballistic-
missile-2022-04-20.

[852] Lyle J. Goldstein, “Threat Inflation, Russian Military Weakness, and

the Resulting Nuclear Paradox,” Cost of War Project, September 15, 2022,
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/Threat%20Infla
tion%20and%20Russian%20Military%20Weakness_Goldstein_CostsofWar
-2.pdf.
[853] Vladimir Putin, “Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly,”
Kremlin, March 1, 2018, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/56957.

[854] “Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview with Mediaset, Italian

television network,” Russian Foreign Ministry, May 1, 2022,
https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1811569.

[855] “Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community,”

Office of the Director of National Intelligence, February 5, 2024,
https://dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2024-Unclassified-
Report.pdf.

[856] Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Russian nuclear weapons,

2022,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 78, No. 2 (2022), 98–121,
https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2022.2038907.

[857] Holly Ellyatt, “Is Russia’s latest provocation great timing for
Ukraine?” CNBC, November 27, 2018, https://cnbc.com/2018/11/27/russia-
ukraine-ships-seizure-could-spell-more-sanctions-on-russia.html.

[858] Press Release, “Treasury Sanctions Russia over Continued

Aggression in Ukraine,” US Treasury Department, March 15, 2019,
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/sm629.

[859] Oliver Carroll, “How Ukraine became the unlikely home for Isis
leaders escaping the caliphate,” Independent, November 21, 2019,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/isis-leaders-ukraine-tukey-
syria-caliphate-al-bara-shishani-a9211676.html.
[860] Oliver Carroll, “How Ukraine became the unlikely home for Isis
leaders escaping the caliphate,” Independent, November 21, 2019,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/isis-leaders-ukraine-tukey-
syria-caliphate-al-bara-shishani-a9211676.html.

[861] Joshua Cohen, “Ukraine’s ultra-right militias are challenging the

government to a showdown,” Washington Post, June 15, 2017,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/democracy-post/wp/2017/06/15/ukraines-
ultra-right-militias-are-challenging-the-government-to-a-showdown; Staff,
“‘Azovites’ threatened MPs with physical violence,” Korrespondent.net,
May 20, 2016, https://korrespondent.net/ukraine/3685301-azovtsy-
pryhrozyly-fyzycheskoi-raspravoi-nardepam.

[862] Staff, “Ukraine election: Comedian Zelensky wins presidency by

landslide,” BBC, April 22, 2019, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-
48007487.

[863] David Rennie, “Remember Churchill: US hawks cite ‘lone stand’ to

justify war on Iraq,” Telegraph, August 29, 2002,
https://telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1405726/Remem
ber-Churchill-US-hawks-cite-lone-stand-to-justify-war-on-Iraq.html.

[864] Press Release, “President George W. Bush Meets with Ukrainian

President Volodymyr Zelenskyy,” George W. Bush Center, May 5, 2022,
https://bushcenter.org/newsroom/president-george-w-bush-meets-with-
ukrainian-president-volodymyr-zelenskyy.
[865] Staff, “Ukrainian Police: 22 Officers Hospitalized After Clashes With
Far-Right Activists,” RFERL, March 10, 2019, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-
police-twenty-officers-hospitalized-after-clashes-with-far-right-
activists/29813289.html.

[866] Tweet by Volodymyr Viatrovych, April 14, 2019,

https://x.com/viatrovych/status/1117402906809065472.

[867] Lilia Ragutskaya, “Yarosh: if Zelensky betrays Ukraine, he will lose

not his position, but his life,” Obozrevatel, May 27, 2019,
https://incident.obozrevatel.com/ukr/crime/dmitro-yarosh-1-chastina-
intervyu.htm.

[868] David Broder, Richard Sakwa interview, “Biden’s Escalation With

Russia Over Ukraine Is a Terrible Idea,” Jacobin, January 26, 2022,
https://jacobin.com/2022/01/putin-nato-us-war-Donbas-minsk-2.

[869] Tarik Cyril Amar, et al., “Supporting Ukraine Means Opposing Anti-
Semitic Nationalism Now, Not Later,” Tablet, March 23, 2014,
https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/no-time-to-waste-in-ukraine.

[870] Volodymyr Ishchenko, “Ukraine has ignored the far right for too long
– it must wake up to the danger,” Guardian, November 13, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/13/ukraine-far-right-
fascism-mps.

[871] Josh Cohen, “Ukraine’s Got a Real Problem with Far-Right Violence
(And No, RT Didn’t Write This Headline),” Atlantic Council, June 20,
2018, https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/ukraine-s-got-a-real-
problem-with-far-right-violence-and-no-rt-didn-t-write-this-headline.

[872] Staff, “Inside a Ukrainian nationalist camp training kids to kill,” CBS
News, November 12, 2018, https://cbsnews.com/news/ukrainian-
nationalist-camp-training-kids-to-kill.

[873] Jonathan Brunson, “Russia Isn’t the Only Threat to Ukrainian

Democracy: The Impact of Far-Right Nationalist Revolutionaries,” War on
the Rocks, April 20, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/russia-isnt-
the-only-threat-to-ukrainian-democracy-the-impact-of-far-right-nationalist-
revolutionaries.

[874] Maryana Pietsuh, “Andrey Parubiy: The Law on the Prosecutor

General’s Office is a matter of national security,” Ukrainska Pravda, May
24, 2016, https://pravda.com.ua/rus/articles/2016/05/24/7109442.

[875] Pavlo Solodko, “The opposition are fascists! As it was 10 years ago,”
Istorychna Pravda, May 24, 2013,
http://istpravda.com.ua/artefacts/2013/05/24/124685.

[876] Kait Bolongaro, “By Russian Orthodox Church a ‘national security

threat’ to Ukraine, says president,” Politico Europe, July 28, 2018,
https://politico.eu/article/petro-poroshenko-ukraine-russian-orthodox-
church-a-national-security-threat-to-ukraine-says-president.

[877] Lev Golinkin, “How the Holocaust Haunts Eastern Europe,” New
York Times, January 26, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/01/26/opinion/holocaust-eastern-europe.html.

[878] Jonathan Brunson, “Russia Isn’t the Only Threat to Ukrainian

Democracy: The Impact of Far-Right Nationalist Revolutionaries,” War on
the Rocks, April 20, 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/04/russia-isnt-
the-only-threat-to-ukrainian-democracy-the-impact-of-far-right-nationalist-
revolutionaries.

[879] Christian Wehrschütz, “Special Envoy Sajdik: Having a new plan to

solve the Ukraine crisis,” Kleine Zeitung, January 24, 2019,
https://kleinezeitung.at/politik/aussenpolitik/5567894/ExklusivInterview_S
ondergesandter-Sajdik_Haben-neuen-Plan-zur; Staff, “OSCE envoy unveils
new peace plan for E. Ukraine,” Xinhua, January 1, 2019,
http://xinhuanet.com/english/2019-01/29/c_137782354.htm.

[880] Ihor Prokopchuk, “Statement in response to Ambassador Martin

Sajdik, Special Representative of the Chairperson-in-Office, and
Ambassador Ertuğrul Apakan, Chief Monitor of the OSCE Special
Monitoring Mission to Ukraine,” Ukraine Foreign Ministry, February 1,
2019, https://mfa.gov.ua/en/news/70283-zajava-delegaciji-ukrajini-u-
vidpovidy-na-dopovidi-specpredstavnika-dijuchogo-golovi-obse-martina-
sajdika-ta-glavi-smm-obse-v-ukrajini-jertugrula-apakana-movoju-originalu.

[881] Staff, “Ukrainian Nationalists Disrupt Peace Presentation On War In

East,” RFERL, March 12, 2020, https://rferl.org/a/ukrainian-nationalists-
disrupt-peace-presentation-on-war-in-east/30484359.html.
[882] Christopher Miller, “Explainer: What Is The Steinmeier Formula –
And Did Zelenskiy Just Capitulate To Moscow?” RFERL, October 2, 2019,
https://rferl.org/a/what-is-the-steinmeier-formula-and-did-zelenskiy-just-
capitulate-to-moscow-/30195593.html.

[883] See Chapter One.

[884] Paul Sonne and David L. Stern, “A year in the trenches has hardened
Ukraine’s president,” Washington Post, February 22, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/22/volodymyr-zelensky-
president-war-ukraine.

[885] Justin Lynch, “Zelensky Flounders in Bid to End Ukraine’s War,”

Foreign Policy, October 11, 2019,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/11/zelensky-pushes-peace-deal-ukraine-
war-russia-Donbas-steinmeier-formula.

[886] Christopher Miller, “Explainer: What Is The Steinmeier Formula –

And Did Zelenskiy Just Capitulate To Moscow?” RFERL, October 2, 2019,
https://rferl.org/a/what-is-the-steinmeier-formula-and-did-zelenskiy-just-
capitulate-to-moscow-/30195593.html.

[887] Christopher Miller, “Explainer: What Is The Steinmeier Formula –

And Did Zelenskiy Just Capitulate To Moscow?” RFERL, October 2, 2019,
https://rferl.org/a/what-is-the-steinmeier-formula-and-did-zelenskiy-just-
capitulate-to-moscow-/30195593.html.
[888] Ann M. Simmons, “Ukraine Plan to End Conflict With Russia Meets
Resistance,” Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2019,
https://wsj.com/articles/ukraine-plan-to-end-conflict-with-russia-meets-
resistance-11571081695.

[889] Staff, “Ukrainians gather on Kyiv’s Maidan to protest against

‘Steinmeier formula’ for Donbas,” UNIAN, October 6, 2019,
https://unian.info/kyiv/10710540-ukrainians-gather-on-kyiv-s-maidan-to-
protest-against-steinmeier-formula-for-donbas-photos-video.html.

[890] Staff, “Far-right groups protest Ukrainian president’s peace plan,” AP,
October 14, 2019, https://latimes.com/world-nation/story/2019-10-
14/ukraine-protest-zelensky-peace-plan.

[891] Maryna Vorotnyuk, “Ukrainian Protests Against the Steinmeier

Formula – A View From the Ground,” Jamestown Foundation Eurasia
Daily Monitor, Vol. 16, No. 145 (October 21, 2019),
https://jamestown.org/program/ukrainian-protests-against-the-steinmeier-
formula-a-view-from-the-ground.

[892] “Protests against Zelenskyy’s peace plan for Donbas continue as

12,000 march in Kyiv,” Euromaidan Press, October 15, 2019,
https://euromaidanpress.com/2019/10/15/steinmeier-formula-protest-
continue-as-12000-march-in-kyiv-ukraine.

[893] Moss Robeson, “‘Now, All of You Are Azov’: Ukrainian ‘Neo-Nazis’
Tour US,” Ukes, Kooks & Spooks, October 5, 2022,
https://mossrobeson.medium.com/now-all-of-you-are-azov-ukrainian-neo-
nazis-tour-u-s-3bf4eddb34e2.

[894] Aaron Maté, “Siding With Ukraine’s Far-right, US Sabotaged

Zelensky’s Mandate for Peace,” Aaron Maté Substack, April 10, 2022,
https://mate.substack.com/p/siding-with-ukraines-far-right-us.

[895] Lilia Ragutskaya, “Yarosh: if Zelensky betrays Ukraine, he will lose

not his position, but his life,” Obozrevatel, May 27, 2019,
https://incident.obozrevatel.com/ukr/crime/dmitro-yarosh-1-chastina-
intervyu.htm.

OceanofPDF.com
[896] See Chapter Six.

[897] Oksana Grytsenko, “‘I’m Not a Loser’: Zelensky Clashes with

Veterans Over Donbas Disengagement,” Kyiv Post, October 28, 2019,
https://kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/im-not-a-loser-zelensky-clashes-with-
veterans-over-donbas-disengagement.html.

[898] Shaun Walker, “Azov fighters are Ukraine’s greatest weapon and may
be its greatest threat,” Guardian, September 10, 2014,
https://theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/10/azov-far-right-fighters-ukraine-
neo-nazis.

[899] “Andriy Biletskyi: We have the courage to dissolve this Verkhovna

Rada,” February 22, 2017, https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xma2UwUHpsY.

[900] Oksana Grytsenko, “‘I’m Not a Loser’: Zelensky Clashes with

Veterans Over Donbas Disengagement,” Kyiv Post, October 28, 2019,
https://kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/im-not-a-loser-zelensky-clashes-with-
veterans-over-donbas-disengagement.html.

[901] Valery Engel, “Zelensky Struggles To Contain Ukraine’s Neo-Nazi

Problem,” Radical Right Analysis, November 30, 2019,
https://radicalrightanalysis.com/2019/11/30/zelensky-struggles-to-contain-
ukraines-neo-nazi-problem.

[902] Ilya Zhegulev, “How Putin Came to Hate Ukraine,” Nestka, April 25,
2023, https://verstka.media/kak-putin-pridumal-voynu.
[903] Aaron Maté, “US ‘success’ is Ukraine’s disaster,” Aaron Maté
Substack, November 28, 2022, https://mate.substack.com/p/us-success-is-
ukraines-disaster.

[904] Staff, “Beaten Up by the Nazis, Sivokho Is Back at It,” Ukraina, July
16, 2021, https://ukraina.ru/news/20210716/1031858276.html; Petro, 242–
43.

[905] “The President addressed the Parliament with the annual Address on
the Internal and External Situation of Ukraine and presented state awards,”
Volodymyr Zelensky, President of Ukraine, Official Online Representation,
December 1, 2021, https://president.gov.ua/news/prezident-vistupiv-u-
parlamenti-zi-shorichnim-poslannyam-pro-71817.

[906] Anton Troianovski, “‘A Threat From the Russian State’: Ukrainians
Alarmed as Troops Mass on Their Doorstep,” New York Times, April 10,
2021, https://nytimes.com/2021/04/20/world/europe/-ukraine-russia-putin-
invasion.html.

[907] Kim Sengupta, “Death of nationalist Ukrainian commander ‘Da

Vinci’ gives Russia a propaganda win,” Independent, March 9, 2023,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-war-russia-bakhmut-
zelensky-b2296581.html.

[908] Matthias Williams and Natalia Zinets, “Comedian faces scrutiny over
oligarch ties in Ukraine presidential race,” Reuters, April 1, 2019,
https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-election-zelenskiy-oligarch-
idUSKCN1RD30L; Elena Loginova, “Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore
Holdings of Ukrainian President and his Inner Circle,” Organized Crime
and Corruption Reporting Project, October 3, 2021, https://occrp.org/en/the-
pandora-papers/pandora-papers-reveal-offshore-holdings-of-ukrainian-
president-and-his-inner-circle; Ray Furlong, “Zelenskiy’s Oligarch
Connection,” RFERL, April 18, 2019, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-zelenskiy-
kolomoyskiy/29888017.html.

[909] Dana Kennedy, “Hunter Biden’s Ukraine contact allegedly a ‘fixer’

for shady oligarchs,” New York Post, October 31, 2020,
https://nypost.com/2020/10/31/hunter-bidens-ukraine-contact-allegedly-
fixer-for-rulers; Dmytro Hnap and Anna Babinets, “Kings of Ukrainian
Gas,” Anticorruption Action Center, October 26, 2012,
https://archive.is/HYr3k; See below.

[910] Graham Stack, “Oligarchs Weaponized Cyprus Branch of Ukraine’s

Largest Bank to Send $5.5 Billion Abroad,” Organized Crime and
Corruption Reporting Project, April 19, 2019,
https://occrp.org/en/investigations/oligarchs-weaponized-cyprus-eranch-of-
ukraines-largest-bank-to-send-5-billion-abroad; Michel, 192–96.

[911] Jim Armitage, “Oligarchs at War: Claims of Murder Among

Ukrainian Billionaires in High Court Case,” Independent, March 13, 2015,
https://independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/oligarchs-at-war-claims-of-
murder-among-ukrainian-billionaires-in-high-court-case-10107612.html.
[912] Damien Sharkov, “Ukrainian Nationalist Volunteers Committing
‘ISIS-Style’ War Crimes,” Newsweek, October 9, 2014,
http://newsweek.com/evidence-war-crimes-committed-ukrainian-
nationalist-volunteers-grows-269604; Staff, “Profile: Who are Ukraine’s
far-right Azov regiment?” Al Jazeera, March 1, 2022,
https://aljazeera.com/news/2022/3/1/who-are-the-azov-regiment; Tomas
Hirst, “Meet the private army controlled by sacked Ukrainian billionaire
Igor Kolomoisky,” Business Insider, March 25, 2015,
https://businessinsider.com/the-pocket-army-controlled-by-sacked-
ukrainian-billionaire-igor-kolomoisky-2015-3; Casey Michel, American
Kleptocracy: How the US Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering
Scheme in History (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2021), 180–81.

[913] Gabriela Baczynska, “Kiev pins hopes on oligarch in battle against

eastern separatists,” Reuters, May 23, 2014,
https://reuters.com/article/world/kiev-pins-hopes-on-oligarch-in-battle-
against-eastern-separatists-idUSKBN0E31V1; Alan Cullison, “Ukraine’s
Secret Weapon: Feisty Oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky,” Wall Street Journal,
June 27, 2014, http://wsj.com/articles/ukraines-secret-weapon-feisty-
oligarch-ihor-kolomoisky-1403886665; Josh Cohen, “In the Battle Between
Ukraine and Russian Separatists, Shady Private Armies Take the Field,”
Reuters, May 5, 2015, https://reuters.com/article/idUS60927080220150505.

[914] Andrew Cockburn, “Undelivered Goods,” Harper’s, August 13, 2015,

https://harpers.org/2015/08/undelivered-goods.
[915] Staff, “Breaking Bodies: Torture and Summary Executions in Eastern
Ukraine,” Amnesty International, May 2015, https://amnesty.org/en/wp-
content/uploads/2021/05/EUR5016832015ENGLISH.pdf; Staff, “You
Don’t Exist,” Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, July 21,
2016, https://hrw.org/report/2016/07/21/you-dont-exist/arbitrary-detentions-
enforced-disappearances-and-torture-eastern; Staff, “Ukraine: Abuses and
War Crimes by the Aidar Volunteer Battalion in the North Luhansk
Region,” Amnesty International, September 8, 2014,
https://amnesty.org/en/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/eur500402014en.pdf;
Staff, “Eastern Ukraine: Humanitarian disaster looms as food aid blocked,”
Amnesty International, December 24, 2014,
http://amnesty.org/en/news/eastern-ukraine-humanitarian-disaster-looms-
food-aid-blocked.

[916] Elizabeth Piper and Sergiy Karazy, “Special Report: Ukraine

struggles to control maverick battalions,” Reuters, July 29, 2015,
https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-battalions-special-rep/special-
report-ukraine-struggles-to-control-maverick-battalions-
idUSKCN0Q30YT20150729; See Chapter Four.

[917] Richard Balmforth, “Ukrainian oligarch under fire after night raid on
state oil firm,” Reuters, March 20, 2015, https://reuters.com/article/us-
ukraine-crisis-kolomoisky/ukrainian-oligarch-under-fire-after-night-raid-
on-state-oil-firm-idUSKBN0MG2A320150320; Tomas Hirst, “Meet the
Private Army Controlled by Sacked Ukrainian Billionaire Igor
Kolomoisky,” Business Insider, March 25, 2015,
https://businessinsider.com/the-pocket-army-controlled-by-sacked-
ukrainian-billionaire-igor-kolomoisky-2015-3; Michel, 181–82.

[918] Hahn, 292–93.

[919] “The Pandora Papers,” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting

Project, October 3, 2021, https://occrp.org/en/the-pandora-papers.

[920] Miranda Patrucic, et al., “Azerbaijan’s Ruling Aliyev Family and

Their Associates Acquired Dozens of Prime London Properties Worth
Nearly $700 Million,” ICIJ, October 3, 2021, https://occrp.org/en/the-
pandora-papers/azerbaijans-ruling-aliyev-family-and-their-associates-
acquired-dozens-of-prime-london-properties-worth-nearly-700-million;
Elena Loginova, “Pandora Papers Reveal Offshore Holdings of Ukrainian
President and his Inner Circle,” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting
Project, October 3, 2021, https://occrp.org/en/the-pandora-papers/pandora-
papers-reveal-offshore-holdings-of-ukrainian-president-and-his-inner-
circle; Staff, “World leaders scramble to limit fallout from Pandora Papers
revelations,” France 24, October 4, 2021,
https://france24.com/en/business/20211004-world-leaders-try-to-limit-
fallout-from-pandora-papers-revelations.

[921] Anton Troianovski, “A Ukrainian Billionaire Fought Russia. Now

He’s Ready to Embrace It,” New York Times, November 13, 2019,
https://nytimes.com/2019/11/13/world/europe/ukraine-ihor-kolomoisky-
russia.html.
[922] Andrew Cockburn, “Undelivered Goods,” Harper’s, August 13, 2015,
https://harpers.org/2015/08/undelivered-goods; Holly Ellyatt, “A bank
scandal, an oligarch and the IMF: Ukraine’s president has a lot to deal with
right now,” CNBC, September 20, 2019,
https://cnbc.com/2019/09/20/privatbank-ukraines-president-zelensky-and-
the-oligarch-kolomoisky.html.

[923] Interview with author, Andrew Cockburn, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, September 2, 2015, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/9215-
andrew-cockburn.

[924] Polina Ivanova and Pavel Polityuk, “Ukraine tycoon crows ‘I won’
after PrivatBank nationalization ruled illegal,” Reuters, April 18, 2019,
https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-privatbank/ukraine-tycoon-crows-i-
won-after-privatbank-nationalization-ruled-illegal-idUSKCN1RU1KY.

[925] Tom Balmforth and Olena Harmash, “Ukraine raids home of

billionaire in war-time anti-corruption crackdown,” Reuters, February 1,
2023, https://reuters.com/world/europe/russia-presses-ahead-with-donetsk-
campaign-ukraine-wants-fighter-jets-2023-01-31.

[926] Yuras Karmanau, “Ex-leader Poroshenko returns to Ukraine to face

charges,” AP, January 17, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/europe-russia-
ukraine-warsaw-kyiv-adbaa0754a07560c776d74e5fef0c2f0; Oleg Sukhov,
“Explainer: Is Poroshenko treason case justice or political persecution?”
Kyiv Independent, January 25, 2022,
https://kyivindependent.com/explainer-is-poroshenko-treason-case-justice-
or-political-persecution.

[927] George Lucas, “Darth Tyranus and Darth Sidious,” Star Wars Episode
II: Attack of the Clones, May 16, 2002, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=3yykRJZokCU.

[928] Richard Balmforth, “Ukrainian oligarch under fire after night raid on
state oil firm,” Reuters, March 20, 2015, https://reuters.com/article/us-
ukraine-crisis-kolomoisky/ukrainian-oligarch-under-fire-after-night-raid-
on-state-oil-firm-idUSKBN0MG2A320150320.

[929] Max Hunder, “Ukraine’s security service alleges Russian plot

involving ex-president,” Reuters, December 2, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/ukraines-security-service-alleges-russian-
plot-involving-ex-president-2023-12-02.

[930] Nicolai N. Petro, The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek

Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution (Berlin: De Gruyter,
2022), 90.

[931] “Fact Sheet: NATO-Ukraine relations,” NATO, February 2022,

https://nato.int/nato_static_fl2014/assets/pdf/2022/2/pdf/220214-
factsheet_NATO-Ukraine_Relations_.pdf.

[932] Steve Clemons, “Cheney Attempting to Constrain Bush’s Choices on

Iran Conflict,” The Washington Note, May 24, 2007,
https://web.archive.org/web/20070614165908/http://thewashingtonnote.co
m/archives/002145.php; Helene Cooper, “Rice Plays Down Hawkish Talk
About Iran,” New York Times, June 2, 2007,
https://nytimes.com/2007/06/02/world/middleeast/02diplo.html; Barton
Gellman, Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency (New York: Penguin Books,
2009), 369; Michael Hirsh and Mark Hosenball, “The Lady and the Veep,”
Newsweek, June 7, 2007,
https://web.archive.org/web/20070607151326/http://msnbc.msn.com/id/190
01199/site/newsweek/page/0.

[933] Joe Klein, “Cheney’s Iran Fantasy,” Time, May 25, 2007,
https://web.archive.org/web/20070812055331/http://time-
blog.com/swampland/2007/05/cheneys_iran_fantasy.html.

[934] Miranda Devine, “Hunter Biden’s Ukraine salary was cut two months
after Joe Biden left office,” New York Post, May 26, 2021,
https://nypost.com/2021/05/26/hunter-bidens-ukraine-salary-was-cut-after-
joe-biden-left-office.

[935] Stephen Braun, “Ukrainian energy firm hires Biden son as lawyer,”
AP, June 7, 2014, https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-europe-business-
c49555d51eb243e09a42f7577fc5937f.

[936] Dana Kennedy, “Hunter Biden’s Ukraine contact allegedly a ‘fixer’

for shady oligarchs,” New York Post, October 31, 2020,
https://nypost.com/2020/10/31/hunter-bidens-ukraine-contact-allegedly-
fixer-for-rulers; Dmytro Hnap and Anna Babinets, “Kings of Ukrainian
Gas,” Anticorruption Action Center, October 26, 2012,
https://archive.is/HYr3k.

[937] Susie Coen, “Let me meet my grandpa: Joe Biden’s secret grandchild
makes heartfelt plea,” Telegraph, July 13, 2024,
https://telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2024/07/13/let-me-meet-my-grandpa-joe-
biden-secret-grandchild.

[938] Pilar Melendez, “Hunter’s Women: The Three Exes Tangled Up in

Biden’s Trial,” Daily Beast, June 6, 2024,
https://thedailybeast.com/kathleen-buhle-zoe-kestan-hallie-biden-the-three-
exes-tangled-up-in-hunter-bidens-trial; Jennifer Haberkorn, “Biden publicly
recognizes grandchild, Hunter’s 4-year-old daughter, for first time,”
Politico, July 28, 2023, https://politico.com/news/2023/07/28/biden-
publicly-recognizes-grandchild-hunter-00108831.

[939] Press Release, “Hunter Biden joins the team of Burisma Holdings,”
Burisma, May 12, 2014,
https://docs.house.gov/meetings/JU/JU00/20191211/110331/HMKP-116-
JU00-20191211-SD984.pdf; Michael Scherer, “Ukrainian Employer of Joe
Biden’s Son Hires a DC Lobbyist,” Time, July 7, 2014,
https://time.com/2964493/ukraine-joe-biden-son-hunter-burisma; Thomas
Grove, et al., “Ukraine Company’s Campaign to Burnish Its Image
Stretched Beyond Hunter Biden,” Wall Street Journal, November 7, 2019,
https://wsj.com/articles/ukraine-companys-campaign-to-burnish-its-image-
stretched-beyond-hunter-biden-11573154199.
[940] Matt Taibbi, “The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the
Point of Absurdity,” Racket News, March 25, 2022,
https://racket.news/p/tk-mashup-the-media-campaign-to-protect.

[941] John Solomon and Steven Richards, “FBI knew since 2016 Hunter
Biden’s team nearly scored $120 million Ukrainian deal while Joe was VP,”
Just the News, June 17, 2024,
https://justthenews.com/accountability/political-ethics/hld-hunter-biden-
was-proposed-board-member-120-million-burisma.

[942] Thomas Grove and Alan Cullison, “Ukraine Company’s Campaign to

Burnish Its Image Stretched Beyond Hunter Biden,” Wall Street Journal,
November 7, 2019, https://wsj.com/articles/ukraine-companys-campaign-
to-burnish-its-image-stretched-beyond-hunter-biden-11573154199.

[943] Mary Jacoby, “Lobbyists’ NATO Goldmine,” Wall Street Journal,

June 2, 2007, https://wsj.com/articles/SB118066857163421159; See
Chapter Two.

[944] Kenneth P. Vogel and Iuliia Mendel, “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest
Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies,” New York
Times, May 1, 2019, https://nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-
ukraine.html. (For those less familiar, the New York Post is considered the
more right-leaning and more sensationalistic of the two, while the Times is
the most important media organ of the national government and its center-
left consensus. Not that the Post’s articles on this subject were flawed. Their
Miranda Devine and colleagues deserve much credit).
[945] Dan De Luce and Reid Standish, “What Will Ukraine Do Without
Uncle Joe?” Foreign Policy, October 30, 2016,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/10/30/what-will-ukraine-do-without-joe-
biden-putin-war-kiev-clinton-trump.

[946] “Biden Tells Story of Getting the Ukraine Prosecutor Fired,” C-

SPAN, January 23, 2018, https://c-span.org/video/?c4820105/user-clip-
biden-tells-story-ukraine-prosecutor-fired.

[947] Steve Clemons, “The Biden Doctrine,” The Atlantic, August 22, 2016,
https://theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/08/biden-
doctrine/496841.

[948] Abbey Marshall, “Biden defends Hunter: ‘My son did nothing wrong.
I did nothing wrong,’” Politico, October 15, 2019,
https://politico.com/news/2019/10/15/joe-biden-debate-047900.

[949] “Joe Biden Leaked Call Transcript with Petro Poroshenko,” Rev.com,
March 22, 2016, https://rev.com/blog/transcripts/joe-biden-leaked-call-
transcript-with-petro-poroshenko.

[950] Matt Taibbi, “The Media Campaign to Protect Joe Biden Passes the
Point of Absurdity,” Racket News, March 25, 2022,
https://racket.news/p/tk-mashup-the-media-campaign-to-protect.

[951] Matt Taibbi, “With the Hunter Biden Expose, Suppression is a Bigger
Scandal Than The Actual Story,” Racket News, October 24, 2020,
https://racket.news/p/with-the-hunter-biden-expose-suppression.
[952] Paul Sonne, et al., “The gas tycoon and the vice president’s son: The
story of Hunter Biden’s foray into Ukraine,” Washington Post, September
28, 2019, https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/the-gas-
tycoon-and-the-vice-presidents-son-the-story-of-hunter-bidens-foray-in-
ukraine/2019/09/28/1aadff70-dfd9-11e9-8fd3-d943b4ed57e0_story.html.

[953] Kenneth P. Vogel and Iuliia Mendel, “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest
Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies,” New York
Times, May 1, 2019, https://nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-
ukraine.html.

[954] James Politi, “Envoys pushed to oust Ukraine prosecutor before

Biden,” Financial Times, October 4, 2019, https://ft.com/content/e1454ace-
e61b-11e9-9743-db5a370481bc.

[955] Kenneth P. Vogel and Iuliia Mendel, “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest
Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies,” New York
Times, May 1, 2019, https://nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-
ukraine.html.

[956] The Editorial Board, “Joe Biden Lectures Ukraine,” New York Times,
December 11, 2015, https://nytimes.com/2015/12/12/opinion/joe-biden-
lectures-ukraine.html.

[957] Anne Williamson, Unpublished Manuscript.

[958] Christopher Miller, “Why Was Ukraine’s Top Prosecutor Fired? The
Issue At The Heart Of The Dispute Gripping Washington,” RFERL,
September 24, 2019, https://rferl.org/a/why-was-ukraine-top-prosecutor-
fired-viktor-shokin/30181445.html.

[959] Alan Cullison, “Bidens in Ukraine: An Explainer,” Wall Street

Journal, September 22, 2019, https://wsj.com/articles/bidens-
anticorruption-effort-in-ukraine-overlapped-with-sons-work-in-country-
11569189782; Glenn Kessler, “Hunter Biden’s alleged laptop: An
explainer,” Washington Post, October 14, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bidens-alleged-
laptop-an-explainer; Josh Christenson, “Washington Post quietly ‘updates’
Hunter Biden laptop story after Devon Archer testimony,” New York Post,
August 9, 2023, https://nypost.com/2023/08/09/washington-post-quietly-
updates-hunter-biden-story-after-devon-archer-testimony.

[960] Staff, “Kremlin Critic Latynina Leaves Russia After ‘Arson Attack’
On Her Car,” RFERL, September 9, 2017, https://rferl.org/a/russia-latynina-
leaves-russia-journalist-arson/28726196.html.

[961] Yulia Latynina, “Let’s go down the evil path,” Novaya Gazeta,
October 2, 2019, https://novayagazeta.ru/articles/2019/10/01/82184-poshli-
zlochinnim-shlyahom.

[962] Burisma Group Press Release, “All Cases Closed against Burisma
Group and its President Nikolay Zlochevskyi in Ukraine,” Kyiv Post,
January 12, 2017, https://kyivpost.com/post/10161.
[963] John Solomon, “Joe Biden’s 2020 Ukrainian nightmare: A closed
probe is revived,” The Hill, April 1, 2019, https://thehill.com/opinion/white-
house/436816-joe-bidens-2020-ukrainian-nightmare-a-closed-probe-is-
revived.

[964] Tom Llamas, et al., “Biden sidesteps questions about his son’s foreign
business dealings but promises ethics pledge,” ABC News, June 20, 2019,
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-sidesteps-questions-sons-foreign-
business-dealings-promises/story?id=63820806.

[965] Kenneth P. Vogel and Iuliia Mendel, “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest
Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies,” New York
Times, May 1, 2019, https://nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-
ukraine.html.

[966] John Solomon, “State Department reported Burisma paid bribe while
Hunter Biden served on board, memos show,” Just the News, September 14,
2020, https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-
scandals/monamholdstate-dept-feared-burisma-paid-bribe-while.

[967] “Readout of Vice President Biden’s Call Ukrainian President Petro

Poroshenko,” US Embassy Kiev, November 5, 2015,
https://ua.usembassy.gov/readout-vice-president-bidens-call-ukrainian-
president-petro-poroshenko-110515; Staff, “US willing to provide $1
billion loan guarantee to Ukraine- White House,” Reuters, November 5,
2015, https://reuters.com/article/usa-ukraine-idUSW1N12501H20151105.
[968] “Interview of Devon Archer,” House Committee on Oversight and
Accountability, July 31, 2023, https://oversight.house.gov/wp-
content/uploads/2023/08/Devon-Archer-Transcript.pdf.

[969] Tweet by Maze Moore, August 3, 2023,

https://x.com/mazemoore/status/1687253048995774464.

[970] Miranda Devine, “Despite Biden’s claim, Europeans Weren’t trying to

oust Ukraine prosecutor targeting Hunter’s firm,” New York Post,
September 8, 2023, https://nypost.com/2023/09/08/despite-bidens-claim-
europeans-werent-trying-to-oust-ukraine-prosecutor-targeting-hunters-firm.

[971] “Commission Progress Report: Ukraine meets criteria for visa

liberalisation,” European Commission, December 18, 2015,
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_15_6367.

[972] “Ukraine Reform Monitor: August 2015,” Carnegie Endowment for

International Peace, August 19, 2015,
https://carnegieendowment.org/2015/08/19/ukraine-reform-monitor-august-
2015-pub-60963.

[973] Michael Birnbaum, et al., “Former Ukraine prosecutor says Hunter

Biden ‘did not violate anything,’” Washington Post, September 26, 2019,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/europe/former-ukraine-prosecutor-says-
hunter-biden-did-not-violate-anything/2019/09/26/48801f66-e068-11e9-
be7f-4cc85017c36f_story.html.

[974] See below.

[975] Email from Vadym Pozharskyi to Devon Archer, Hunter Biden and
Eric Schwerin, “Re: Revised Burisma Proposal, Contract and Invoice,”
November 5, 2015, https://bidenlaptopemails.com/biden-emails/email.php?
id=20151105-161119_64772.

[976] Email from Eric Schwerin to Devon Archer and Hunter Biden, “Re:
Revised Burisma Proposal, Contract and Invoice,” November 2, 2015,
https://bidenlaptopemails.com/biden-emails/email.php?id=20151102-
185908_69565.

[977] Vice President Joe Biden, “Remarks by Vice President Joe Biden to
The Ukrainian Rada,” White House, December 9, 2015,
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2015/12/09/remarks-
vice-president-joe-biden-ukrainian-rada.

[978] Miranda Devine, “Veep Joe Biden skirted ‘no see’ mail law with
private accounts,” New York Post, July 23, 2021,
https://nypost.com/2021/07/23/vp-joe-biden-skirted-no-see-mail-law-with-
private-accounts-devine.

[979] Letter from Stephanie Oriabure to Southeastern Legal Foundation,

June 24, 2022, https://slfliberty.org/wp-
content/uploads/sites/12/2023/08/20230828-Complaint-Exhibit-4-Doc.-1-
4.pdf.

[980] Tom Dempsey, “Conservative law firm files suit against NARA in
Biden probe,” News Nation, August 30, 2023,
https://newsnationnow.com/politics/hunter-biden/conservative-law-firm-
suit-nara-biden-probe.

[981] “Interview of Devon Archer,” House Committee on Oversight and

Accountability, July 31, 2023, https://oversight.house.gov/wp-
content/uploads/2023/08/Devon-Archer-Transcript.pdf; See below.

[982] Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s “Fact Checker,” “Hunter

Biden’s alleged laptop: An explainer,” Washington Post, October 14, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bidens-alleged-
laptop-an-explainer.

[983] Brooke Singman, “Ex-Ukraine prosecutor said he was told to back off
probe of Biden-linked firm, files show,” Fox News, October 2, 2019,
https://foxnews.com/politics/ukraine-prosecutor-biden-burisma-back-off-
state-department-files.

[984] “Read Trump’s phone conversation with Volodymyr Zelensky,” CNN,

September 26, 2019, https://cnn.com/2019/09/25/politics/donald-trump-
ukraine-transcript-call/index.html.

[985] “Telephone Conversation with President Zelenskyy of Ukraine,”

White House, September 24, 2019,
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6429025/Unclassified09-2019.pdf.

[986] Paul Sperry, “The Beltway’s ‘Whistleblower’ Furor Obsesses Over

One Name,” RealClearInvestigations, October 30, 2019,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/10/30/whistleblower_expos
ed_close_to_biden_brennan_dnc_oppo_researcher_120996.html.

[987] Paul Sperry, “The Beltway’s ‘Whistleblower’ Furor Obsesses Over

One Name,” RealClearInvestigations, October 30, 2019,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/10/30/whistleblower_expos
ed_close_to_biden_brennan_dnc_oppo_researcher_120996.html.

[988] Paul Sperry, “The Beltway’s ‘Whistleblower’ Furor Obsesses Over

One Name,” RealClearInvestigations, October 30, 2019,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/10/30/whistleblower_expos
ed_close_to_biden_brennan_dnc_oppo_researcher_120996.html.

[989] “Document: Read the Whistle-Blower Complaint,” New York Times,

September 26, 2019,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/26/us/politics/whistle-blower-
complaint.html.

[990] Greg Miller, et al., “How a CIA analyst, alarmed by Trump’s shadow
foreign policy, triggered an impeachment inquiry,” Washington Post,
November 16, 2019, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/how-a-
cia-analyst-alarmed-by-trumps-shadow-foreign-policy-triggered-an-
impeachment-inquiry/2019/11/15/042684a8-03c3-11ea-8292-
c46ee8cb3dce_story.html.

[991] Alexander Vindman, “What I Heard in the White House Basement,”

The Atlantic, August 1, 2021,
https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/trump-ukraine-call-
impeachment-vindman/619617.

[992] Alexander Vindman, “What I Heard in the White House Basement,”

The Atlantic, August 1, 2021,
https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/trump-ukraine-call-
impeachment-vindman/619617.

[993] Alexander Vindman, “What I Heard in the White House Basement,”

The Atlantic, August 1, 2021,
https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/trump-ukraine-call-
impeachment-vindman/619617.

[994] Alexander Vindman, “What I Heard in the White House Basement,”

The Atlantic, August 1, 2021,
https://theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/trump-ukraine-call-
impeachment-vindman/619617.

[995] Staff, “Read Alexander Vindman’s full opening statement on Trump

and Ukraine,” PBS News, October 28, 2019,
https://pbs.org/newshour/politics/read-alexander-vindmans-full-opening-
statement-on-trump-and-ukraine.

[996] Kenneth P. Vogel and Iuliia Mendel, “Biden Faces Conflict of Interest
Questions That Are Being Promoted by Trump and Allies,” New York
Times, May 1, 2019, https://nytimes.com/2019/05/01/us/politics/biden-son-
ukraine.html.
[997] Mark Moore, “Hunter Biden had falling out with business partner
over Ukraine gig,” New York Post, September 29, 2019,
https://nypost.com/2019/09/29/hunter-biden-had-falling-out-with-business-
partner-over-ukraine-gig.

[998] Michael S. Schmidt, “Sondland Updates Impeachment Testimony,

Describing Ukraine Quid Pro Quo,” New York Times, November 5, 2019,
https://nytimes.com/2019/11/05/us/politics/impeachment-trump.html.

[999] Simon Shuster, “Exclusive: Top Ukraine Official Andriy Yermak

Casts Doubt on Key Impeachment Testimony,” Time, December 10, 2019,
https://time.com/5746417/ukraine-andriy-yermak-impeachment-interview.

[1000] Shane Harris and Aaron C. Davis, “With revised testimony,

Sondland ties Trump to quid pro quo,” Washington Post, November 5,
2019, https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/with-revised-
testimony-sondland-ties-trump-to-quid-pro-quo/2019/11/05/3059b3b8-ffec-
11e9-9518-1e76abc088b6_story.html.

[1001] Staff, “Zelenskiy Says Didn’t Know US Was Withholding Military

Aid Ahead Of Trump Call,” RFERL, October 10, 2019,
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aid-ahead-of-trump-call/30209432.html.

[1002] Simon Shuster, “‘I Don’t Trust Anyone at All.’ Ukrainian President
Volodymyr Zelensky Speaks Out on Trump, Putin and a Divided Europe,”
Time, December 2, 2019, https://time.com/5742108/ukraine-zelensky-
interview-trump-putin-europe.

[1003] Peter Certo, “John Bolton,” Militarist Monitor, January 3, 2020,

https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/john-bolton.

[1004] Adam Shaw, “Bolton warned of ‘hand grenade’ Giuliani, shut down
Ukraine meeting, aide told impeachment inquiry,” Fox News, November 8,
2019, https://foxnews.com/politics/officials-say-bolton-shut-down-ukraine-
meeting-warned-of-hand-grenade-giuliani-transcript.

[1005] Aaron Maté, “Bolton’s Memoir Undercuts Hype as Impeachment’s

Would-Be Star Witness,” RealClearInvestigations, June 23, 2020,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/06/23/bolton_memoir_und
ercuts_his_impeachment_hype_124146.html.

[1006] Brian Barrett, “Trump’s Ukraine Server Delusion Is Spreading,”

Wired, November 26, 2019, https://wired.com/story/trump-ukraine-server-
delusion-spreading.

[1007] Debarati Guha Sapir, et al., “Civil war and death in Yemen: Analysis
of SMART survey and ACLED data, 2012–2019,” PLOS Global Public
Health, Vol. 2, No. 8 (August 8, 2022),
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[1008] Michael LaForgia and Walt Bogdanich, “Why Bombs Made in

America Have Been Killing Civilians in Yemen,” New York Times, May 16,
2020, https://nytimes.com/2020/05/16/us/arms-deals-raytheon-yemen.html.
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takeover: Inside America’s failed Afghan drone campaign,” Connecting
Vets, August 24, 2021, https://audacy.com/connectingvets/news/inside-
america-failed-afghan-drone-campaign-against-taliban.

[1010] David L. Stern and Robyn Dixon, “Ukraine says it intercepted $6

million bribe to stop probe of Burisma founder,” Washington Post, June 14,
2020, https://washingtonpost.com/world/europe/ukraine-corruption-
burisma-biden-trump-giuliani/2020/06/14/9ca28342-adb1-11ea-a43b-
be9f6494a87d_story.html.

[1011] Michelle Cottle, “They Are Not the Resistance. They Are Not a
Cabal. They Are Public Servants,” New York Times, October 20, 2019,
https://nytimes.com/2019/10/20/opinion/trump-impeachment-
testimony.html.

[1012] Eric Ciaramella Biography, Carnegie Endowment,

https://carnegieendowment.org/experts/2254.

[1013] Paul Sperry, “The Beltway’s ‘Whistleblower’ Furor Obsesses Over

One Name,” RealClearInvestigations, October 30, 2019,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2019/10/30/whistleblower_expos
ed_close_to_biden_brennan_dnc_oppo_researcher_120996.html.

[1014] Justin Wise, “YouTube removes video of Rand Paul reading alleged
whistleblower’s name on Senate floor,” The Hill, February 13, 2020,
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/482897-youtube-removes-video-of-
rand-paul-reading-alleged-whistleblowers-name-on; Chrissy Clark,
“Facebook And YouTube Erase All Mentions Of Anti-Trump
Whistleblower’s Name,” The Federalist, November 10, 2019,
https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/10/facebook-and-youtube-erase-all-
mentions-of-anti-trump-whistleblowers-name.

[1015] Tweet by Larry the Cable Guy, August 21, 2013,

https://x.com/GitRDoneLarry/status/370354854792675328.

[1016] Natasha Bertrand, “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of

former intel officials say,” Politico, October 19, 2020,
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430276.

[1017] James Cronan, “The day the White House burned,” National
Archives, August 26, 2014, https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/day-white-
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[1018] Matt Orfalea, “Media Lies: Hunter Biden Laptop is ‘Russian

Disinformation!’” 0rf, March 25, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=8qQazyJ99OE.

[1019] Tom Winter, et al., “Analysis of Hunter Biden’s hard drive shows he,
his firm took in about $11 million from 2013 to 2018, spent it fast,” NBC
News, May 19, 2022, https://nbcnews.com/politics/national-
security/analysis-hunter-bidens-hard-drive-shows-firm-took-11-million-
2013-2018-rcna29462.
[1020] Ebony Bowden and Steven Nelson, “Hunter’s ex-partner Tony
Bobulinski: Joe Biden’s a liar and here’s the proof,” New York Post,
October 22, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/10/22/hunter-ex-partner-tony-
bobulinski-calls-joe-biden-a-liar.

[1021] James Lynch, “Former Biden Business Partner Accuses Hunter, Jim
of Lying under Oath about Chinese Dealings,” National Review, March 20,
2024, https://nationalreview.com/news/former-biden-business-partner-
accuses-hunter-jim-of-lying-under-oath-about-chinese-dealings; Peter Van
Buren, “Hunter Biden’s Guilty Laptop,” The American Conservative,
December 31, 2020, https://theamericanconservative.com/hunter-bidens-
guilty-laptop.

[1022] Stephen Dinan, “Hunter whodunnit: Biden’s son denies giving

laptop to repair shop,” Washington Times, March 11, 2024,
https://washingtontimes.com/news/2024/mar/11/hunter-biden-whodunnit-
president-joe-bidens-son-de.

[1023] Emma-Jo Morris and Gabrielle Fonrouge, “Smoking-gun email

reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,”
New York Post, October 14, 2020, https://nypost.com/2020/10/14/email-
reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad.

[1024] “Interview of Devon Archer,” House Committee on Oversight and

Accountability, July 31, 2023, https://oversight.house.gov/wp-
content/uploads/2023/08/Devon-Archer-Transcript.pdf.
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Washington Post, October 14, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/14/hunter-bidens-alleged-
laptop-an-explainer.

[1026] Glenn Kessler, “Hunter Biden’s laptop: The April 16, 2015, dinner,”
Washington Post, June 7, 2021,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/06/07/hunter-bidens-laptop-april-
16-2015-dinner.

[1027] Ben Schreckinger, “Fresh revelations contradict Joe Biden’s

sweeping denials on Hunter,” Politico, November 5, 2023,
https://politico.com/news/2023/11/05/hunter-joe-biden-business-testimony-
00125056.

[1028] Staff, “Read Trump’s phone conversation with Volodymyr

Zelensky,” CNN, September 26, 2019,
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transcript-call/index.html.

[1029] “Interview of Gary A. Shapley Jr.,” US House of Representatives

Committee on Ways and Means, May 26, 2023,
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content/uploads/2023/06/Whistleblower-1-Transcript_Redacted.pdf.

[1030] Adam Goldman, “What We Know and Don’t About Hunter Biden
and a Laptop,” New York Times, October 22, 2020,
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[1031] Abbe David Lowell, “Letter-to-NS-AAG-Re-Request-for-

Investigation,” February 1, 2023,
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23595947/letter-to-ns-aag-re-
request-for-investigation.pdf; Rebecca Falconer, “Read: Hunter Biden
lawyers ask Justice Department for investigation,” Axios, February 2, 2023,
https://axios.com/2023/02/02/read-hunter-biden-lawyers-request-criminal-
investigation-letters; Katie Robertson, “Hunter Biden’s Laptop, Revealed
by New York Post, Comes Back to Haunt Him,” New York Times, June 11,
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new-york-post.html.

[1032] Miranda Devine, “FBI warned Twitter during ‘weekly’ meetings of

Hunter Biden ‘hack-and-leak operation’ before censoring The Post,” New
York Post, December 4, 2022, https://nypost.com/2022/12/04/fbi-warned-
twitter-of-hunter-biden-hack-before-censoring-the-post.

[1033] See above.

[1034] Rep. Jim Jordan, “Letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray,” July
20, 2023, “House Judiciary Committee’s Transcribed Interview of Laura
Dehmlow,” July 17, 2023, https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-
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reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad,”
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reveals-how-hunter-biden-introduced-ukrainian-biz-man-to-dad.

[1036] James Clapper, et al., “Public Statement on the Hunter Biden

Emails,” Politico, October 19, 2020, https://politico.com/f/?id=00000175-
4393-d7aa-af77-579f9b330000.

[1037] Tweet by Andy Stone, October 14, 2020,

https://x.com/andymstone/status/1316395902479872000.

[1038] Kelvin Chan, “Twitter CEO says it was wrong to block links to
Hunter Biden story,” AP, October 16, 2020,
https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-changes-hacked-content-rules-
111818399.html.

[1039] Sen. Ron Johnson, “Whistleblower Allegations Reveal Corrupt FBI

Undermined Hunter Biden Investigations,” US Senate, July 27, 2022,
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allegations-reveal-corrupt-fbi-undermined-hunter-biden-investigations.

[1040] Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Michael R. Turner, “Letter to Antony
Blinken,” April 20, 2023, https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-
subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2023-
04-20-jdj-mt-to-blinken-re-public-statement-on-hunter-biden-emails_0.pdf.
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RealClearInvestigations, June 26, 2024,
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ctober_surprise_how_obamas_intel_czar_rigged_2016_and_2020_debates_
against_trump_1040444.html.

[1042] Ian Schwartz, “Leslie Stahl: We’re Not Covering Hunter Biden
Laptop ‘Because It Can’t Be Verified,’” RealClearPolitics, October 22,
2020,
https://realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/10/22/leslie_stahl_were_not_coveri
ng_hunter_biden_laptop_because_it_cant_be_verified.html.

[1043] Tweet by NPR’s Public Editor, October 22, 2022,

https://x.com/NPRpubliceditor/status/1319281101223940096.

[1044] Jacki Lyden, “Opposition Leaders Discuss Possible Post-Saddam

Iraq,” NPR News, December 15, 2002,
https://legacy.npr.org/programs/atc/transcripts/2002/dec/021215.raz.html;
Lynn Neary, “Analysis: US Believes Iraq to Use Biological and Chemical
Weapons if There is a War With the United States,” NPR News, November
12, 2002,
https://legacy.npr.org/programs/atc/transcripts/2002/nov/021112.gjelten.htm
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[1045] Andrew Kerr, “NY Post’s ‘Smoking Gun’ Hunter Biden Email 100%
Authentic, Forensic Analysis Concludes,” Daily Caller, October 29, 2020,
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hunter-biden-burisma-email.

[1046] Ryan Lizza, et al., “Politico Playbook: Double trouble for Biden,”
Politico, September 21, 2021,
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[1047] Katie Benner, et al., “Hunter Biden Paid Tax Bill, but Broad Federal
Investigation Continues,” New York Times, March 16, 2022,
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[1048] Stephen F. Hayes, “Case Closed,” Weekly Standard, November 24,

2003, https://washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/445959/case-closed.

[1049] Matt Barganier, “Scheuer Corrects National Review, Weekly

Standard,” Antiwar.com, April 18, 2007,
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weekly-standard; Walter Pincus, “CIA Learned in ’02 That Bin Laden Had
No Iraq Ties, Report Says,” Washington Post, September 15, 2006,
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[1051] David E. Sanger, “Diplomacy Fails to Slow Advance of Nuclear

Arms,” New York Times, August 8, 2004,
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[1052] “Man Arrested for Transporting Images of Child Sexual Abuse,” US

Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs, February 1, 2023,
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[1053] David Folkenflik, “The FBI raided a notable journalist’s home.

Rolling Stone didn’t tell readers why,” NPR News, March 21, 2023,
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[1054] Michael Shellenberger, “The Censorship Industrial Complex US

Government Support For Domestic Censorship And Disinformation
Campaigns, 2016–2022,” Testimony by Michael Shellenberger to the House
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[1055] Josh Boswell, “Secretary of State Blinken and his cabinet secretary
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embroiled-alleged-attempt-influence-officials-Burisma.html.

[1056] Peter van Buren, “Hunter Biden’s Laptop, Revisited,” April 18,
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b9039fa3bd5a.

[1057] Ken Bensinger and Jessica Garrison, “The FBI Investigation Into
The Alleged Plot To Kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer Has Gotten
Very Complicated,” BuzzFeed News, December 16, 2021,
https://buzzfeednews.com/article/kenbensinger/fbi-michigan-kidnap-
whitmer; Trevor Aaronson and Eric L. VanDussen, “The Informant,”
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[1058] Allan Smith, “Whitmer says Trump ‘complicit’ after feds reveal
thwarted plot to kidnap her,” NBC News, October 8, 2020,
https://nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/whitmer-says-trump-complicit-
after-feds-reveal-thwarted-plot-kidnap-n1242641; Alana Wise, “Democrats
Blame Trump Rhetoric For Michigan Governor Kidnapping Plot,” NPR
News, October 8, 2020, https://npr.org/2020/10/08/921824550/democrats-
blame-trump-rhetoric-for-michigan-governor-kidnapping-plot; Jesse
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Gretchen Whitmer,” Chicago Sun-Times, October 12, 2020,
https://chicago.suntimes.com/2020/10/12/21513347/michigan-right-wing-
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[1059] James Dobbins, et al., “Extending Russia: Competing from

Advantageous Ground,” RAND Corporation, June 15, 2019,
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[1060] Interview with author, Robert Stinnett, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, June 1, 2003, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/june-1-2003-robert-
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[1061] “McCollum memo facts for kids,” Kiddle.co,

https://kids.kiddle.co/McCollum_memo.

[1062] Robert Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl
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[1063] Vice President Mike Pence, “Remarks by the Vice President and
Georgian Prime Minister in a Joint Press Conference,” August 1, 2017,
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president-georgian-prime-minister-joint-press-conference.

[1064] Staff, “Isis rebels declare ‘Islamic state’ in Iraq and Syria,” BBC,
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[1066] Stephanie Pezard and Ashley Rhoades, “What Provokes Putin’s

Russia?” RAND Corporation, January 2020,
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[1067] Zach Dorfman, “As the Russian threat grew, US intelligence ties to
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ukraine-deepened-225919359.html.

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[1069] Staff, “Ukraine President Signs Constitutional Amendment On

NATO, EU Membership,” RFERL, February 19, 2019,
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nato-eu-membership/29779430.html.

[1070] Staff, “Trump Seeks Kissinger’s Advice On Relations With China,

Russia, Iran,” RFERL, November 18, 2016, https://rferl.org/a/trump-seeks-
kissinger-advice-relations-china-russia-iran-europe/28125432.html;
Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian, et al., “Henry Kissinger Pushed Trump to Work
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russia-to-box-in-china.

[1071] Margarita Antidze and Sergei Karazy, “Senator McCain Says US

‘Must Stand Up to Vladimir Putin,’” Reuters, December 31, 2016,
https://reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-mccain/senator-mccain-says-u-
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[1072] Andrius Sytas, “NATO war game defends Baltic weak spot for first
time,” Reuters, June 18, 2017, https://reuters.com/article/us-nato-russia-
suwalki-gap/nato-war-game-defends-baltic-weak-spot-for-first-time-
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[1073] “National Security Strategy of the United States of America,”

December 2017, https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-
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[1074] “Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United

States of America,” US Defense Department, January 19, 2018,
https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-
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[1075] Ralph Clem and Ray Finch, “Crowded Skies and Turbulent Seas:
Assessing the Full Scope of NATO-Russian Military Incidents,” War on the
Rocks, August 19, 2021, https://warontherocks.com/2021/08/crowded-
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[1077] Scott Neuman, “American Paul Whelan, Held In Russia On Spy

Charges, Is Sentenced To 16 Years,” NPR News, June 15, 2020,
https://npr.org/2020/06/15/876966569/american-paul-whelan-held-in-
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[1078] “Statement by Ambassador John Sullivan on Paul Whelan’s

continued detention,” US Embassy Moscow, April 13, 2020,
https://ru.usembassy.gov/statement-by-ambassador-john-sullivan-on-paul-
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[1079] Robert Hart and Ty Roush, “Russia Releases Evan Gershkovich And
Paul Whelan In Massive 26-Person Prisoner Swap – Here’s What We
Know,” Forbes, August 1, 2024,
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gershkovich-and-paul-whelan-in-massive-26-person-prisoner-swap-heres-
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[1082] Staff, “Nord Stream gas pipeline opened by Merkel and Medvedev,”
BBC, November 8, 2011, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-15637244.

[1083] Rep. Ron Paul’s son.

[1084] Sen. Rand Paul, “Nord Stream II Sanctions Are Not About
Security,” The American Conservative, January 10, 2022,
https://theamericanconservative.com/nord-stream-sanctions-are-not-about-
security.

[1085] “Origins, NATO Leaders, Lord Ismay,” NATO,

https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/declassified_137930.htm.

[1086] Staff, “The Full Tally of World War II,” The Mackenzie Institute,
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[1087] Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms (Irvington-on-Hudson:

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[1088] Patrick Bet-David, “Political Consultant Paul Manafort,” PBD

Podcast, April 28, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=GtiUVm3Z4eo;
Imagine, people believed the lie this guy was Putin’s spy.
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Energy?” Council on Foreign Relations, August 16, 2018, https://cfr.org/in-
brief/nord-stream-2-germany-captive-russian-energy; Nataliya Bugayova
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Challenge for the US and Its Allies,” Institute for the Study of War,
December 5, 2021, https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/nord-stream-
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[1090] Jeremy Diamond, “NATO summit: Trump accuses Germany of

being a ‘captive of Russia,’” CNN, July 11, 2018,
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[1091] “Treaty Between The United States Of America And The Union Of
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[1092] Joseph Trevithick, “What Pulling Out Of The Intermediate-Range

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Vow to Work for Greater Reductions,” New York Times, December 9, 1987,
https://nytimes.com/1987/12/09/politics/reagan-and-gorbachev-sign-
missile-treaty-and-vow-to-work-for.html; “Ronald Reagan and Mikhail
Gorbachev sign Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty,” NATO History,
December 8, 1987, https://youtube.com/watch?v=74lNHXJzfEw; Daryl
Kimball, “The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty at a
Glance,” Arms Control Association, August 2019,
https://armscontrol.org/factsheets/INFtreaty.

[1094] “MK41 Vertical Launching System,” Lockheed-Martin,

https://lockheedmartin.com/content/dam/lockheed-
martin/rms/documents/naval-launchers-and-munitions/MK41-VLS-
product-card.pdf.

[1095] Theodore A. Postol, “Russia may have violated the INF Treaty.
Here’s how the United States appears to have done the same,” Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists, February 14, 2019,
https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/russia-may-have-violated-the-inf-treaty-
heres-how-the-united-states-appears-to-have-done-the-same.

[1096] “Factsheet - Refuting Russian Allegations of US Noncompliance

with the INF Treaty,” US State Department, December 8, 2017,
https://2017-2021.state.gov/refuting-russian-allegations-of-u-s-
noncompliance-with-the-inf-treaty.
[1097] Mark Zimmermann, “MK 41 Vertical Launching System (VLS),”
Lockheed Martin, January 2014,
https://web.archive.org/web/20140109165748/https://alternatewars.com/BB
OW/Weapons/VLS_Baselines.pdf.

[1098] Theodore A. Postol, “Russia may have violated the INF Treaty.
Here’s how the United States appears to have done the same,” Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists, February 14, 2019,
https://thebulletin.org/2019/02/russia-may-have-violated-the-inf-treaty-
heres-how-the-united-states-appears-to-have-done-the-same.

[1099] Interview with author, Col. Douglas Macgregor, Scott Horton Show
radio archive, November 4, 2022, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/11-4-
22-douglas-macgregor-on-the-lost-opportunities-to-leave-ukraine-better-off.

[1100] Interview with author, Joe Cirincione, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, February 24, 2022, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/2-24-22-joe-
cirincione-us-actions-dont-justify-putins-attack-but-they-set-the-stage-for-
it.

[1101] Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “This is the ground-launched cruise missile

that Russia has reportedly just deployed,” Washington Post, February 15,
2017, https://washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2017/02/15/this-is-
the-ground-launched-cruise-missile-that-russia-has-reportedly-just-
deployed.
[1102] Michael Gordon, “US Says Russia Tested Missile, Despite Treaty,”
New York Times, January 29, 2014,
https://nytimes.com/2014/01/30/world/europe/us-says-russia-tested-missile-
despite-treaty.html.

[1103] Michael Gordon, “Russia Deploys Missile, Violating Treaty and

Challenging Trump,” New York Times, February 14, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/02/14/world/europe/russia-cruise-missile-arms-
control-treaty.html.

[1104] Andrew Osborn and Vladimir Soldatkin, “Trump adviser tells Putin:
We’ll quit arms control treaty you’re breaking,” Reuters, October 23, 2018,
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-nuclear-bolton/trump-adviser-tells-putin-
well-quit-arms-control-treaty-youre-breaking-idUSKCN1MX1LO;
Grzegorz Kuczyński, “The Collapse of the INF Treaty and the US-China
Rivalry,” Warsaw Institute, January 3, 2020, https://warsawinstitute.org/the-
collapse-of-the-inf-treaty-and-the-us-china-rivalry; Adam Taylor, “How
China plays into Trump’s decision to pull out of INF treaty with Russia,”
Washington Post, October 23, 2018,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/23/how-china-plays-into-
trumps-decision-pull-out-inf-treaty-with-russia; John Ismay, “The Death of
a Treaty Could Be a Lifesaver for Taiwan,” New York Times, May 3, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/05/03/us/politics/china-taiwan-inf-treaty.html;
Jacob Stokes, “China’s Missile Program and US Withdrawal from the
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty,” US-China Economic and
Security Review Commission, February 4, 2019,
https://uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/China%20and%20INF_0.pdf.

[1105] Paul McLeary, “The Rest Of The Story: Trump, DoD & Hill
Readied INF Pullout For Years,” Breaking Defense, October 22, 2018,
https://breakingdefense.com/2018/10/the-rest-of-the-story-trump-dod-hill-
readied-inf-pullout-for-years.

[1106] See Chapter Three.

[1107] Paul Sonne and John Hudson, “Trump orders staff to prepare arms-
control push with Russia and China,” Washington Post, April 25, 2019,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/trump-orders-staff-to-
prepare-arms-control-push-with-russia-and-china/2019/04/25/c7f05e04-
6076-11e9-9412-daf3d2e67c6d_story.html.

[1108] Chris Perez, “Putin cracks joke about eagle on US seal in jab at
Trump,” New York Post, October 23, 2018,
https://nypost.com/2018/10/23/putin-cracks-joke-about-eagle-on-us-seal.

[1109] Tom Balmforth and Andrew Osborn, “Russia asks US for missile
moratorium as nuclear pact ends,” Reuters, August 2, 2019,
https://reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-arms-moratorium-
idUSKCN1US13M.

[1110] Kingston Reif and Shannon Bugos, “Russia Expands Proposal for
Moratorium on INF-Range Missiles,” Arms Control Association, November
2020, https://armscontrol.org/act/2020-11/news-briefs/russia-expands-
proposal-moratorium-inf-range-missiles.

[1111] Robert Burns, “US might deploy missiles in Europe to counter

Russia,” AP, June 4, 2015, https://apnews.com/us-might-deploy-missiles-in-
europe-to-counter-russia-662a937d2d8f4757b72e7cc8061577b8.

[1112] Paul McLeary, “The Rest Of The Story: Trump, DoD & Hill Readied
INF Pullout For Years,” Breaking Defense, October 22, 2018,
https://breakingdefense.com/2018/10/the-rest-of-the-story-trump-dod-hill-
readied-inf-pullout-for-years.

[1113] Robert Burns, “US might deploy missiles in Europe to counter

Russia,” AP, June 4, 2015,
https://apnews.com/article/662a937d2d8f4757b72e7cc8061577b8.

[1114] Pavel Podvig, “Sorting fact from fiction on Russian missile claims,”
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, June 22, 2015,
https://thebulletin.org/2015/06/sorting-fact-from-fiction-on-russian-missile-
claims.

[1115] “US-Russia arms control treaty dies; US to test new weapon,” AP,
August 2, 2019, https://nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-russia-arms-control-
treaty-dies-u-s-test-n1038566.

[1116] Aaron-Matthew Lariosa, “Marines Activate First Tomahawk

Battery,” US Naval Institute News, July 25, 2023,
https://news.usni.org/2023/07/25/marines-activate-first-tomahawk-battery.
[1117] Brennan Deveraux, “Why Intermediate-Range Missiles Are a Focal
Point in the Ukraine Crisis,” War on the Rocks, January 28, 2022,
https://warontherocks.com/2022/01/why-intermediate-range-missiles-are-a-
focal-point-in-the-ukraine-crisis.

[1118] Michael R. Gordon, “Trump Exits Open Skies Treaty, Moves to

Discard Observation Planes,” Wall Street Journal, November 22, 2020,
https://wsj.com/articles/trump-exits-open-skies-treaty-moves-to-discard-
observation-planes-11606055371; Kingston Reif and Shannon Bugos, “US
Completes Open Skies Treaty Withdrawal,” Arms Control Association,
December 1, 2020, https://armscontrol.org/act/2020-12/news/us-completes-
open-skies-treaty-withdrawal.

[1119] Staff, “Russia calls on US to stop NATO eastward expansion in draft

security treaty,” TASS, December 17, 2021,
https://tass.com/politics/1377261; Brennan Deveraux, “Why Intermediate-
Range Missiles Are a Focal Point in the Ukraine Crisis,” War on the Rocks,
January 28, 2022, https://warontherocks.com/2022/01/why-intermediate-
range-missiles-are-a-focal-point-in-the-ukraine-crisis.

[1120] Vladimir Isachenkov, “Russia hints it may return to Open Skies

Treaty if US does,” Military Times, February 2, 2021,
https://militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2021/02/02/russia-hints-it-
may-return-to-open-skies-treaty-if-us-does; Joe Gould and Aaron Mehta,
“Rejoining Open Skies would send ‘wrong message’ to Russia, State tells
partners,” Defense News, April 7, 2021, https://defensenews.com/breaking-
news/2021/04/07/rejoining-open-skies-would-send-wrong-message-to-
russia-says-us-state-department; Matthew Lee, “US tells Russia it won’t
rejoin Open Skies arms control pact,” AP, May 27, 2021,
https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-europe-russia-government-and-
politics-69038e96de8488f2c759b126c27d1366.

[1121] See Chapter Six.

[1122] Petro, 169.

[1123] See Chapter Four.

[1124] Cnaan Liphshiz, “Ukraine historian honors Nazi collaborator, calls

criticism ‘Russian propaganda,’” Times of Israel, June 15, 2019,
https://timesofisrael.com/ukraine-state-historian-says-poland-and-israel-
parrot-russian-propaganda.

[1125] Matthias Williams and Pavel Polityuk, “Once an outcast, Ukrainian

Patriarch ready to lead church split from Russia,” Reuters, September 28,
2018, https://reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1M82CQ.

[1126] Staff, “Things to know about the Catholic Church in Ukraine,”

Catholic News Agency, February 24, 2022,
https://catholicnewsagency.com/news/250474/things-to-know-about-the-
catholic-church-in-ukraine.

[1127] Jonathan Boyd, “The number of Jews living in Ukraine is much

lower than estimated, and will only decline from here,” Institute for Jewish
Policy Research, March 10, 2022, https://jpr.org.uk/insights/number-jews-
living-ukraine-much-lower-estimated-and-will-only-decline-here.

[1128] Petro, 170.

[1129] “‘Thanks for independence’: Ukraine’s schismatic Patriarch bestows

highest award on ex-CIA ops chief,” Arkin Group, December 28, 2018,
https://thearkingroup.com/highlights/%E2%80%98thanks-for-
independence%E2%80%99-ukraine%E2%80%99s-schismatic-patriarch-
bestows-highest-award-on-ex-cia-ops-chief-jack-devine-in-kiev-ukraine-
december-2018.

[1130] Staff, “Ukraine Orthodox priests establish independent Church,”

BBC, December 15, 2018, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-46575548.

[1131] David M. Herszenhorn, “Ukrainian Orthodox Church granted

divorce from Moscow,” Politico Europe, October 12, 2018,
https://politico.eu/article/ukrainian-orthodox-church-granted-divorce-from-
moscow-ecumenical-patriarch-bartholomew.

[1132] Staff, “Ukraine Orthodox priests establish independent Church,”

BBC, December 15, 2018, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-46575548.

[1133] Kait Bolongaro, “Russian Orthodox Church a ‘national security

threat’ to Ukraine, says president,” Politico Europe, July 28, 2018,
https://politico.eu/article/petro-poroshenko-ukraine-russian-orthodox-
church-a-national-security-threat-to-ukraine-says-president.
[1134] Staff, “Ukrainian president slams Russian church as ‘national
security threat,’” AFP, July 28, 2018,
https://web.archive.org/web/20180729065631/https://yahoo.com/news/ukra
inian-president-slams-russian-church-national-security-threat-
005648776.html.

[1135] Staff, “Poroshenko signs law on renaming Ukrainian Orthodox

Church of Moscow Patriarchate,” Interfax-Ukraine, December 22, 2018,
https://kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/poroshenko-signs-law-on-renaming-
ukrainian-orthodox-church-of-moscow-patriarchate.html; Staff, “Ukraine’s
President Signs Law Forcing Russia-Affiliated Church To Change Name,”
RFERL, December 22, 2018, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-s-president-signs-
law-forcing-orthodox-church-to-change-its-name/29671193.html.

[1136] “Russian Orthodox Priest Flees Ukraine in Fear,” RT, April 14,
2024, https://rt.com/news/odessa-ukraine-orthodox-priest-476; “Dozens of
Priests Leave Ukraine, 19 Churches of Moscow Patriarchate Seized –
Russian Orthodox Church Representative,” Interfax, May 21, 2015,
https://russialist.org/dozens-of-priests-leave-ukraine-19-churches-of-
moscow-patriarchate-seized-russian-orthodox-church-representative; “His
Holiness Patriarch Kirill addressed religious and statesmen, heads of
international organizations with messages in connection with pressure from
the Ukrainian authorities on the Ukrainian Orthodox Church and state
interference in church,” Department For External Church Relations of the
Moscow Patriarchate, December 14, 2018,
https://mospat.ru/en/news/46863.
[1137] “Statement by the delegation of Ukraine at the UNSC Arria-formula
meeting on advancing the safety and security of persons belonging to
religious minorities in armed conflict,” Ukrainian Mission to the UN,
August 22, 2019, http://ukraineun.org/en/press-center/392-statement-by-
the-delegation-of-ukraine-at-the-unsc-arria-formula-meeting-on-advancing-
the-safety-and-security-of-persons-belonging-to-religious-minorities-in-
armed-conflict; Staff, “Crimean Court Orders Demolition Of Ukrainian
Orthodox Church,” RFERL, November 20, 2019,
https://rferl.org/a/crimean-court-orders-demolition-of-ukrainian-orthodox-
church/30282712.html.

[1138] Staff, “Filaret, supporters to leave Ukraine’s new church on June

24,” Interfax-Ukraine, June 20, 2019, https://archive.kyivpost.com/ukraine-
politics/filaret-supporters-to-leave-ukraines-new-church-on-june-24.html;
Staff, “Filaret: Restore the ‘Patriarchate of Kiev’ – The answer of
Metropolitan Epiphanius,” Orthodox Times, May 10, 2019,
https://orthodoxtimes.com/filaret-restore-the-patriarchate-of-kiev-what-is-
the-answer-of-metropolitan-epiphanius.

[1139] Yaroslav Trofimov, “Ukraine Clamps Down on Orthodox Church

Linked to Moscow,” Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2022,
https://wsj.com/articles/ukraine-clamps-down-on-orthodox-church-linked-
to-moscow-11669984943; See Chapter Six.

[1140] Rachel Maddow, “Russia Paid Up To $100k Bounty For US Deaths

In Afghanistan: NYT,” Rachel Maddow, MSNBC, July 2, 2020,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=E7fDIr_DUhU; Nick Paton Walsh, “Russia
offered cash rewards to Taliban fighters to kill US troops in Afghanistan,”
CNN, June 28, 2020, https://youtube.com/watch?v=eg3Soydqub8.

[1141] Noor Zahid, “Afghan Locals, Taliban Drive Islamic State From Tora
Bora Region,” Voice of America, June 9, 2017,
https://voanews.com/a/afghan-locals-taliban-drive-islamic-state-from-tora-
bora-region/3894244.html; Wesley Morgan, “Our secret Taliban air force,”
Washington Post, October 22, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/22/taliban-isis-drones-
afghanistan.

[1142] Missy Ryan and Amie Ferris-Rotman, “The Kremlin’s comeback,”

Washington Post, October 12, 2018,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/world/wp/2018/10/12/feature/behind-the-
scenes-russia-regains-a-complicated-status-afghanistan-power-broker;
Karoun Demirjian and Eric Schmitt, “Taliban Kill Head of ISIS Cell That
Bombed Kabul Airport,” New York Times, April 25, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/04/25/us/politics/isis-leader-killed-kabul-airport-
bombing.html; Michael Scollon, “Russia Inches Toward Marriage Of
Convenience With Taliban In Terror Fight,” RFERL, May 5, 2024,
https://rferl.org/a/taliban-russia-islamic-state-terrorism/32931725.html.

[1143] Patricia Grossman, “Despite Progress, Torture in Afghanistan Still

‘Disturbingly High,’” Human Rights Watch, April 17, 2019,
https://hrw.org/news/2019/04/17/despite-progress-torture-afghanistan-still-
disturbingly-high.
[1144] Luis Martinez, “Top Pentagon officials say Russian bounty program
not corroborated,” ABC News, July 9, 2020,
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/top-pentagon-officials-russian-bounty-
program-corroborated/story?id=71694167.

[1145] Courtney Kube and Ken Dilanian, “US commander: Intel still hasn’t
established Russia paid Taliban ‘bounties’ to kill US troops,” NBC News,
September 14, 2020, https://nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/u-s-
commander-intel-still-hasn-t-established-russia-paid-n1240020.

[1146] Robert Burns and Lolita C. Baldor, “Pentagon: US will respond if

Russia bounty reports are true,” AP, July 9, 2020,
https://apnews.com/article/taliban-russia-ap-top-news-mark-esper-
afghanistan-92d0cd32b4db25ac768dfbb75890f3cc.

[1147] Luis Martinez, “Top Pentagon officials say Russian bounty program
not corroborated,” ABC News, July 9, 2020,
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/top-pentagon-officials-russian-bounty-
program-corroborated/story?id=71694167.

[1148] Jennifer Griffin, “Pentagon says ‘no corroborating’ evidence to stand

up NYT report on Russian bounties,” Fox News, June 30, 2020,
https://foxnews.com/politics/pentagon-says-no-corroborating-evidence-to-
stand-up-nyt-report-on-russian-bounties.

[1149] Paul D. Shinkman, “DOD Intel Hasn’t Confirmed Russian Bounty

Scheme in Afghanistan,” US News and World Report, July 9, 2020,
https://usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2020-07-09/dod-intel-
hasnt-confirmed-russian-bounty-scheme-in-afghanistan.

[1150] Gordon Lubold and Warren P. Strobel, “NSA Differed From CIA,
Others on Russia Bounty Intelligence,” Wall Street Journal, June 30, 2020,
https://wsj.com/articles/nsa-differed-from-cia-others-on-russia-bounty-
intelligence-11593534220.

[1151] Mairead McArdle, “Intel Official: Allegations of Russian Bounties

to Taliban ‘Uncorroborated,’” National Review, June 29, 2020,
https://nationalreview.com/news/intel-official-allegations-of-russian-
bounties-to-taliban-uncorroborated.

[1152] Charlie Savage, et al., “New Administration Memo Seeks to Foster

Doubts About Suspected Russian Bounties,” New York Times, July 3, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/politics/memo-russian-bounties.html.

[1153] Charlie Savage, et al., “New Administration Memo Seeks to Foster

Doubts About Suspected Russian Bounties,” New York Times, July 3, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/politics/memo-russian-bounties.html.

[1154] Sarah K. Burris, “This is the Afghan contractor who delivered

Russian cash to the Taliban: report,” RawStory, July 1, 2020,
https://rawstory.com/2020/07/afghan-contractor-rahmatullah-azizi-
delivered-russian-cash-to-the-taliban-report.

[1155] Charlie Savage, Email to author, August 20, 2020.

[1156] Gareth Porter, “How the Pentagon failed to sell Afghan
government’s bunk ‘Bountygate’ story to US intelligence agencies,”
Grayzone, July 7, 2020, https://thegrayzone.com/2020/07/07/pentagon-
afghan-bountygate-us-intelligence-agencies.

[1157] Ken Dilanian, “Remember those Russian bounties for dead US

troops? Biden admin says the CIA intel is not conclusive,” NBC News,
April 15, 2021, https://nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/remember-
those-russian-bounties-dead-u-s-troops-biden-admin-n1264215.

[1158] Scott Horton, “Shame On You, Charlie Savage,” Libertarian

Institute, June 26, 2020, https://libertarianinstitute.org/blog/shame-on-you-
charlie-savage.

[1159] Adam Rawnsley, et al., “US Intel Walks Back Claim Russians Put
Bounties on American Troops,” Daily Beast, April 15, 2021,
https://thedailybeast.com/us-intel-walks-back-claim-russians-put-bounties-
on-american-troops.

[1160] Carol E. Lee and Courtney Kube, “Trump tells advisers US should
pull troops as Afghanistan COVID-19 outbreak looms,” NBC News, April
27, 2020, https://nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-tells-
advisers-u-s-should-pull-troops-afghanistan-covid-n1191761.

[1161] John Vaughn, “Evacuation Eyewitness: What I Saw in Kabul,”

Libertarian Institute, September 22, 2021,
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/evacuation-eyewitness-what-i-saw-in-
kabul; Alice Speri, “The US Still Owes Money to Family of 10 Afghans It
Killed in ‘Horrible Mistake,’” Intercept, May 17, 2023,
https://theintercept.com/2023/05/17/kabul-drone-strike-survivor-payment.

[1162] Farah Stockman, “US building ties with Assad opponents in Syria,”
International Herald Tribune, November 26, 2006,
https://nytimes.com/2006/11/26/world/americas/26iht-syria.3675092.html;
Adam Zagorin, “Syria in Bush’s Cross Hairs,” Time, December 19, 2006,
https://time.com/archive/6939918/syria-in-bushs-cross-hairs.

[1163] Rebecca Kheel, “House panel votes to constrain Afghan drawdown,

ask for assessment on ‘incentives’ to attack US troops,” The Hill, July 1,
2020, https://thehill.com/policy/defense/505568-house-panel-votes-to-
constrain-afghan-drawdown-ask-for-assessment-on.

[1164] Michael McFaul, “Trump would do anything for Putin. No wonder

he’s ignoring the Russian bounties,” Washington Post, July 1, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/outlook/trump-would-do-anything-for-putin-
no-wonder-hes-ignoring-the-russian-bounties/2020/07/01/0013f1d0-bb19-
11ea-8cf5-9c1b8d7f84c6_story.html.

[1165] Michael Crowley, “Bounties Uproar Casts a Shadow Over a Rare

Trump Foreign Policy Achievement,” New York Times, July 2, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/07/02/us/politics/trump-afghanistan-russia-
bounty.html.
[1166] Jamie Dettmer, “‘Slipper Revolution’ Shakes Belarus,” Voice of
America, June 22, 2020, https://voanews.com/a/europe_slipper-revolution-
shakes-belarus/6191532.html; Tony Wesolowsky, “Although Banned From
Running, Vlogger’s Calls To Cast Out ‘Cockroach’ Lukashenka Resonating
With Many Belarusians,” RFERL, May 27, 2020, https://rferl.org/a/banned-
from-running-vlogger-s-calls-for-cockroach-lukashenka-to-leave-still-
resonate-with-many-belarusians/30638157.html.

[1167] “Belarus 2019,” National Endowment for Democracy,

https://web.archive.org/web/20200809091237/https://ned.org/region/central
-and-eastern-europe/belarus-2019.

[1168] Isabelle Khurshudyan, “Belarusan President Lukashenko wins sixth

term in widely disputed election,” Washington Post, August 10, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/europe/violent-crackdown-on-belarus-
protests-follows-disputed-results-showing-lukashenko-
reelected/2020/08/10/cc56fb12-d9c2-11ea-a788-2ce86ce81129_story.html.

[1169] Staff, “Golos platform: Tsikhanouskaya defeated Lukashenko in 1st

round of presidential election,” Voice of Belarus, August 9, 2020,
https://voiceofbelarus.org/belarus-news/golos-proved-that-tsikhanouskaya-
had-defeated-lukashenko-in-the-first-round.

[1170] Staff, “Opposition in Belarus refuses to recognise official election

win by Lukashenko,” Reuters, August 10, 2020,
https://reuters.com/article/belarus-election-opposition/opposition-in-
belarus-refuses-to-recognise-official-election-win-by-lukashenko-
idINKCN2560T5.

[1171] Nataliya Vasilyeva, “Authorities in Belarus to charge anti-

government protesters with rioting for clashing with police,” Telegraph,
July 14, 2020, https://telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/07/14/protests-belarus-
government-blocks-president-lukashenkos-rivals.

[1172] Kristina Safonov, “It looks like hell on earth. Just hell,” Meduza,
August 13, 2020, https://meduza.io/feature/2020/08/13/k-visku-pristavlyali-
oruzhie-i-perezaryazhali.

[1173] Tweet by Europe Elects, August 9, 2020,

https://x.com/EuropeElects/status/1292595429440454662.

[1174] Isabelle Khurshudyan, “Belarusan President Lukashenko wins sixth

term in widely disputed election,” Washington Post, August 10, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/europe/violent-crackdown-on-belarus-
protests-follows-disputed-results-showing-lukashenko-
reelected/2020/08/10/cc56fb12-d9c2-11ea-a788-2ce86ce81129_story.html.

[1175] Tweet by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, August 10, 2020,

https://x.com/secpompeo/status/1292908531298054144.

[1176] Staff, “Belarus election: Opposition leader Tikhanovskaya left ‘for

sake of her children,’” BBC, August 12, 2020, https://bbc.com/news/world-
europe-53733330.
[1177] Staff, “Belarus jails Lukashenko opponent Siarhei Tsikhanouski,”
DW, December 14, 2021, https://dw.com/en/belarus-jails-lukashenko-
opponent-siarhei-tsikhanouski/a-60116132.

[1178] Carl Gershman, “For a Free and Independent Belarus: NED

President Carl Gershman at the Kalinowski Forum,” National Endowment
for Democracy, March 22, 2021,
https://web.archive.org/web/20210326192019/https://ned.org/for-a-free-
and-independent-belarus-ned-president-carl-gershman-at-the-kalinowski-
forum.

[1179] Marc Bennetts, “We fund Russian democracy protesters, boasts US

group,” London Times, May 19, 2021, https://thetimes.co.uk/article/russian-
pranksters-trick-us-officials-into-boasting-about-funding-protests-
hbtwtvg6n.

[1180] “The Union State Treaty,” President of Belarus, December 8, 1999,

https://president.gov.by/en/belarus/economics/economic-integration/union-
state.

[1181] Isabelle Khurshudyan, “Belarus just ordered US oil for the first time.
It was a message to Russia,” Washington Post, May 22, 2020,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/europe/belarus-russia-us-oil-
lukashenko/2020/05/21/0c04e0a2-99c3-11ea-ad79-
eef7cd734641_story.html.
[1182] Staff, “Putin, Lukashenka Agree To 28 Union State ‘Programs,’”
RFERL, November 4, 2021, https://rferl.org/a/putin-lukashenka-union-
state/31546225.html.

[1183] Interview with author, Lyle J. Goldstein, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, February 21, 2022, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/2-21-22-lyle-
j-goldstein-on-todays-developments-concerning-russia-and-ukraine.

[1184] “A Conversation With Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya,” Council on

Foreign Relations, July 26, 2021, https://cfr.org/event/conversation-
sviatlana-tsikhanouskaya.

[1185] “Belarus 2021,” National Endowment for Democracy, February 14,

2022,
https://web.archive.org/web/20220309032107/https://ned.org/region/central
-and-eastern-europe/belarus-2021.

[1186] Alan MacLeod, “US Writes Belarus into Its Familiar Regime-
Change Script,” MintPress News, October 12, 2021,
https://mintpressnews.com/us-writes-belarus-familiar-regime-change-
script/278700.

[1187] Ryhor Astapenia, “Prepare For a Belarus Without Lukashenka?”

Chatham House, June 16, 2020, https://chathamhouse.org/2020/06/prepare-
belarus-without-lukashenka.

[1188] “Belarusians’ views on the political crisis,” Chatham House, April

2021, https://chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/2021-06/2021-06-14-
belarusians-views-political-crisis.pdf.

[1189] Alan MacLeod, “US Writes Belarus into Its Familiar Regime-
Change Script,” MintPress News, October 12, 2021,
https://mintpressnews.com/us-writes-belarus-familiar-regime-change-
script/278700.

[1190] Jack Clover, “Meet ‘Predator’ and ‘Grandad,’ the exiled Belarusians
plotting against Putin’s friend,” Sunday Times, June 18, 2023,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/meet-predator-and-grandad-the-exiled-
belarusians-plotting-against-putins-friend-stc8pwjm9.

[1191] Interview with author, Stephen M. Walt, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, May 6, 2022, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/5-6-22-stephen-
walt-a-realists-take-on-the-war-in-ukraine.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter 6: Joe Biden

[1] Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Damon Grosvenor, “Second

US Destroyer enters Black Sea, Operates alongside NATO AIRCOM,”
January 28, 2021, https://c6f.navy.mil/Press-
Room/News/Article/2485628/second-us-destroyer-enters-black-sea-
operates-alongside-nato-aircom; John Vandiver, “Navy sends three ships
into Black Sea as Russia takes notice,” Stars and Stripes, January 28, 2021,
https://stripes.com/theaters/europe/navy-sends-three-ships-into-black-sea-
as-russia-takes-notice-1.660114.

[2] Barbara Starr, “US deploying B-1 bombers to Norway to send a

message to Russia,” CNN, February 8, 2021,
https://cnn.com/2021/02/08/politics/us-b-1-bombers-norway/index.html.

[3] Joseph Trevithick, “Air Force F-15Es Train To Launch Cruise Missiles
Over The Baltic Sea,” The Warzone, March 2, 2021,
https://thedrive.com/the-war-zone/39551/air-force-f-15es-trained-to-launch-
cruise-missiles-in-the-baltic-region-during-major-exercise.

[4] Dan Mangan, “Biden believes Putin is a killer, vows Russian leader
‘will pay a price’ for trying to help Trump win the election,” CNBC, March
17, 2021, https://cnbc.com/2021/03/17/biden-says-putin-is-a-killer-will-
pay-for-trying-to-help-trump-win-election.html.
[5] Trevor Hunnicutt, et al., “US imposes wide array of sanctions on Russia
for ‘malign’ actions,” Reuters, April 15, 2021,
https://reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-imposes-wide-array-sanctions-
russia-malign-actions-2021-04-15.

[6] Alison Bath, “US Navy and NATO presence in the Black Sea has fallen
since Russia took part of Ukraine, figures show,” Stars and Stripes, January
28, 2022, https://stripes.com/theaters/europe/2022-01-28/sporadic-nato-
patrols-in-black-sea-leaving-void-for-Russians-4443921.html.

[7] John Vandiver, “Navy sends three ships into Black Sea as Russia takes
notice,” Stars and Stripes, January 28, 2021,
https://stripes.com/theaters/europe/navy-sends-three-ships-into-black-sea-
as-russia-takes-notice-1.660114.

[8] Staff, “US announces $125 million defense aid package for Ukraine,”
AP, March 1, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-
b983b35504f61ec8e7edc24503e5c091; Laura Kelly, “US pledges $60M in
military aid to Ukraine ahead of Zelensky visit,” The Hill, August 31, 2021,
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/570194-us-pledges-60m-in-military-aid-
to-ukraine-ahead-of-zelensky-visit; Annie Karni, “Biden Affirms Support
Against ‘Russian Aggression’ in Meeting With Ukraine’s Leader,” New
York Times, September 1, 2021,
https://nytimes.com/2021/09/01/us/politics/biden-ukraine-zelensky-
russia.html; Lindsay Wise, “Senate Passes $778 Billion Defense-Policy
Bill,” Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2021,
https://wsj.com/amp/articles/senate-set-to-pass-778-billion-ndaa-defense-
policy-bill-11639586115.

[9] Gabrielle Tétrault-Farber and Trevor Hunnicutt, “Russia, US extend

arms pact, Kremlin says, as Biden, Putin talk,” Reuters, January 26, 2021,
https://reuters.com/article/us-russia-usa-security-kremlin/russia-u-s-extend-
new-start-arms-pact-kremlin-says-idUSKBN29V10N.

[10] Hans M. Kristensen and Matt Korda, “Russian nuclear weapons,

2022,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. 78, No. 2 (2022), 98–121,
https://doi.org/10.1080/00963402.2022.2038907.

[11] Andrea Shalal, et al., “US waives sanctions on Nord Stream 2 as Biden
seeks to mend Europe ties,” Reuters, May 19, 2021,
https://reuters.com/business/energy/us-waive-sanctions-firm-ceo-behind-
russias-nord-stream-2-pipeline-source-2021-05-19.

[12] Rachel Frazin, “Biden imposes Nord Stream 2 sanctions,” The Hill,
February 23, 2021, https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/595518-
biden-imposes-nord-stream-2-sanctions.

[13] Fadel Allassan, “Biden at NATO summit: Collective defense is, ‘sacred
obligation,’” Axios, June 14, 2021, https://axios.com/2021/06/14/biden-
nato-summit-article-five.

[14] Xhorxhina Bami, “Kosovo Ex-Fighter’s Testimony Bolsters

Prosecution Case at Thaci Trial,” Balkan Insight, June 25, 2024,
https://balkaninsight.com/2024/06/25/kosovo-ex-fighters-testimony-
bolsters-prosecution-case-at-thaci-trial.

[15] Scott Horton and Gus Cantevero, “Enough Already Chapter 8: Af-Pak
War,” Scott Horton Show, February 12, 2021, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=okCfnE4ru7I.

[16] Samy Magdy, “Militia infighting kills at least 9 in Libya’s capital,

officials say,” AP, August 10, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/libya-
militias-clashes-war-c727c3f982fbe12ad8952e060b3e500a; Staff, “Libya’s
central bank chief flees country over militia threats: Report,” Al Jazeera,
August 30, 2024, https://aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/30/libyas-central-bank-
chief-flees-country-over-militia-threats-report.

[17] Aryn Baker, “Inside the Modern Slave Trade Trapping African
Migrants,” Time, March 14, 2019, https://time.com/longform/african-slave-
trade.

[18] Peter Bergen and Alyssa Sims, “The Jihadist Environment in Libya
Today,” New America Foundation, June 20, 2018,
https://newamerica.org/future-security/reports/airstrikes-and-civilian-
casualties-libya/the-jihadist-environment-in-libya-today.

[19] Steven Erlanger, “NATO Needs to Adapt Quickly to Stay Relevant for
2030, Report Urges,” New York Times, November 30, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/11/30/world/europe/nato-2030-russia-china.html.
[20] Michael Crowley and Edward Wong, “Ukraine War Ushers In ‘New
Era’ for US Abroad,” New York Times, March 12, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/03/12/us/politics/biden-ukraine-diplomacy.html.

[21] Peter Certo, “Bret Stephens,” Militarist Monitor, April 11, 2019,
https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/bret-stephens.

[22] Bret Stephens, “This Is a Moment for America to Believe in Itself

Again,” New York Times, February 22, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/02/22/opinion/ukraine-russia-us-war.html.

[23] David Ignatius, “Putin warned the West 15 years ago. Now, in Ukraine,
he’s poised to wage war,” Washington Post, February 20, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/20/putin-ukraine-nato-2007-
munich-conference.

[24] Astri Suhrke, When More Is Less: The International Project in

Afghanistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 11.

[25] See Chapter Five.

[26] Alyona Getmanchuk, “Russia as aggressor, NATO as objective:

Ukraine’s new National Security, Strategy,” Atlantic Council, September
30, 2020, https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russia-as-aggressor-
nato-as-objective-ukraines-new-national-security-strategy.

[27] John Vandiver, “Ukraine plans Black Sea bases as US steps up

presence in region,” Stars and Stripes, February 10, 2021,
https://stripes.com/theaters/europe/ukraine-plans-black-sea-bases-as-us-
steps-up-presence-in-region-1.661679.

[28] See Chapter Five.

[29] Press Release, “Defender-Europe 21 activities begin this month,

include two dozen nations,” US Army Europe and Africa Public Affairs,
March 15, 2021,
https://army.mil/article/244260/defender_europe_21_activities_begin_this_
month_include_two_dozen_nations.

[30] Press Release, “US forces redeploy as DEFENDER-Europe 21

concludes,” US Army, June 21, 2021,
https://europeafrica.army.mil/ArticleViewPressRelease/Article/2663573/us-
forces-redeploy-as-defender-europe-21-concludes.

[31] “Decree of the President of Ukraine, No. 117/2021,” March 24, 2021,
https://president.gov.ua/documents/1172021-37533.

[32] Tim Ripley, “US, UK surge surveillance flights over Ukraine and
Black Sea,” Jane’s Defence, April 12, 2021,
https://web.archive.org/web/20210515211147/https://janes.com/defence-
news/news-detail/us-uk-surge-surveillance-flights-over-ukraine-and-black-
sea.

[33] Kanaryan Lyudmila, “Ukraine’s envoy on Russia’s build-up: Either

joining NATO or restoring nuclear status,” Ukrainian Independent
Information Agency, April 15, 2021, https://unian.info/politics/russia-s-
build-up-either-joining-nato-or-restoring-nuclear-status-ukraine-s-envoy-to-
germany-11389207.html.

[34] Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer, “Biden Administration Debates

Legality of Arming Ukrainian Resistance,” Foreign Policy, February 24,
2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/24/biden-legal-ukraine-russia-
resistance.

[35] Ilya Zhegulev, “How Putin Came to Hate Ukraine,” Nestka, April 25,
2023, https://verstka.media/kak-putin-pridumal-voynu.

[36] Staff, “Ukraine bans pro-Russian TV stations,” DW, February 3, 2021,

https://dw.com/en/ukraine-zelenskiy-bans-three-opposition-tv-stations/a-
56438505.

[37] Cristina Maza, “Ukraine Opens Treason Investigation Into Vladimir

Putin Ally Who Proposed ‘Peace Plan’ for War With Russia,” Newsweek,
February 5, 2019, https://newsweek.com/ukraine-treason-investigation-
vladimir-putin-ally-peace-plan-viktor-1318761.

[38] President Volodymyr Zelensky, “Deoligarchization is the key to

Ukraine’s future success,” Atlantic Council speech, May 18, 2021,
https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/president-zelenskyy-
deoligarchization-is-the-key-to-ukraines-future-success.

[39] Simon Shuster, “The Untold Story of the Ukraine Crisis,” Time,
February 2, 2022, https://time.com/6144109/russia-ukraine-vladimir-putin-
viktor-medvedchuk.
[40] Michael R. Gordon, et al., “Vladimir Putin’s 20-Year March to War in
Ukraine—and How the West Mishandled It,” Wall Street Journal, April 1,
2022, https://wsj.com/articles/vladimir-putins-20-year-march-to-war-in-
ukraineand-how-the-west-mishandled-it-11648826461.

[41] Simon Shuster, “The Untold Story of the Ukraine Crisis,” Time,
February 2, 2022, https://time.com/6144109/russia-ukraine-vladimir-putin-
viktor-medvedchuk.

[42] Michael Gordon, et al., “Satellite Images Show Russia’s Expanding

Ukraine Buildup,” Wall Street Journal, April 20, 2021,
https://wsj.com/articles/satellite-images-show-russias-expanding-ukraine-
buildup-11618917238.

[43] “US & NATO Aircraft Integrate, Fly Over All 30 NATO Nations,” US
Air Force, May 31, 2021, https://usafe.af.mil/News/Press-
Releases/Article/2639558/us-nato-aircraft-integrate-fly-over-all-30-nato-
nations.

[44] Staff, “Swift Response 21 kicks off in Estonia,” Multinational Corps

Northeast Public Affairs Office, May 10, 2021,
https://mncne.nato.int/newsroom/news/2021/swift-response-kicks-off-in-
estonia.

[45] “Meeting with permanent members of the Security Council,” Kremlin,

May 14, 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/65572.
[46] Press Release, “Brussels Summit Communiqué,” NATO, June 14,
2021, https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm.

[47] Josh Wingrove and Jennifer Jacobs, “Biden Says Ukraine Has Work to
Do on Corruption to Get Into NATO,” Bloomberg News, June 14, 2021,
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-06-14/biden-says-ukraine-has-
work-to-do-on-corruption-to-get-into-nato.

[48] President Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden in Press

Conference,” White House, June 16, 2021, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-
room/speeches-remarks/2021/06/16/remarks-by-president-biden-in-press-
conference-4.

[49] Anton Zverev, “Kremlin Says NATO Membership for Ukraine Would
be ‘Red Line,’” Reuters, June 17, 2021,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-says-it-is-worried-by-talk-
ukraine-road-map-nato-2021-06-17.

[50] Press Release, “Brussels Summit Communiqué,” NATO, June 14,

2021, https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_185000.htm.

[51] Press Release, “UK signs agreement to support enhancement of

Ukrainian naval capabilities,” UK Ministry of Defence, June 23, 2021,
https://gov.uk/government/news/uk-signs-agreement-to-support-
enhancement-of-ukrainian-naval-capabilities.

[52] “Ukraine, US to start Black Sea military drills despite Russian protest,”
Reuters, June 28, 2021, https://reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-us-start-
black-sea-military-drills-despite-russian-protest-2021-06-28; Robyn Dixon,
“The US-Ukraine Sea Breeze naval exercises, explained,” Washington Post,
July 2, 2021, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/02/ukraine-us-
military-black-sea.

[53] Staff, “Black Sea Drills Showcase NATO-Ukraine Defense Ties,” AP,
July 10, 2021, https://voanews.com/a/europe_black-sea-drills-showcase-
nato-ukraine-defense-ties/6208102.html.

[54] Staff, “HMS Defender: Russian jets and ships shadow British
warship,” BBC, June 23, 2021, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-
57583363; Kelley Beaucar Vlahos, “Classified docs found at UK bus stop
reveal sensitive defense plans,” Responsible Statecraft, June 27, 2021,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2021/06/27/classified-docs-found-at-uk-
bus-stop-reveal-sensitive-defense-plans; Vladimir Isachenkov and Daria
Litvinova, “Putin says US and UK were behind Black Sea ‘provocation,’”
AP, June 30, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/europe-russia-coronavirus-
pandemic-health-business-3581667136e1cabd6a19d5fcf5bec531.

[55] Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,”
Kremlin, July 12, 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.

[56] Richard Sakwa, “The March of Folly Resumed: Russia, Ukraine and
the West,” Public Reading Rooms, March 10, 2022, https://prruk.org/the-
march-of-folly-resumed-russia-ukraine-and-the-west.
[57] Vladimir Putin, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,”
Kremlin, July 12, 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.

[58] Peter Dickinson, “Putin’s new Ukraine essay reveals imperial

ambitions,” Atlantic Council, July 15, 2021,
https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putins-new-ukraine-essay-
reflects-imperial-ambitions.

[59] Garry Kasparov, “Has Biden Lost His Nerve With Putin?” Wall Street
Journal, June 1, 2021, https://wsj.com/articles/has-biden-lost-his-nerve-
with-putin-11622566741.

[60] Shane Harris, et al., “Road to war: US struggled to convince allies, and
Zelensky, of risk of invasion,” Washington Post, August 16, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-
to-war.

[61] Lilia Ragutskaya, “Yarosh: if Zelensky betrays Ukraine, he will lose

not his position, but his life,” Obozrevatel, May 27, 2019,
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intervyu.htm.

[62] Alexander Osang, “A Year with Ex-Chancellor Angela Merkel,” Der

Spiegel, January 12, 2022, https://spiegel.de/international/germany/a-year-
with-ex-chancellor-merkel-you-re-done-with-power-politics-a-f46149cb-
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with a ponytail?” Die Zeit, December 7, 2022,
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bundeskanzler/seite-5.

[64] Theo Prouvost, “Hollande: ‘There will only be a way out of the
conflict when Russia fails on the ground,’” Kyiv Independent, December
28, 2022, https://kyivindependent.com/national/hollande-there-will-only-
be-a-way-out-of-the-conflict-when-russia-fails-on-the-ground.

[65] Vovan and Lexus, “Full prank with former French President Francois
Hollande,” Show VL, April 6, 2023, https://rumble.com/v2gr7ru-full-prank-
with-former-french-president-francois-hollande.html.

[66] John Reed, “Ukraine’s Ex-president Petro Poroshenko: ‘The Army is

Like My Child, and I Am Very Proud,’” Financial Times, May 20, 2022,
https://ft.com/content/39356ee4-a505-4391-a7a9-998252cb67ee.

[67] Lotte Murphy-Johnson, et al., “Putin vs the West,” BBC, January 30,
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[68] Petro, 229.

[69] Yuras Karmanau, “Ukraine security chief: Minsk peace deal may create
chaos,” AP, January 31, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-
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drache-der-fressen-muss-a-458b7fe2-e15a-49a9-a38e-4bfba834f27b.

[71] Michael Crowley, “Obama’s Ukraine policy in shambles,” Politico,

February 29, 2016, https://politico.com/story/2016/02/obama-ukraine-
russia-putin-219783.

[72] Paul Sonne and David L. Stern, “A year in the trenches has hardened
Ukraine’s president,” Washington Post, February 22, 2023,
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war-russia-Donbas-steinmeier-formula.

[73] Robert Parry, “Ukraine’s Poison Pill for Peace Talks,” Consortium
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[74] Oleksiy Reznikov, “On the Principles of the State Policy of

Transition,” Rada, August 4, 2021,
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[75] Petro, 244.

[76] Petro, 244.

[77] Paul Sonne, “Putin is testing US, NATO with buildup along Russia-
Ukraine border, defense minister says,” Washington Post, November 19,
2021, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/russia-ukraine-
border/2021/11/19/f2ad2ed0-4979-11ec-973c-be864f938c72_story.html.

[78] “News conference following Russian-German talks,” Kremlin, August

20, 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/66418.

[79] “Speech by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on the occasion of the

30th anniversary of Ukraine’s independence,” President of Ukraine, August
24, 2021, https://president.gov.ua/en/news/promova-prezidenta-volodimira-
zelenskogo-z-nagodi-30-yi-rich-70333.

[80] “Fact Sheet – US-Ukraine Strategic Defense Framework,” US Defense

Department, August 31, 2021,
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[81] Jeff Mason and Steve Holland, “Biden pledges US support, security
aid in first meeting with Ukraine’s Zelenskiy,” Reuters, September 2, 2021,
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[82] “Joint Statement on the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership,” White

House Briefing Room, September 1, 2021, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-
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strategic-partnership.

[83] Michael R. Gordon, et al., “Vladimir Putin’s 20-Year March to War in

Ukraine – and How the West Mishandled It,” Wall Street Journal, April 1,
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[84] Senator Joe Biden Opening Remarks, “Iraq Transition: Civil War or
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20, 2004, https://govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-
108shrg95512/html/CHRG-108shrg95512.htm.

[85] “Joint Statement on the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership,” White

House, September 1, 2021, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-
room/statements-releases/2021/09/01/joint-statement-on-the-u-s-ukraine-
strategic-partnership.

[86] Sommer Brokaw, “Ukraine-led Rapid Trident to increase US, NATO

interoperability,” UPI, September 20, 2021, https://upi.com/Defense-
News/2021/09/20/ukraine-army-nato-rapidtrident21-exercise-
begins/8581632150304.

[87] Sgt. 1st Class Chad Menegay and Capt. Aimee Valles, “US, NATO,
Ukraine enhance interoperability with Rapid Trident exercise,” US Army,
September 21, 2021,
https://army.mil/article/250444/us_nato_ukraine_enhance_interoperability_
with_rapid_trident_exercise.

[88] Interview with author, Jeff Huber, Scott Horton Show radio archive,
September 9, 2008, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/antiwar-radio-jeff-
huber.

[89] Horton, Fool’s Errand, ii, 209.

[90] Catherine Lutz, et al., “Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars: Direct War
Deaths in Major War Zones, Afghanistan & Pakistan (Oct. 2001 – Aug.
2021),” Cost of War Project, August 2023,
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathToll.

[91] Catherine Lutz, et al., “Human and Budgetary Costs to Date of the US
War in Afghanistan, 2001-2022,” Cost of War Project, August 2021,
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/human-and-budgetary-
costs-date-us-war-afghanistan-2001-2022.

[92] “Joint Declaration between the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan and

the United States of America for Bringing Peace to Afghanistan,” US State
Department, February 29, 2020, https://state.gov/wp-
content/uploads/2020/02/02.29.20-US-Afghanistan-Joint-Declaration.pdf.

[93] Interview of author, “President Biden defends Afghanistan exit

decision,” Kennedy Nation, Fox Business, August 16, 2022,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dc2Df9nsUMs.
[94] Matthew Olay, “Kabul Airport Attack Review Reaffirms Initial
Findings, Identifies Attacker,” DOD News, April 15, 2024,
https://defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3741245/kabul-
airport-attack-review-reaffirms-initial-findings-identifies-attacker.

[95] John Vaughn, “Evacuation Eyewitness: What I Saw in Kabul,”

Libertarian Institute, September 22, 2021,
https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/evacuation-eyewitness-what-i-saw-in-
kabul; Mallory Shelbourne, “One Explosive Device Responsible for Deaths
of 13 US Service Members in Kabul Attack, Pentagon Says,” US Naval
Institute News, February 4, 2022, https://news.usni.org/2022/02/04/one-
explosive-device-responsible-for-deaths-of-13-service-members-in-kabul-
attack.

[96] Alice Speri, “The US Still Owes Money to Family of 10 Afghans It

Killed in ‘Horrible Mistake,’” Intercept, May 17, 2023,
https://theintercept.com/2023/05/17/kabul-drone-strike-survivor-payment;
Azmat Khan, “Military Investigation Reveals How the US Botched a Drone
Strike in Kabul,” New York Times, January 6, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/01/06/us/politics/drone-civilian-deaths-
afghanistan.html.

[97] Officials supposedly told Bob Woodward they had solid intelligence
indicating this, but after catching him fraudulently changing a quote of
Russian FM Lavrov – see note below – the author decided not to cite his
new book War at all. It’s still a reasonable inference. Officials telling
Woodward they knew for certain would still be nothing more than an
indication, even if taken at face value.

[98] Michael Kofman, “Zapad 2021: What We Learned From Russia’s

Massive Military Drills,” Moscow Times, September 23, 2021,
https://themoscowtimes.com/2021/09/23/zapad-2021-what-we-learned-
from-russias-massive-military-drills-a75127.

[99] “2021 Trends and Observations,” OSCE, February 4, 2022,

https://osce.org/files/f/documents/2/a/511327.pdf.

[100] “Conflict-related civilian casualties in Ukraine,” UN Office of the

High Commissioner for Human Rights, January 27, 2022,
https://ukraine.un.org/sites/default/files/2022-02/Conflict-
related%20civilian%20casualties%20as%20of%2031%20December%2020
21%20%28rev%2027%20January%202022%29%20corr%20EN_0.pdf.

[101] Natalia Zinets and Matthias Williams, “Ukraine Using Turkish

Drones in Donbas Conflict in Self-defence, Zelenskiy Says,” Reuters,
October 29, 2021, https://reuters.com/world/ukraine-using-turkish-drones-
Donbas-conflict-self-defence-zelenskiy-says-2021-10-29.

[102] Isabelle Khurshudyan and David L. Stern, “Why Ukraine’s Turkish-

made drone became a flash point in tensions with Russia,” Washington
Post, January 15, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/15/ukraine-russia-drones-turkey.
[103] John Pike, “Nagorno-Karabakh/Republic of Artsakh,” Global
Security, July 21, 2024,
https://globalsecurity.org/military/world/war/nagorno-karabakh.htm.

[104] Mark Episkopos, “Ukraine’s Recent Drone Strike Reignites Tensions

in Donbas,” The National Interest, October 31, 2021,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/ukraine’s-recent-drone-strike-reignites-
tensions-Donbas-195709.

[105] David Broder, “Interview of Richard Sakwa,” Jacobin, January 26,

2022, https://jacobin.com/2022/01/putin-nato-us-war-Donbas-minsk-2.

[106] Staff, “Russia to suspend Nato diplomatic mission amid tension,”

BBC, October 18, 2021, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-58959386.

[107] Paul Sonne, et al., “Russian troop movements near Ukraine border
prompt concern in US, Europe,” Washington Post, October 30, 2021,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/russian-troop-movements-near-ukraine-
border-prompt-concern-in-us-europe/2021/10/30/c122e57c-3983-11ec-
9662-399cfa75efee_story.html.

[108] Polina Devitt and Tom Balmforth, “CIA director makes rare trip to
Moscow for talks on Russia-US ties,” Reuters, November 2, 2021,
https://reuters.com/world/heads-russias-security-council-cia-discuss-russia-
us-ties-ria-2021-11-02; Shane Harris, et al., “The Post examined the lead-up
to the Ukraine war. Here’s what we learned,” Washington Post, August 16,
2022, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/08/16/ukraine-
road-to-war-takeaways.

[109] William M. Arkin, “The CIA’s Blind Spot about the Ukraine War,”
Newsweek, July 5, 2023, https://newsweek.com/2023/07/21/exclusive-cias-
blind-spot-about-ukraine-war-1810355.html.

[110] “US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership,” Office of State

Department Spokesperson, November 10, 2021,
https://web.archive.org/web/20211202055500/https://state.gov/u-s-ukraine-
charter-on-strategic-partnership.

[111] Michael R. Gordon, et al., “Vladimir Putin’s 20-Year March to War in

Ukraine—and How the West Mishandled It,” Wall Street Journal, April 1,
2022, https://wsj.com/articles/vladimir-putins-20-year-march-to-war-in-
ukraineand-how-the-west-mishandled-it-11648826461.

[112] Christopher Caldwell, “The War in Ukraine May Be Impossible to

Stop. And the US Deserves Much of the Blame,” New York Times, May 31,
2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/us-ukraine-putin-war.html.

[113] Andrew Osborn and Phil Stewart, “Moscow says US rehearsed

nuclear strike against Russia this month,” Reuters, November 23, 2021,
https://reuters.com/world/russia-notes-significant-increase-us-bomber-
activity-east-minister-2021-11-23.

[114] Press Release, “USS Arleigh Burke Enters the Black Sea in Support
of NATO Allies and Partners,” USS Arleigh Burke Public Affairs, US Navy,
November 25, 2021, https://c6f.navy.mil/Press-
Room/News/Article/2854472/uss-arleigh-burke-enters-the-black-sea-in-
support-of-nato-allies-and-partners.

[115] Staff, “Putin Says US, NATO Moves In Black Sea ‘Serious
Challenge’ For Russia,” RFERL, November 13, 2021,
https://rferl.org/a/russia-challenge-nato-black-sea/31559632.html.

[116] Samuel Charap, “The US Approach to Ukraine’s Border War Isn’t

Working. Here’s What Biden Should Do Instead,” Politico, November 19,
2021, https://politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/19/ukraine-russia-putin-
border-522989.

[117] Tom Balmforth and Vladimir Soldatkin, “Putin Says West Taking
Russia’s ‘Red Lines’ Too Lightly,” Reuters, November 18, 2021,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-west-not-taking-russias-
warnings-red-lines-seriously-enough-2021-11-18.

[118] Vladimir Putin, “Ceremony for presenting foreign ambassadors’

letters of credence,” Kremlin, December 1, 2021,
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67250.

[119] “Statement by Sergey Lavrov, Minister of Foreign Affairs of the

Russian Federation, at the Twenty-Eighth Meeting of the OSCE Ministerial
Council,” OSCE, December 2, 2021,
https://osce.org/files/f/documents/a/c/506840.pdf. Bob Woodward
misquoted this to mean the opposite in his October 2024 book War (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 2024), 88; Scott Horton, “Bob Woodward Badly
Misquotes Russian FM Lavrov,” Libertarian Institute, October 16, 2024,
https://libertarianinstitute.org/blog/bob-woodward-badly-misquotes-russian-
fm-lavrov.

[120] Shane Harris, et al., “Road to war: US struggled to convince allies,

and Zelensky, of risk of invasion,” Washington Post, August 16, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-
to-war.

[121] Michael Schwirtz, “NATO Signals Support for Ukraine in Face of

Threat From Russia,” New York Times, December 16, 2021,
https://nytimes.com/2021/12/16/world/europe/ukraine-nato-russia.html.

[122] “Agreement on measures to ensure the security of The Russian

Federation and member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,”
Russian Foreign Ministry, December 17, 2021,
https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/rso/nato/1790803/?lang=en.

[123] Robyn Dixon and Paul Sonne, “Russia broadens security demands
from West, seeking to curb US and NATO influence on borders,”
Washington Post, December 17, 2021,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/17/ukraine-russia-military.

[124] Max Seddon, “Russia demands Nato retract pledge to admit Ukraine
and Georgia,” Financial Times, December 10, 2021,
https://ft.com/content/d86f8961-15c1-4f73-8cee-8251ab139204.
[125] Tomasz Kurianovz and Moritz Eichhorn, “Interview with Gerhard
Schröder: This is how peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia
failed,” Berliner-Zeitung, October 20, 2023, https://berliner-
zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/gerhard-schroeder-im-exklusiv-interview-
was-merkel-2015-gemacht-hat-war-politisch-falsch-li.2151196.

[126] Paul Sonne, et al., “US plans to discuss missile deployments with
Russia as part of effort to defuse Ukraine crisis,” Washington Post, January
8, 2022, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-russia-talks-
ukraine/2022/01/07/2fb5874e-6ff6-11ec-974b-d1c6de8b26b0_story.html.

[127] Paul Sonne, et al., “US plans to discuss missile deployments with
Russia as part of effort to defuse Ukraine crisis,” Washington Post, January
8, 2022, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-russia-talks-
ukraine/2022/01/07/2fb5874e-6ff6-11ec-974b-d1c6de8b26b0_story.html.

[128] “NATO Enlargement: The American Viewpoint,” US Foreign Policy

Agenda, Vol. 2, No. 4 (October 1997),
https://usinfo.org/usia/usinfo.state.gov/journals/itps/1097/ijpe/ijpe1097.pdf.

[129] Staff, “US could strengthen ‘defensive posture’ in Europe if Russia

escalates situation – El País,” TASS, February 2, 2022,
https://tass.com/defense/1396565.

[130] See Chapters Two, Three, Four and Five.

[131] Gordon Prather, “How Bush Pushed North Korea to Nukes,”

Antiwar.com, March 27, 2009,
https://original.antiwar.com/prather/2009/03/27/how-bush-pushed-north-
korea-to-nukes.

[132] See Chapter Three.

[133] Tabassum Zakaria and Arshad Mohammed, “Libya’s Gaddafi speaks

to Bush,” Reuters, November 17, 2008, https://reuters.com/article/world/us-
politics/libyas-gaddafi-speaks-to-bush-idUSTRE4AG3V2.

[134] President Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President on Libya,”

White House, March 19, 2011, https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-
press-office/2011/03/19/remarks-president-libya.

[135] Gareth Porter, “Obama’s Line on the Iran Nuclear Deal: A Second
False Narrative,” Antiwar.com, July 27, 2015,
https://original.antiwar.com/porter/2015/07/26/obamas-line-on-the-iran-
nuclear-deal-a-second-false-narrative.

[136] Alexander Fulbright, “In recording, Netanyahu boasts Israel

convinced Trump to quit Iran nuclear deal,” Times of Israel, July 17 2018,
https://timesofisrael.com/in-recording-netanyahu-boasts-israel-convinced-
trump-to-quit-iran-nuclear-deal.

[137] See Chapter Three.

[138] Paul Sonne, et al., “US plans to discuss missile deployments with
Russia as part of effort to defuse Ukraine crisis,” Washington Post, January
8, 2022, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-russia-talks-
ukraine/2022/01/07/2fb5874e-6ff6-11ec-974b-d1c6de8b26b0_story.html.

[139] Andrew Kramer and Steven Erlanger, “Russia Lays Out Demands for
a Sweeping New Security Deal With NATO,” New York Times, December
17, 2021, https://nytimes.com/2021/12/17/world/europe/russia-nato-
security-deal.html.

[140] “A Conversation with the Counselor: Derek Chollet on Navigating

the World,” War on the Rocks podcast, April 13, 2022,
https://warontherocks.com/2022/04/a-conversation-with-the-counselor-
derek-chollet-on-navigating-the-world.

[141] Paul Sonne, et al., “US plans to discuss missile deployments with
Russia as part of effort to defuse Ukraine crisis,” Washington Post, January
8, 2022, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/us-russia-talks-
ukraine/2022/01/07/2fb5874e-6ff6-11ec-974b-d1c6de8b26b0_story.html.

[142] Chandelis Duster, “Zelensky: ‘If we were a NATO member, a war

wouldn’t have started,’” CNN, March 20, 2022,
https://edition.cnn.com/europe/live-news/ukraine-russia-putin-news-03-20-
22/h_7c08d64201fdd9d3a141e63e606a62e4.

[143] “Telephone conversations with US President Joseph Biden,” Kremlin,

December 30, 2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67487.

[144] Isabelle Khurshudyan, “Russia-US talks hit impasse over NATO

expansion as Moscow denies plans to invade Ukraine,” Washington Post,
January 10, 2022, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/10/us-russia-
delegations-meet-geneva.

[145] Shane Harris, et al., “Road to war: US struggled to convince allies,

and Zelensky, of risk of invasion,” Washington Post, August 16, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-
to-war.

[146] Shane Harris, et al., “Road to war: US struggled to convince allies,

and Zelensky, of risk of invasion,” Washington Post, August 16, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-
to-war.

[147] Interview with author, Chas Freeman, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, February 24, 2023, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/2-24-23-chas-
freeman-america-needs-to-use-diplomacy.

[148] Staff, “Russia’s Proposal To Redraw European Security

‘Unacceptable,’ US Says,” RFERL, December 17, 2021,
https://rferl.org/a/nato-russia-security-guarantees/31614168.html.

[149] Michael Crowley and David Sanger, “US and NATO Respond to
Putin’s Demands as Ukraine Tensions Mount,” New York Times, January 26,
2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/01/26/us/politics/russia-demands-us-
ukraine.html.

[150] Hibai Arbide Aza and Miguel González, “US offered disarmament
measures to Russia in exchange for deescalation of military threat in
Ukraine,” El País, February 2, 2022, https://english.elpais.com/usa/2022-
02-02/us-offers-disarmament-measures-to-russia-in-exchange-for-a-
deescalation-of-military-threat-in-ukraine.html.

[151] “Biden says likelihood of Ukraine joining NATO in near term is ‘not
very likely,’” Global News, January 19, 2022,
https://globalnews.ca/video/8524725/biden-says-likelihood-of-ukraine-
joining-nato-in-near-term-is-not-very-likely; Ellen Knickmeyer, et al.,
“Biden Assures Ukraine’s Leader of US Support to Deter Russia,” AP,
December 9, 2021, https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-russia-ukraine-
europe-vladimir-putin-8193787ec21ca2aded4a37fa325f07b5.

[152] Julian Borger, “US Holds Firm on Ukraine’s Right to Join Nato in Its
Response to Russian Demands,” Guardian, January 26, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/26/ukraine-and-russia-to-hold-
paris-talks-in-latest-effort-to-ease-tensions.

[153] Alberto Nardelli, et al., “US Dangles Offer to Russia on Missile

Checks at Key NATO Bases,” Bloomberg News, February 1, 2022,
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-01/u-s-dangles-offer-to-
russia-on-missile-checks-at-key-bases.

[154] “Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken at a Press Availability,” January

26, 2022, https://state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-at-a-press-
availability-13.
[155] Vladimir Isachenkov and Matthew Lee, “US offers no concessions in
response to Russia on Ukraine,” AP, January 26, 2022,
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-europe-russia-united-states-
moscow-72856781c3b92640d03c5e954488ba90.

[156] Staff, “US gives no positive reply on inadmissibility of NATO

expansion, says Lavrov,” TASS, January 27, 2022,
https://tass.com/politics/1393941.

[157] “Interview of Jake Sullivan,” CNN This Morning, July 12, 2023,
https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/ctmo/date/2023-07-12/segment/04.

[158] Jonathan Guyer, “How America’s NATO expansion obsession plays

into the Ukraine crisis,” Vox.com, January 27, 2022,
https://vox.com/platform/amp/22900113/nato-ukraine-russia-crisis-clinton-
expansion.

[159] Anchal Vohra, “Ukraine Is Ready for Painful Concessions,” Foreign

Policy, March 30, 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/30/ukraine-is-
ready-for-painful-concessions.

[160] Sarotte, 320.

[161] Patrick Tucker, “US ‘Unequivocal’ to Russia on Right of Ukraine,

Others, to Join NATO,” Defense One, January 10, 2022,
https://defenseone.com/policy/2022/01/us-unequivocal-russia-right-ukraine-
others-join-nato/360574.
[162] Samuel Charap, “Nato honesty on Ukraine could avert conflict with
Russia,” Financial Times, January 13, 2022,
https://ft.com/content/74089d46-abb8-4daa-9ee4-e9e9e4c45ab1.

[163] Stephen M. Walt, “The West Is Sleepwalking Into War in Ukraine,”

Foreign Policy, February 23, 2022,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/23/united-states-europe-war-russia-
ukraine-sleepwalking.

[164] Staff, “Kazakhstan gripped by protests as popular frustration spills

over,” Eurasianet, January 4, 2022, https://eurasianet.org/kazakhstan-
gripped-by-protests-as-popular-frustration-spills-over.

[165] Darya Boronilo, “Five dead in Kazakhstan ‘terror’ attacks on police,”

AFP, July 18, 2016, https://sg.news.yahoo.com/several-attacks-against-
security-services-kazakhstan-official-073003571.html.

[166] Lucian Kim, “The Other Jan. 6,” Foreign Policy, January 5, 2023,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/01/05/kazakhstan-bloody-january-violence-
tokayev-nazarbayev-conspiracy-protest.

[167] Staff, “Kazakh leader declares ‘coup d’etat’ over as Putin claims
victory,” Al Jazeera, January 10, 2022,
https://aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/10/kazakh-leader-declares-attempted-
coup-detat-over.

[168] Tweet by Maxim A. Suchkov, January 5, 2022,

https://x.com/m_suchkov/status/1478738984230694916.
[169] “Kazakhstan 2021,” National Endowment for Democracy, February
10, 2022,
https://web.archive.org/web/20220309142432/https://ned.org/region/eurasia
/kazakhstan-2021.

[170] “Demonstration Alert: US Mission Kazakhstan,” US Embassy

Kazakhstan, December 16, 2021, https://kz.usembassy.gov/demonstration-
alert121521.

[171] Bernard, “The US Directed Rebellion in Kazakhstan May Well

Strengthen Russia,” Moon of Alabama, January 6, 2022,
https://moonofalabama.org/2022/01/the-us-directed-rebellion-in-
kazakhstan-may-well-strengthen-russia.html.

[172] Staff, “Putin Says Moscow-Led Forces in Kazakhstan for ‘Limited’

Time,” Defense Post, January 10, 2022,
https://thedefensepost.com/2022/01/10/putin-moscow-forces-kazakhstan.

[173] Jamie Dettmer, “Putin: No More Color Revolutions,” Voice of

America, January 10, 2022, https://voanews.com/a/putin-no-more-color-
revolutions/6390636.html.

[174] “Blinken to Kazakhstan: It’s hard to get Russians to leave once

they’re in your home,” Times of Israel, January 9, 2022,
https://timesofisrael.com/blinken-to-kazakhstan-its-hard-to-get-russians-to-
leave-once-theyre-in-your-home.
[175] “Russia-led bloc starts Kazakhstan pullout after possible coup bid
crushed,” Reuters, January 13, 2022, https://reuters.com/world/asia-
pacific/russia-led-bloc-starts-pulling-troops-out-kazakhstan-2022-01-13.

[176] Staff, “The number of population of the Republic of Kazakhstan at

the beginning of 2024,” Bureau of National Statistics Agency for Strategic
Planning and Reforms of the Republic of Kazakhstan, April 22, 2024,
https://web.archive.org/web/20240921005348/https://stat.gov.kz/en/industri
es/social-statistics/demography/publications/157662.

[177] Lynne O’Donnell, “It’s a New Great Game. Again,” Foreign Policy,
March 20, 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/03/20/russia-china-
competition-central-asia-diplomacy-influence-great-game.

[178] “First defence shipment support in 2022 from US to Ukraine’s Armed

Forces arrived at Boryspil airport,” Ministry of Defense of Ukraine, January
22, 2022, https://mil.gov.ua/en/news/2022/01/22/first-defence-shipment-
support-in-2022-from-us-to-ukraines-armed-forces-arrived-at-boryspil-
airport; Amy Cheng, “Military trainers, missiles and over 200,000 pounds
of lethal aid: What NATO members have sent Ukraine so far,” Washington
Post, January 22, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/22/ukraine-russia-military-
weapons-nato-biden.

[179] Natalia Zinets, “Ukraine receives second batch of US weapons in

Russian stand-off Reuters,” Reuters, January 23, 2022,
https://reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/ukraine-receives-second-
batch-us-weapons-russian-stand-off-2022-01-23.

[180] Zach Dorfman, “In closer ties to Ukraine, US officials long saw
promise and peril,” Yahoo News, April 28, 2022,
https://yahoo.com/news/in-closer-ties-to-ukraine-us-officials-long-saw-
promise-and-peril-090006105.html.

[181] Shane Harris, et al., “Road to war: US struggled to convince allies,

and Zelensky, of risk of invasion,” Washington Post, August 16, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-
to-war.

[182] Jack F. Matlock Jr., “Today’s Crisis Over Ukraine,” ACURA,

February 14, 2022, https://usrussiaaccord.org/acura-viewpoint-jack-f-
matlock-jr-todays-crisis-over-ukraine.

[183] “News conference following Russian-Hungarian talks,” Kremlin,

February 1, 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67690.

[184] Anton Troianovski, et al., “Putin Warns the West and Ukraine, but
Keeps His Intentions a Mystery,” New York Times, February 7, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/02/07/world/europe/putin-macron-russia-france-
ukraine.html.

[185] Russian Security Council Meeting, Kremlin, February 21, 2022,

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[195] See Chapter Four.

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[202] David C. Hendrickson, “Will Tensions in Ukraine Boil Over?” The

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[203] “Emmanuel Macron to Vladimir Putin, four days before the war: ‘I
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[209] Vladimir Putin, “Address by the President of the Russian Federation,”

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[210] Interview with author, Stephen M. Walt, Scott Horton Show radio
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[211] Vladimir Putin, “Address by the President of the Russian Federation,”

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[217] Geoffrey Roberts, “‘Now or never’: Putin’s Decision for War with
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[218] Samuel Charap, “Nato honesty on Ukraine could avert conflict with
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[219] Brian Stelter, “The Anti-Fox Gains Ground,” New York Times,
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[225] Gerard Toal, Near Abroad: Putin, the West and the Contest over
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[226] Andrew Osborn and Andrey Ostroukh, “Putin rues Soviet collapse as
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[227] Andrew S. Weiss, “Five myths about Vladimir Putin,” Washington

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[228] See Chapter Four.

[229] Staff, “What Does Putin Really Want?” Politico Magazine, February
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[230] President Joe Biden, “President Biden’s State of the Union Address,”
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[232] See Chapter Four.

[233] Lyle J. Goldstein, “Threat Inflation, Russian Military Weakness, and

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[234] Gregg Re, “Schiff warns of Russian attack on US mainland, as Day 2

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[235] Julian Barnes, et al., “US Believes Ukrainians Were Behind an

Assassination in Russia,” New York Times, October 5, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/10/05/us/politics/ukraine-russia-dugina-
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[236] Marlene Laruelle, “Aleksandr Dugin: A Russian Version of the

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[238] Alex Hu, “Alexander Dugin is Not That Important,” The National
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[239] George Barros, “The West Overestimates Aleksandr Dugin’s

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[240] Richard Engel, et al., “Russian documents reveal desire to sow racial
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[242] Alex Hu, “Alexander Dugin is Not That Important,” The National
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[243] Andrew Radin and Clint Reach, “Russian Views of the International
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[244] Jeffrey Sommers, “This Is How the New Cold War Turns Hot,” The
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[245] Marlene Laruelle, “Aleksandr Dugin: A Russian Version of the

European Radical Right?” Woodrow Wilson International Center for
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[246] Anton Barbashin and Hannah Thoburn, “Putin’s Brain,” Foreign

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[247] Scott Horton, “They Hate Our Freedom,” Libertarian Institute, July
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[249] Jens Stoltenberg, “Opening remarks,” Joint meeting of the European

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[251] John J. Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault,”
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[252] David D. Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking in the

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[253] Stone, 13.

[254] See Chapter Four.

[255] Nicolai N. Petro, “A True Solution to the Tragedy of Ukraine,” The

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[257] Wrong, Commie! It’s Houston!

[258] Bill Clinton, “I Tried to Put Russia on Another Path,” The Atlantic,
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[259] John J. Mearsheimer, interview with the author, Scott Horton Show
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[260] Thomas L. Friedman, “This Is Putin’s War. But America and NATO
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[261] Jack S. Levy, “Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping a Conceptual

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[265] Jonathan Chait, “61 Times Bill Kristol Was Reminded of Hitler and
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[268] “Transcript: Vladimir Putin’s Televised Address on Ukraine,”

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[270] Alexander Chramshykin, “Advance onto Thin Ice: Reasons for the
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[272] Anatol Lieven, “Russia’s missiles keep missing and other lessons
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[273] See Chapter Five.

[274] Patrick Bet-David, “Political Consultant Paul Manafort,” PBD

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[278] Mark Trevelyan and Alexander Winning, “Russia states more limited
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[282] Horton, Fool’s Errand, 26–30; Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret
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[285] “President Jimmy Carter’s July 3, 1979, ‘Finding’ Authorizing Covert

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[287] Peter Bergen, Holy War Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama Bin
Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 176.

[288] Douglas Jehl, “CIA Officers Played Role in Sheik Visas,” New York
Times, July 22, 1993, http://nytimes.com/1993/07/22/nyregion/cia-officers-
played-role-in-sheik-visas.html; Alison Mitchell, “Official Recalls Delay in
Using Informer,” New York Times, July 16, 1993,
http://nytimes.com/1993/07/16/nyregion/official-recalls-delay-in-using-
informer.html; Ralph Blumenthal, “Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb
Used in Trade Center Blast,” New York Times, October 28, 1993,
http://nytimes.com/1993/10/28/nyregion/tapes-depict-proposal-to-thwart-
bomb-used-in-trade-center-blast.html; Alison Mitchell, “Letter Explained
Motive in Bombing, Officials Now Say,” New York Times, March 28, 1993,
http://nytimes.com/1993/03/28/nyregion/letter-explained-motive-in-
bombing-officials-now-say.html.

[289] Staff, “Ambassador: Car Bomb Destroyed Military Building,” CNN,

November 13, 1995, http://cnn.com/WORLD/9511/saudi_blast/11am.

[290] Gareth Porter, “Who Bombed Khobar Towers? Anatomy of a

Crooked Terrorism Investigation,” Truthout, September 1, 2015,
https://truthout.org/articles/who-bombed-khobar-towers-anatomy-of-a-
crooked-terrorism-investigation; Staff, “William Perry: US Eyed Iran
Attack After Bombing,” UPI, June 6, 2007,
http://upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2007/06/06/Perry-US-
eyed-Iran-attack-after-bombing/UPI-70451181161509; Wayne Barrett,
“Rudy’s Ties to a Terror Sheikh,” Village Voice, November 20, 2007,
http://villagevoice.com/news/rudys-ties-to-a-terror-sheikh-6424129; Atwan,
36–37, 54, 168–69.

[291] Pretty close anyway: “While it could become a Soviet Vietnam, the
initial effects of the intervention are likely to be adverse to us. . .,”
Zbigniew Brzezinski, “National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s
Memo to President Carter of December 26, 1979, Regarding the Soviet
Invasion of Afghanistan,” December 26, 1979,
https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/brzezinski.
[292] “The Revelations of a Former Carter Aide: Yes, the CIA Entered
Afghanistan Before the Russians,” Le Nouvel Observateur, January 15–21,
1998,
https://web.archive.org/web/20130906210557/http://dgibbs.faculty.arizona.
edu:80/brzezinski_interview; “President Jimmy Carter’s July 3, 1979,
‘Finding’ Authorizing Covert Support For the Mujahideen in Afghanistan,”
https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/carter; It was not true that US intervention
was the deciding factor in the USSR’s 1979 invasion, but that is what they
were going for. Margolis, War at the Top of the World, 17; Andrei Sakharov,
“Afghanistan, Gorky, and an Open Letter to Leonid Brezhnev, 1980,” in
The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan, ed. Nick Turse (New York:
Verso, 2010), 17.

[293] Mark Mazzetti, et al., “For the US, a Tenuous Balance in Confronting
Russia,” New York Times, March 19, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/03/19/us/politics/us-ukraine-russia-
escalation.html.

[294] Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and

Terrorism in Western Europe (New York: Frank Cast, 2005).

[295] Joshua Yaffa, “Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine,” The New
Yorker, October 17, 2022,
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/inside-the-us-effort-to-arm-
ukraine.
[296] Fred Kagan, “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,”
American Enterprise Institute, January 5, 2007, https://aei.org/wp-
content/uploads/2011/11/20070111_ChoosingVictoryupdated.pdf.

[297] Justin Elliott, “Meet the Think Tankers Advising the US Military in
Kabul,” ProPublica, November 30, 2012,
https://propublica.org/article/meet-the-think-tankers-advising-the-us-
military-in-kabul.

[298] Fred Kagan, et al., “Putin’s Likely Course of Action in Ukraine,”

Institute for the Study of War, December 2021, https://archive.is/EEuLg.

[299] David Ignatius, “The Biden administration weighs backing Ukraine

insurgents if Russia invades,” Washington Post, December 19, 2021,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/19/biden-ukraine-insurgents-
russia.

[300] Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, “The Spy War: How the CIA
Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin,” New York Times, February 25, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/the-spy-war-how-the-cia-
secretly-helps-ukraine-fight-putin.html.

OceanofPDF.com
[301] Zach Dorfman, “CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take
central role if Russia invades,” Yahoo News, January 13, 2022,
https://news.yahoo.com/cia-trained-ukrainian-paramilitaries-may-take-
central-role-if-russia-invades-185258008.html.

[302] “Transcript: Jake Sullivan interview,” Face the Nation, CBS News,
February 13, 2022, https://cbsnews.com/news/transcript-jake-sullivan-face-
the-nation-02-13-2022.

[303] Aamer Madhani, “Top Biden Aide Says Ukraine Invasion Could
Come ‘Any Day,’” AP, February 6, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/russia-
ukraine-joe-biden-business-national-security-jake-sullivan-
4f766b3b07014bddb9006d44a9f240b8.

[304] Helene Cooper, “US Considers Backing an Insurgency if Russia

Invades Ukraine,” New York Times, January 14, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/01/14/us/politics/russia-ukraine-biden-
military.html.

[305] James Stavridis, “If Russia Takes Ukraine, Insurgency Could Be

Putin’s Nightmare,” Bloomberg News, February 5, 2022,
https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-02-05/ukrainian-insurgency-
could-be-putin-s-worst-nightmare.

[306] John Vandiver, “US special operations presses on in Ukraine amid

threat of Russian invasion,” Stars and Stripes, January 19, 2022,
https://stripes.com/theaters/europe/2022-01-19/special-forces-press-on-in-
ukraine-amid-threat-of-russian-invasion-4343248.html; See Chapter Four.

[307] Matt Bradley and Veronika Melkozerova, “Ukraine readies for

insurgency as Russia prepares for possible war,” NBC News, February 8,
2022, https://nbcnews.com/news/world/ukraine-readies-insurgency-russia-
prepares-possible-war-n1288778.

[308] Eric Schmitt and John Ismay, “US Arms Sent to Ukraine Would Blunt
but Not Stop a Russian Invasion,” New York Times, February 15, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/02/15/us/politics/us-ukraine-weapons.html.

[309] Emily Harding, “Scenario Analysis on a Ukrainian Insurgency,”

Center for Strategic and International Studies, February 15, 2022,
https://csis.org/analysis/scenario-analysis-ukrainian-insurgency.

[310] James Bruno, “How to Make Russia Bleed,” Washington Monthly,

February 28, 2022, https://washingtonmonthly.com/2022/02/28/how-to-
make-russia-bleed.

[311] Staff, “Video shows people falling from jet after chaos at Afghanistan
airport,” CBS 17, August 16, 2021, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=yVkbqNcaOTo.

[312] Horton, Fool’s Errand, 134–42, 191–95.

[313] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan,
and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York:
Penguin Books, 2004).

[314] Neta Crawford and Catherine Lutz, “Human Cost of Post-9/11 Wars:
Direct War Deaths in Major War Zones,” Cost of War Project, September 1,
2021,
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2021/Costs%20
of%20War_Direct%20War%20Deaths_9.1.21.pdf.

[315] Scott Horton, Fool’s Errand.

[316] Patrick Wintour, et al., “West plans to arm resistance if Russian forces
occupy Ukraine,” Guardian, February 19, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/19/west-plans-to-arm-resistance-if-
russian-forces-occupy-ukraine.

[317] Marc Santora and Andrew Kramer, “Ukraine’s Advances Near

Bakhmut Expose Rifts in Russian Forces,” New York Times, May 12, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/05/12/world/europe/ukraine-bakhmut-russia.html.

[318] Marc Santora, “In Bakhmut, the Tides of Battle Are Ever Shifting,”
New York Times, May 20, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/05/20/world/europe/ukraine-bakhmut.html.

[319] Peter Certo, “Eliot Cohen,” Militarist Monitor, January 30, 2017,
https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/eliot-cohen.

[320] Eliot A. Cohen, “Arm the Ukrainians Now,” The Atlantic, February
23, 2022, https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/putin-russia-
invasion-ukraine-war/621182.

[321] Anna Borshchevskaya, “How to Make Russia Pay in Ukraine: Study

Syria,” WINEP, February 15, 2022, https://washingtoninstitute.org/policy-
analysis/how-make-russia-pay-ukraine-study-syria.

[322] See Chapter Four.

[323] Horton, Enough Already, 213–16.

[324] See Chapter Five.

[325] Sean McFate, “How to keep Russia from winning in Ukraine: Get
sneaky,” The Hill, February 7, 2022, https://thehill.com/opinion/national-
security/595935-how-to-keep-russia-from-winning-in-ukraine-get-sneaky;
Which is too bad because he liked the author’s Fool’s Errand: Time to End
the War in Afghanistan, writing, “I like the book a lot. You meticulously
source everything and name names, which is important. I tell people they
should read it when asked about ‘what should we do in Afghanistan?’”
Email to author, March 9, 2019.

[326] Douglas London, “The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency,” Foreign

Affairs, February 25, 2022, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-
02-25/coming-ukrainian-insurgency.

[327] Phil Stewart and Idrees Ali, “Russia to emerge from Ukraine conflict
weaker, senior Pentagon official says,” Reuters, March 24, 2022,
https://reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russia-emerge-ukraine-
conflict-weaker-senior-pentagon-official-says-2022-03-25.

[328] Staff, “Syria War Death Toll Over 507,000, 13 Years On,” AFP,
March 14, 2024, https://barrons.com/news/syria-war-death-toll-over-507-
000-13-years-on-32a62fe9.

[329] Dan Lamothe, “US sends more troops, warplanes to Middle East as
bulwark against Iran,” Washington Post, September 30, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/09/30/us-troops-middle-
east-israel-iran-hezbollah.

[330] Robert Scheer, “A Confession That Confirms Old Suspicions: Thirty

years late, McNamara says, ‘We were wrong, terribly wrong’ in Vietnam,”
Los Angeles Times, April 11, 1995, https://latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-
1995-04-11-me-53252-story.html.

[331] Lindsey Kennedy and Nathan Southern, “Khmer Rouge Tribunal,

helping Cambodians heal, nears end,” Al Jazeera, April 28, 2022,
https://aljazeera.com/features/2022/4/28/khmer-rouge-tribunal-nears-end-
in-cambodia; “Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia,” June
2024, https://eccc.gov.kh/en.

[332] “News conference following Russian-Hungarian talks,” Kremlin,

February 1, 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67690; Natalia
Zinets and Vladimir Soldatkin, “Putin accuses US of trying to lure Russia
into war,” Reuters, February 2, 2022,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-announces-plan-boost-army-
foreign-leaders-rally-2022-02-01.

[333] Jeff Rogg, “The CIA has backed Ukrainian insurgents before. Let’s
learn from those mistakes,” Los Angeles Times, February 25, 2022,
https://latimes.com/opinion/story/2022-02-25/ukraine-cia-insurgents-russia-
invasion.

[334] Phil Stewart and Dmitry Antonov, “Biden orders nearly 3,000 US
troops to Eastern Europe to counter Russia,” Reuters, February 3, 2022,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/kremlin-mocks-britains-utterly-confused-
johnson-before-putin-talks-2022-02-02; Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart, “Biden
sends troops to Baltics, F-35s to NATO’s eastern flank -US official,”
Reuters, February 22, 2022, https://reuters.com/world/europe/biden-sends-
troops-baltics-f-35s-natos-eastern-flank-us-official-2022-02-22.

[335] Matthew Luxmoore, et al., “NATO Members Mount Huge Operation

to Resupply Ukrainian Fighters,” Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2022,
https://wsj.com/articles/nato-members-mount-huge-operation-to-resupply-
ukrainian-fighters-11646761821; Michael R. Gordon, “How Removing a
Handful of Screws Allowed the Pentagon to Deliver Stingers to Ukraine,”
Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2022, https://wsj.com/articles/u-s-stinger-
deliveries-to-ukraine-followed-long-search-for-technical-fix-11646773886.

[336] Patricia Zengerle, “US Gives Ukraine $800 Million More in Military
Aid, Adds Heavy Weapons,” Reuters, April 13, 2022,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/us-announces-additional-800-million-
military-aid-ukraine-2022-04-13.

[337] Michael R. Gordon, et al., “Biden Administration to Provide Ukraine

With More Intelligence, Heavier Weapons to Fight Russia,” Wall Street
Journal, April 13, 2022, https://wsj.com/articles/u-s-expands-flow-of-
intelligence-to-ukraine-as-white-house-sends-more-arms-11649868029; Joe
Gould, “Western Nations Adapt Their Ukraine Help as War Enters New
Phase,” Defense News, April 11, 2022,
https://defensenews.com/global/europe/2022/04/11/western-nations-adapt-
their-ukraine-help-as-war-enters-new-phase.

[338] “Russia Says US, NATO Weapon Transports in Ukraine Are

Legitimate Targets” Reuters, April 13, 2022,
https://usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-04-13/russia-says-u-s-nato-
weapon-transports-in-ukraine-are-legitimate-targets.

[339] Karen DeYoung, “Russia Warns US to Stop Arming Ukraine,”

Washington Post, April 14, 2022, https://washingtonpost.com/national-
security/2022/04/14/russia-warns-us-stop-arming-ukraine.

[340] Justin Raimondo, “Baghdad Bomb Blasts American Hubris,”

Antiwar.com, August 20, 2003, https://antiwar.com/justin/j082003.html.

[341] Niall Ferguson, “Putin Misunderstands History. So, Unfortunately,

Does the US,” Bloomberg News, March 22, 2022,
https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-22/niall-ferguson-putin-
and-biden-misunderstand-history-in-ukraine-war.

[342] Alberto Nardelli, et al., “NATO Allies Are Split on Whether They
Should Talk to Putin,” Bloomberg News, March 28, 2022,
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-03-28/nato-allies-are-split-on-
whether-they-should-talk-to-putin.

[343] Michael Birnbaum and Missy Ryan, “NATO Says Ukraine to Decide
on Peace Deal With Russia – Within Limits,” Washington Post, April 5,
2022, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/04/05/ukraine-
nato-russia-limits-peace.

[344] Reis Thebault, et al., “Biden calls for Putin ‘war-crimes trial’ as world
leaders issue fresh rebukes,” Washington Post, April 4, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/04/russia-ukraine-war-news-
putin-live-updates.

[345] Maureen Breslin, “Top US general says he expects Russia, Ukraine

conflict to be ‘measured in years,’” The Hill, March 6, 2022,
https://thehill.com/news/3260171-top-us-general-says-he-expects-russia-
ukraine-conflict-to-be-measured-in-years.

[346] “Richard Haass: ‘I Did Not Believe In The Iraq War,’” NPR News,
May 13, 2009, https://npr.org/2009/05/13/104088144/richard-haass-i-did-
not-believe-in-the-iraq-war.
[347] Richard Haass, “What Does the West Want in Ukraine?” Foreign
Affairs, April 22, 2022, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-
federation/2022-04-22/what-does-west-want-ukraine.

[348] Staff, “NATO allies want longer Ukraine war to weaken Moscow:
Turkey,” The New Arab, April 21, 2022,
https://english.alaraby.co.uk/news/nato-allies-want-longer-ukraine-war-
weaken-moscow-turkey.

[349] Steve Inskeep, “Blinken sets a standard for lifting sanctions: an

‘irreversible’ Russian withdrawal,” NPR News, March 16, 2022,
https://wbur.org/npr/1086835380/blinken-sets-a-standard-for-lifting-
sanctions-an-irreversible-russian-withdrawal.

[350] Sarakshi Rai, “Pentagon chief says US wants to see Russia

‘weakened,’” The Hill, April 25, 2022,
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3462190-Pentagon-chief-says-us-wants-
to-see-russia-weakened; “Secretary Antony J. Blinken and Secretary Lloyd
Austin Remarks to Traveling Press,” US State Department, April 25, 2022,
https://state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-and-secretary-lloyd-austin-
remarks-to-traveling-press.

[351] David Sanger, “Behind Austin’s Call for a ‘Weakened’ Russia, Hints
of a Shift,” New York Times, April 25, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/04/25/us/politics/ukraine-russia-us-dynamic.html.
[352] Carol E. Lee, et al., “When the secretaries of Defense and State said
publicly the US wants Ukraine to win and weaken Russia, Biden said tone
it down,” NBC News, June 16, 2022, https://nbcnews.com/politics/national-
security/secretaries-defense-state-said-publicly-us-wanted-ukraine-win-
biden-sa-rcna33826.

[353] Peter Baker and David Sanger, “Ukraine and the Contest of Global
Stamina,” New York Times, July 9, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/07/09/us/politics/ukraine-strategy-biden.html.

[354] Tom Stevenson, “America and Its Allies Want to Bleed Russia. They
Really Shouldn’t,” New York Times, May 11, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/05/11/opinion/russia-ukraine-war-america.html.

[355] Joseph Choi, “Sullivan: US wants to see an ‘independent Ukraine’

and ‘a weakened and isolated Russia,’” The Hill, April 10, 2022,
https://thehill.com/news/3263473-sullivan-us-wants-to-see-an-independent-
ukraine-and-a-weakened-and-isolated-russia.

[356] Scott Horton, “Iraq War II, Part 2: A Clean Break,” Scott Horton
Show Substack, February 10, 2023,
https://scotthortonshow.substack.com/p/iraq-war-ii-part-2-a-clean-break.

[357] James Heappey, “Ukrainians are fighting for their freedom, and
Britain is doing everything to help them,” Telegraph, February 26, 2022,
https://telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/02/26/ukrainians-fighting-
freedom-britain-everything-help.
[358] The same woman John Brennan picked to help write the phony ICA
of January 2017. See Chapter Five.

[359] Mark Mazzetti, et al., “For the US, a Tenuous Balance in Confronting
Russia,” New York Times, March 19, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/03/19/us/politics/us-ukraine-russia-
escalation.html.

[360] Jeffrey Goldberg, “A Russian Defeat in Ukraine Could Save Taiwan,”

The Atlantic, July 25, 2022,
https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/jake-sullivan-interview-china-
russia-biden-foreign-policy/670930.

[361] Ellen Mitchell, “Why Biden is ambiguous on Ukraine’s Crimea

question,” The Hill, March 5, 2023,
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/3884764-why-biden-is-ambiguous-on-
ukraines-crimea-question.

[362] Anton Troianovski, et al., “Ukraine-Russia Peace Is as Elusive as

Ever. But in 2022 They Were Talking,” New York Times, June 15, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/15/world/europe/ukraine-russia-
ceasefire-deal.html.

[363] Asma Khalid, “How Biden is trying to clean up his comments about
Russia and Ukraine,” NPR News, January 20, 2022,
https://npr.org/2022/01/20/1074466148/biden-russia-ukraine-minor-
incursion; Anton Troianovski, et al., “Ukraine-Russia Peace Is as Elusive as
Ever. But in 2022 They Were Talking,” New York Times, June 15, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/15/world/europe/ukraine-russia-
ceasefire-deal.html.

[364] “Volodymyr Zelenskyy at a Meeting of the Joint Expeditionary Force

Leaders Presented His Vision of How to Stop Russian Aggression,” March
15, 2022, https://president.gov.ua/en/news/volodimir-zelenskij-na-zustrichi-
lideriv-derzhav-joint-exped-73573; Adam Cancryn, “Biden deems idea of
Ukraine NATO membership as ‘premature,’” Politico, July 9, 2023,
https://politico.com/news/2023/07/09/biden-deems-ukraine-nato-
membership-premature-00105321.

[365] President Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on Russia’s

Unprovoked and Unjustified Attack on Ukraine,” White House, February
24, 2022, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-
remarks/2022/02/24/remarks-by-president-biden-on-russias-unprovoked-
and-unjustified-attack-on-ukraine; About 114,000 search results for
“Ukraine” “unprovoked attack,” Google, July 24, 2024,
https://google.com/search?q=“ukraine”+“unprovoked+attack”.

[366] “Secretary Blinken’s Call with Ukrainian President Zelenskyy,” US

State Department, December 6, 2021, https://state.gov/secretary-blinkens-
call-with-ukrainian-president-zelenskyy.

[367] Matt Orfalea, “Ukraine Will Win – No Amount of Propaganda Can

Hide the Fact that Ukraine is Winning this War,” 0rf, February 22, 2024,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=e3F3owL3iQo.
[368] Search results for Reddit, “Russia second strongest,”
https://reddit.com/search/?q=russia+second+strongest.

[369] Tweet by Richard Haass, February 27, 2022,

https://x.com/RichardHaass/status/1497975759352250376.

[370] Tweet by Benjamin Wittes, February 27, 2022,

https://web.archive.org/web/20220227124944/https://x.com/benjaminwittes
/status/1497916216903618562.

[371] Staff, “Clinton Twp. flies Ukrainian flag outside Civic Center,”
Macomb Daily, March 12, 2022,
https://macombdaily.com/2022/03/12/clinton-twp-flies-ukrainian-flag-
outside-civic-center.

[372] Will DuPree, “Large Ukrainian flag flying at Austin car dealership,”
KXAN News Austin, April 6, 2022,
https://kxan.com/news/international/ukraine/large-ukrainian-flag-flying-at-
austin-car-dealership.

[373] Staff, “Ukraine’s flag flies across the United States,” Share America,
August 23, 2024, https://share.america.gov/2-years-after-russias-invasion-
ukraines-flag-still-flies-in-us.

[374] Morning Consult, National Tracking Poll #2202035, February 7,

2022, https://assets.morningconsult.com/wp-
uploads/2022/02/08174124/2202035_crosstabs_GEOPOLITICAL_RISK_
UKRAINE_RVs_v2_LM.pdf.
[375] John Robb, “Swarms vs. Nukes,” Global Guerrillas, March 23, 2022,
https://johnrobb.substack.com/p/swarms-vs-nukes.

[376] Hannah Brooks, “Putin invaded Ukraine. But Russian immigrants are
paying the price,” NBC News, May 2, 2022,
https://nbcnews.com/think/opinion/putin-ukraine-russia-war-russian-
immigrants-paying-price-rcna26971.

[377] Zoe Strozewski, “Officials Pour Out Vodka to Protest War but Use
Brands From US Companies,” Newsweek, March 8, 2022,
https://newsweek.com/officials-pour-out-vodka-protest-war-dont-use-
russian-brands-1686000.

[378] Press Release, “Gov. Cox orders Russian products removed from
state liquor stores,” Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox, February 26, 2022,
https://governor.utah.gov/2022/02/26/russian-products.

[379] Erica Pieschke, “Rep. Eric Swalwell suggests ‘kicking every Russian
student’ out of U.S. universities,” KRON 4, February 25, 2022,
https://kron4.com/russia-ukraine-crisis/rep-eric-swalwell-suggests-kicking-
every-russian-student-out-of-u-s-universities.

[380] Staff, “CHL bans Russian, Belarusian players from selection at

upcoming import draft,” CBC News, April 27, 2022,
https://cbc.ca/sports/hockey/chl-bans-russian-belarusian-players-draft-
1.6433173.
[381] Staff, “Germany: Munich private clinic refuses Russian and
Belarusian patients,” Nova.news, March 11, 2022,
https://agenzianova.com/en/news/germania-clinica-privata-di-monaco-
rifiuta-pazienti-russi-e-bielorussi.

[382] Ronald Blum, “Top Russian soprano axed over Ukraine invasion sues
Met Opera,” AP, August 4, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/netrebko-
lawsuit-metropolitan-opera-309718ebf5117e39c3435339376a802a.

[383] Elizabeth Ammon, et al., “Russia’s Daniil Medvedev faces

Wimbledon ban unless he disavows Putin,” London Times, March 15, 2022,
https://thetimes.com/article/russia-s-daniil-medvedev-faces-wimbledon-
ban-unless-he-distances-himself-from-putin-9h6hfxxrm.

[384] Press Release, “FIFA/UEFA suspend Russian clubs and national

teams from all competitions,” FIFA, February 28, 2022,
https://inside.fifa.com/tournaments/mens/worldcup/qatar2022/media-
releases/fifa-uefa-suspend-russian-clubs-and-national-teams-from-all-
competitions.

[385] Bridget Brown, “Boston Marathon bars runners from Russia and
Belarus from participating,” CBS News, April 6, 2022,
https://cbsnews.com/news/boston-marathon-bans-russian-belarusian-
athletes-boston-athletic-association-5k.

[386] Khaleda Rahman, “College Backtracks on Banning Teaching

Dostoevsky Because He’s Russian,” Newsweek, March 2, 2022,
https://newsweek.com/college-backtracks-banning-teaching-dostoevsky-
russian-1684080.

[387] Matthew Weaver, “Cardiff Philharmonic removes Tchaikovsky

performance over Ukraine conflict,” Guardian, March 9, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/mar/09/cardiff-philharmonic-
orchestra-removes-tchaikovsky-over-ukraine-conflict.

[388] Roxana Saberi, “Russian artists and athletes hurt by international

boycotts: ‘You are treated as part of that state,’” CBS News, April 21, 2022,
https://cbsnews.com/news/russian-artists-athletes-banned-protest-ukraine-
war.

[389] Tom Grater, “European Film Academy Joins Call For Boycott Of
Russian Films,” Deadline, March 1, 2022,
https://deadline.com/2022/03/european-film-academy-call-boycott-russian-
films-1234967972.

[390] Rebecca Klar, “Facebook, Instagram to allow calls for violence

against Russians temporarily,” The Hill, March 10, 2022,
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/597763-facebook-instagram-to-allow-
calls-for-violence-against-russians-temporarily.

[391] Sam Biddle, “Facebook Allows Praise of Neo-Nazi Ukrainian

Battalion If It Fights Russian Invasion,” Intercept, February 24, 2022,
https://theintercept.com/2022/02/24/ukraine-facebook-azov-battalion-
russia.
[392] Stuti Mishra, “Russian cats are now banned from international
competition,” Independent, March 7, 2022,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/russian-cats-banned-
federation-internationale-feline-b2028508.html.

[393] Susan Schmidt, et al., “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex:

The Top 50 Organizations to Know,” Racket News, May 10, 2023,
https://racket.news/p/report-on-the-censorship-industrial-74b.

[394] See Chapter Four.

[395] Susan Schmidt, et al., “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex:

The Top 50 Organizations to Know,” Racket News, May 10, 2023,
https://racket.news/p/report-on-the-censorship-industrial-74b.

[396] The same former Polish defense and foreign minister who was in on
the W. Bush-era CIA torture program, helped negotiate the 2014 regime
change in Kiev and demanded that Biden bomb Russia after Ukraine
accidentally hit Poland with one small anti-aircraft rocket, as detailed
above.

[397] Gabe Kaminsky, “Disinformation Inc: Meet the groups hauling in

cash to secretly blacklist conservative news,” Washington Examiner,
February 9, 2023,
https://washingtonexaminer.com/news/2749593/disinformation-inc-meet-
the-groups-hauling-in-cash-to-secretly-blacklist-conservative-news.
[398] Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth
of American Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

[399] Email to author, Google Adsense Team, April 13, 2022.

[400] See below.

[401] Jeff Nesbit, “Google’s true origin partly lies in CIA and NSA research
grants for mass surveillance,” Quartz, December 8, 2017,
https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-
research-grants-for-mass-surveillance.

[402] Michael Muskal, “Ex-Tribune reporter said to have ‘collaborative’

relationship with CIA,” Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2014,
https://latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-tribune-dilanian-20140904-
story.html.

[403] Nandita Bose and Alexandra Alper, “Biden says Putin is weighing use
of chemical weapons in Ukraine, without citing evidence,” Reuters, March
21, 2022, https://reuters.com/world/biden-says-putin-is-weighing-use-
chemical-weapons-ukraine-2022-03-21.

[404] Ken Dilanian, et al., “US is Using Intel to Fight an Info War with
Russia, Even When the Intel Isn’t Rock Solid,” NBC News, April 6, 2022,
https://nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-using-declassified-intel-
fight-info-war-russia-even-intel-isnt-rock-rcna23014.
[405] Ken Dilanian, et al., “US is Using Intel to Fight an Info War with
Russia, Even When the Intel Isn’t Rock Solid,” NBC News, April 6, 2022,
https://nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-using-declassified-intel-
fight-info-war-russia-even-intel-isnt-rock-rcna23014.

[406] See Chapter Two.

[407] Rachel Treisman, “Russia bombards a Kyiv TV tower and the Babyn
Yar Holocaust memorial site,” NPR News, March 1, 2022,
https://npr.org/2022/03/01/1083733323/russia-bombards-a-kyiv-tv-tower-
and-the-babyn-yar-holocaust-memorial-site; Alexander Smith, “Russia
criticized after Ukraine says Kyiv airstrike hits near Holocaust memorial
site,” NBC News, March 2, 2022, https://nbcnews.com/news/world/babi-
yar-russia-criticized-ukraine-strike-holocaust-memorial-rcna18245;
Matthew Brown, “Babi Yar, Kyiv’s Holocaust memorial to victims of
Nazis, damaged in Russian bombing attack,” USA Today, March 1, 2022,
https://usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2022/03/01/ukraine-holocaust-
babi-yar/6979800001.

[408] See Chapter Four.

[409] Ron Ben-Yishai, “I toured the memorial site in Babi Yar. Nothing was
hurt there yesterday,” Ynet, March 2, 2022,
https://ynet.co.il/news/article/sky0frhg5.

[410] Isabelle Khurshudyan, et al., “Ukraine’s president says Russian

missile hit site of Babyn Yar Holocaust memorial,” Washington Post, March
2, 2022, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/01/ukraine-russia-
babyn-yar.

[411] Larisa Brown, “Ghost of Kyiv is alive in all pilots fighting for
Ukraine, says air force,” London Times, April 29, 2022,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/ghost-of-kyiv-who-shot-down-more-than-40-
russian-aircraft-dies-in-battle-q3sq0hztx.

[412] Ed Skibicki, “I am doing everything I can to lead the fight for

Ukraine’s freedom,” Fox News, March 4, 2022,
https://foxnews.com/opinion/fight-ukraine-freedom-ed-skibicki.

[413] Isabel van Brugen, “Who is the Ghost of Kyiv? Ukraine MiG-29
Fighter Pilot Becomes the Stuff of Legend,” Newsweek, February 25, 2022,
https://newsweek.com/who-ghost-kyiv-ukraine-fighter-pilot-mig-29-
russian-fighter-jets-combat-1682651.

[414] Tweet by Rep. Adam Kinzinger, February 25, 2022,

https://x.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1497284628226445318.

[415] Andy Wolf and Todd Speyer, “‘Ghost of Kyiv’ revealed to be a hoax,
joins list of false narratives by both sides,” War is Boring, May 2, 2022,
https://warisboring.com/ghost-of-kyiv-revealed-to-be-a-hoax-joins-list-of-
false-narratives-by-both-sides.

[416] Tweet by @warupdates9, February 25, 2022,

https://x.com/warupdates9/status/1497140960127590401; Ethan Gach,
“‘Ghost Of Kyiv’ Fighter Pilot Blowing Up Russian Aircraft In Trending
Clip Actually From Video Game,” Kotaku, February 26, 2022,
https://kotaku.com/ghost-kyiv-russia-ukraine-invasion-viral-video-fake-pc-
1848598266.

[417] Geoff Ziezulewicz, “Ukrainians trapped on Snake Island to the

Russians demanding their surrender: ‘go fuck yourself,’” Military.com,
February 25, 2022, https://navytimes.com/news/your-
navy/2022/02/25/ukrainians-trapped-on-snake-island-to-the-russians-
demanding-their-surrender-go-fck-yourself.

[418] Valentina Romanenko, “Russian Ship, go to hell! – The defenders of

Zmeinoye responded to the enemy,” Ukrainska Pravda, February 24, 2022,
https://pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2022/02/25/7325592.

[419] Rachel Nostrant, “Snake Island Ukrainians found alive, taken as

Russian prisoners,” Military Times, February 28, 2022,
https://militarytimes.com/flashpoints/ukraine/2022/02/28/snake-island-
ukrainians-found-alive-taken-as-russian-prisoners.

[420] Dan Lamothe and Paul Sonne, “On Ukraine’s Snake Island, a defiant
last stand against Russian forces,” Washington Post, February 25, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/02/25/snake-island-
russian-warship-ukraine; Brad Lendon, et al., “Soldiers on Snake Island
reacted with defiant words to threats from Russian warship,” CNN,
February 28, 2022, https://cnn.com/2022/02/25/europe/ukraine-russia-
snake-island-attack-intl-hnk-ml/index.html.
[421] Megan Brenan, “Media Confidence in US Matches 2016 Record
Low,” Gallup Poll, October 19, 2023,
https://news.gallup.com/poll/512861/media-confidence-matches-2016-
record-low.aspx.

[422] John Hudson and Missy Ryan, “US claims Russia has list of
Ukrainians ‘to be killed or sent to camps’ following a military occupation,”
Washington Post, February 21, 2022, https://washingtonpost.com/national-
security/2022/02/20/ukraine-russia-human-rights.

[423] John Hudson and Missy Ryan, “US claims Russia has list of
Ukrainians ‘to be killed or sent to camps’ following a military occupation,”
Washington Post, February 21, 2022, https://washingtonpost.com/national-
security/2022/02/20/ukraine-russia-human-rights.

[424] Staff, “‘Children’: The attack on the Donetsk Regional Academic

Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine,” Amnesty International, June 30,
2022, https://amnesty.org/en/documents/eur50/5713/2022/en; Staff,
“Ukraine: Deadly Mariupol theatre strike ‘a clear war crime’ by Russian
forces – new investigation,” Amnesty International, June 30, 2022,
https://amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/06/ukraine-deadly-mariupol-
theatre-strike-a-clear-war-crime-by-russian-forces-new-investigation.

[425] Nebi Qena and Andrea Rosa, “Ukraine reports 300 dead in airstrike
on Mariupol theater,” AP, March 25, 2022,
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-zelenskyy-kyiv-europe-moscow-
b56759e5d40db18e94bef8e42db23e47.
[426] Lori Hinnant, et al., “AP evidence points to 600 dead in Mariupol
theatre airstrike,” AP, May 4, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/Russia-
ukraine-war-mariupol-theater-c321a196fbd568899841b506afcac7a1;
Marshall Ritzel and Lori Hinnant, “AP Methodology: Calculating Mariupol
theatre airstrike dead,” AP, May 4, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/russia-
ukraine-business-europe-donetsk-0e361756c6acc287e8974103913abfc6.

[427] Staff, “‘Children’: The attack on the Donetsk Regional Academic

Drama Theatre in Mariupol, Ukraine,” Amnesty International, June 30,
2022, https://amnesty.org/en/documents/eur50/5713/2022/en.

[428] Max Blumenthal, “Was bombing of Mariupol theater staged by

Ukrainian Azov extremists to trigger NATO intervention?” Grayzone,
March 18, 2022, https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/18/bombing-mariupol-
theater-ukrainian-azov-nato-intervention.

[429] Telegram post, March 12, 2022, https://t.me/DmitriySteshin/4246;

Tweet by @elenaevdokimov7, March 13, 2022,
https://x.com/elenaevdokimov7/status/1502875319170387968.

[430] “Official appeal of Azov commander, the major Denis Prokopenko, to

the world community,” Azov Battalion, March 7, 2022,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=dZ8KFqQWRbY.

[431] Laurin-Whitney Gottbrath, “Why Ukraine wants a no-fly zone – but

is unlikely to get one,” Axios, March 16, 2022,
https://axios.com/2022/03/03/ukraine-no-fly-zone-meaning-nato-biden.
[432] Staff, “Messing with the Truth: Disinformation in the West Spread by
Max Blumenthal,” VoxCheck, November 28, 2023,
https://voxukraine.org/en/messing-with-the-truth-disinformation-in-the-
west-spread-by-max-blumenthal.

[433] Catie Edmondson, “Annotated Transcript: Zelensky’s Speech to

Congress,” New York Times, March 16, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/03/16/us/politics/transcript-zelensky-speech.html.

[434] Tweet by Rep. Adam Kinzinger, March 16, 2022,

https://x.com/AdamKinzinger/status/1504228898183262211.

[435] Illia Novikov, “Ukraine and Russia trade fresh accusations of

targeting a major nuclear power plant,” AP, April 8, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-nuclear-power-plant-drone-
strike-7d3f345c8e01a4b185359da7b88cf952.

[436] Maxim Tucker, “Ukraine’s secret attempt to retake the Zaporizhzhia

nuclear plant,” London Times, April 7, 2023,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/ukrainian-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant-
russia-putin-war-2023-fx82xz3xz.

[437] Marc Santora, “UN Inspectors Say Nuclear Plant in Ukraine Was
Struck by Drones,” New York Times, April 8, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/04/08/world/europe/ukraine-nuclear-power-plant-
russia.html.
[438] Francois Murphy, “IAEA Board to meet on Zaporizhzhia attacks on
Thursday, diplomats say,” Reuters, April 9, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/iaea-board-meet-ukraines-zaporizhzhia-
thursday-diplomats-say-2024-04-09.

[439] Louis Charbonneau, “US envoy: Gaddafi troops raping, issued

Viagra,” Reuters, April 29, 2011,
https://reuters.com/article/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/us-envoy-
gaddafi-troops-raping-issued-viagra-idUSTRE73S74B; Patrick Cockburn,
“Amnesty questions claim that Gaddafi ordered rape as weapon of war,”
Independent, June 24, 2011,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/amnesty-questions-claim-that-
gaddafi-ordered-rape-as-weapon-of-war-2302037.html.

[440] Dr. Ewelina U. Ochab, “United Nations: Rape Is Part Of Russia’s

Military Strategy,” Forbes, October 14, 2022,
https://forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2022/10/14/united-nations-rape-is-
part-of-russias-military-strategy.

[441] Alexander Rubinstein, “UN envoy admits fabricating claim of Viagra-

fueled rape as ‘Russian military strategy,’” Grayzone, November 13, 2022,
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/11/13/un-envoy-fabricating-viagra-russian.

[442] Staff, “Report on the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine 1 February

to 31 July 2022,” UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,
September 27, 2022,
https://ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/countries/ua/2022-09-
23/ReportUkraine-1Feb-31Jul2022-en.pdf.

[443] “Pramila Patten (UN Rep) spread the fake about Russian soldiers’
rapes with Viagra,” Vovan and Lexus, November 11, 2022,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=AYAxinmll7I.

[444] Unlike the rest on the list, America was actually attacked by men in
Afghanistan, but not by the Taliban regime. Horton, Fool’s Errand, 49–52;
Kate Clark, “Revealed: The Taliban Minister, the US Envoy and the
Warning of September 11 That Was Ignored,” Independent, September 6,
2002, http://independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/revealed-the-taliban-
minister-the-us-envoy-and-the-warning-of-september-11-that-was-ignored-
131426.html; Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, An Enemy We
Created: The Myth of the Taliban-Al Qaeda Merger in Afghanistan (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2012), 170.

[445] Ned Price, State Department Press Briefing, March 21, 2022,
https://state.gov/briefings/department-press-briefing-march-21-2022.

[446] Ned Price, State Department Press Briefing, October 25, 2022,
https://state.gov/briefings/department-press-briefing-october-25-2022.

[447] John Hudson, “As war nears 5th month, Blinken keeps Russian
diplomats at arm’s length,” Washington Post, July 10, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/07/09/blinken-lavrov-
diplomacy.
[448] President Volodymyr Zelensky, “Address by the President to
Ukrainians at the end of the first day of Russia’s attacks,” February 25,
2022, https://president.gov.ua/en/news/zvernennya-prezidenta-do-
ukrayinciv-naprikinci-pershogo-dnya-73149.

[449] Valerie Hopkins, “Initial talks between Russia and Ukraine yield no
resolution,” New York Times, February 28, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/02/28/world/europe/ukraine-russia-talks-
belarus.html.

[450] Ben Caspit, “What is going on in negotiations between Russia and

Ukraine?” Jerusalem Post, March 9, 2022,
https://jpost.com/international/article-700677.

[451] Max Seddon, et al., “Ukraine and Russia explore neutrality plan in
peace talks,” Financial Times, March 16, 2022,
https://ft.com/content/7b341e46-d375-4817-be67-802b7fa77ef1.

[452] Fabian Scheidler, “Naftali Bennett wanted peace between Ukraine

and Russia: who blocked?” Berliner Zeitung, February 6, 2023,
https://berliner-zeitung.de/open-source/naftali-bennett-wollte-den-frieden-
zwischen-ukraine-und-russland-wer-hat-blockiert-li.314871.

[453] Naftali Bennett interview, “Bennett Speaks Out,” February 4, 2023,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=qK9tLDeWBzs; Translated from Hebrew by
a friend.
[454] Tweet by Naftali Bennett, February 6, 2023,
https://x.com/naftalibennett/status/1622571402430750721.

[455] Max Seddon, et al., “Russia No Longer Requesting Ukraine Be

‘Denazified’ as Part of Ceasefire Talks,” Financial Times, March 28, 2022,
https://ft.com/content/7f14efe8-2f4c-47a2-aa6b-9a755a39b626; Staff,
“Ukraine Ready to Discuss Adopting Neutral Status in Russia Peace Deal –
Zelenskiy,” Reuters, March 27, 2022,
https://usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-03-27/ukraine-prepared-to-
discuss-neutrality-status-zelenskiy-tells-russian-journalists.

[456] Fiona Hill and Angela Stent, “The World Putin Wants,” Foreign
Affairs, September/October 2022, https://foreignaffairs.com/russian-
federation/world-putin-wants-fiona-hill-angela-stent.

[457] Ned Price, “Department Press Briefing,” US State Department,

March 21, 2022, https://state.gov/briefings/department-press-briefing-
march-21-2022.

[458] “Ukraine Ready to Discuss Adopting Neutral Status in Russia Peace

Deal – Zelenskiy,” Reuters, March 27, 2022,
https://usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-03-27/ukraine-prepared-to-
discuss-neutrality-status-zelenskiy-tells-russian-journalists.

[459] Anchal Vohra, “Ukraine Is Ready for Painful Concessions,” Foreign

Policy, March 30, 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/30/ukraine-is-
ready-for-painful-concessions.
[460] “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki and Deputy NSA for
Cyber and Emerging Technologies Anne Neuberger,” White House, March
21, 2022, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-
briefings/2022/03/21/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-and-
deputy-nsa-for-cyber-and-emerging-technologies-anne-neuberger-march-
21-2022.

[461] Farida Rustamova, “Ukraine’s 10-point plan,” Faridaily, March 29,

2022, https://faridaily.substack.com/p/ukraines-10-point-plan; Anchal
Vohra, “Ukraine Is Ready for Painful Concessions,” Foreign Policy, March
30, 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/30/ukraine-is-ready-for-
painful-concessions.

[462] Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, “The Talks That Could Have
Ended the War in Ukraine,” Foreign Affairs, April 16, 2024,
https://foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/talks-could-have-ended-war-ukraine.

[463] Kareem Fahim, “Ukraine-Russia talks stir optimism, but West urges
caution,” Washington Post, March 29, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/03/29/ukraine-russia-
turkey-negotiations.

[464] See Chapter Five.

[465] Freddie Sayers, “Oleksiy Arestovych: Zelensky’s challenger The

President’s former spokesman has turned into his fiercest critic,” UnHerd,
January 15, 2024, https://unherd.com/2024/01/oleksiy-arestovych-
zelenskyys-challenger.

[466] William Booth, et al., “What weapons to send to Ukraine? How

debate shifted from helmets to tanks,” Washington Post, April 9, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/09/nato-heavy-weapons-
ukraine.

[467] “Tomas Fiala buys ‘Ukrainskaya Pravda’ – Profile of new owner,”

Mezha, May 26, 2021, https://mezha.net/eng/bukvy/tomas-fiala-buys-
ukrainskaya-pravda-profile-of-new-owner.

[468] “Dragon Capital New Ukraine Fund,” Dragon Capital, https://dragon-

capital.com/what-we-do/private-equity.

[469] Roman Romaniuk, “Possibility of talks between Zelenskyy and Putin

came to a halt after Johnson’s visit – UP sources,” Ukrainska Pravda, May
5, 2022, https://pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2022/05/5/7344206; Roman
Romaniuk, “From Zelenskyy’s ‘surrender’ to Putin’s surrender: how the
negotiations with Russia are going,” Ukrainska Pravda, May 5, 2022,
https://pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096.

[470] Michael von der Schulenburg, “Obligation to seek peace,” Emma,

March 7, 2023, https://emma.de/artikel/obligation-seek-peace-340199.

[471] Staff, “Interview: Sergey Lavrov: There Should Be No Nuclear War,”

TASS, June 16, 2022, https://tass.ru/interviews/14935127.
[472] Staff, “Putin’s National Address on a Partial Military Mobilization,”
Washington Post, September 21, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/21/putin-speech-russia-ukraine-
war-mobilization.

[473] Staff, “Head of Ukraine’s leading party claims Russia proposed

‘peace’ in exchange for neutrality,” Ukrainska Pravda, November 24, 2023,
https://news.yahoo.com/head-ukraines-leading-party-claims-
205150773.html.

[474] Staff, “Head of Ukraine’s leading party claims Russia proposed

‘peace’ in exchange for neutrality,” Ukrainska Pravda, November 24, 2023,
https://news.yahoo.com/head-ukraines-leading-party-claims-
205150773.html.

[475] “PM call with President Macron,” UK Prime Minister’s Office, May
6, 2022, https://gov.uk/government/news/pm-call-with-president-macron-6-
may-2022.

[476] Marc Bennetts, “Johnson embroiled in war of words over ‘sabotaged’

Ukraine peace deal,” London Times, January 10, 2024,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-ukraine-peace-talks-russia-war-
k220zcrvf.

[477] Yaroslav Trofimov, “Did Ukraine Miss an Early Chance to Negotiate

Peace With Russia?” Wall Street Journal, January 5, 2004,
https://wsj.com/world/did-ukraine-miss-an-early-chance-to-negotiate-
peace-with-russia-d864b7c9.

[478] Max Seddon, et al., “Russia no longer requesting Ukraine be

‘denazified’ as part of ceasefire talks,” Financial Times, March 28, 2022,
https://archive.md/wOp4O.

[479] “Former Ukrainian Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs reveals Putin’s

genuine desire for peace during Istanbul negotiations,” Voice of Europe,
December 28, 2023, https://voiceofeurope.com/former-ukrainian-deputy-
minister-of-foreign-affairs-reveals-putins-genuine-desire-for-peace-during-
istanbul-negotiations.

[480] “Breaking the Stalemate to Find Peace: The Russia-Ukraine War – A

Geneva Security Debate,” Geneva Centre for Security Policy (GCSP),
December 22, 2023, https://youtube.com/watch?v=t2zpV35fvHw.

[481] See below.

[482] Tomasz Kurianovz and Moritz Eichhorn, “Interview with Gerhard

Schröder: This is how peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia
failed,” Berliner-Zeitung, October 20, 2023, https://berliner-
zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/gerhard-schroeder-im-exklusiv-interview-
was-merkel-2015-gemacht-hat-war-politisch-falsch-li.2151196.

[483] “Turkish FM says some NATO states want Ukrainian war to

continue,” Hurriyet Daily News, April 21, 2022,
https://hurriyetdailynews.com/nato-allies-want-longer-ukraine-war-to-
weaken-moscow-turkey-173158.

[484] Numan Kurtulmuş, “Last minute: (Russia-Ukraine) Someone is trying

not to end the war,” CNN Türk, November 18, 2022,
https://cnnturk.com/video/turkiye/son-dakika-ak-parti-genel-baskanvekili-
numan-kurtulmus-cnn-turkte181122.

[485] “Zelensky told Russian journalists that he agrees to the neutral status
of Ukraine,” Strana, March 2022, https://strana.news/news/383576-
zelenskij-prezident-zajavil-chto-sohlasen-na-nejtralnyj-status-ukrainy.html.

[486] Max Colchester, et al., “Document From 2022 Reveals Putin’s

Punishing Terms for Peace,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2024,
https://wsj.com/world/russia-ukraine-peace-deal-2022-document-6e12e093.

[487] Mark Patinkin, “Gen. Nathanael Greene’s legacy stretches far beyond
RI,” The Providence Journal, July 28, 2017,
https://providencejournal.com/story/opinion/columns/2017/07/28/mark-
patinkin-gen-nathanael-greenes-legacy-stretches-far-beyond-
ri/20058472007.

[488] See Chapter Four.

[489] Robert D. Murphy, “The Political Adviser in Germany (Murphy) to

the Secretary of State, Subject: Report on Denazification,” No. 576, July 7,
1945, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1945Berlinv01/d347.
[490] “Victoria Nuland on Russia-NATO relations, peace negotiations with
Ukraine, and the US elections,” Mikhail Zygar, September 3, 2024,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HiS2dg_atfc.

[491] See Chapter One.

[492] Anton Troianovski, et al., “Ukraine-Russia Peace Is as Elusive as

Ever. But in 2022 They Were Talking,” New York Times, June 15, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/15/world/europe/ukraine-russia-
ceasefire-deal.html.

[493] President Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden in Press

Conference,” White House, March 24, 2022,
https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-
remarks/2022/03/24/remarks-by-president-biden-in-press-conference-7;
President Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on the United Efforts of
the Free World to Support the People of Ukraine,” White House, March 26,
2022, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-
remarks/2022/03/26/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-united-efforts-of-
the-free-world-to-support-the-people-of-ukraine.

[494] “Statement from Press Secretary Jen Psaki on Russian Aggression

Towards Ukraine,” January 19, 2022, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-
room/statements-releases/2022/01/19/statement-from-press-secretary-jen-
psaki-on-russian-aggression-towards-ukraine; Molly Nagle, “Biden clarifies
comments on Ukraine, says any Russian move across border would be an
‘invasion,’” ABC News, January 20, 2022,
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-clarifies-comments-ukraine-russian-
move-border-invasion/story?id=82376647.

[495] Graeme Massie, “Joe Biden says Nato would respond ‘in kind’ to
Russian use of chemical weapons,” Independent, March 25, 2022,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/biden-nato-
russia-chemical-weapon-b2043704.html.

[496] Steven Nelson, “Biden tells US troops they’ll be in Ukraine in war

gaffe,” New York Post, March 25, 2022, https://nypost.com/2022/03/25/joe-
biden-says-us-troops-will-be-in-ukraine-in-apparent-gaffe.

[497] President Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on the United

Efforts of the Free World to Support the People of Ukraine,” White House,
March 26, 2022, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-
remarks/2022/03/26/remarks-by-president-biden-on-the-united-efforts-of-
the-free-world-to-support-the-people-of-ukraine.

[498] Staff, “Insults from Biden narrow window of opportunity for mending
ties with US: Peskov,” First Channel News, March 26, 2022,
https://1lurer.am/en/2022/03/26/Insults-from-Biden-narrow-window-of-
opportunity-for-mending-ties.

[499] Aaron Maté, “US fighting Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’: veteran US
diplomat,” Grayzone, March 24, 2022,
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/24/us-fighting-russia-to-the-last-
ukrainian-veteran-us-diplomat.
[500] Reis Thebault, et al., “Biden calls for Putin ‘war-crimes trial’ as world
leaders issue fresh rebukes,” Washington Post, April 4, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/04/04/russia-ukraine-war-news-
putin-live-updates.

[501] Eric McDaniel, “Biden accuses Putin of committing a ‘genocide’ in

Ukraine,” NPR News, April 12, 2022,
https://npr.org/2022/04/12/1092460473/biden-appeared-to-accuse-putin-of-
committing-a-genocide-in-ukraine.

[502] Ted Galen Carpenter, “Is the Biden Administration Trying to Prolong
the Ukraine War?” Antiwar.com, April 12, 2022,
https://original.antiwar.com/Ted_Galen_Carpenter/2022/04/11/is-the-biden-
administration-trying-to-prolong-the-ukraine-war.

[503] Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, “The Talks That Could Have
Ended the War in Ukraine,” Foreign Affairs, April 16, 2024,
https://foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/talks-could-have-ended-war-ukraine.

[504] Maite Fernández Simon, “Ukraine offers neutrality in talks with

Russia. What does that mean?” Washington Post, March 29, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/29/ukraine-russia-invasion-
neutral-status.

[505] See below.

[506] Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, “The Talks That Could Have
Ended the War in Ukraine,” Foreign Affairs, April 16, 2024,
https://foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/talks-could-have-ended-war-ukraine.

[507] Zachary B. Wolf, “The new journalism uncovering poisoning and war
crimes,” CNN, April 23, 2022,
https://cnn.com/2022/04/23/politics/navalny-christo-grozev-russia-
investigations-what-matters/index.html.

[508] Yaroslav Trofimov and Max Colchester, “Roman Abramovich and

Ukrainian Peace Negotiators Suffer Suspected Poisoning,” Wall Street
Journal, March 28, 2022, https://wsj.com/articles/roman-abramovich-and-
ukrainian-peace-negotiators-suffer-symptoms-of-suspected-poisoning-
11648480493.

[509] Catarina Demony, et al., “Billionaire Abramovich, Ukrainian peace

negotiators hit by suspected poisoning – reports,” Reuters, March 28, 2022,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/russian-billionaire-abramovich-ukrainian-
peace-negotiators-hit-by-suspected-2022-03-28.

[510] “Roman Abramovich seen at Ukraine and Russia peace talks in

Turkey as Kremlin denies allegations he was poisoned,” Sky News, March
29, 2022, https://news.sky.com/story/roman-abramovich-seen-at-peace-
talks-between-russia-and-ukraine-in-istanbul-after-allegations-he-was-
poisoned-12577301.

[511] Frank Gardner, et al., “Roman Abramovich suffered ‘suspected

poisoning’ at talks,” BBC, March 28, 2022, https://bbc.com/news/world-
europe-60904676.
[512] “Experts react: After Russia-Ukraine talks in Istanbul, is an end to
war imminent?” Atlantic Council, April 1, 2022,
https://atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/turkeysource/experts-react-after-russia-
ukraine-talks-in-istanbul-is-an-end-to-war-imminent.

[513] Colin Campbell, “Zelensky: ‘This is genocide,’” Yahoo News, April

3, 2022, https://news.yahoo.com/zelensky-genocide-bucha-
145356624.html.

[514] Jack Dutton, “Zelensky Visits Bucha, Finds It ‘Difficult To Talk’

Among Dead Civilians,” Newsweek, April 4, 2022,
https://newsweek.com/ukraine-war-volodymyr-zelensky-visits-bucha-
difficult-talk-dead-civilians-russia-1694798.

[515] Mansur Mirovalev, “‘Orcs’ and ‘Rashists’: Ukraine’s new language of

war,” Al Jazeera, May 3, 2022, https://aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/3/orcs-
and-rashists-ukraines-new-language-of-war.

[516] Staff, “Zelensky calls killings in Bucha ‘genocide,’” France 24, April
5, 2022, https://france24.com/en/video/20220405-zelensky-calls-killings-in-
bucha-genocide; Victor Jack, “Bucha killings not ‘far short of genocide,’
Boris Johnson says,” Politico Europe, April 6, 2022,
https://politico.eu/article/boris-johnson-bucha-killings-ukraine-genocide-
russia; George Wright, “Ukraine war: Is Russia committing genocide?”
BBC, April 13, 2022, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-61017352;
Andrew Buncombe, “Killings in Ukraine amount to genocide, Holocaust
expert says,” Independent, April 4, 2022,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/ukraine-bucha-war-crimes-
genocide-b2050897.html.

[517] William M. Arkin, “How US Intelligence Sees Russia’s Behavior

After Bucha,” Newsweek, April 12, 2022, https://newsweek.com/how-us-
intel-sees-russias-behavior-after-bucha-1697074.

[518] Interview with author, William M. Arkin, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, April 22, 2022, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/4-22-22-william-
arkin-on-russias-failures-in-ukraine.

[519] Hajo Funke and Harald Kujat, “How the Chance was Lost for a Peace
Settlement of the Ukraine War,” Michael von der Schulenburg, November
14, 2023, https://michael-von-der-schulenburg.com/how-the-chance-was-
lost-for-a-peace-settlement-of-the-ukraine-war; Tomasz Kurianovz and
Moritz Eichhorn, “Interview with Gerhard Schröder: This is how peace
negotiations between Ukraine and Russia failed,” Berliner-Zeitung, October
20, 2023, https://berliner-zeitung.de/politik-gesellschaft/gerhard-schroeder-
im-exklusiv-interview-was-merkel-2015-gemacht-hat-war-politisch-falsch-
li.2151196.

[520] Samuel Charap and Sergey Radchenko, “The Talks That Could Have
Ended the War in Ukraine,” Foreign Affairs, April 16, 2024,
https://foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/talks-could-have-ended-war-ukraine.

[521] Bill Bostock, “Ukraine official negotiating with Russia said the peace
talks turned darker after evidence emerged of a massacre in Bucha,”
Business Insider, April 8, 2022, https://businessinsider.com/ukrainian-
peace-negotiator-says-mood-peace-talks-changed-bucha-russia-2022-4.

[522] Louise Callaghan, “Bodies of mutilated children among horrors the

Russians left behind,” London Times, April 2, 2022,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/bodies-of-mutilated-children-among-horrors-
the-russians-left-behind-5ddnkkwp2; Simon Gardner, “Ukrainian mayor
shows dead bodies amid battle-scarred city of Bucha,” Reuters, April 3,
2022, https://reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-mayor-shows-dead-
bodies-liberated-city-bucha-2022-04-03.

[523] “Special Forces Regiment SAFARI Begins Clearing Operation in

Bucha from Saboteurs and Accomplices of Russia – National Police,”
LB.ua, April 2, 2022,
https://en.lb.ua/news/2022/04/02/12441_special_forces_regiment_safari.ht
ml.

[524] Statement by Bucha Mayor Anatolii Fedoruk, April 1, 2022,

https://facebook.com/bucharada.gov.ua/videos/270161321982745.

[525] Katerina Tishchenko, “The mayor of Buchi announced the liberation

of the city from the invaders,” Ukrainska Pravda, April 1, 2022,
https://pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2022/04/1/7336396.

[526] Andrew Kramer and Neil MacFarquhar, “In a broad retreat from
Kyiv, Russia seeks to regroup,” New York Times, April 2, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/live/2022/04/02/world/ukraine-russia-war.
[527] Malachy Browne, et al., “Satellite images show bodies lay in Bucha
for weeks, despite Russian claims,” New York Times, April 4, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/04/04/world/europe/bucha-ukraine-bodies.html;
Yousur Al-Hlou, et al., “Caught on Camera, Traced by Phone: The Russian
Military Unit That Killed Dozens in Bucha,” New York Times, December
22, 2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/12/22/video/russia-ukraine-bucha-
massacre-takeaways.html.

[528] Yousur Al-Hlou, et al., “New Evidence Shows How Russian Soldiers
Executed Men in Bucha,” New York Times, May 19, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/05/19/world/europe/russia-bucha-ukraine-
executions.html.

[529] Tom Jennings, et al., “Putin’s Attack on Ukraine – Documenting War

Crimes,” PBS Frontline, October 25, 2022,
https://pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/putins-attack-on-ukraine-
documenting-war-crimes.

[530] Staff, “Ukraine: ‘He’s not coming back.’ War crimes in Northwest
areas of Kyiv Oblast,” Amnesty International, May 6, 2022,
https://amnesty.org/en/documents/eur50/5561/2022/en.

[531] Staff, “Ukraine: ‘He’s not coming back.’ War crimes in Northwest
areas of Kyiv Oblast,” Amnesty International, May 6, 2022,
https://amnesty.org/en/documents/eur50/5561/2022/en.
[532] Masha Froliak, et al., “Their Final Moments: Victims of a Russian
Atrocity in Bucha,” New York Times, December 21, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/21/world/europe/bucha-ukraine-
massacre-victims.html.

[533] Olha Kyrylenko, “They started shooting when they realized that they
could not take Kyiv – the mayor of Bucha, Anatoly Fedoruk,” Ukrainska
Pravda, April 8, 2022, https://pravda.com.ua/articles/2022/04/8/7338142;
Joshua Davidovich, “Ukraine says it destroyed Russian military convoy
outside of Kyiv,” Times of Israel, February 27, 2022,
https://timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/ukraine-says-it-destroyed-russian-
military-convoy-outside-of-kyiv; Staff, “‘We can’t gather bodies due to
heavy shelling, dogs are tearing them apart in street,’” Times of Israel,
March 8, 2022, https://timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/we-cant-gather-
bodies-due-to-heavy-shelling-dogs-are-tearing-them-apart-in-street; “SOS!
Rescue civilians in Bucha, Irpin, Hostomel!” Open Dialog Foundation,
March 8, 2022, https://en.odfoundation.eu/a/232528,sos-rescue-civilians-in-
bucha-irpin-hostomel; Staff, “Ukrainian Man Films Devastation In His
Town After Russian Military Column Destroyed,” RFERL, February 28,
2022, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-bucha-russian-destroyed/31728780.html;
Daniel Boffey, “‘Why did they do this to us?’: Bucha’s survivors come out
of hiding,” Guardian, April 4, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/04/why-did-they-do-this-to-us-
buchas-survivors-come-out-of-hiding; Zhanna Bezpiatchuk, “Russia-
Ukraine war: Family drags grandmother to safety from Bucha,” BBC,
March 10, 2022, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-60688640.
[534] Roman Romaniuk, “From Zelenskyy’s ‘surrender’ to Putin’s
surrender: how the negotiations with Russia are going,” Ukrainska Pravda,
May 5, 2022, https://pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2022/05/5/7344096.

[535] Kate Tsurkan, “Wartime book of on-the-ground reporting details

Ukraine’s resilience,” Kyiv Independent, January 18, 2024,
https://kyivindependent.com/yaroslav-trofimov-our-enemies-will-vanish-
book-review.

[536] Olivier Knox, “The US has a big new goal in Ukraine: Weaken
Russia,” Washington Post, April 26, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/26/us-has-big-new-goal-
ukraine-weaken-russia.

[537] Zoya Sheftalovich, “Zelenskyy calls out Angela Merkel, Nicolas

Sarkozy for blocking Ukraine’s NATO bid,” Politico Europe, April 4, 2022,
https://politico.eu/article/zelenskyy-calls-out-angela-merkel-nicolas-
sarkozy-for-blocking-ukraines-nato-bid.

[538] “Putin shows initialed draft agreement with Ukraine to African

leaders,” Kremlin, June 17, 2023, https://tass.com/politics/1634479.

[539] “Kiev initialed Istanbul agreement, but then threw it into ‘landfill of
history’ – Putin,” Kremlin, June 17, 2023, https://tass.com/politics/1634503.

[540] Annabelle Dickson, “Johnson warns Macron not to attempt Ukraine

settlement now,” Politico Europe, June 26, 2022,
https://politico.eu/article/johnson-warns-macron-not-attempt-ukraine-
settlement-now.

[541] Tom Balmforth and Andrea Shalal, “UK’s Johnson, in Kyiv, Warns
Against ‘Flimsy’ Plan for Talks With Russia,” Reuters, August 24, 2022,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/uks-johnson-kyiv-warns-against-flimsy-
plan-talks-with-russia-2022-08-24.

[542] Chas Freeman Jr., “The propaganda that damned Ukraine,” UnHerd,
January 4, 2024, https://unherd.com/2024/01/the-propaganda-that-damned-
ukraine.

[543] David Stern, “Ukraine crisis: Deadly anti-autonomy protest outside

parliament,” BBC, August 31, 2015, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-
34105925; Staff, “Right-Wing Protesters Clash With Police Outside
Ukrainian President’s Office,” RFERL, August 14, 2021,
https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-right-protesters-zelenskiy/31410694.html.

[544] I mean, possibly not for Donald Trump? Josh Dawsey and Carol D.
Leonnig, “Secret Service said to have denied requests for more security at
Trump events,” Washington Post, July 20, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/07/20/trump-secret-service-
security-attempted-assassination.

[545] Andrew Kramer, “Armed Nationalists in Ukraine Pose a Threat Not

Just to Russia,” New York Times, February 10, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/02/10/world/europe/ukraine-nationalism-russia-
invasion.html.

[546] Yevhen Karas, “To fight, kill, fulfill the tasks of the West,” Bandera
Readings, February 5, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=03AqKuCg96I.

[547] “Why Nazi Accepted Zelensky as President,” Angelo Giuliano,

March 31, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=WGGR30WUkFQ.

[548] Shaun Walker, et al., “Mariupol The ruin of a city,” Guardian,

February 23, 2023, https://theguardian.com/world/ng-
interactive/2023/feb/23/mariupol-the-ruin-of-a-city.

[549] David Axe, “Ukraine Deradicalized Its Extremist Troops. Now They
Might Be Preparing A Counteroffensive,” Forbes, December 16, 2022,
https://forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2022/12/16/ukraine-deradicalized-its-
extremist-troops-now-they-might-be-preparing-a-counteroffensive.

[550] See Chapter Four.

[551] Lev Golinkin, “The Western Media Is Whitewashing the Azov

Battalion,” The Nation, June 13, 2023,
https://thenation.com/article/world/azov-battalion-neo-nazi.

[552] Christopher Miller, “Ukraine’s Far-Right Forces See An Opportunity

In Russia’s Invasion Threat To Grow Their Violent Movement,” BuzzFeed
News, January 31, 2022,
https://buzzfeednews.com/article/christopherm51/ukraine-russia-invasion-
far-right-training.

[553] “Zelenskyy answers questions on assassination attempts,” Fox News,

April 3, 2022, https://foxnews.com/video/6302790525001.

[554] “Country Report on Human Rights Practices 2016 – Ukraine,” State

Department, March 3, 2017, https://state.gov/report/custom/2b3684b258.

[555] Olha Kyrylenko, “Changes await Right Sector’s 67th Brigade after
losing positions in Chasiv Yar,” Ukrainska Pravda, April 14, 2024,
https://pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/04/14/7451183.

[556] Carlotta Gall, et al., “Ukrainian Marines on ‘Suicide Mission’ in

Crossing the Dnipro River,” New York Times, December 16, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/12/16/world/europe/ukraine-kherson-river-
russia.html.

[557] Staff, “Meet The Soldiers Committed To Fighting The Russians On

The Eastern Front,” RFERL, July 26, 2022, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-
carpathian-sich-battalion-russia-invasion/31960108.html.

[558] Guillaume Ptak, “In a grinding battle far from the spotlight, weary
Ukrainian soldiers hold the line,” Washington Times, June 16, 2024,
https://washingtontimes.com/news/2024/jun/16/grinding-battle-far-
spotlight-weary-ukrainian-sold.
[559] Illia Ponomarenko, “After more than 3 years in bases, Azov Regiment
returns to front,” Kyiv Post, February 1, 2019,
https://kyivpost.com/post/7537.

[560] Anthony Faiola and David L. Stern, “Inside Mariupol’s besieged steel
plant, a symbol of bravery and terror,” Washington Post, May 12, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/12/ukraine-mariupol-steel-plant-
last-stand.

[561] Tara John and Tim Lister, “A far-right battalion has a key role in
Ukraine’s resistance. Its neo-Nazi history has been exploited by Putin,”
CNN, March 30, 2022, https://cnn.com/2022/03/29/europe/ukraine-azov-
movement-far-right-intl-cmd/index.html.

[562] Will Carless, “A regiment in Ukraine’s military was founded by white

supremacists. Now it’s battling Russia on the front lines,” USA Today,
March 10, 2022, https://usatoday.com/story/news/world/2022/03/05/russia-
invasion-ukraine-attention-extremist-regiment-nazi/9368016002.

[563] Rémy Ourdan, “Azov Brigade is once again at heart of fighting in

Donbas,” Le Monde, May 13, 2024,
https://lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/13/azov-brigade-is-once-
again-at-heart-of-fighting-in-donbas_6671268_4.html.

[564] Denys Prokopenko, “Why does Azov still not receive Western
weapons?” Ukrainska Pravda, April 19, 2024,
https://pravda.com.ua/eng/columns/2024/04/19/7451974.
[565] Rémy Ourdan, “Azov Brigade is once again at heart of fighting in
Donbas,” Le Monde, May 13, 2024,
https://lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/13/azov-brigade-is-once-
again-at-heart-of-fighting-in-donbas_6671268_4.html.

[566] Statement by President Volodymyr Zelensky, Telegram, August 14,

2023, https://t.me/VZelenskiyofficial/7371.

[567] Tweet by Max Blumenthal, August 14, 2023,

https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1691260160021295104.

[568] Tasos Kokkinidis, “Ethnic Greek Azov Fighter Overshadows

Zelensky Speech at Greek Parliament,” Greek Reporter, April 7, 2022,
https://greekreporter.com/2022/04/07/greek-azov-fighter-zelensky-speech-
greek-parliament; Renee Maltezou and Karolina Tagaris, “Azov Fighter
Video Overshadows Zelenskiy’s Address to Greek Lawmakers,” Reuters,
April 7, 2022, https://usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-04-07/azov-
fighter-video-overshadows-zelenskiys-address-to-greek-lawmakers.

[569] Scott McDonald, “Ukraine Receives 20,000 Applications for

‘Stormtrooper’ Fighting Force,’” Newsweek, February 12, 2023,
https://newsweek.com/ukraine-receives-20000-applications-stormtrooper-
fighting-force-1780627.

[570] Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines

Highlight Thorny Issues of History,” New York Times, June 5, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/06/05/world/europe/nazi-symbols-ukraine.html.
[571] See Chapter Four.

[572] Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Nazi Symbols on Ukraine’s Front Lines

Highlight Thorny Issues of History,” New York Times, June 5, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/06/05/world/europe/nazi-symbols-ukraine.html.

[573] Interview of Andrij Melnyk, Jung and Naiv, June 29, 2022,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=JVEGR7apzoI.

[574] Tristin Hopper, “Trudeau toured Kyiv alongside controversial

Bandera apologist,” National Post, June 14, 2023,
https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/trudeau-toured-kyiv-alongside-
controversial-ukrainian-diplomat.

[575] Lev Golinkin, “Why did Stanford students host a group of neo-
Nazis?” The Forward, July 3, 2023,
https://forward.com/opinion/552958/why-did-stanford.

[576] Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?” The National Interest, No.
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[662] Nathan Hodge, et al., “Video appears to show execution of Russian

prisoner by Ukrainian forces,” CNN, April 8, 2022,
https://cnn.com/2022/04/07/europe/ukraine-execution-russian-prisoner-
intl/index.html; Snejana Farberov, “Ukraine IDs hero soldier ‘executed’ in
viral ‘Glory to Ukraine’ video,” New York Post, March 7, 2023,
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[663] Karl Ritter and Jamey Keaten, “UN decries torture, killing of
Ukrainian and Russian POWs,” AP, March 24, 2023,
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29bc27d06d6bad359c957fdb0aa9f929.

[664] Rémy Ourdan, “Azov Brigade is once again at heart of fighting in

Donbas,” Le Monde, May 13, 2024,
https://lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/13/azov-brigade-is-once-
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[665] Staff, “Ukraine: Ukrainian fighting tactics endanger civilians,”

Amnesty International, August 4, 2022,
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tactics-endanger-civilians.

[666] Lillian Posner, “Amnesty announces review as Ukraine report

backlash continues,” Atlantic Council, August 25, 2022,
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ukraine-report-backlash-continues.

[667] David L. Stern, “Ukrainian hit squads target Russian occupiers and
collaborators,” Washington Post, September 8, 2022,
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occupied-territory-russia.

[668] Evan Hill, “Video appears to show Ukrainian troops killing captured
Russian soldiers,” New York Times, April 6, 2022,
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pows-ukraine-executed; Malachy Browne, et al., “Videos Suggest Captive
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shot-ukraine.html.

[669] Staff, “Videos Appear to Show Ukrainian Troops Shooting

Surrendering Russians,” Wall Street Journal, November 21, 2022,
https://wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/videos-appear-to-show-ukrainian-
troops-shooting-surrendering-russians/09C4C2F2-6A94-46BE-B3A5-
207DDC6B4D29.

[670] Stefan Korshak, “Ukraine’s Secret Service Boss Details Assassination

Campaign vs. Kremlin-Loyal Occupation Officials,” Kyiv Post, March 27,
2024, https://kyivpost.com/post/30139.

[671] Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “In Ukraine, Killings of Surrendering

Russians Divide an American-Led Unit,” New York Times, July 6, 2024,
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us.html.

[672] Eva Bartlett, “Here’s What I Found at the Reported ‘Mass Grave’
Near Mariupol,” RT, April 28, 2022,
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[673] Mstyslav Chernov, et al., “20 Days in Mariupol,” PBS Frontline,

November 21, 2023, https://pbs.org/video/20-days-in-mariupol-x62itb.
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[675] Staff, “After Partial Russian Retreat, Chilling Signs of Horrors

Against Ukrainians Revealed,” Voice of America, September 24, 2022,
https://voanews.com/a/after-partial-russian-retreat-chilling-signs-of-horrors-
against-ukrainians-revealed/6761684.html.

[676] “Situation in Ukraine: ICC judges issue arrest warrants against

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin and Maria Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova,”
International Criminal Court, March 17, 2023, https://icc-
cpi.int/news/situation-ukraine-icc-judges-issue-arrest-warrants-against-
vladimir-vladimirovich-putin-and.

[677] Jake Garcia, “Yale research credited for evidence leading to Putin’s
arrest warrant,” Fox 61, March 22, 2023,
https://fox61.com/article/news/nation-world/ukraine/yale-research-
creditedr-evidence-leading-putins-arrest-warrant/520-5393fb25-19d7-41df-
aa76-c447cfdad3b9.

[678] Nathaniel Raymond, “Russia’s Systematic Program For the Re-

education and Adoption of Ukraine’s Children,” Yale School of Public
Health Humanitarian Research Lab, February 14, 2023,
https://hub.conflictobservatory.org/portal/sharing/rest/content/items/97f919
ccfe524d31a241b53ca44076b8/data.
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education of Ukrainian children,” Yale News, February 22, 2023,
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2023/02/22/ysph-research-reveals-
relocation-and-re-education-of-ukrainian-children; Transcript, Anderson
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https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/acd/date/2023-02-15/segment/01.

[680] Transcript, Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees, CNN, February 15, 2023,
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[681] Petro Sineokiy, “Andryushchenko told where the occupiers are

holding 267 orphans from Mariupol and Volnovakha,” 24 TV, June 1, 2022,
https://24tv.ua/ru/andrjushhenko-rasskazal-gde-okkupanty-soderzhat-267-
detej-sirot_n1992410.

[682] Nathaniel Raymond, “Russia’s Systematic Program For the Re-

education and Adoption of Ukraine’s Children,” Yale School of Public
Health Humanitarian Research Lab, February 14, 2023,
https://hub.conflictobservatory.org/portal/sharing/rest/content/items/97f919
ccfe524d31a241b53ca44076b8/data.

[683] Jeremy Loffredo and Max Blumenthal, “ICC’s Putin arrest warrant
based on State Dept-funded report that debunked itself,” Grayzone, March
31, 2023, https://thegrayzone.com/2023/03/31/iccs-putin-arrest-state-dept-
report.
[684] Nathaniel Raymond, “Russia’s Systematic Program For the Re-
education and Adoption of Ukraine’s Children,” Yale School of Public
Health Humanitarian Research Lab, February 14, 2023,
https://hub.conflictobservatory.org/portal/sharing/rest/content/items/97f919
ccfe524d31a241b53ca44076b8/data.

[685] “News Briefing Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld,” US

Defense Department, February 12, 2002, https://usinfo.org/wf-
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[686] Isobel Koshiw, “Weeks turn to months as children become stuck at

camps in Crimea,” Guardian, December 27, 2022,
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camps-in-crimea-ukraine-russia.

[687] Jeremy Loffredo and Max Blumenthal, “ICC’s Putin arrest warrant
based on State Dept-funded report that debunked itself,” Grayzone, March
31, 2023, https://thegrayzone.com/2023/03/31/iccs-putin-arrest-state-dept-
report; Jeremy Loffredo, “Inside a Russian youth camp condemned by the
ICC,” Grayzone, March 31, 2023, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=NDS1OSEIoz8.

[688] Scott Horton, “Torturing Our Sovereignty,” Antiwar.com, February

24, 2005, https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2005/02/24/torturing-our-
sovereignty.
[689] Staff, “US Is in a Proxy War With Russia: Panetta,” Bloomberg
News, March 17, 2022, https://bloomberg.com/news/videos/2022-03-17/u-
s-is-in-a-proxy-war-with-russia-panetta-video.

[690] “German Minister of Foreign Affairs: ‘We Are Fighting a War

Against Russia,’” In Context, January 26, 2023, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=U7XV-ujwuu4; Thomas Fazi, “We Are Already At War With Russia,”
UnHerd, February 11, 2023, https://unherd.com/2023/02/we-are-already-at-
war-with-russia.

[691] Benjamin Schwarz and Christopher Layne, “Why Are We in

Ukraine?” Harper’s, June 2023, https://harpers.org/archive/2023/06/why-
are-we-in-ukraine.

[692] Stephen Biddle, “Seeing Baghdad, Thinking Saigon,” Foreign Affairs,

March/April 2006, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/iraq/2006-03-
01/seeing-baghdad-thinking-saigon.

[693] Scott Horton, “Iraq War II, Part 10: Soda Straws and EFPs,” Scott
Horton Show Substack, March 3, 2023,
https://scotthortonshow.substack.com/p/iraq-war-ii-part-10-soda-straws-
and.

[694] John Bell, “Logistics and American entry into the Great War,”
Defense Logistics Agency, April 1, 2017, https://dla.mil/About-
DLA/News/News-Article-View/Article/1162583/logistics-and-american-
entry-into-the-great-war.
[695] Stephen Biddle, “Arming Ukraine Is Worth the Risk,” Foreign
Affairs, March 11, 2022, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-
03-11/arming-ukraine-worth-risk.

[696] Isabelle Khurshudyan and Emily Rauhala, “Zelensky Pushes

‘Accelerated’ Application for Ukraine NATO Membership,” Washington
Post, September 30, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/30/ukraine-application-nato-
russia-war.

[697] Hugo Bachega, “Ukraine defence minister: We are a de facto member

of Nato alliance,” BBC, January 13, 2023, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-
europe-64255249.

[698] Shane Harris, et al., “Road to war: US struggled to convince allies,

and Zelensky, of risk of invasion,” Washington Post, August 16, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-
to-war.

[699] David Sanger, et al., “Arming Ukraine: 17,000 Anti-Tank Weapons in

6 Days and a Clandestine Cybercorps,” New York Times, March 6, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/03/06/us/politics/us-ukraine-weapons.html.

[700] Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart, “US providing intelligence to Ukraine,
officials say,” Reuters, March 3, 2022, https://reuters.com/article/ukraine-
crisis-usa-intelligence/u-s-providing-intelligence-to-ukraine-officials-say-
idUSL2N2V62MD.
[701] Loveday Morris, et al., “US defense chief in Berlin for talks as
Germany stalls on tank deliveries,” Washington Post, January 19, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/01/19/germany-tanks-ukraine-
pistorius-austin.

[702] Caitlin Doornbos, “F-16s won’t be ‘magic weapon’ to win Ukraine

war, top US general warns,” New York Post, May 25, 2023,
https://nypost.com/2023/05/25/f-16s-arent-magic-weapon-to-win-ukraine-
war-us-general.

[703] Aaron Blake, “Biden’s complicated history on cluster munitions,”

Washington Post, July 7, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/07/bidens-complicated-
history-cluster-munitions.

[704] Steve Holland, “US will not send Ukraine rocket systems that can
reach Russia, says Biden,” Reuters, May 30, 2022,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/us-will-not-send-ukraine-rocket-systems-
that-can-reach-russia-says-biden-2022-05-30.

[705] Press Release, “US Security Cooperation with Ukraine,” US State

Department, June 7, 2024, https://state.gov/u-s-security-cooperation-with-
ukraine; Lolita C. Baldor and Tara Copp, “Ukraine uses long-range missiles
secretly provided by US to hit Russian-held areas, officials say,” AP, April
24, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-long-range-
missiles-4d2254639eb5a503d8b0a291ed0680e9; “Press Briefing by Press
Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan
on the President’s Trip to Japan,” White House, May 20, 2023,
https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2023/05/20/press-
briefing-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-national-security-
advisor-jake-sullivan-on-the-presidents-trip-to-japan; David Vergun, “Biden
Announces Abrams Tanks to be Delivered to Ukraine,” US Defense
Department, January 25, 2023, https://defense.gov/News/News-
Stories/Article/article/3277910/biden-announces-abrams-tanks-to-be-
delivered-to-ukraine.

[706] John Hudson and Dan Lamothe, “Biden shows growing appetite to
cross Putin’s red lines,” Washington Post, June 1, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/01/ukraine-f-16s-
biden-russia-escalation.

[707] David Sanger, et al., “How Biden Reluctantly Agreed to Send Tanks
to Ukraine,” New York Times, January 25, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/01/25/us/politics/biden-abrams-tanks-ukraine-
russia.html.

[708] Nick Paton Walsh, et al., “Soldiers in Ukraine say US-supplied tanks
have made them targets for Russian strikes,” CNN, May 29, 2024,
https://cnn.com/2024/05/29/europe/ukraine-war-us-tanks-intl/index.html.

[709] Thibault Spirlet, “Ukraine pulled its Abrams tanks from the front due
to Russian drone tactics, US officials say,” Business Insider, April 26, 2024,
https://businessinsider.com/ukraine-pulls-abrams-tanks-from-front-over-
russia-drone-tactics-2024-4.
[710] Douglas Macgregor, Warrior’s Rage: The Great Tank Battle of 73
Easting (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2009).

[711] Cockburn, Rumsfeld, 49–51.

[712] Idrees Ali and Anastasia Malenko, “Ukrainian F-16 jet destroyed in
crash, US source says,” Reuters, August 29, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/ukrainian-f-16-jet-destroyed-crash-
monday-wsj-reports-2024-08-29.

[713] Staff, “Russian Strikes Raise Concerns Over Ukraine’s Imminent F-

16s,” AFP, July 5, 2024, https://straitstimes.com/world/europe/russian-
strikes-raise-concerns-over-ukraines-imminent-f-16s.

[714] Courtney McBride and Andrea Palasciano, “Ukraine’s F-16

Ambitions Snarled by Language Barrier, Runways and Parts,” Bloomberg
News, July 12, 2024, https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-07-
12/ukraine-s-f-16-ambitions-snarled-by-language-barrier-runways-and-
parts.

[715] Erin Banco, et al., “Biden ‘open’ to sending long-range cruise

missiles to Ukraine,” Politico, August 15, 2024,
https://politico.com/news/2024/08/15/biden-missiles-ukraine-russia-
00174147.

[716] Mike Stone, et al., “US close to agreeing on long-range missiles for
Ukraine; delivery to take months,” Reuters, September 3, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/us-close-agreeing-long-range-missiles-ukraine-
delivery-take-months-2024-09-03.

[717] “Russia Blames US for Kaliningrad Transit Restrictions,” Reuters,

June 24, 2022, https://usnews.com/news/world/articles/2022-06-24/russia-
blames-u-s-for-kaliningrad-transit-restrictions.

[718] Ivan Nechepurenko and Andrew Higgins, “Russia threatens to

retaliate against Lithuania, a NATO member, over restrictions on shipments
to Kaliningrad,” New York Times, June 20, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/live/2022/06/20/world/russia-ukraine-war-
news/moscow-threatens-retaliation-over-lithuanias-ban-of-certain-
shipments-across-its-borders.

[719] Daniel Boffey, “Russia threatens ‘serious consequences’ as Lithuania

blocks rail goods,” Guardian, June 21, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/21/kaliningrad-russia-threatens-
serious-consequences-as-lithuania-blocks-rail-goods.

[720] David Ljunggren, “Lithuania lifts ban on rail transport of goods into
Russian exclave,” Reuters, July 22, 2022,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/lithuania-lifts-ban-rail-transport-goods-
into-russian-exclave-agencies-2022-07-22.

[721] Andy Greenberg, “How A ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, A

CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut,” Forbes, August 14, 2013,
https://forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-
how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-
juggernaut.

[722] David Sanger, “In Ukraine, New American Technology Won the Day
Until It Was Overwhelmed,” New York Times, April 23, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/ukraine-new-american-
technology.html.

[723] See Chapter Three.

[724] Kenneth Niemeyer, “Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt says the Ukraine
War turned him into an arms dealer,” Business Insider, August 17, 2024,
https://businessinsider.com/eric-schmidt-white-stork-ai-drones-ukraine-war-
russia-2024-8.

[725] Eric Schmitt, et al., “Commando Network Coordinates Flow of

Weapons in Ukraine, Officials Say,” New York Times, June 25, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/06/25/us/politics/commandos-russia-
ukraine.html.

[726] Ken Klippenstein and Sara Sirota, “US Quietly Assists Ukraine With
Intelligence, Avoiding Direct Confrontation With Russia,” Intercept, March
17, 2022, https://theintercept.com/2022/03/17/us-intelligence-ukraine-
russia.

[727] Catherine Philp, “SAS Troops ‘Are Training Local Forces in

Ukraine,’” London Times, April 15, 2022, https://thetimes.co.uk/article/sas-
troops-are-training-local-forces-in-ukraine-32vs5bjzb; George Grylls,
“Royal Marines deployed on ‘high-risk covert operations’ in Ukraine,”
London Times, December 14, 2022, https://thetimes.co.uk/article/royal-
marines-deployed-on-high-risk-covert-operations-in-ukraine-r7b50gv3p.

[728] James Risen and Ken Klippenstein, “The CIA Thought Putin Would
Quickly Conquer Ukraine. Why Did They Get It So Wrong?” Intercept,
October 5, 2022, https://theintercept.com/2022/10/05/russia-ukraine-putin-
cia.

[729] William M. Arkin, “Read the Leaked Secret Intelligence Documents

on Ukraine and Vladimir Putin,” Newsweek, April 16, 2023,
https://newsweek.com/2023/05/05/read-leaked-secret-intelligence-
documents-ukraine-vladimir-putin-1794656.html; Haley Willis, et al., “FBI
Arrests National Guardsman in Leak of Classified Documents,” New York
Times, April 13, 2023, https://nytimes.com/2023/04/13/world/documents-
leak-leaker-identity.html; Teixeira was later sentenced to 15 years for the
leak. Maya Shwayder and Eileen Sullivan, “Teixeira Is Sentenced to 15
Years in Prison,” New York Times, November 12, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/11/12/us/politics/jack-teixeira-national-security-
leak.html.

[730] Will Porter, “Leaked Pentagon Documents: A Thread,” Libertarian

Institute, April 11, 2023, https://libertarianinstitute.org/blog/leaked-
Pentagon-documents-a-thread.

[731] Michael Schwirtz and Adam Entous, “About 100 special forces troops
from the West were in Ukraine in February, a leaked US document says,”
New York Times, April 12, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/live/2023/04/12/world/russia-ukraine-news/about-100-
special-forces-troops-from-the-west-were-in-ukraine-in-february-a-leaked-
us-document-says; Philip Oltermann, “French defence ministry denies
presence of French soldiers in Ukraine,” Guardian, April 9, 2023,
https://theguardian.com/world/live/2023/apr/09/russia-ukraine-war-live-
two-killed-in-russian-strike-on-zaporizhzhia-ukraine-children-returned-
from-russia-rights-group-says?page=with:block-
6432854d8f08156fb81ebc3b#block-6432854d8f08156fb81ebc3b.

[732] Karen DeYoung, “An intellectual battle rages: Is the US in a proxy

war with Russia?” Washington Post, April 18, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/18/russia-ukraine-
war-us-involvement-leaked-documents.

[733] William M. Arkin, “The CIA’s Blind Spot about the Ukraine War,”
Newsweek, July 5, 2023, https://newsweek.com/2023/07/21/exclusive-cias-
blind-spot-about-ukraine-war-1810355.html.

[734] David L. Stern, et al., “Russian missiles strike Ukrainian military

range near Poland, killing dozens. Moscow promises further attacks,”
Washington Post, March 13, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/03/13/yavoriv-base-ukraine-russia-
attack-nato-lviv.

[735] Max Boot, “The Case for American Empire,” Weekly Standard,
October 15, 2001, https://washingtonexaminer.com/magazine/170364/the-
case-for-american-empire.

[736] Max Boot, “The ‘surge’ is working,” Los Angeles Times, September
8, 2007, https://latimes.com/opinion/la-oe-boot8sep08-story.html; Max
Boot, “Post-Gadhafi Libya needs peacekeeping troops,” Dallas Morning
News, August 25, 2011,
https://dallasnews.com/opinion/commentary/2011/08/25/ma; Max Boot,
“On Syria, a Realistic Assessment and an Unrealistic Response,”
Commentary, April 17, 2013, https://commentary.org/max-boot/on-syria-a-
realistic-as; Max Boot, “Back to Nation-Building in Afghanistan. Good,”
New York Times, August 22, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/08/22/opinion/president-trump-nation-building-
afghanistan.html; Max Boot, “Yemen: Acts of War Cannot Go Ignored,”
Commentary, October 10, 2016, https://commentary.org/max-boot/yemen-
iran-acts-of-war-cannot-go-ignored.

[737] See Chapter Five.

[738] Max Boot, “In Its Righteous Fury, America Has Sometimes
Overreached. Don’t Make That Mistake in Ukraine,” Washington Post,
March 7, 2022, https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/03/07/putin-
assassination-no-fly-zone-needed-to-oppose-russian-invasion-ukraine.

[739] Ken Dilanian, “Biden Administration Walks Fine Line on

Intelligence-sharing with Ukraine,” NBC News, March 4, 2022,
https://nbcnews.com/news/investigations/biden-administration-walks-fine-
line-intelligence-sharing-ukraine-rcna18542.
[740] Hadas Gold, “Ken Dilanian sent CIA drafts of stories,” Politico,
September 4, 2014, https://politico.com/blogs/media/2014/09/ken-dilanian-
sent-cia-drafts-of-stories-194906; Michael Muskal, “Ex-Tribune reporter
said to have ‘collaborative’ relationship with CIA,” Los Angeles Times,
September 4, 2014, https://latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-tribune-
dilanian-20140904-story.html.

[741] Ken Dilanian, “US intel helped Ukraine protect air defenses, shoot
down Russian plane carrying hundreds of troops,” NBC News, April 26,
2022, https://nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/us-intel-helped-
ukraine-protect-air-defenses-shoot-russian-plane-carry-rcna26015.

[742] William M. Arkin, “Read the Leaked Secret Intelligence Documents

on Ukraine and Vladimir Putin,” Newsweek, April 16, 2023,
https://newsweek.com/2023/05/05/read-leaked-secret-intelligence-
documents-ukraine-vladimir-putin-1794656.html.

[743] Julian Barnes, et al., “US Intelligence Is Helping Ukraine Kill

Russian Generals, Officials Say,” New York Times, May 4, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/05/04/us/politics/russia-generals-killed-
ukraine.html; Michael Schwirtz, et al., “Putin’s War,” New York Times,
December 16, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2022/12/16/world/europe/russia-putin-war-
failures-ukraine.html; Peter Beaumont, “Arms shipments are a legitimate
military target, Kremlin warns west,” Guardian, March 12, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/12/arms-shipments-are-a-
legitimate-military-target-kremlin-warns-west.
[744] Shane Harris, et al., “US Intelligence Helped Ukraine Sink Russian
Warship,” Washington Post, May 5, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/05/05/us-intelligence-
ukraine-moskva-sinking.

[745] Joshua Yaffa, “Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine,” The New
Yorker, October 17, 2022,
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/inside-the-us-effort-to-arm-
ukraine.

[746] Joe Gould, “Pentagon Replacing HIMARS Launcher and Rocket

Stocks Sent to Ukraine,” Defense News, October 19, 2022,
https://defensenews.com/Pentagon/2022/10/19/Pentagon-replacing-himars-
launcher-and-rocket-stocks-sent-to-ukraine.

[747] Isabelle Khurshudyan, et al., “Ukraine’s rocket campaign reliant on

US precision targeting, officials say,” Washington Post, February 9, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/09/ukraine-himars-rocket-
artillery-russia.

[748] Andrew Quilty, “A CIA-Backed Militia Targeted Clinics in

Afghanistan, Killing Medical Workers and Civilians,” Intercept, October
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airstrikes-taliban.

[749] Greg Miller and Isabelle Khurshudyan, “Ukrainian spies with deep
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[750] Pierre Emmanuel Ngendakumana, “Moscow threatens to strike

British military facilities following Cameron’s remarks,” Politico Europe,
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military-facility-david-camerons-remark-war-ukraine.

[751] Anna Chernova and Christian Edwards, “Putin orders tactical nuclear
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russia-ukraine-intl/index.html.

[752] Staff, “Risk of WWIII if NATO enters Ukraine: Polish general,”

Polskie Radio, February 29, 2024,
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enters-ukraine-polish-general.

[753] William M. Arkin, “Read the Leaked Secret Intelligence Documents

on Ukraine and Vladimir Putin,” Newsweek, April 16, 2023,
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documents-ukraine-vladimir-putin-1794656.html.

[754] Kylie MacLellan, “Russian aircraft missile launch not deliberate

escalation - UK defence minister,” Reuters, October 20, 2022,
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escalation-uk-defence-minister-2022-10-20.
[755] Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Eric Schmitt, “Miscommunication Nearly
Led to Russian Jet Shooting Down British Spy Plane, US Officials Say,”
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plane.html.

[756] Aditi Bharade, “Lindsey Graham says the US should shoot down
Russian fighter jets in response to Russia downing a US drone,” Yahoo
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[757] Julian Borger and Pjotr Sauer, “Miscalculation fears rise after Russian
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collides-us-drone-black-sea-crash.

[758] See Chapter Five.

[759] David Sanger, “Ukraine Wants the US to Send More Powerful

Weapons. Biden Is Not So Sure,” New York Times, September 17, 2022,
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[760] Joshua Yaffa, “Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine,” The New
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[761] See Chapter Five.

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russia-war-ukraine-military-defense.

[763] David Sanger, et al., “Ukraine Wants the US to Send More Powerful
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[764] James Jackson, “Germany spills British military secrets to Russia,”

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[765] Staff, “Germany’s Scholz explains his reluctance to send Taurus long-
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4a7d8da5b1999792b694136af18ab037.

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brits-in-ukraine-readying-storm-shadow-hit-on-crimean-bridge-
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[768] Bojan Pancevski, “Russian Tape of Secret German Meeting Reveals

Berlin’s Thinking on Sending Missiles to Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal,
March 3, 2024, https://wsj.com/world/europe/russian-tape-of-secret-
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a3a02cc3.

[769] Staff, “Slovak PM Claims EU, NATO States Mulling Sending Troops
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[770] Sylvie Corbet, “Putting Western troops on the ground in Ukraine is

not ‘ruled out’ in the future, French leader says,” AP, February 26, 2024,
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c458a1df3f9a7626128cdeb84050d469.

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abd144aee256a72388c196dae8acaf7f.

[772] Guy Chazan in Berlin and Henry Foy, “Germany rebuffs Emmanuel
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407f-8509-76c65ec6e740.

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[776] Guy Faulconbridge and Felix Light, “Russia moves to formally annex
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[777] Staff, “Moscow-held regions of Ukraine vote on whether to join

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[778] Pavel Polityuk, “Biden not planning to speak to Putin for now,”
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[780] Olena Roshchina, “Zelenskyy Approves National Security Council

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[782] “Thayer Leadership Announces Dan Rice, President, Was Recently

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[785] Carol E. Lee, et al., “A Biden admin official recently told members of
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[802] Tweet by President Joe Biden, March 26, 2022,

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[822] Mark Mazzetti and Eric Schmitt, “Quiet Support for Saudis Entangles
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[823] Nima Elbagir, et al., “Sold to an ally, lost to an enemy,” CNN,

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[826] Horton, Enough Already, 235–56.

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[832] Hiroko Tabuchi, “Russia’s Oil Revenue Soars Despite Sanctions,

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[833] Missy Ryan and Dan Lamothe, “With Scant Options in Ukraine, US
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[834] President Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden in Press

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[836] Staff, “World Economic Outlook,” IMF, January 2023,

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[837] Staff, “World Economic Outlook,” IMF, April 2022,

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[843] David J. Lynch, “With Russian economy far from collapse, US opts
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[844] Victor Jack and Gabriel Gavin, “Russian oil price cap has largely
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[845] Lauri Myllyvirta, et al., “One year of sanctions: Russia’s oil export
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[849] Darya Korsunskaya and Alexander Marrow, “Russia’s GDP boost

from military spending belies wider economic woes,” Reuters, February 7,
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spending-belies-wider-economic-woes-2024-02-07.

[850] David J. Lynch, “With Russian economy far from collapse, US opts
for tougher punishment,” Washington Post, February 23, 2024,
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economy.

[851] Marc A. Thiessen, “Ukraine aid’s best-kept secret: Most of the money
stays in the USA.,” Washington Post, November 29, 2023,
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american-economy-boost.

[852] Emma Burrows, “The West has sanctioned Russia’s rich. But is that
really punishing Putin and helping Ukraine?” AP, December 6, 2023,
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fc2d9d2bba3e81f27b14f7e69a7df818.

[853] Tatiana Stanovaya, “Putin’s Age of Chaos,” Foreign Affairs,

September/October 2023, https://foreignaffairs.com/russian-
federation/vladimir-putin-age-chaos.

[854] See below.

[855] Dina Smeltz, et al., “In Russia, Navalny Inspires Respect for Some,
Indifference for Most,” Global Affairs, February 22, 2021,
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[856] Alec Luhn, “Alexei Navalny demands recount in Moscow mayoral

election,” Guardian, September 9, 2013,
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[857] Huileng Tan, “Russia’s war-driven economy is so hot that the World
Bank upgraded it to a ‘high-income country,’” Business Insider, July 2,
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[858] Olena Harmash, “Ukraine suffers biggest economic fall in

independent era due to war,” Reuters, January 5, 2023,
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says,” Reuters, March 28, 2024,
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[860] Vanessa Gera, et al., “Europe’s energy crisis raises firewood prices,
theft fears,” AP, October 27, 2022, https://apnews.com/article/technology-
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[861] Kate Abnett, “Europe’s spend on energy crisis nears 800 billion
euros,” Reuters, February 13, 2023,
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billion-euros-2023-02-13.

[862] Ben McWilliams, et al., “The European Union is ready for the 2023-
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[863] Harry Robertson, “Goldman Sachs warns the dollar is at risk of losing
its dominance, and could end up a lesser player like the UK pound,”
Business Insider, April 1, 2022, https://businessinsider.in/stock-
market/news/goldman-sachs-warns-the-dollar-is-at-risk-of-losing-its-
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[865] Walter Russell Mead, “Sanctions on Russia Pit the West Against the
Rest of the World,” Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2022,
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dictators-south-america-asia-africa-11647894483.

[866] Nigel Walker, “Brexit timeline: events leading to the UK’s exit from
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[867] Rob Picheta, “Scotland blocked from holding independence vote by

UK’s Supreme Court,” CNN, November 23, 2022,
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intl/index.html.

[868] Anwen Elias and Núria Franco-Guillén, “Why Catalan pro-

independence parties want their own state,” European Consortium for
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parties-want-their-own-state.

[869] Vladimir Putin speech, “Valdai International Discussion Club

meeting,” Kremlin, October 27, 2022,
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sanctions relief for Russia,” Financial Times, March 30, 2022,
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[871] Ben McWilliams, et al., “The European Union is ready for the 2023-
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[872] Virginia Furness, “Exclusive: West must ensure total isolation of

Russia to end war, says Ukraine ex-finance minister,” Capital Monitor,
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ensure-total-isolation-of-russia-to-end-war-says-ukraine-ex-finance-
minister.

[873] Steven Mufson, “The US imports uranium from Russia. What if

sanctions end that?” Washington Post, January 21, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/business/2023/01/21/uranium-imports-russia-
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[874] Staff, “Russia to consider restricting uranium exports, Putin says,”

World Nuclear News, September 12, 2024, https://world-nuclear-
news.org/articles/putin-considering-restricting-uranium-sales.

[875] Hahn, 85.

[876] Murray N. Rothbard, “Austrian Business Cycle Theory, Explained,”

Excerpted from America’s Great Depression (Auburn: Ludwig von Mises
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theory-explained.

[877] Thomas E. Woods, Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock

Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will
Make Things Worse (New York: Regnery, 2009); Petya Koeva Brooks,
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2009, https://imf.org/en/News/Articles/2015/09/28/04/53/sonum062409a.

[878] Hahn, 82–85; Kawala Xie, “China and Russia make united stand to
reform West-led global system,” South China Morning Post, April 9, 2024,
https://scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3258422/china-and-russia-
make-united-stand-reform-west-led-global-system; Chelsey Dulaney, et al.,
“Russia Turns to China’s Yuan in Effort to Ditch the Dollar,” Wall Street
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yuan-in-effort-to-ditch-the-dollar-a8111457.

[879] Tania Branigan, “China calls for end to dollar’s reign as global
reserve currency,” Guardian, March 24, 2009,
https://theguardian.com/business/2009/mar/24/china-reform-international-
monetary-system; Staff, “Russia’s Medvedev backs long-term ‘super
currency,’” Reuters, March 29, 2009,
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[880] Ajeet Kumar, “Forget dollar, India, Russia must create digital rupee or
ruble to boost trade relations: Top Moscow official,” India TV News, March
30, 2023, https://indiatvnews.com/news/india/india-russia-trade-in-digital-
rupee-ruble-to-boost-economic-relations-amid-ukraine-war-alexander-
babakov-at-st-petersburg-international-economic-forum-2023-03-30-
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[881] Staff, “China, Brazil Strike Deal To Ditch Dollar For Trade,” AFP,
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dollar-for-trade-8ed4e799; Joe Leahy and Hudson Lockett, “Brazil’s Lula
calls for end to dollar trade dominance,” Financial Times, April 13, 2023,
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[882] Christian Shepherd, “Six countries to join BRICS group; China labels
expansion ‘historic,’” Washington Post, August 24, 2023,
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[883] Victoria Bela, “Xi and Putin vow stronger China-Russia cooperation
for ‘fair world order’ at Brics summit,” South China Morning Post, October
23, 2024, https://scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3283434/china-
and-russia-brics-summit-vow-stronger-cooperation-fair-world-order.

[884] Robert Aro, “How Much Did They Print?” Ludwig von Mises
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[885] Glenn Kessler, “Biden’s claim that 70% of inflation jump is due to
‘Putin’s price hike,’” Washington Post, April 15, 2022,
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[886] Alberto Nardelli and Jennifer Jacobs, “US Plans New Russia Export
Controls, Sanctions on Key Industries,” Bloomberg News, February 19,
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russia-export-controls-sanctions-on-key-industries.

[887] Liz Sly, “A global divide on the Ukraine war is deepening,”

Washington Post, February 23, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/22/global-south-russia-war-
divided.

[888] Liu Zhen, “Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping agree to expand Russia-China

military coordination,” South China Morning Post, May 17, 2024,
https://scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3262975/vladimir-putin-xi-
jinping-agree-expand-russia-china-military-coordination; Michelle Ye Hee
Lee and Pei-Lin Wu, “Putin hails Russia’s ties with China as ‘stabilizing’
force in the world,” Washington Post, May 16, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/15/russia-vladimir-putin-china-
xi-meeting.

[889] Staff, “How much is Russia spending on its invasion of Ukraine?”

The Economist, May 30, 2023, https://economist.com/graphic-
detail/2023/05/30/how-much-is-russia-spending-on-its-invasion-of-ukraine.

[890] Nik Martin, “Ukraine war: The trillion-dollar cost to the West,” DW,
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still-buying-russian-gas/a-68925869.

[892] Michael Crowley, “US says $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline will
not move forward if Russia invades Ukraine,” New York Times, January 28,
2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/01/28/world/europe/nord-stream-2-ukraine-
russia.html; Sarah Marsh and Madeline Chambers, “Germany freezes Nord
Stream 2 gas project as Ukraine crisis deepens,” Reuters, February 22,
2022, https://reuters.com/business/energy/germanys-scholz-halts-nord-
stream-2-certification-2022-02-22.

[893] Vladimir Soldatkin, “Russia Completes Nord Stream 2 Construction,

Gas Flows Yet to Start,” Reuters, September 10, 2021,
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nord-stream-2-construction-2021-09-10.

[894] “Former CIA director John Brennan blames Russia for Nord Stream
Bombing,” CNN, September 29, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=gPQO1wjQIvo; Matt Orfalea, “Who Blew Up Nord Stream Pipelines? A
Mystery!” 0rf, October 22, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=NSZyKYitC3M.

[895] Alex Lawson, “G7 countries agree plan to impose price cap on
Russian oil,” Guardian, September 2, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/02/g7-poised-to-agree-plan-to-
impose-price-cap-on-russian-oil; Alex Lawson, “Nord Stream 1: Gazprom
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announces-indefinite-shutdown-of-pipeline.

[896] Press Release, “Secretary Antony J. Blinken And Canadian Foreign

Minister Mélanie Joly At a Joint Press Availability,” US State Department,
September 30, 2022, https://state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-and-
canadian-foreign-minister-melanie-joly-at-a-joint-press-availability.

[897] Seymour Hersh, “How America Took Out The Nord Stream
Pipeline,” Seymour Hersh Substack, February 8, 2023,
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/how-america-took-out-the-nord-
stream; Seymour Hersh, “A Year of Lying About Nord Stream,” Seymour
Hersh Substack, September 26, 2023,
https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/a-year-of-lying-about-nord-stream;
Interview with author, Seymour Hersh, Scott Horton Show radio archive,
February 24, 2023, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/2-24-23-seymour-
hersh-how-and-why-america-blew-up-nord-stream.

[898] Michael Crowley, “US says $11 billion Nord Stream 2 pipeline will
not move forward if Russia invades Ukraine,” New York Times, January 28,
2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/01/28/world/europe/nord-stream-2-ukraine-
russia.html.

[899] Christina Wilkie and Amanda Macias, “Biden Says Nord Stream 2
Won’t Go Forward If Russia Invades Ukraine, But German Chancellor
Demurs,” CNBC, February 7, 2022, https://cnbc.com/2022/02/07/biden-
says-nord-stream-2-wont-go-forward-if-russia-invades-ukraine-.html.

[900] Shane Harris, et al., “No conclusive evidence Russia is behind Nord
Stream attack,” Washington Post, December 21, 2022,
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stream-explosions.

OceanofPDF.com
[901] Rebecca R. Ruiz and Justin Scheck, “In Nord Stream Mystery, Baltic
Seabed Provides a Nearly Ideal Crime Scene,” New York Times, December
26, 2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/12/26/world/europe/nordstream-
pipeline-explosion-russia.html.

[902] Matt Orfalea, “Who Blew Up Nord Stream Pipelines? A Mystery!”

0rf, October 22, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?v=NSZyKYitC3M.

[903] “‘Absolute victory over Russia isn’t possible,’” Interview of Fiona

Hill, UnHerd.com, February 22, 2023,
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[904] Adam Entous, et al., “Intelligence Suggests Pro-Ukrainian Group

Sabotaged Pipelines, US Officials Say,” New York Times, March 7, 2023,
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ukraine.html.

[905] Maxim Tucker, “West kept quiet about Nord Stream attack to protect
Ukraine,” London Times, March 8, 2023,
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ukraine-qsrqxvssw.

[906] Von Holger Stark, “Nord Stream investigations: traces lead to

Ukraine,” Die Zeit, March 7, 2023, https://zeit.de/politik/ausland/2023-
03/nordstream-2-ukraine-anschlag.
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military grounds,” Der Spiegel, March 13, 2023,
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steht-aufgebockt-auf-ehemaligem-militaergelaende-a-52203bf0-2bf0-4996-
b034-5ff0ce849fe4.

[908] Seymour Hersh, “The Cover-Up,” Seymour Hersh Substack, March

22, 2023, https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-cover-up.

[909] Shane Harris, et al., “Investigators skeptical of yacht’s role in Nord

Stream bombing,” Washington Post, April 3, 2023,
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bombing-yacht-andromeda.

[910] Erika Solomon, “Suspicions Multiply as Nord Stream Sabotage

Remains Unsolved,” New York Times, April 7, 2023,
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sabotage-theories.html.

[911] James Bamford, “The Nord Stream Explosions: New Revelations

About Motive, Means, and Opportunity,” The Nation, May 7, 2023,
https://thenation.com/article/world/nord-stream-pipeline-explosions.

[912] Shane Harris and Souad Mekhennet, “US had intelligence of detailed
Ukrainian plan to attack Nord Stream pipeline,” Washington Post, June 6,
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stream-pipeline-explosion-ukraine-russia.
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Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2023, https://wsj.com/articles/u-s-warned-
ukraine-not-to-attack-nord-stream-7777939b.

[914] Shane Harris and Isabelle Khurshudyan, “Ukrainian military officer

coordinated Nord Stream pipeline attack,” Washington Post, November 11,
2023, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/11/nordstream-
bombing-ukraine-chervinsky.

[915] “Sweden won’t share Nord Stream investigation findings with Russia
– PM,” Reuters, October 10, 2022,
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investigation-findings-with-russia-pm-2022-10-10.

[916] Jan M. Olsen, “Sweden closes probe into explosions on Nord Stream
pipelines, saying it doesn’t have jurisdiction,” AP, February 7, 2024,
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russia-1ce8c5198afd312e34e83a38d565a4ca.

[917] Rachel More and Anna Wlodarczak-semczuk, “Poland received

German request to arrest Nord Stream suspect but he’s left country,
prosecutors say,” Reuters, August 14, 2024,
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diver-nord-stream-probe-media-report-2024-08-14.

[918] Bojan Pancevski, “A Drunken Evening, a Rented Yacht: The Real

Story of the Nord Stream Pipeline Sabotage,” Wall Street Journal, August
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real-story-da24839c.

[919] Gavin Maguire, “US LNG exports both a lifeline and a drain for
Europe in 2023,” Reuters, December 21, 2022,
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europe-2023-maguire-2022-12-20.

[920] Barbara Moens, et al., “Europe accuses US of profiting from war,”

Politico Europe, November 24, 2022, https://politico.eu/article/vladimir-
putin-war-europe-ukraine-gas-inflation-reduction-act-ira-joe-biden-rift-
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[921] Peter Certo, “Bret Stephens,” Militarist Monitor, April 11, 2019,
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[922] Bret Stephens, “20 Years On, I Don’t Regret Supporting the Iraq
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supporting-the-iraq-war.html.

[923] Bret Stephens, “Damascus Needs Regime Change,” Wall Street

Journal, April 19, 2011,
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[924] Bret Stephens, “What if Putin Didn’t Miscalculate?” New York Times,
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[925] “Statistical Review of World Energy 2021, 70th edition,” British

Petroleum, July 2021, https://bp.com/content/dam/bp/business-
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[926] Anatoliy Amelin, et al., “The Forgotten Potential of Ukraine’s Energy

Reserves,” Harvard International Review, October 10, 2020,
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[927] Krystyna Marcinek, “Russia Does Not Seem to Be After Ukraine’s

Gas Reserves,” RAND Corporation, April 11, 2022,
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after-ukraines-gas-reserves.html.

[928] Catherine Belton, et al., “Kremlin tries to build antiwar coalition in

Germany, documents show,” Washington Post, April 21, 2023,
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[929] Catherine Belton, et al., “Kremlin tries to build antiwar coalition in

Germany, documents show,” Washington Post, April 21, 2023,
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[930] Zac Crellin, “Kremlin influencing anti-war coalition in Germany:

report,” DW, April 22, 2023, https://dw.com/en/kremlin-influencing-anti-
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[931] José Bautista, et al., “US and Ukrainian Embassies Targeted by Letter
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[932] Edward Wong, et al., “Russian Agents Suspected of Directing Far-

Right Group to Mail Bombs in Spain,” New York Times, January 22, 2023,
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[933] Emma Pinedo, et al., “Letter bomb suspect sought to end Spain’s
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[934] Bernard, “How Russia ‘Weaponized’ 111 Times,” Moon of Alabama,

April 5, 2021, https://moonofalabama.org/2021/04/how-russia-weaponized-
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[935] Pjotr Sauer, “Ukraine suspends 11 political parties with links to

Russia,” Guardian, March 20, 2022,
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[936] Max Hunder and Tom Balmforth, “Ukraine seizes stakes in strategic
companies under wartime laws,” Reuters, November 7, 2022,
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nationalisation-stakes-several-strategic-2022-11-07.

[937] Nicolai N. Petro, “Ukraine Has a Civil Rights Problem,” Foreign

Policy, December 28, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/18/ukraine-
russia-war-civil-rights-freedom-speech-religion.

[938] Branko Marcetic, “The State of Ukrainian Democracy Is Not Strong,”

Jacobin, February 25, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/02/ukraine-
censorship-authoritarianism-illiberalism-crackdown-police-zelensky; Katya
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[939] Emily Feng, “Zelenskyy has consolidated Ukraine’s TV outlets and

dissolved rival political parties,” NPR News, March 19, 2019,
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ukraines-tv-outlets-and-dissolved-rival-political-par; Pavel Polityuk,
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channels into one platform,” Reuters, March 20, 2022,
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signs-decree-combine-national-tv-channels-2022-03-20; Pjotr Sauer,
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suspends-11-political-parties-with-links-to-russia.

[940] Andrew Kramer, et al., “‘A Big Step Back’: In Ukraine, Concerns
Mount Over Narrowing Press Freedoms,” New York Times, June 18, 2024,
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[941] Lorenzo Tondo, “Ukraine’s security service raids Russian-backed

monastery in Kyiv,” Guardian, November 22, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/22/ukraine-security-service-raids-
1000-year-old-monastery-in-kyiv; “Ukraine’s Orthodox churches and the
fight for the country’s soul,” The Economist, December 11, 2022,
https://economist.com/europe/2022/12/11/ukraines-orthodox-churches-and-
the-fight-for-the-countrys-soul; Staff, “Ukraine’s SBU Conducts More
Raids At Churches Formerly Under Moscow’s Jurisdiction,” RFERL,
December 10, 2022, https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-sbu-raids-churches-moscow-
jurisdiction/32170873.html; “Chronicles of the destruction of UOC in
Western Ukraine,” Union of Orthodox Journalists, April 22, 2023,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6w_NSxh1-zM.

[942] Staff, “The UOC (MP) declared its disagreement with Patriarch Kirill
and its independence from Moscow,” RFERL, May 27, 2022,
https://radiosvoboda.org/a/news-upts-mp-kyrylo-
nezalezhnist/31872023.html; Thomas d’Istria, “Ukraine places orthodox
leader Metropolitan Pavlo under house arrest,” Le Monde, April 5, 2023,
https://lemonde.fr/en/religions/article/2023/04/05/ukraine-places-orthodox-
leader-metropolitan-pavlo-under-house-arrest_6021868_63.html.

[943] Nicolai N. Petro, “Ukraine Has a Civil Rights Problem,” Foreign

Policy, December 28, 2013, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/12/18/ukraine-
russia-war-civil-rights-freedom-speech-religion.

[944] Alice Speri, “Ukraine Blocks Journalists From Front Lines With
Escalating Censorship,” Intercept, June 22, 2023,
https://theintercept.com/2023/06/22/ukraine-war-journalists-press-
credentials.

[945] Brett Forrest and Matthew Luxmoore, “Zelensky Removes Ukraine’s

General Prosecutor, Head of Secret Service,” Wall Street Journal, July 17,
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tighten-grip-on-donbas-11658059249.

[946] Ted Galen Carpenter, “Ukraine’s Accelerating Slide into

Authoritarianism,” Cato Institute, May 30, 2021,
https://cato.org/commentary/ukraines-accelerating-slide-authoritarianism;
Pjotr Sauer, “Ukraine suspends 11 political parties with links to Russia,”
Guardian, March 20, 2022,
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parties-with-links-to-russia.

[947] Matthew Luxmoore and Lindsay Wise, “Ukraine’s Zelensky Is

Challenged by Return of Domestic Political Troubles,” Wall Street Journal,
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corruption-allegations-a874bff0.

[948] James Gregory, “Ukrainian billionaire Ihor Kolomoisky held in anti-

corruption drive,” BBC, September 3, 2023, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-
europe-66699004.

[949] Seymour Hersh, “Trading With the Enemy,” Seymour Hersh

Substack, April 12, 2023, https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/trading-
with-the-enemy.

[950] Igor Kossov and Oleksiy Sorokin, “Rumors of Zelensky stripping top
oligarch Kolomoisky’s citizenship gain ground,” Kyiv Independent, July
23, 2022, https://kyivindependent.com/hot-topic/rumors-of-zelensky-
stripping-top-oligarch-kolomoiskys-citizenship-gain-ground; Olena
Harmash and Tom Balmforth, “Zelenskiy fires slew of top officials, cites
need to clean up Ukraine,” Reuters, January 24, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/deputy-head-ukraines-presidential-office-
tymoshenko-tenders-his-resignation-2023-01-24; Staff, “Ukraine officials
leave posts after corruption allegations,” DW, January 24, 2023,
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allegations/a-64495325.

[951] “When will Ukraine be given F-16 and is Putin ready to use nuclear
weapons. Zelensky’s interview with the BBC,” BBC, June 22, 2023,
https://bbc.com/ukrainian/vert-fut-65963080; “Ukraine to hold elections
after war ends, says Zelenskyy,” The New Voice of Ukraine, June 22, 2023,
https://english.nv.ua/nation/ukraine-to-hold-elections-after-war-ends-says-
zelenskyy-50333899.html.

[952] Alex Kasprak, “Did Zelenskyy Say There Would Be No Elections in

Ukraine Until War Ends?” Snopes, June 27, 2023, https://snopes.com/fact-
check/zelenskyy-say-no-elections-until-war-ends; Tweet by Zerohedge,
June 28, 2023, https://x.com/zerohedge/status/1674066407108014080.

[953] Anna Pruchnicka, “Ukraine Extends Martial Law, Ruling Out October
Parliament Vote,” Reuters, July 27, 2023,
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october-parliament-vote-2023-07-27.

[954] Christian Esch, “Fight and Live,” Der Spiegel, December 1, 2023,
https://spiegel.de/ausland/ukraine-im-kriegswinter-kaempfen-und-leben-a-
fa0ee2a7-e267-4d0e-9a1e-84e5af901419.

[955] Staff, “The mystery of the murdered Ukrainian negotiator accused of

being a traitor (+ Sensitive images),” Maduradas, March 7, 2022,
https://maduradas.com/extrano-misterio-del-negociador-ucraniano-
asesinado-senalado-traidor-imagenes-sensibles.

[956] Maggie Astor, “A Photo That Changed the Course of the Vietnam
War,” New York Times, February 1, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/02/01/world/asia/vietnam-execution-photo.html.

[957] Andy Grundberg, “Eddie Adams, Journalist Who Showed Violence of

Vietnam, Dies at 71,” New York Times, September 20, 2004,
https://nytimes.com/2004/09/20/arts/eddie-adams-journalist-who-showed-
violence-of-vietnam-dies-at-71.html.

[958] Brett Forrest, “Russian Spy or Ukrainian Hero? The Strange Death of
Denys Kiryeyev,” Wall Street Journal, January 18, 2023,
https://wsj.com/articles/russian-spy-or-ukrainian-hero-the-strange-death-of-
denys-kiryeyev-11674059395.

[959] “Peacekeeper,” Myrotvorets, https://myrotvorets.center.

[960] Anthony Lloyd, “Ukraine’s blacklist: Killers, lawyers, writers and

spies,” London Times, January 25, 2022,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/ukraines-blacklist-killers-lawyers-writers-and-
spies-0gccbbwp0.

[961] Branko Marcetic, “The State of Ukrainian Democracy Is Not Strong,”

Jacobin, February 25, 2023, https://jacobin.com/2023/02/ukraine-
censorship-authoritarianism-illiberalism-crackdown-police-zelensky.

[962] Inna Gadzynska, et al., “Roller Coaster,” Texty.org.ua, June 6, 2024,

https://texty.org.ua/projects/112617/roller-coaster; Daniel McAdams, “US-
Backed Ukrainian Publication Releases New ‘Enemies List’ Including
Donald Trump, Ron Paul, Ron Paul Institute, Hundreds More. . .” Ron Paul
Institute, June 7, 2024, https://ronpaulinstitute.org/us-backed-ukrainian-
publication-releases-new-enemies-list-including-donald-trump-ron-paul-
ron-paul-institute-hundreds-more.
[963] Shivya Kanojia, “Scratched my left eye with toothpick, cracked rib:
US-Chilean journalist describes torture in Ukrainian prison,” First Post,
August 1, 2023, https://firstpost.com/world/scratched-my-left-eye-with-
toothpick-cracked-rib-us-chilean-journalist-describes-torture-in-ukrainian-
prison-12943002.html.

[964] Alexander Rubinstein, “American citizen Gonzalo Lira dies from

neglect in Ukrainian prison,” Grayzone, January 12, 2024,
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/12/gonzalo-lira-dies-ukrainian-prison.

[965] “User Clip: Gonzalo Lira: State Dept disinterest,” C-SPAN, January
22, 2024, https://c-span.org/video/?c5104258/user-clip-gonzalo-lira-state-
dept-disinterest.

[966] Anatol Lieven, “The Rise and Role of Ukrainian Ethnic Nationalism,”
The Nation, April 17, 2023, https://thenation.com/article/world/ukraine-
russia-nationalism-war.

[967] Staff, “Ukraine passes bill to ban Orthodox church with ties to
Russia; Zelensky hails ban, Moscow slams it,” WION, August 20, 2024,
https://wionews.com/world/ukraine-passes-bill-to-ban-orthodox-church-
with-ties-to-russia-zelensky-hails-ban-moscow-slams-it-751722.

[968] Martha Muir, “Investors size up opportunities in post-conflict

Ukraine,” Financial Times, December 11, 2022,
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will mean giant investments and potential big payoffs, say economists
adding up the costs,” Fortune, December 7, 2022,
https://fortune.com/2022/12/07/rebuilding-ukraine-trillion-dollar-
investment-opportunity.

[970] President of Ukraine official statement, “Volodymyr Zelenskyy meets

with senior members of JP Morgan, takes part in investment summit
organized by holding,” February 11, 2023,
https://president.gov.ua/en/news/volodimir-zelenskij-zustrivsya-z-top-
menedzherami-jp-morgan-80933; Charlie Gasparino, “JP Morgan reaches
agreement with Ukraine’s Zelenskyy on rebuilding infrastructure, presents
Patriots jersey,” Fox Business, February 12, 2023,
https://foxbusiness.com/business-leaders/jp-morgan-reach-agreement-
ukraine-zelenskyy-rebuild-infrastructure-present-patriots-jersey.

[971] Patricia Cohen and Liz Alderman, “‘The World’s Largest

Construction Site’: The Race Is On to Rebuild Ukraine,” New York Times,
February 16, 2023,
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[972] Nomaan Merchant and Hannah Fingerhut, “AP-NORC poll: Most in

US oppose major role in Russia strife,” AP, February 23, 2022,
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-business-vladimir-putin-europe-
election-2020-ac251d00b8979cebd0496374fc622a1b.
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[974] Staff, “US names former commerce secretary, big Democrat donor to
coordinate private sector aid for Ukraine,” AP, September 14, 2023,
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-biden-penny-pritzker-aid-adviser-donor-
f919a2ae3ac0a21573a8b6c378818e69.

[975] Staff, “US Commerce nominee faces questions on failed bank, tax
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[976] Antony Blinken, Press Statement, “Announcing the US Special

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[977] Miranda Davis, “Penny Pritzker Looks to Commodity Firms to Help

Rebuild Ukraine,” Bloomberg News, February 14, 2024,
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[978] Press Release, “Graham, Blumenthal Statement on Visit to Ukraine,”

Sen. Lindsey Graham, August 12, 2024,
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[980] Interview with author, Frank Ledwidge, Scott Horton Show radio
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ledwidge-on-what-its-like-in-ukraine-right-now.

[981] Julian Hayda, “President Zelenskyy shakes up Ukraine’s Cabinet

amid corruption allegations,” NPR News, January 24, 2023,
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ukraines-cabinet-amid-corruption-allegations.

[982] Paul Adams and Malu Cursino, “Ukraine’s defence minister Oleksii
Reznikov dismissed,” BBC, September 4, 2023,
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[983] Tara Law, “What to Know About the Corruption Scandals Sweeping
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[984] Tweet by Lee Fang, July 21, 2023,

https://x.com/lhfang/status/1682470052728020993.

[985] Michael Roark, et al., “The DoD’s Accountability of Equipment

Provided to Ukraine,” US Defense Department Inspector General’s Office,
October 6, 2022,
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/23881939/5ff9e457-8c21-46ee-
af93-cb4321fba336.pdf.

[986] Michael Birnbaum, et al., “US failed to track $1 billion in Ukraine

military aid, watchdog says,” Washington Post, January 11, 2024,
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ukraine-inspector-general.

[987] Brendan Cole, “Zelensky’s Corruption Problem,” Newsweek, January

28, 2024, https://newsweek.com/ukraine-zelensky-corruption-problem-
1863644.

[988] Staff, “Ukraine says corrupt officials stole $40 million meant to buy
arms for the war with Russia,” AP, January 28, 2024,
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476d673cc64a4b005c7ee8ed5f5d5361.

[989] Andrew Kramer, “‘Where Is the Money?’ Military Graft Becomes a

Headache for Ukraine,” New York Times, September 4, 2023,
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corruption.html.

[990] Simon Shuster, “‘Nobody Believes in Our Victory Like I Do.’ Inside
Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight,” Time,
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[992] Ted Galen Carpenter, “Washington’s Whoppers on the War in

Ukraine,” The American Conservative, October 24, 2022,
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[993] “Countries and Territories Democracy Scores,” Freedom House,

2022, https://freedomhouse.org/countries/nations-transit/scores.

[994] Ben Freeman, “The Lobbying Battle Before the War: Russian and
Ukrainian Influence in the US,” Quincy Brief No. 26, July 20, 2022,
https://web.archive.org/web/20220721162537/https://quincyinst.org/wp-
content/uploads/2022/07/quincy-brief-no.-26-July-2022-freeman-5.pdf; Ben
Freeman, “Army of Ukraine lobbyists behind unprecedented Washington
blitz,” Responsible Statecraft, February 11, 2022,
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unprecedented-campaign-on-us-lawmakers-in-2021.

[995] Interview with author, Ben Freeman, Scott Horton Show radio
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[996] Scott Horton, “Blame Wilson,” Antiwar.com, April 23, 2005,

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[998] “Vladimir Putin’s annual news conference,” Kremlin, December 23,

2021, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67438.

[999] Anchal Vohra, “The West Is Preparing for Russia’s Disintegration,”

Foreign Policy, April 17, 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/17/the-
west-is-preparing-for-russias-disintegration.

[1000] Anchal Vohra, “The West Is Preparing for Russia’s Disintegration,”

Foreign Policy, April 17, 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/17/the-
west-is-preparing-for-russias-disintegration.

[1001] Anchal Vohra, “The West Is Preparing for Russia’s Disintegration,”

Foreign Policy, April 17, 2023, https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/04/17/the-
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[1002] Bakhti Nishanov, et al., “Decolonizing Russia,” CSCE, June 23,

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[1003] Staff, “Putin accuses the West of trying to ‘dismember and plunder’
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747d4cb0b899cf5c76f2f5ae80df376c.

[1004] Casey Michel, “Decolonize Russia,” The Atlantic, May 27, 2022,
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ukraine-chechnya/639428.

[1005] As part of then-Deputy Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas

Feith and his assistant Abram Shulsky’s Office of Special Plans, Rubin is
guilty of helping lie the United States into invading Iraq in 2003. Scott
Horton, “Iraq War II, Part 2: A Clean Break,” Scott Horton Show Substack,
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2-a-clean-break; Tweet by author, “28 Articles About How the
Neoconservatives Lied Us Into Iraq War II,” February 23, 2024,
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[1006] Michael Rubin, “Putin Wants Russia’s Borders Changed? History

Says He Should Be Quiet,” 19FortyFive, September 30, 2022,
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[1007] David Wurmser, et al., “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for

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[1008] Valeriya Oleksandrivna Shakhvorostova, “Officially rename the

name ‘Russia’ to ‘Moscow.’ Replace the term ‘Russian’ with ‘Moscow,’
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into it,” Politico Europe, March 13, 2023, https://politico.eu/article/rename-
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[1010] Staff, “Azov Regiment believes Russian troops should have been
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185949791.html.

[1011] Oleksiy Danilov – Secretary of the NSDC of Ukraine, “The world

must accept the irreversible event of Russia’s internal decolonization,”
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[1012] Tweet by Gunter Fehlinger, April 25, 2023,

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[1013] Free Nation of Post-Russia Forum, https://freenationsrf.org.

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[1016] Murray N. Rothbard, “Just War,” Mises Institute, May 1994,

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[1018] “Vladimir Putin Interview with Dmitry Kiselyov,” Kremlin, March

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[1019] “President Dwight Eisenhower Farewell Address,” C-SPAN,

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[1020] Michael Swanson, The War State: The Cold War Origins Of The
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[1021] Nick Turse, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday
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[1022] Damien Markham, “Lockheed and Boeing target House

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[1024] Murray N. Rothbard, “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the

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[1025] Dov Cohen, et al., “Insult, Aggression, and the Southern Culture of
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[1026] Matt Orfalea, “Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC Host Lying for 30 Minutes
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[1027] Glenn Diesen, The Think Tank Racket: Managing the Information
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[1028] Justin Raimondo, “Beware the Red Heifer,” Antiwar.com, April 15,
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[1030] Brink Lindsey, “No more 9/11s – The case for invading Iraq,”
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[1031] Claes Ryn, “The Ideology of American Empire,” Foreign Policy

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[1032] Andrew Cockburn, “Our Real National Security Budget – $2

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[1034] By the middle of his last year in office, even his closest allies agreed
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[1035] John Ismay and Lara Jakes, “Meeting in Brussels Signifies a

Turning Point for Allies Arming Ukraine,” New York Times, September 28,
2022, https://nytimes.com/2022/09/28/us/politics/ukraine-weapons-
nato.html.

[1036] Paul McLeary, “NATO sets sights on rebuilding Ukraine’s defense

industry,” Politico, October 12, 2022,
https://politico.com/news/2022/10/12/Pentagon-chief-ukraine-support-
00061387.

[1037] Ciara Linnane, “Raytheon’s profit more than doubles as Ukraine war
boosts defense budgets,” MarketWatch, January 25, 2023,
https://marketwatch.com/story/raytheons-profit-more-than-doubles-as-
ukraine-war-boosts-defense-budgets-11674589555; Connor Echols, “US
weapons makers report ‘all-time record orders’ since Russian invasion,”
Responsible Statecraft, January 26, 2023,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/01/26/us-weapons-makers-report-all-
time-record-orders-since-russian-invasion.

[1038] Staff, “US defense contractors see longer term benefits from war in
Ukraine,” AFP, April 2, 2022, https://france24.com/en/live-news/20220403-
us-defense-contractors-see-longer-term-benefits-from-war-in-ukraine.

[1039] “Raytheon Technologies (RTX) Q4, 2021 Earnings Call Transcript,”

Motley Fool, January 25, 2022, https://fool.com/earnings/call-
transcripts/2022/01/25/raytheon-technologies-rtx-q4-2021-earnings-call-tr.

[1040] Staff, “Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes: How Ukraine Has

Highlighted Gaps in US Defense Technologies,” Harvard Business Review,
March 25, 2022, https://hbr.org/2022/03/raytheon-ceo-gregory-hayes-how-
ukraine-has-highlighted-gaps-in-us-defense-technologies.

[1041] Eli Clifton, “Ukraine War is great for the portfolio, as defense stocks
enjoy a banner year,” Responsible Statecraft, February 24, 2023,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/02/24/war-is-great-for-the-portfolio-
as-defense-stocks-enjoy-a-banner-year.

[1042] David Moore, “Here Are the Members of Congress Invested in

War,” Sludge, September 12, 2024,
https://readsludge.com/2024/09/12/here-are-the-members-of-congress-
invested-in-war.

[1043] Eli Clifton and Ben Freeman, “Pro-bono Ukraine lobbyists quietly
profit from defense contractor clients,” Responsible Statecraft, March 1,
2023, https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/03/01/pro-bono-ukraine-
lobbyists-quietly-profit-from-defense-contractor-clients.

[1044] Kyle Anzalone, “US General Says Weapons Stockpiles

‘Dangerously Low,’ Calls for Production Boost,” Libertarian Institute, July
17, 2023, https://libertarianinstitute.org/news/us-general-says-weapons-
stockpiles-dangerously-low-calls-for-production-boost.

[1045] Natasha Bertrand, et al., “US and NATO grapple with critical ammo
shortage for Ukraine,” CNN, July 18, 2023,
https://cnn.com/2023/07/18/politics/ukraine-critical-ammo-shortage-us-
nato-grapple/index.html.

[1046] Lara Jakes, “For Western Weapons, the Ukraine War Is a Beta Test,”
New York Times, November 15, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/11/15/world/europe/ukraine-weapons.html.

[1047] Aditi Ramaswami and Andrew Perez, “The Defense Industry’s

Ukraine Pundits,” Lever News, April 12, 2022, https://levernews.com/the-
defense-industrys-ukraine-pundits.

[1048] “Jeh Johnson,” Lockheed, https://lockheedmartin.com/en-us/who-

we-are/leadership-governance/board-of-directors/jeh-johnson.html.

[1049] “Leon Panetta,” Beacon Global Strategies,

https://bgsdc.com/team/leon-panetta.
[1050] “James Stavridis,” Carlyle Group, https://carlyle.com/about-
carlyle/team/admiral-james-stavridis.

[1051] David Barstow, “One Man’s Military-Industrial-Media Complex,”

New York Times, November 29, 2008,
https://nytimes.com/2008/11/30/washington/30general.html.

[1052] “David Petraeus,” KKR, https://kkr.com/our-firm/leadership/david-

h-petraeus.

[1053] “Michèle Flournoy,” Booz Allen, https://boozallen.com/e/bio/board-

of-directors/michele-flournoy.html; Eric Lipton and Kenneth Vogel, “Biden
Aides’ Ties to Consulting and Investment Firms Pose Ethics Test,” New
York Times, November 28, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/11/28/us/politics/biden-westexec.html.

[1054] Kenneth Vogel and Eric Lipton, “Corporations and Foreign Nations
Pivot to Lobby Biden,” New York Times, November 17, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/11/17/us/politics/corporations-and-foreign-
nations-pivot-to-lobby-biden.html.

[1055] Libby Emmons and Jack Posobiec, “Alexander Vindman Secretly

Pitching Ukrainian Military for Millions in Defense Contracts,” Human
Events, March 2, 2023, https://humanevents.com/2023/03/02/exclusive-
alexander-vindman-secretly-pitching-ukrainian-military-for-millions-in-
defense-contracts.
[1056] Tweet by Alexander Vindman, March 3, 2023,
https://x.com/AVindman/status/1631679969423237121.

[1057] Paul McLeary, “Vindman leads new push to send military

contractors to Ukraine,” Politico, February 2, 2023,
https://politico.com/news/2023/02/02/vindman-leads-new-push-to-send-
military-contractors-to-ukraine-00081016.

[1058] Staff, “AP Race Call: Democrat Eugene Vindman wins election to
US House in Virginia’s 7th Congressional District,” AP, November 6, 2024,
https://apnews.com/live/senate-house-election-updates-11-5-
2024#00000193-03cb-d7a2-a1bb-93cb50d20000.

[1059] Victoria Churchill, “Democratic House candidate Eugene Vindman

won’t answer questions about business he started after 14 taxpayer-funded
trips to Ukraine,” New York Post, October 25, 2024,
https://nypost.com/2024/10/25/us-news/democratic-house-candidate-
eugene-vindman-wont-answer-questions-about-business-he-started-after-
14-taxpayer-funded-trips-to-ukraine.

[1060] Staff, “Europeans want peace, not sanctions,” Századvég, December

20, 2022,
https://web.archive.org/web/20230114172451/https://szazadveg.hu/en/2022
/12/20/europeans-want-peace-not-sanctions~n3420.

[1061] “Mexico’s Peace Proposal for Ukraine,” Telesur, September 16,

2022,
https://web.archive.org/web/20220917000127/https://telesurenglish.net/new
s/Mexicos-Peace-Proposal-for-Ukraine-20220916-0012.html.

[1062] “Call for a Christmas Truce in Ukraine!” PeaceInUkraine.org,

https://peaceinukraine.org/christmas_truce_in_ukraine; Marcy Winograd,
“Letter to the Left on Ukraine,” December 2, 2022,
https://marcywinograd.medium.com/letter-to-the-left-on-ukraine-
6a9d91b630a.

[1063] Guy Faulconbridge, “Putin orders ceasefire in Ukraine over

Orthodox Christmas – Kremlin,” Reuters, January 5, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/russia-will-cease-fire-ukraine-orthodox-
christmas-kremlin-2023-01-05.

[1064] Pjotr Sauer, “Ukraine rejects Putin’s 36-hour ceasefire for Orthodox
Christmas,” Guardian, January 5, 2023,
https://theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/05/putin-orders-36-hour-truce-in-
ukraine-for-orthodox-christmas.

[1065] Staff, “Fighting never stopped as Russia’s Orthodox Christmas

ceasefire ends,” France 24, January 7, 2023,
https://france24.com/en/europe/20230107-live-what-ceasefire-shells-fly-at-
ukraine-front-despite-putin-s-truce.

[1066] “China’s Position on the Political Settlement of the Ukraine Crisis,”

Chinese Foreign Ministry, February 24, 2023,
https://fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/zxxx_662805/202302/t20230224_11030713.
html.

[1067] Staff, “Ukraine welcomes some Chinese ceasefire ‘thoughts,’ insists

on Russian withdrawal,” Reuters, February 24, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/ukraine-says-its-open-some-parts-china-ceasefire-
proposal-2023-02-24.

[1068] “Biden says China negotiating Russia-Ukraine peace deal ‘not

rational,’” The Hill, February 26, 2023,
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/3874833-biden-says-china-
negotiating-russia-ukraine-peace-deal-not-rational.

[1069] Marita Vlachou, “Antony Blinken Says China ‘Can’t Have It Both
Ways’ On Russia’s War In Ukraine,” Yahoo News, March 1, 2023,
https://news.yahoo.com/antony-blinken-says-china-cant-160943078.html.

[1070] Staff, “Ukraine sees some merit in Chinese peace plan,” Reuters,
February 24, 2023, https://reuters.com/world/china-wants-prevent-ukraine-
crisis-getting-out-control-2023-02-24.

[1071] Staff, “White House calls potential Russian ceasefire in Ukraine

‘unacceptable’ ahead of China meeting,” Global News, March 19, 2023,
https://globalnews.ca/video/9563322/white-house-calls-potential-russian-
ceasefire-in-ukraine-unacceptable-ahead-of-china-meeting.

[1072] Edward Wong, “In First Wartime Meeting, Blinken Confronts His
Russian Counterpart,” New York Times, March 2, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/03/02/world/europe/ukraine-blinken-lavrov-
g20.html.

[1073] Secretary Antony J. Blinken, “Remarks on the 2022 Country

Reports on Human Rights Practices,” US State Department, March 20,
2023, https://state.gov/secretary-antony-j-blinken-on-the-2022-country-
reports-on-human-rights-practices.

[1074] Clea Caulcutt, “China has key role in finding ‘path to peace’ in
Ukraine, Macron says,” Politico Europe, April 5, 2023,
https://politico.eu/article/china-role-peace-ukraine-russia-war-france-
president-emmanuel-macron.

[1075] Hans Kristensen, “Chinese Nuclear Forces, 2024: A ‘Significant

Expansion,’” Federation of American Scientists, January 16, 2024,
https://fas.org/publication/chinese-nuclear-forces-2024-a-significant-
expansion.

[1076] Valerie Hopkins, et al., “Putin and Xi Celebrate Ties Unbroken by

Russia’s War in Ukraine,” New York Times, March 20, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/03/20/world/europe/putin-xi-russia-china.html.

[1077] Francis Fukuyama, et al., “Letter to President George W. Bush,”

Project for a New American Century, September 20, 2001,
https://scotthorton.org/pnac/letter-to-president-bush-on-the-war-on-
terrorism.
[1078] Jim Lobe, “‘Leninists!’ Cries Neocon Nabob, Suing for Divorce,”
Antiwar.com, February 23, 2006,
https://original.antiwar.com/lobe/2006/02/23/leninists-cries-neocon-nabob-
suing-for-divorce.

[1079] Francis Fukuyama, “Why Ukraine Will Win,” The Journal of

Democracy, September 8, 2022, https://journalofdemocracy.org/why-
ukraine-will-win.

[1080] “Faculty Salary By Academic Rank at Stanford University,”

UnivStats, https://univstats.com/salary/stanford-university/faculty.

[1081] See above.

[1082] Jennifer Brown, “The cost of 5 common grocery items has gone up
35% in Colorado in 5 years. Here’s the breakdown,” Colorado Sun,
November 12, 2023, https://coloradosun.com/2023/11/12/cost-common-
grocery-items-colorado; Laura Beck, “Here’s How Much Grocery Prices
Have Increased Since the Last Election,” GO Banking Rates, May 5, 2024,
https://gobankingrates.com/money/economy/how-much-grocery-prices-
have-increased-since-last-election.

[1083] Staff, “Inflation and Rising Food Prices: How Does Federal Food
Assistance Change?” Government Accountability Office, January 19, 2023,
https://gao.gov/blog/inflation-and-rising-food-prices-how-does-federal-
food-assistance-change.
[1084] President Joe Biden, “What America Will and Will Not Do in
Ukraine,” New York Times, May 31, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/05/31/opinion/biden-ukraine-strategy.html.

[1085] Nathan Rott, et al., “With winter approaching, Ukraine prepares to

fight on frozen ground,” NPR News, November 16, 2022,
https://npr.org/2022/11/16/1136014801/ukraine-prepares-winter-russia-war.

[1086] Cristian Segura, “Ukraine in race against time to launch spring

offensive with NATO-supplied tanks,” El País, January 26, 2023,
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-01-26/ukraine-in-race-against-
time-to-launch-spring-offensive-with-nato-supplied-tanks.html.

[1087] Tracey Shelton, “Why Ukraine’s spring offensive still hasn’t begun
– with summer just weeks away,” AP, May 19, 2023,
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-counteroffensive-war-attack-
b962aba2b779044d22b11dab719f1614.

[1088] Tracey Shelton, “What is Ukraine waiting for before beginning the
much-anticipated ‘spring offensive’?” ABC News Australia, May 12, 2023,
https://abc.net.au/news/2023-05-13/when-is-ukraine-spring-
counteroffensive-coming/102317228.

[1089] Leslie Gelb, et al., The Pentagon Papers, National Archives, January
15, 1969, https://archives.gov/research/pentagon-papers.

[1090] Craig Whitlock, et al., “The Afghanistan Papers,” Washington Post,

December 9, 2019,
https://washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-
papers/documents-database.

[1091] Karen DeYoung, et al., “Leaked documents warn of weaknesses in

Ukraine’s defenses,” Washington Post, April 8, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/04/08/leak-documents-
ukraine-air-defense; Yaroslav Trofimov, “Ukraine May Run Out of Air
Defenses by May, Leaked Pentagon Documents Warn,” Wall Street Journal,
April 9, 2023, https://wsj.com/articles/ukraine-may-run-out-of-air-defenses-
by-may-leaked-Pentagon-documents-warn-b96b0655.

[1092] Adam Taylor, “Russia can fund war in Ukraine for another year
despite sanctions, leaked document says,” Washington Post, April 26, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/04/26/russia-sanctions-impact-
leaked-documents.

[1093] Jonathan Lemire and Alexander Ward, “Biden’s team fears the
aftermath of a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive,” Politico, April 24, 2023,
https://politico.com/news/2023/04/24/biden-ukraine-russia-
counteroffensive-defense-00093384; Jeremy Herb, “Leaked Pentagon
documents suggest US is pessimistic Ukraine can quickly end war against
Russia,” CNN, April 12, 2023,
https://cnn.com/2023/04/11/politics/pentagon-documents-ukraine-war-
assessment/index.html.

[1094] Alex Horton (no relation), et al., “US doubts Ukraine

counteroffensive will yield big gains, leaked document says,” Washington
Post, April 10, 2023, https://washingtonpost.com/national-
security/2023/04/10/leaked-documents-ukraine-counteroffensive.

[1095] Dan Lamothe and Shane Harris, “Accused leaker Teixeira was seen
as potential mass shooter, probe finds,” Washington Post, December 22,
2023, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/22/teixeira-
investigation-active-shooter-threat.

[1096] John Hudson and Missy Ryan, “US officials were ‘furious’ about
leaks exposing Ukraine war concerns,” Washington Post, December 13,
2023, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/13/ukraine-
war-discord-leaks.

[1097] Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt, “At US Base in Germany,

Ukraine’s Military Conducts War Games,” New York Times, March 2, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/03/02/world/europe/ukraine-us-wargames-
germany.html.

[1098] Jonathan Lemire and Alexander Ward, “Biden’s team fears the
aftermath of a failed Ukrainian counteroffensive,” Politico, April 24, 2023,
https://politico.com/news/2023/04/24/biden-ukraine-russia-
counteroffensive-defense-00093384.

[1099] Bojan Pancevski and Laurence Norman, “NATO’s Biggest European

Members Float Defense Pact With Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal, February
24, 2023, https://wsj.com/articles/natos-biggest-european-members-float-
defense-pact-with-ukraine-38966950.
[1100] Olafimihan Oshin, “Sullivan: US believes Ukrainians ‘will meet
with success’ in counteroffensive,” The Hill, June 4, 2023,
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/4033861-sullivan-us-believes-
ukrainians-will-meet-with-success-in-counteroffensive.

[1101] Alexander Ward and Ari Hawkins, “Ukraine’s counteroffensive plan

‘impressive,’ Sen. Graham says,” Politico, May 30, 2023,
https://politico.com/newsletters/national-security-
daily/2023/05/30/ukraines-counteroffensive-plan-impressive-sen-graham-
says-00099230.

[1102] Staff, “Stoltenberg: I Am Confident Ukraine Will Be Successful,”

RFERL, April 21, 2023, https://rferl.org/a/nato-ukraine-membership-
battlefield-success/32374085.html.

[1103] Interview of David Petraeus, CNN, May 23, 2023,

https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/cnc/date/2023-05-23/segment/04.

[1104] John Hudson and Missy Ryan, “US officials were ‘furious’ about
leaks exposing Ukraine war concerns,” Washington Post, December 13,
2023, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/13/ukraine-
war-discord-leaks.

[1105] Vasco Cotovio, et al., “Unfazed by strikes, Ukrainians gear up for a

counteroffensive,” CNN, May 30, 2023,
https://cnn.com/2023/05/30/europe/ukraine-counteroffensive-russia-
preparations-intl/index.html.
[1106] Bryce Greene, “Hyping Ukraine Counteroffensive, US Press Chose
Propaganda Over Journalism,” FAIR, September 15, 2023,
https://fair.org/home/hyping-ukraine-counteroffensive-us-press-chose-
propaganda-over-journalism; Ben Armbruster, “Why blind optimism leads
us astray on Ukraine,” Responsible Statecraft, September 5, 2023,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/ukraine-counteroffensive.

[1107] Daniel L. Davis, “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan,” Armed Forces

Journal, February 1, 2012, http://armedforcesjournal.com/truth-lies-and-
afghanistan.

[1108] Daniel L. Davis, “Joe Biden Needs a New Ukraine War Strategy
Now,” 19FortyFive, May 2, 2023, https://19fortyfive.com/2023/05/joe-
biden-needs-a-new-ukraine-war-strategy-now.

[1109] Interview with author, Daniel L. Davis, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, April 27, 2023, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/4-27-23-daniel-
davis-on-the-actual-state-of-ukraines-forces.

[1110] Staff, “Satellite Images Reveal Russian Defenses for Ukraine

Counteroffensive,” Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2024,
https://wsj.com/video/series/on-the-news/why-gazas-philadelphi-corridor-
is-obstructing-an-israel-hamas-cease-fire/7FAB7AD4-341A-4894-8D78-
82E85FDA41D3.

[1111] William Mauldin, “‘Real Peace’ for Ukraine Requires More Military
Support, Blinken Says,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2023,
https://wsj.com/articles/real-peace-for-ukraine-requires-more-military-
support-blinken-says-ac1d637e.

[1112] Roland Oliphant, “Ukraine may not be able to reclaim Crimea by

force, US says,” Telegraph, March 24, 2023, https://telegraph.co.uk/world-
news/2023/03/24/ukraine-reclaim-crimea-force-kyiv-secretary-state-
antony-blinken.

[1113] John M. Goshko, “Arafat PLO Accepts Israeli State,” Washington

Post, December 7, 1988,
https://washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1988/12/08/arafat-plo-accepts-
israeli-state/e0034b38-c5c1-4408-ac71-6a8c0efa22b9.

[1114] Missy Ryan, “US rebuffs cease-fire calls in its strategy for Ukraine
resilience,” Washington Post, June 2, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/02/ukraine-russia-
blinken-address-finland.

[1115] Andrew Harding, “Ukraine war: Front-line troops discuss counter-

offensive,” BBC, July 7, 2023, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-
66121584.

[1116] Samantha Schmidt and Serhii Korolchuk, “On front lines of Ukraine
counteroffensive, soldiers pay heavy price,” Washington Post, June 13,
2023, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/06/13/ukraine-
counteroffensive-kryvyi-rih-donetsk.
[1117] Max Colchester and James Marson, “Ukraine Counterattack Is
Heavy Going, West Says, as Russia Resists,” Wall Street Journal, July 5,
2023, https://wsj.com/articles/ukraine-counterattack-is-heavy-going-west-
says-as-russian-resists-dc6fb4b4; James Marson, “Ukraine Adopts Slow
Approach to Counteroffensive: ‘Our Problem Everywhere Is the Sky,’”
Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2023, https://wsj.com/articles/ukraine-adopts-
slow-approach-to-counteroffensive-our-problem-everywhere-is-the-sky-
a2e51d7a.

[1118] Marcus Walker, “‘Mines Everywhere’: Ukraine’s Offensive Is

Proving a Hard Slog,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2023,
https://wsj.com/articles/mines-everywhere-ukraines-offensive-is-proving-a-
hard-slog-270a1e4a.

[1119] Tweet by Rob Lee, June 9, 2023,

https://x.com/RALee85/status/1667152744728395781.

[1120] Senorpash, “Good quality video of destroying of Ukrainian army

Leopards and Bradley in Zaporozhye,” Reddit, June 9, 2023,
https://reddit.com/r/CombatFootage/comments/1454hxy/good_quality_vide
o_of_destroying_of_ukrainian.

[1121] David Axe, “25 Tanks And Fighting Vehicles, Gone In A Blink: The
Ukrainian Defeat Near Mala Tokmachka Was Worse Than We Thought,”
Forbes, June 27, 2023, https://forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/06/27/25-
tanks-and-fighting-vehicles-gone-in-a-blink-the-ukrainian-defeat-near-
mala-tokmachka-was-worst-than-we-thought.
[1122] Lara Jakes, et al., “After Suffering Heavy Losses, Ukrainians Paused
to Rethink Strategy,” New York Times, July 15, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/07/15/us/politics/ukraine-leopards-bradleys-
counteroffensive.html.

[1123] Daniel L. Davis, “Why Ukraine’s counter-offensive is failing,”

Responsible Statecraft, July 19, 2023,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/07/19/why-ukraines-counter-
offensive-is-failing.

[1124] Jim Sciutto, “Early stages of Ukrainian counteroffensive ‘not

meeting expectations,’ Western officials tell CNN,” CNN, June 23, 2023,
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/06/22/politics/ukraine-counteroffensive-
western-assessment/index.html.

[1125] Michael Birnbaum, et al., “In Ukraine, a war of incremental gains as

counteroffensive stalls,” Washington Post, December 4, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/04/ukraine-counteroffensive-
stalled-russia-war-defenses.

[1126] Staff, “‘Every 100m Cost 4-5 Men’: Ukraine’s Frontline Fighters
Report Bloody Battles, Battered Morale,” Kyiv Post, July 22, 2023,
https://kyivpost.com/post/19707.

[1127] Staff, “Ukraine’s sluggish counter-offensive is souring the public

mood,” The Economist, August 20, 2023,
https://economist.com/europe/2023/08/20/ukraines-sluggish-counter-
offensive-is-souring-the-public-mood.

[1128] Staff, “Donald Trump will ‘never’ support Putin, says Volodymyr
Zelensky,” The Economist, September 10, 2023,
https://economist.com/europe/2023/09/10/donald-trump-will-never-support-
putin-says-volodymyr-zelensky.

[1129] Siobhán O’Grady, et al., “Slow counteroffensive darkens mood in

Ukraine,” Washington Post, August 10, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/08/10/ukraine-national-mood-
counteroffensive-gloom.

[1130] Lara Seligman, “No breakthrough yet in Ukraine’s

counteroffensive,” Politico, August 1, 2023,
https://politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2023/08/01/no-
breakthrough-yet-in-ukraines-counteroffensive-00109205.

[1131] Interview with author, Daniel L. Davis, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, July 11, 2023, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/7-11-23-daniel-
davis-on-the-counteroffensive-and-cluster-bombs.

[1132] Ellie Cook, “Ukraine Bracing for Russia’s Renewed Assault on

Kharkiv,” Newsweek, February 27, 2024, https://newsweek.com/ukraine-
russia-attacks-kharkiv-kupiansk-1873750.

[1133] Seymour Hersh, “Opera Buffa in Ukraine,” Seymour Hersh

Substack, July 27, 2023, https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/opera-buffa-
in-ukraine.

[1134] Gareth Porter, “How the Myth Began – Petraeus in Mosul,”

Truthout, November 27, 2012, https://truthout.org/articles/how-petraeus-
created-the-myth-of-his-success; Gareth Porter, “How Petraeus Quietly
Stoked the Fires of Sectarian War Without Getting Burned,” Truthout,
December 4, 2012, https://truthout.org/news/item/13122-how-petraeus-
quietly-stoked-the-fires-of-sectarian-war-without-getting-burned; Gareth
Porter, “Petraeus Rising: Managing the ‘War of Perceptions’ in Iraq,”
Truthout, December 14, 2012, https://truthout.org/articles/petraeus-rising-
managing-the-war-of-perceptions-in-iraq; Gareth Porter, “True Believer:
Petraeus and the Mythology of Afghanistan,” Truthout, December 20, 2012,
https://truthout.org/articles/believing-his-own-myth-petraeus-in-
afghanistan; Mona Mahmood, et al., “From El Salvador to Iraq:
Washington’s man behind brutal police squads,” Guardian, March 6, 2013,
https://theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/06/el-salvador-iraq-police-squads-
washington; Kimberly Dozier, “Petraeus Tells CIA to Consult Troops on
War in Afghanistan,” AP, October 14, 2011,
https://arkansasonline.com/news/2011/oct/14/petraeus-tells-cia-analysts-
heed-troops-war; Shane Harris and Nancy Youssef, “Petraeus: Use Al
Qaeda Fighters to Beat ISIS,” Daily Beast, April 14, 2017,
https://thedailybeast.com/petraeus-use-al-qaeda-fighters-to-beat-isis.

[1135] David Ignatius, “Transcript: Gen. David H. Petraeus (US Army,

Ret.), Co-Author, ‘Conflict,’” Washington Post, December 1, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/washington-post-live/2023/12/01/transcript-
gen-david-h-petraeus-us-army-ret-co-author-conflict.

[1136] Isabelle Khurshudyan, et al., “Ukraine short of skilled troops and

munitions as losses, pessimism grow,” Washington Post, March 13, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/03/13/ukraine-casualties-
pessimism-ammunition-shortage.

[1137] Lara Jakes, et al., “After Suffering Heavy Losses, Ukrainians Paused
to Rethink Strategy,” New York Times, July 15, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/07/15/us/politics/ukraine-leopards-bradleys-
counteroffensive.html.

[1138] Missy Ryan, et al., “Ukraine aims to sap Russia’s defenses, as US

urges a decisive breakthrough,” Washington Post, July 18, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/07/18/ukraine-counter-
offensive-weapons-tactics.

[1139] James Marson, “Ukraine Adopts Slow Approach to

Counteroffensive: ‘Our Problem Everywhere Is the Sky,’” Wall Street
Journal, July 18, 2023, https://wsj.com/articles/ukraine-adopts-slow-
approach-to-counteroffensive-our-problem-everywhere-is-the-sky-
a2e51d7a.

[1140] Eric Schmitt, “US Cluster Munitions Arrive in Ukraine, but Impact
on Battlefield Remains Unclear,” New York Times, July 14, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/07/14/us/politics/ukraine-war-cluster-
munitions.html.

[1141] Daniel Michaels, “Ukraine’s Lack of Weaponry and Training Risks

Stalemate in Fight With Russia,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2023,
https://wsj.com/articles/ukraines-lack-of-weaponry-and-training-risks-
stalemate-in-fight-with-russia-f51ecf9.

[1142] Nagl was one of the most prominent of the “COINdinistas” who
pushed so hard for the massive, failed “surge” of troops to Afghanistan in
2009–2012; Horton, Fool’s Errand, 159–60.

[1143] Daniel Michaels, “Ukraine’s Lack of Weaponry and Training Risks

Stalemate in Fight With Russia,” Wall Street Journal, July 23, 2023,
https://wsj.com/articles/ukraines-lack-of-weaponry-and-training-risks-
stalemate-in-fight-with-russia-f51ecf9.

[1144] Staff, “Ukraine’s commander-in-chief on the breakthrough he needs

to beat Russia,” The Economist, November 1, 2023,
https://economist.com/europe/2023/11/01/ukraines-commander-in-chief-on-
the-breakthrough-he-needs-to-beat-russia.

[1145] Gordon Lubold, et al., “Ukraine’s Stalled Offensive Puts Biden in

Uneasy Political Position,” Wall Street Journal, July 25, 2023,
https://wsj.com/articles/ukraines-stalled-offensive-puts-biden-in-uneasy-
political-position-6f686ab5; Daniel Michaels, “Ukraine’s Slog Prompts
Focus on Next Year’s Fight,” Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2023,
https://wsj.com/articles/ukraines-slog-prompts-focus-on-next-years-fight-
d638cdf7.

[1146] Thomas Gibbons-Neff, et al., “Weary Soldiers, Unreliable

Munitions: Ukraine’s Many Challenges,” New York Times, July 23, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/07/23/world/europe/weary-soldiersunreliable-
munitions-ukraines-many-challenges.html.

[1147] Eric Schmitt and Helene Cooper, “Ukrainian Troops Trained by the
West Stumble in Battle,” New York Times, August 2, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/08/02/us/politics/ukraine-troops-
counteroffensive-training.html.

[1148] John Hudson and Alex Horton (no relation), “US intelligence says
Ukraine will fail to meet offensive’s key goal,” Washington Post, August
17, 2023, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/17/ukraine-
counteroffensive-melitopol.

[1149] Eric Schmitt, et al., “Ukraine’s Forces and Firepower Are

Misallocated, US Officials Say,” New York Times, August 22, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/08/22/us/politics/ukraine-counteroffensive-russia-
war.html.

[1150] John Hudson and Alex Horton (no relation), “US intelligence says
Ukraine will fail to meet offensive’s key goal,” Washington Post, August
17, 2023, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/08/17/ukraine-
counteroffensive-melitopol.
[1151] Helene Cooper, et al., “Troop Deaths and Injuries in Ukraine War
Near 500,000, US Officials Say,” New York Times, August 18, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/08/18/us/politics/ukraine-russia-war-
casualties.html.

[1152] Alexander Ward, “‘Milley had a point,’” Politico, August 18, 2023,
https://politico.com/newsletters/national-security-daily/2023/08/18/milley-
had-a-point-00111878.

[1153] Helene Cooper, et al., “Mutual Frustrations Arise in US-Ukraine

Alliance,” New York Times, March 7, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/03/07/us/politics/ukraine-us-military-
frustrations.html.

[1154] John Hudson and Shane Harris, “CIA director, on secret trip to
Ukraine, hears plan for war’s endgame,” Washington Post, June 30, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/30/cia-director-
burns-ukraine-counteroffensive.

[1155] Josh Holder, “Who’s Gaining Ground in Ukraine? This Year, No

One,” New York Times, September 28, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/28/world/europe/russia-ukraine-
war-map-front-line.html.

[1156] Nahal Toosi, “Ukraine could join ranks of ‘frozen’ conflicts, US

officials say,” Politico, May 18, 2023,
https://politico.com/news/2023/05/18/ukraine-russia-south-korea-
00097563.

[1157] David Ignatius, “How the US sees Ukraine’s push: No stalemate, but
no breakthrough,” Washington Post, August 27, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/27/ukraine-counteroffensive-
russia-us-support-holds.

[1158] Eve Sampson and Samuel Granados, “Ukraine is now the most
mined country. It will take decades to make safe,” Washington Post, July
22, 2023, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/22/ukraine-is-now-
most-mined-country-it-will-take-decades-make-safe.

[1159] Isabel van Brugen, “Every Russian Black Sea Ship Sunk or Disabled
by Ukraine,” Newsweek, March 31, 2024, https://newsweek.com/every-
russian-black-sea-ship-sunk-damaged-ukraine-full-list-1884448; Yaroslav
Trofimov, “Ukrainian Tactics Put Russia on the Defensive in the Black
Sea,” Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2023,
https://wsj.com/world/europe/ukrainian-tactics-put-russia-on-the-defensive-
in-the-black-sea-4d3f492d.

[1160] Michael Birnbaum, et al., “Miscalculations, divisions marked

offensive planning by US, Ukraine,” Washington Post, December 4, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/04/ukraine-counteroffensive-us-
planning-russia-war; Michael Birnbaum, et al., “In Ukraine, a war of
incremental gains as counteroffensive stalls,” Washington Post, December
4, 2023, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/04/ukraine-
counteroffensive-stalled-russia-war-defenses.

[1161] Carlotta Gall, et al., “Ukrainian Marines on ‘Suicide Mission’ in

Crossing the Dnipro River,” New York Times, December 16, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/12/16/world/europe/ukraine-kherson-river-
russia.html.

[1162] Quentin Sommerville, “‘Dying by the dozens every day’ – Ukraine

losses climb,” BBC, August 28, 2023, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-
66581217.

[1163] Staff, “‘Putin’s already lost the war,’ says Biden,” Le Monde, July
14, 2023, https://lemonde.fr/en/united-states/article/2023/07/14/putin-s-
already-lost-the-war-says-biden_6052643_133.html.

[1164] Karen DeYoung, et al., “US war plans for Ukraine don’t foresee
retaking lost territory,” Washington Post, January 26, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/01/26/ukraine-war-plan-
biden-defense.

[1165] Valerii Zaluzhnyi, “Ukraine’s army chief: The design of war has
changed,” CNN, February 8, 2024,
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/01/opinions/ukraine-army-chief-war-
strategy-russia-valerii-zaluzhnyi/index.html.

[1166] Dmytro Basmat, “Zelensky announces new chief of general staff,”

Kyiv Independent, February 9, 2024,
https://kyivindependent.com/zelensky-replaces-chief-of-general-staff;
President Volodymyr Zelensky, “Starting today, a new management team
takes over the leadership of the Armed Forces of Ukraine,” February 8,
2024, https://president.gov.ua/en/news/vidsogodni-do-kerivnictva-
zbrojnimi-silami-ukrayini-pristupa-88857.

[1167] Veronika Melkozerova, et al., “Zelenskyy’s new top commander has

a reputation as a ‘butcher,’” Politico Europe, February 9, 2024,
https://politico.eu/article/oleksandr-syrskyi-ukraine-commander-in-chief-
butcher-volodymyr-zelenskyy-war-russia.

[1168] Staff, “Ukraine’s commander-in-chief on the breakthrough he needs

to beat Russia,” The Economist, November 1, 2023,
https://economist.com/europe/2023/11/01/ukraines-commander-in-chief-on-
the-breakthrough-he-needs-to-beat-russia.

[1169] “Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community,”

Office of the Director of National Intelligence, February 5, 2024,
https://dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2024-Unclassified-
Report.pdf.

[1170] James Bickerton, “Kari Lake Accuses Zelensky of Threatening US,”

Newsweek, September 13, 2023, https://newsweek.com/kari-lake-accuses-
zelensky-threatening-us-1826687.

[1171] Staff, “Donald Trump will ‘never’ support Putin, says Volodymyr
Zelensky,” The Economist, September 10, 2023,
https://economist.com/europe/2023/09/10/donald-trump-will-never-support-
putin-says-volodymyr-zelensky.

[1172] See Chapter Four.

[1173] Kit Klarenberg, “Meet Centuria, Ukraine’s Western-trained Neo-

Nazi Army,” Grayzone, April 7, 2024,
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/04/07/centuria-ukraines-western-neo-nazi-
army.

[1174] Staff, “Donald Trump will ‘never’ support Putin, says Volodymyr
Zelensky,” The Economist, September 10, 2023,
https://economist.com/europe/2023/09/10/donald-trump-will-never-support-
putin-says-volodymyr-zelensky.

[1175] Josh Lederman, “Former US officials have held secret Ukraine talks
with prominent Russians,” NBC News, July 6, 2023,
https://nbcnews.com/news/world/former-us-officials-secret-ukraine-talks-
russians-war-ukraine-rcna92610.

[1176] Richard Haass and Charles Kupchan, “The West Needs a New
Strategy in Ukraine,” Foreign Affairs, April 13, 2023,
https://foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/russia-richard-haass-west-battlefield-
negotiations; Kupchan had opposed NATO expansion back in the Clinton
years. See Chapter Two.

[1177] Barnett Rubin, “A Tale of Two Skepticisms: Fighting and Talking

with the Taliban During the Obama Years,” War on the Rocks, February 26,
2020, https://warontherocks.com/2020/02/a-tale-of-two-skepticisms-
fighting-and-talking-with-the-taliban-during-the-obama-years.

[1178] Dan Sabbagh and David Smith, “Secret US-Russia talks over
Ukraine ‘not sanctioned by Biden administration,’” Guardian, July 7, 2023,
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/07/russia-us-talks-ukraine-war-
biden.

[1179] Richard Haass, “Jaw to Jaw: Meeting with Russia,” Home and
Away, July 7, 2023, https://richardhaass.substack.com/p/jaw-to-jaw-
meeting-with-russia-july.

[1180] Cameron Manley, “Former US Official Shares Details of Secret

‘Track 1.5’ Diplomacy With Moscow,” Moscow Times, July 27, 2023,
https://themoscowtimes.com/2023/07/26/former-us-official-shares-details-
of-secret-track-15-diplomacy-with-moscow-a81972.

[1181] Cameron Manley, “Former US Official Shares Details of Secret

‘Track 1.5’ Diplomacy With Moscow,” Moscow Times, July 27, 2023,
https://themoscowtimes.com/2023/07/26/former-us-official-shares-details-
of-secret-track-15-diplomacy-with-moscow-a81972.

[1182] James Politi and Isobel Koshiw, “Jake Sullivan says US military aid
will help Ukraine mount counteroffensive in 2025,” Financial Times, May
5, 2024, https://ft.com/content/6fd11006-01db-4548-96d6-76343f38aea8.

[1183] Richard Haass, “Defining Success in Ukraine,” Project Syndicate,

May 15, 2024, https://project-syndicate.org/commentary/defining-success-
in-ukraine-facing-russian-offensive-by-richard-haass-2024-05.

[1184] Pjotr Sauer and Andrew Roth, “Putin sides with military chiefs over
placing Wagner under direct control,” Guardian, June 14, 2023,
https://theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/14/vladimir-putin-sides-with-
military-chiefs-placing-wagner-under-direct-control.

[1185] Anne Applebaum, “Russia Slides Into Civil War,” The Atlantic, June
24, 2023, https://theatlantic.com/international/archive/2023/06/russia-civil-
war-wagner-putin-coup/674517; Max Butterworth, “Photos: 24 hours that
took Russia to the brink of civil war,” NBC News, June 26, 2023,
https://nbcnews.com/news/photo/photos-russia-mercenary-rebellion-
prigozhin-putin-rcna91088.

[1186] Staff, “Russian mercenary boss Prigozhin to move to Belarus under

Wagner deal, Kremlin says,” Reuters, June 24, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/russian-mercenary-boss-prigozhin-move-
belarus-under-wagner-deal-kremlin-says-2023-06-24.

[1187] Guy Faulconbridge and Vladimir Soldatkin, “Putin suggests plane of

Wagner boss Prigozhin was blown up by hand grenades on board,” Reuters,
October 5, 2023, https://reuters.com/world/europe/putin-hand-grenade-
fragments-found-bodies-prigozhin-plane-crash-2023-10-05.

[1188] Anton Troianovski and Anatoly Kurmanaev, “Putin’s New War

Weapon: An Economist Managing the Military,” New York Times, May 13,
2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/05/13/world/europe/russia-defense-
minister-ukraine-belousov.html; Staff, “A Timeline of Russia’s Defense
Ministry Purge,” Moscow Times, July 25, 2024,
https://themoscowtimes.com/2024/07/25/a-timeline-of-russias-defense-
ministry-purge-a85216.

[1189] Lucian Kim, “Prigozhin’s Mutiny Is the Beginning of Putin’s End,”

Foreign Policy, June 24, 2023,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/06/24/prigozhin-wagner-rebellion-putin-
russia-politics-ukraine-war; Keren Yarhi-Milo, et al., “Is this the beginning
of the end for Putin?” Columbia SIPA, June 27, 2023,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=REE3msL2Xx0; Liana Fix and Michael
Kimmage, “The Beginning of the End for Putin?” Foreign Affairs, June 27,
2023, https://foreignaffairs.com/russian-federation/beginning-end-putin-
prigozhin-rebellion.

[1190] Guy Faulconbridge, “CIA says wartime Russia is a rare spy-

recruiting opportunity,” Reuters, July 1, 2023, https://reuters.com/world/cia-
says-russia-is-recruiting-opportunity-disaffection-with-war-rises-2023-07-
01.

[1191] Evelyn Farkas, “The US Must Prepare for War Against Russia Over
Ukraine,” Defense One, January 11, 2022,
https://defenseone.com/ideas/2022/01/us-must-prepare-war-against-russia-
over-ukraine/360639.

[1192] Helene Cooper, “US Considers Backing an Insurgency if Russia

Invades Ukraine,” New York Times, January 14, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/01/14/us/politics/russia-ukraine-biden-
military.html.

[1193] Tom O’Connor and Naveed Jamali, “A Year After 1/6, Ukraine’s
War Draws US Far-Right to Fight Russia, Train for Violence at Home,”
Newsweek, January 5, 2022, https://newsweek.com/ukraine-war-draws-us-
far-right-fight-russia-violence-home-1665027.

[1194] Andrew Kramer, “Ukraine Targets Bases Deep in Russia, Showing

Expanded Reach,” New York Times, December 5, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/12/05/world/europe/ukraine-russia-military-
bases.html.

[1195] Staff, “Inside Ukraine’s drone war against Putin,” The Economist,
August 27, 2023, https://economist.com/europe/2023/08/27/inside-
ukraines-drone-war-against-putin.

[1196] Edelman was Vice President Dick Cheney’s national security adviser
from the beginning of the George W. Bush administration through the
beginning of Iraq War II, and later deputy secretary of defense for policy
where he helped to oversee the final failure of that war. “Eric S. Edelman,
Senior Advisor,” Foundation for the Defense of Democracies,
https://fdd.org/team/eric-s-edelman.

[1197] Michael Evans and Marc Bennetts, “Pentagon gives Ukraine green
light for drone strikes inside Russia,” London Times, December 9, 2022,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/ukraine-drone-warfare-russia-732jsshpx.
[1198] Isobel Koshiw, et al., “Drones hit Moscow, shocking Russian capital
after new missile attack on Kyiv,” Washington Post, May 30, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/30/moscow-drones-kyiv-russia-
counteroffensive.

[1199] David Axe, “Watch 400 Shahed Attack Drones Explode At The
Same Time In Southern Russia,” Forbes, October 9, 2024,
https://forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/10/09/russia-has-acquired-more-
than-8000-shahed-attack-drones-from-iran-ukraine-may-have-blown-up-
five-percent-of-them-in-a-single-attack; Tweet by Anton Gerashchenko,
October 3, 2024,
https://x.com/Gerashchenko_en/status/1841771478510895340.

[1200] David Ignatius, “Zelensky: ‘We are trying to find some way not to
retreat,’” Washington Post, March 29, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/29/ignatius-zelensky-
interview-ukraine-aid-russia.

OceanofPDF.com
[1201] Yuliya Talmazan, “Drones strike Moscow in first apparent attack on
Russian capital’s residential areas since Ukraine war began,” NBC News,
May 30, 2023, https://nbcnews.com/news/world/moscow-drone-attack-
ukraine-russia-capital-putin-rcna86734.

[1202] Fred Kagan, et al., “Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment,”

ISW, May 3, 2023, https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-
offensive-campaign-assessment-may-3-2023.

[1203] Holly Ellyatt, “False flag? Analysts say Russia ‘likely staged’
Kremlin drone attack it blamed on Ukraine and the West,” CNBC, May 4,
2023, https://cnbc.com/2023/05/04/did-russia-stage-the-kremlin-drone-
attack-it-blamed-on-ukraine-.html; Mike Eckel, “The Kremlin And The
Drones: An Audacious Attack, A Provocation, A False Flag, Or Something
Else?” RFERL, May 4, 2023, https://rferl.org/a/russia-kremlin-drone-
attack-ukraine-provocation-false-flag/32396332.html; Mia Jankowicz,
“There are big problems with the way the Kremlin drone incident went
down, and war experts say Russia ‘likely staged’ it,” Business Insider, May
4, 2023, https://businessinsider.com/kremlin-drone-attack-likely-russia-
false-flag-us-think-tank-2023-5.

[1204] Julian Barnes, et al., “Ukrainians Were Likely Behind Kremlin

Drone Attack, US Officials Say,” New York Times, May 24, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/05/24/us/politics/ukraine-kremlin-drone-
attack.html.
[1205] Helene Cooper, et al., “Biden Administration Shrugs Off Ukraine’s
Attacks in Russia,” New York Times, June 5, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/06/05/us/politics/ukraine-attacks-inside-
russia.html.

[1206] Jack Murphy, “Three Green Berets killed by ISIS infiltrator after
CIA ignored warnings,” Sofrep, November 16, 2016,
https://sofrep.com/news/three-green-berets-killed-isis-infiltrator-cia-
ignored-warnings.

[1207] Jack Murphy, “Looser rules, more civilian deaths, a Taliban

takeover: Inside America’s failed Afghan drone campaign,” Connecting
Vets, August 24, 2021, https://audacy.com/connectingvets/news/inside-
america-failed-afghan-drone-campaign-against-taliban.

[1208] Jack Murphy, “The CIA is using a European NATO ally’s spy
service to conduct a covert sabotage campaign inside Russia under the
agency’s direction, according to former US intelligence and military
officials,” JackMurphyWrites.com, December 24, 2022,
https://web.archive.org/web/20221225035808/https://jackmurphywrites.co
m/169/the-cias-sabotage-campaign-inside-russia.

[1209] Staff, “Explosion in Russian border region derails freight train –

governor,” BBC, May 1, 2023, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-
65448141; Marc Santora, “Ukraine, Stalled on the Front, Steps Up
Sabotage, Targeting Trains,” New York Times, December 31, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/12/31/world/europe/ukraine-russia-train-
sabotage.html.

[1210] Kate Plummer, “Russian Ammunition Warehouse Destroyed in

Massive Explosion,” Newsweek, June 23, 2024,
https://newsweek.com/russian-ammunition-warehouse-explosion-ukraine-
1916221.

[1211] David Hambling, “Russia Is Burning: Who Or What Is Behind The

Fires?” Forbes, April 10, 2023,
https://forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2023/04/10/russia-is-burning-who-
or-what-is-behind-the-fires.

[1212] Mike Eckel, “The Ukrainian Fingerprints On A Shadowy

Assassination Campaign On Russian Soil,” RFERL, December 7, 2023,
https://rferl.org/a/ukraine-russia-assassination-campaign/32721025.html.

[1213] Marc Santora, “Ukraine, Stalled on the Front, Steps Up Sabotage,

Targeting Trains,” New York Times, December 31, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/12/31/world/europe/ukraine-russia-train-
sabotage.html.

[1214] Maxim Tucker, “How Kyiv’s kill squads pick off commanders inside
Russia,” London Times, August 8, 2023, https://thetimes.co.uk/article/kyiv-
kill-squads-pick-off-russian-commanders-behind-enemy-lines-zt675cvmn.

[1215] Staff, “Russia Restoring Oil Refining Capacity Knocked Out by

Drones,” Reuters, April 15, 2024, https://reuters.com/world/europe/russia-
restoring-oil-refining-capacity-knocked-out-by-drones-2024-04-15.

[1216] John Hudson, “Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries deepen

tensions with US,” Washington Post, April 15, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/15/ukraine-russia-oil-
refinery-attacks.

[1217] Samya Kullab, “Russia renews big attacks on Ukrainian power grid
using better intelligence and new tactics,” AP, April 5, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-power-plant-missiles-drones-
94692e19900f60c2c3641c9352a416ed; Isabelle Khurshudyan, et al.,
“Russia strikes power plants in heavy blow to Ukrainian electric grid,”
Washington Post, March 29, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/29/ukraine-russia-airstrikes-
energy-war.

[1218] Robert Wright, “Tom Cotton, Soldier in Bill Kristol’s Proxy War
Against Evil,” Responsible Statecraft, January 20, 2020,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2020/01/19/tom-cotton-soldier-in-bill-
kristols-proxy-war-against-evil.

[1219] John Hudson, “Ukraine’s attacks on Russian oil refineries deepen

tensions with US,” Washington Post, April 15, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/15/ukraine-russia-oil-
refinery-attacks.
[1220] Gabriel Gavin, “Ukraine declares war on Russia’s Black Sea
shipping,” Politico Europe, August 8, 2023,
https://politico.eu/article/ukraine-declares-war-on-russia-black-sea-
shipping.

[1221] “Black Sea Grain Initiative extended,” UNCTAD, March 19, 2023,
https://unctad.org/news/black-sea-grain-initiative-extended.

[1222] Hanna Arhirova and Emma Burrows, “Ukraine says its drones
damaged a Russian warship, showing Kyiv’s growing naval capabilities,”
AP, August 4, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-drones-
black-sea-407a02ccfb2b1951c5afe9ec2269eed8; Hanna Arhirova, “Russia
promises retaliation after Ukrainian drones hit a Russian tanker in 2nd sea
attack in a day,” AP, August 5, 2023, https://apnews.com/article/russia-
ukraine-drones-black-sea-crimea-d6ab9c0d71fe9d3d95e1af5953fe8d8a.

[1223] Courtney Bonnell, “Russia suspends deal allowing Ukraine to export

grain, destabilizing global food markets,” AP, July 17, 2023,
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-grain-food-security-
ba7f9146b745337a1948a964cb30331c.

[1224] Staff, “In Novorossiysk, a fire broke out in the cargo terminal,”
TASS, August 18, 2023, https://tass.ru/proisshestviya/18536059.

[1225] Staff, “The Socio-Economic Repercussions of the Russia-Ukraine

War on Yemen,” Republic of Yemen Ministry of Planning & International
Cooperation Economic Studies & Forecasting Sector, June 2022,
https://fscluster.org/sites/default/files/documents/en-
analytical_paper_3_the_socio-economic_repercussions_of_the_russia-
ukraine_war_on_yemen.pdf.

[1226] Horton, Enough Already, 235–56.

[1227] Peyvand Khorsandi, “Yemen: Millions at risk as Ukraine war effect

rocks region,” World Food Program, March 14, 2022,
https://wfp.org/stories/yemen-millions-risk-ukraine-war-effect-rocks-
region.

[1228] Horton, Enough Already, 235–56.

[1229] “Remarks by Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield at a UN

Security Council Briefing on Yemen,” US Mission to the United Nations,
April 14, 2022, https://usun.usmission.gov/remarks-by-ambassador-linda-
thomas-greenfield-at-a-un-security-council-briefing-on-yemen-7.

[1230] Martha Mundy, “Strategies of the Coalition in the Yemen War: Arial
Bombardment and Food War,” World Peace Foundation, October 9, 2018,
https://web.archive.org/web/20190126193348/https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/stra
tegies-of-the-coalition-in-the-yemen-war.

[1231] Tyler Olson, “Graham calls on Russians to assassinate Putin: ‘The

only way this ends,’” Fox News, March 4, 2022,
https://foxnews.com/politics/lindsey-graham-putin-assassinate.
[1232] Nicholas Kristof, “Biden Should Give Ukraine What It Needs to
Win,” New York Times, February 18, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/02/18/opinion/biden-should-give-ukraine-what-it-
needs-to-win.html.

[1233] James Glanz and Marco Hernandez, “How Ukraine Blew Up a Key
Russian Bridge,” New York Times, November 17, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2022/11/17/world/europe/crimea-bridge-
collapse.html; Staff, “Ukraine’s SBU Claims Responsibility For October
Crimea Bridge Blast,” AP, July 26, 2023,
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-crimea-bridge-attack-
ad96fa2012be846600b8c2c6481d9166.

[1234] Peter Beaumont, “Putin warns of further retaliation as Ukraine hit by

massive wave of strikes,” Guardian, October 10, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/10/explosions-kyiv-ukraine-war-
russia-crimea-putin-bridge.

[1235] Staff, “Inside Odesa cathedral after Russian missile strike,” BBC,
July 25, 2023, https://bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-66283657; Gleb
Garanich, “Odesa port infrastructure damaged in Russian air strikes,”
Reuters, July 18, 2023, https://reuters.com/world/europe/russia-launches-
air-attacks-ukraines-south-east-ukraines-air-force-2023-07-17.

[1236] Dmitry Kozhurin, “Who Are The Neo-Nazis Fighting For Russia In
Ukraine?” RFERL, May 27, 2022, https://rferl.org/a/russian-neo-nazis-
fighting-ukraine/31871760.html.
[1237] Lucas Webber, “Russian Volunteer Corps: the far-Right militia
fighting Putin,” UnHerd, March 7, 2023,
https://unherd.com/thepost/russian-volunteer-corps-the-far-right-militia-
fighting-putin; Staff, “Kremlin Accuses Ukrainian Saboteurs of Attack
Inside Russia,” AP, March 2, 2023,
https://usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-03-02/russian-strike-on-
ukraine-apartment-block-kills-3-injures-6.

[1238] Maxim Tucker and George Grylls, “Ukraine-backed partisans

‘invade Russia and seize villages,’” London Times, May 22, 2023,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/ukraine-invade-belgarod-russia-bakhmut-
putin-war-2023-60ncxnsg6; Christopher Miller, et al., “Militias used US
armoured vehicles in attack over Russian border,” Financial Times, May
23, 2023, https://ft.com/content/0b57c31b-814d-4554-91d8-d49b066cea69.

[1239] Max Hunder, “Ukraine-backed anti-Kremlin fighters say they are

still operating inside Russia,” Reuters, March 21, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-backed-anti-kremlin-fighters-say-
they-are-still-operating-inside-russia-2024-03-21.

[1240] Peter Beaumont, “Ukraine has trained and armed Russian volunteers
with Nato equipment,” Guardian, May 23, 2023,
https://theguardian.com/world/live/2023/may/23/russia-ukraine-war-live-
updates-latest-news-belgorod-kremlin-russian-pm-china?page=with:block-
646caf628f088e0216a83841#block-646caf628f088e0216a83841.
[1241] Max Hunder, “Ukraine-backed anti-Kremlin fighters say they are
still operating inside Russia,” Reuters, March 21, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-backed-anti-kremlin-fighters-say-
they-are-still-operating-inside-russia-2024-03-21.

[1242] Max Seddon, “Russian far-right fighter claims border stunt exposes
Putin’s weakness,” Financial Times, March 3, 2023,
https://ft.com/content/c4ffe9b8-a3f5-4f33-a420-effe32754bbf.

[1243] John Pike, “European Paramilitary Groups,” Global Security, 2023,

https://premium.globalsecurity.org/military//world/para/para-europe-
list.htm.

[1244] Phil Miller, “Russian neo-Nazi fighting Putin taught at far-right

camp in UK,” Declassified UK, June 8, 2023,
https://declassifieduk.org/russian-neo-nazi-fighting-putin-taught-at-far-
right-camp-in-uk.

[1245] “Nazi Exodus: How Russian Nazis Ended Up in Ukraine,” The

Marker, November 24, 2021, https://violence-
marker.org.ua/en/2021/11/24/nazi-exodus-how-russian-nazis-ended-up-in-
ukraine.

[1246] Phil Miller, “Revealed: Russian neo-Nazi leader obtained UK

missiles in Ukraine,” Declassified UK, May 17, 2023,
https://declassifieduk.org/revealed-russian-neo-nazi-leader-obtained-uk-
missiles-in-ukraine.
[1247] Staff, “Anti-Putin paramilitary group says there will be more
incursions into Russia,” Sky News, May 25, 2023,
https://news.sky.com/story/anti-putin-paramilitary-group-says-there-will-
be-more-incursions-into-russia-12888773.

[1248] Leonid Ragozin, “Vision of Russia’s Future,” BNE IntelliNews,

March 30, 2023, https://intellinews.com/ragozin-vision-of-russia-s-future-
274389.

[1249] Oleg Sukhov, “Foreigners Who Fight And Die For Ukraine:
Russians join Ukrainians to battle Kremlin in Donbas,” Kyiv Post, April 24,
2015, https://archive.kyivpost.com/article/content/kyiv-post-
plus/foreigners-who-fight-and-die-for-ukraine-russians-join-ukrainians-to-
battle-kremlin-in-donbas-386999.html; Leonid Ragozin, “Brothers in Arms:
Why Russian Ultranationalists Confronted Their Own Government on the
Battlefields of Ukraine,” World Policy Journal, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2017), 91–
98, https://jstor.org/stable/26781493.

[1250] Alexander Smith, “US distances itself from pro-Ukraine incursion

into Russia that involved American military vehicles,” NBC News, May 25,
2023, https://nbcnews.com/news/world/us-humvees-incursion-belgorod-
russia-ukraine-attack-rcna85946; Staff, “Ukraine war: Kremlin says 20 dead
after attack on Russian city,” BBC, December 30, 2023,
https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-67847463.

[1251] Jack Detsch, “Biden Is Still Worried About Poking the Russian
Bear,” Foreign Policy, June 8, 2022,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/08/us-russia-war-ukraine-military-
defense. The same woman John Brennan picked to help write the phony
ICA of January 2017. See Chapter Five.

[1252] Thomas Gibbons-Neff, et al., “For Ukraine Military, Far-Right

Russian Volunteers Make for Worrisome Allies,” New York Times, March
26, 2023, https://nytimes.com/2023/05/26/world/europe/the-leader-of-a-
russian-group-involved-in-a-border-incursion-is-described-by-watchdogs-
as-a-neo-nazi.html.

[1253] Jamie Dettmer, “Ukraine embraces far-right Russian ‘bad guy’ to

take the battle to Putin,” Politico Europe, April 3, 2024,
https://politico.eu/article/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-the-ukraine-war.

[1254] Robert Greenall, “Darya Trepova: Russian woman jailed for 27

years for cafe bomb killing,” BBC, January 25, 2024,
https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-68095875.

[1255] Alexander Rubinstein, “‘Legitimate target’ – Bellingcat defends

terror attack at St. Petersburg café,” Grayzone, April 3, 2023,
https://thegrayzone.com/2023/04/03/bellingcat-terror-attack-st-petersburg-
cafe.

[1256] Tweet to author by Azov Movement Nazis, April 2, 2023,

https://x.com/Azovsouth/status/1642577307272458242,
https://archive.is/5PEih.
[1257] Helene Cooper, et al., “US Warms to Helping Ukraine Target
Crimea,” New York Times, January 18, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/01/18/us/politics/ukraine-crimea-military.html.

[1258] “Antony Blinken ‘warns Ukraine’ against retaking Crimea,”

Telegraph, February 16, 2023, https://telegraph.co.uk/world-
news/2023/02/16/ukraine-warned-against-attempting-retake-crimea-putin;
Alexander Ward and Paul McLeary, “Blinken: Crimea a ‘red line’ for Putin
as Ukraine weighs plans to retake it,” Politico, February 15, 2023,
https://politico.com/news/2023/02/15/blinken-crimea-ukraine-putin-
00083149.

[1259] Staff, “Nuland: US supports Ukraine striking targets in Crimea,”

Kyiv Independent, February 17, 2023, https://kyivindependent.com/nuland-
us-supports-ukraine-striking-targets-in-crimea.

[1260] Robert Dex, “Ukrainian soldiers could be in Crimea ‘soon,’ says top
defence official,” London Evening Standard, July 29, 2023,
https://standard.co.uk/news/world/ukrainian-soldiers-crimea-top-defence-
official-zelensky-kerch-bridge-b1097527.html.

[1261] Matthew Impelli, “Ukraine Testing Weapons With Range Longer

Than Biden Willing to Provide,” Newsweek, January 13, 2023,
https://newsweek.com/ukraine-testing-longer-range-drones-biden-willing-
provide-1773753.
[1262] Jeffrey Goldberg, “A Russian Defeat in Ukraine Could Save
Taiwan,” The Atlantic, July 25, 2022,
https://theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/jake-sullivan-interview-china-
russia-biden-foreign-policy/670930.

[1263] Alexander Ward, “The US secretly sent long-range ATACMS to

Ukraine—and Kyiv used them,” Politico, April 24, 2024,
https://politico.com/news/2024/04/24/us-long-range-missiles-ukraine-
00154110.

[1264] Daria Zubkova, “There cannot be any ‘beaches’ and ‘tourist zones’
in Crimea – Podoliak about explosions in Sevastopol,” Ukrainian News,
June 24, 2024, https://ukranews.com/en/news/1015440-.

[1265] John Hudson and Isabelle Khurshudyan, “Zelensky, in private, plots

bold attacks inside Russia, leak shows,” Washington Post, May 13, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/13/zelensky-ukraine-war-
leaked-documents.

[1266] Lara Seligman, “US says Ukraine can hit inside Russia ‘anywhere’
its forces attack across the border,” Politico, June 20, 2024,
https://politico.com/news/2024/06/20/us-says-ukraine-can-hit-inside-russia-
anywhere-00164261.

[1267] See below.

[1268] Shane Harris, et al., “Road to war: US struggled to convince allies,

and Zelensky, of risk of invasion,” Washington Post, August 16, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/interactive/2022/ukraine-road-
to-war.

[1269] Karen DeYoung, et al., “Biden approves cluster munition supply to

Ukraine,” Washington Post, July 6, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/07/06/biden-cluster-
bombs-ukraine.

[1270] “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jen Psaki,” White House,

February 28, 2022, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-
briefings/2022/02/28/press-briefing-by-press-secretary-jen-psaki-february-
28-2022.

[1271] Frank Gardner, “What are cluster bombs and why is US sending
them to Ukraine?” BBC, July 7, 2023, https://bbc.co.uk/news/world-
europe-66133527.

[1272] Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer, “Turkey Is Sending Cold War-Era
Cluster Bombs to Ukraine,” Foreign Policy, January 10, 2023,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/01/10/turkey-cold-war-cluster-bombs-
ukraine.

[1273] Lara Jakes and Eric Schmitt, “Ukrainians Embrace Cluster

Munitions, but Are They Helping?” New York Times, September 7, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/09/07/world/europe/ukraine-cluster-
munitions.html.
[1274] Wang Kexin and Xie Wenting, “US cluster bombs continue to
plague Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia,” Global Times, July 18, 2023,
https://globaltimes.cn/page/202307/1294611.shtml; Peter Alan Lloyd,
“Remnants of the Secret War in Laos,” The Diplomat, January 27, 2014,
https://thediplomat.com/2014/01/remnants-of-the-secret-war-in-laos;
Interview with author, Shuja Paul, Scott Horton Show radio archive,
January 31, 2021, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/1-28-21-shuja-paul-on-
the-forgotten-bombs-of-americas-secret-war-on-laos.

[1275] Philip J. Heijmans, “Asian nations affected by cluster bombs call on

US not to send them to Ukraine,” Bloomberg News, July 11, 2023,
https://japantimes.co.jp/news/2023/07/11/asia-pacific/cluster-bomb-victims-
rebuke-us-move; Hibah Ansari, “Hmong community recalls devastation of
cluster bombs as Biden promises bombs for Ukraine,” Sahan Journal,
August 2, 2023, https://sahanjournal.com/culture-community/hmong-
community-cluster-bombs-laos-vietnam-war-president-biden-ukraine.

[1276] James Carden, “US a ‘Co-belligerent’ in Ukraine War, Legal Expert

Says,” Asia Times, April 19, 2022, https://asiatimes.com/2022/04/us-a-co-
belligerent-in-ukraine-war-legal-expert-says.

[1277] Erin Banco, et al., “Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike
inside Russia with US weapons,” Politico, May 30, 2024,
https://politico.com/news/2024/05/30/biden-ukraine-weapons-strike-russia-
00160731.
[1278] Lara Jakes, “Taking the Fight to Russia: The West Weighs Ukraine’s
Use of Its Weapons,” New York Times, May 30, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/05/30/world/europe/ukraine-russia-weapons-
strike.html.

[1279] Lara Seligman, “US says Ukraine can hit inside Russia ‘anywhere’
its forces attack across the border,” Politico, June 20, 2024,
https://politico.com/news/2024/06/20/us-says-ukraine-can-hit-inside-russia-
anywhere-00164261.

[1280] Maria Varenikova, et al., “Ukraine Strikes Into Russia With Western
Weapons, Official Says,” New York Times, June 4, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/06/04/world/europe/ukraine-strikes-russia-
western-weapons.html.

[1281] Staff, “Russia Restricts Civilian Access to Villages in Border Region

Shelled by Ukraine,” Reuters, July 16, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/russia-restricts-civilian-access-villages-
border-region-shelled-by-ukraine-2024-07-16.

[1282] Staff, “Putin warns West about consequences of long-range strikes

on Russia,” RT, May 28, 2024, https://rt.com/russia/598350-putin-serious-
consequences-west.

[1283] Isabel van Brugen, “Putin Ally Issues Nuclear Warning Over
Ukraine’s New F-16s,” Newsweek, May 30, 2024,
https://newsweek.com/sergei-lavrov-warning-nato-f-16-jets-ukraine-
1906123.

[1284] Max Thornberry, “Biden Invokes Possibility of ‘Armageddon’ in

Democratic fundraiser speech,” Fox News, October 6, 2022,
https://foxnews.com/politics/biden-invokes-possibility-armageddon-
democratic-fundraiser-speech.

[1285] “Full transcript of the ABC News interview with President Joe
Biden,” ABC News, July 5, 2024, https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/abc-
news-anchor-george-stephanopoulos-exclusive-interview-biden/story?
id=111695695.

[1286] To get the complete, excised chapter, “Nuclear War,” free, just sign
up for the Institute or Scott Horton Show email list at
libertarianinstitute.org/newsletter or scotthorton.org/subscribe.

[1287] “Nuclear Testing – Media Gallery,” 1946–1970, Atomic Archive,

https://atomicarchive.com/media/photographs/testing/us/index.html.

[1288] Alex Wellerstein, “Nukemap,” https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap.

[1289] Ethan Siegel, “Ask Ethan: How Can A Nuclear Bomb Be Hotter
Than The Center Of Our Sun?” Forbes, April 14, 2022,
https://forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2020/03/28/ask-ethan-how-can-a-
nuclear-bomb-be-hotter-than-the-center-of-our-sun; Interview with author,
Ethan Siegel, Scott Horton Show radio archive, May 16, 2022,
https://scotthorton.org/interviews/5-16-22-ethan-siegel-hotter-than-the-sun.
[1290] Chris Buckley, “What’s the Difference Between a Hydrogen Bomb
and a Regular Atomic Bomb?” New York Times, September 3, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/09/03/world/asia/north-korea-hydrogen-
bomb.html.

[1291] Alex Wellerstein, “An unearthly spectacle,” Bulletin of the Atomic

Scientists, October 29, 2021, https://thebulletin.org/2021/11/the-untold-
story-of-the-worlds-biggest-nuclear-bomb.

[1292] John H. Pendleton, et al., “Strategic Weapons: Changes in the

Nuclear Weapons Targeting Process Since 1991,” US Government
Accountability Office, July 31, 2012, https://gao.gov/assets/gao-12-
786r.pdf; “Nuclear Posture Review 2018,” US Defense Department,
February 2018,
https://media.defense.gov/2018/feb/02/2001872886/-1/-1/1/2018-nuclear-
posture-review-final-report.pdf; Kelsey Davenport, “Nuclear Weapons:
Who Has What at a Glance,” Arms Control Association, July 2024,
https://armscontrol.org/factsheets/nuclear-weapons-who-has-what-glance.

[1293] Jack Detsch and Robbie Gramer, “Biden Administration Debates

Legality of Arming Ukrainian Resistance,” Foreign Policy, February 24,
2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/24/biden-legal-ukraine-russia-
resistance.

[1294] W.J. Hennigan, “The Brink,” New York Times, March 7, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/07/opinion/nuclear-war-
prevention.html.
[1295] See Chapter Two.

[1296] “Retired General Explains How to Prevent Putin From Using

Tactical Nuke,” CNN, May 7, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=pwvY6Tm_FqQ.

[1297] Staff, “Putin Puts Russia’s Nuclear Deterrent Forces On High Alert,
Raising Tensions Further,” RFERL, February 27, 2022,
https://rferl.org/a/putin-russia-nuclear-deterrant-forces-alert/31726441.html.

[1298] “Putin Says Russia May Add Nuclear First Strike to Strategy,”
Bloomberg News, December 9, 2022,
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-09/putin-says-russia-may-
add-nuclear-first-strike-to-strategy.

[1299] “News conference following the visit to Kyrgyzstan,” Kremlin,

December 9, 2022, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/70061.

[1300] Staff, “Putin says Russia could use nuclear weapons if it is

threatened,” Voice of America, June 5, 2024, https://voanews.com/a/putin-
says-russia-could-use-nuclear-weapons-if-it-is-threatened/7644941.html.

[1301] Rebecca Kheel, “Russian Military Still a Formidable Threat Despite

Damaged Ground Forces, Defense Officials Say,” Military.com, April 26,
2023, https://military.com/daily-news/2023/04/26/russian-military-still-
formidable-threat-despite-damaged-ground-forces-defense-officials-
say.html.
[1302] Guy Faulconbridge, “Putin says tactical nuclear weapons to be
deployed in Belarus in July,” Reuters, June 9, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/russia-deploy-tactical-nuclear-weapons-
belarus-july-putin-says-2023-06-09.

[1303] Shizuka Kuramitsu, “Russia ‘Deratifies’ Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,”

Arms Control Association, November 2, 2023,
https://armscontrol.org/act/2023-11/news/russia-deratifies-nuclear-test-ban-
treaty.

[1304] Staff, “Russia will only resume nuclear tests if the US does it first, a
top Russian diplomat says,” AP, October 10, 2023,
https://apnews.com/article/russia-putin-nuclear-test-parliament-ban-treaty-
105906e065ea2ade6a4f7b930644be9e.

[1305] Robert C. O’Brien, “The Return of Peace Through Strength,”

Foreign Affairs, July/August 2024, https://foreignaffairs.com/united-
states/return-peace-strength-trump-obrien.

[1306] Daryl G. Kimball, “The Looming Threat of Renewed US Nuclear

Testing,” Arms Control Today, July/August 2024,
https://armscontrol.org/act/2024-07/focus/looming-threat-renewed-us-
nuclear-testing.

[1307] See below.

[1308] W.J. Hennigan, “The Brink,” New York Times, March 7, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/07/opinion/nuclear-war-
prevention.html.

[1309] “Biden Won’t Send US Troops to Ukraine: ‘That’s World War III,’”
Bloomberg Quicktake, March 11, 2022, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=_MpMbBl24L0.

[1310] Staff, “EU warns Russian army will be ‘annihilated’ if Putin uses
nuclear weapon on Ukraine,” AFP, October 13, 2022,
https://timesofisrael.com/eu-warns-russian-army-will-be-annihilated-if-
putin-uses-nuclear-weapon-on-ukraine.

[1311] Staff, “Petraeus Tells CIA to Consult Troops on War in

Afghanistan,” AP, October 14, 2011,
http://foxnews.com/world/2011/10/14/petraeus-tells-cia-to-consult-troops-
on-war-in-afghanistan.html.

[1312] Bill Chappell, “David Petraeus Enters Into Plea Deal With Justice
Department,” NPR News, March 3, 2015, https://npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2015/03/03/390443553/petraeus-enters-into-plea-agreement-on-
criminal-charge.

[1313] David Sanger, “Biden’s Armageddon Moment: When Nuclear

Detonation Seemed Possible in Ukraine,” New York Times, March 9, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/03/09/us/politics/biden-nuclear-russia-
ukraine.html.

[1314] Edward Helmore, “Petraeus: US would destroy Russia’s troops if

Putin uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine,” Guardian, October 2, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/02/us-russia-putin-ukraine-war-
david-petraeus; Olafimihan Oshin, “Petraeus predicts US would lead NATO
response to ‘take out’ Russian forces if Putin uses nuclear weapon,” The
Hill, October 2, 2022, https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-
shows/3671100-petraeus-predicts-us-would-lead-nato-response-to-take-out-
russian-forces-if-putin-uses-nuclear-weapon.

[1315] Max Seddon, et al., “Xi Jinping warned Vladimir Putin against
nuclear attack in Ukraine,” Financial Times, July 5, 2023,
https://ft.com/content/c5ce76df-9b1b-4dfc-a619-07da1d40cbd3.

[1316] Joshua Yaffa, “Inside the US Effort to Arm Ukraine,” The New
Yorker, October 17, 2022,
https://newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/24/inside-the-us-effort-to-arm-
ukraine.

[1317] Isabelle Khurshudyan, “To defeat Russia, Ukraine’s top commander

pushes to fight on his terms,” Washington Post, July 14, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/14/ukraine-military-valery-
zaluzhny-russia.

[1318] Samia Nakhoul, et al., “Putin says Russia does not need to use
nuclear weapons for victory in Ukraine,” Reuters, June 7, 2024,
https://reuters.com/markets/europe/putin-calls-major-expansion-russian-
financial-markets-cutting-use-western-2024-06-07.
[1319] Julian E. Barnes and David E. Sanger, “US Considers Expanded
Nuclear Arsenal, a Reversal of Decades of Cuts,” New York Times, June 7,
2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/06/07/us/politics/us-nuclear-russia-
china.html.

[1320] Guy Faulconbridge, “Russia’s Putin issues new nuclear warnings to

West over Ukraine,” Reuters, March 25, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/putin-update-russias-elite-ukraine-war-major-
speech-2023-02-21.

[1321] David Ljunggren, “Putin says Moscow to station nuclear weapons in

Belarus, first time since 1990s,” Reuters, March 25, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-moscow-has-deal-with-belarus-
station-nuclear-weapons-there-tass-2023-03-25.

[1322] David Ljunggren, “Belarus units complete training on Russian

tactical nuclear missile systems,” Reuters, April 22, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/belarus-units-complete-training-russian-
tactical-nuclear-missile-systems-2023-04-22.

[1323] W.J. Hennigan, “The Brink,” New York Times, March 7, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/07/opinion/nuclear-war-
prevention.html.

[1324] Press Release, “Joint Statement from United States and Germany on
Long-Range Fires Deployment in Germany,” White House, July 10, 2024,
https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/07/10/joint-
statement-from-united-states-and-germany-on-long-range-fires-
deployment-in-germany; Steve Holland, et al., “US to start deploying long-
range weapons in Germany in 2026,” Reuters, July 10, 2024,
https://reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/us-start-deploying-long-
range-weapons-germany-2026-2024-07-10.

[1325] Guy Faulconbridge and Dmitry Antonov, “Putin says Russia may
resume global deployment of intermediate range missiles,” Reuters, June
28, 2024, https://reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-russia-resume-
production-intermediate-range-missiles-2024-06-28.

[1326] Guy Faulconbridge and Dmitry Antonov, “Putin warns the United
States of Cold War-style missile crisis,” Reuters, July 28, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/putin-warns-united-states-cold-war-style-missile-
crisis-2024-07-28.

[1327] Staff, “In a show of growing ties, Russian warships make a new visit
to Cuban waters,” AP, July 27, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/russian-
warships-visit-cuba-havana-fcddda9e9406a81b686d648d007b8757.

[1328] Carlotta Gall, et al., “Avdiivka, Longtime Stronghold for Ukraine,

Falls to Russians,” New York Times, February 17, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/02/17/world/europe/ukraine-avdiivka-withdraw-
despair.html.

[1329] Julian Barnes, et al., “Hundreds of Ukrainian Troops Feared

Captured or Missing in Chaotic Retreat,” New York Times, February 20,
2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/02/20/us/politics/ukraine-prisoners-
avdiivka-russia.html.

[1330] Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Anatoly Kurmanaev, “In Ukraine, Russia

Is Inching Forward Death by Death,” New York Times, February 27, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/02/27/world/europe/russia-deaths-avdiivka-
strategy.html.

[1331] Tim Lister, “Russia’s sheer mass proves too much for Ukraine in
Avdiivka,” CNN, February 17, 2024,
https://cnn.com/2024/02/17/europe/avdiivka-ukraine-russia-intl/index.html.

[1332] Tom Watling, “The Russian glide bombs changing the face of the
war in Ukraine,” Independent, April 10, 2024,
https://independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/glide-bomb-russia-ukraine-
air-strikes-weapons-b2526347.html.

[1333] Interview with author, Frank Ledwidge, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, May 21, 2024, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/5-16-24-frank-
ledwidge-on-what-its-like-in-ukraine-right-now.

[1334] Constant Méheut, “Ukraine Retreats From Villages on Eastern Front

as It Awaits US Aid,” New York Times, April 29, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/04/29/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-
latest.html.

[1335] Staff, “Ukraine’s commander-in-chief on the breakthrough he needs

to beat Russia,” The Economist, November 1, 2023,
https://economist.com/europe/2023/11/01/ukraines-commander-in-chief-on-
the-breakthrough-he-needs-to-beat-russia.

[1336] See Chapter Five.

[1337] Statement by Oleksii Arestovych, Telegram, November 28, 2023,

https://t.me/O_Arestovich_official/4725.

[1338] Sam Skove, “Another US precision-guided weapon falls prey to

Russian electronic warfare, US says,” Defense One, April 28, 2024,
https://defenseone.com/threats/2024/04/another-us-precision-guided-
weapon-falls-prey-russian-electronic-warfare-us-says/396141.

[1339] Isabelle Khurshudyan and Alex Horton (no relation), “Russian

jamming leaves some high-tech US weapons ineffective in Ukraine,”
Washington Post, May 24, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/24/russia-jamming-us-weapons-
ukraine.

[1340] David Axe, “A Russian Drone Spotted A Ukrainian Patriot Air-

Defense Crew Convoying Near The Front Line. Soon, A Russian
Hypersonic Missile Streaked Down,” Forbes, March 9, 2024,
https://forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/03/09/a-russian-drone-spotted-a-
ukrainian-patriot-air-defense-crew-convoying-near-the-front-line-soon-a-
russian-hypersonic-missile-streaked-down.

[1341] Bojan Pancevski, “One Million Are Now Dead or Injured in the
Russia-Ukraine War,” Wall Street Journal, September 17, 2024,
https://wsj.com/world/one-million-are-now-dead-or-injured-in-the-russia-
ukraine-war-b09d04e5.

[1342] Staff, “Ukraine: Worsening impact on civilians of Russia’s attack,

torture of prisoners of war,” UN Office of the High Commissioner for
Human Rights, October 1, 2024, https://ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-
notes/2024/10/ukraine-worsening-impact-civilians-russias-attack-torture-
prisoners.

[1343] Ben Armbruster, et al., “The Ukraine War at two years: By the
numbers,” Responsible Statecraft, February 22, 2024,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/russia-ukraine-war-avdiivka.

[1344] Interview with author, Frank Ledwidge, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, May 21, 2024, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/5-16-24-frank-
ledwidge-on-what-its-like-in-ukraine-right-now.

[1345] Staff, “‘It Will Be A Shock: Ukraine Lost 500,000 Soldiers In War
So Far, Nearly 30,000 Per Month: Lutsenko Claims,” Eurasian Times,
January 7, 2024, https://eurasiantimes.com/it-will-be-a-shock-ukraine-lost-
500000-soldiers-in-war.

[1346] Constant Méheut, “Ukraine Starts Freeing Some Prisoners to Join Its
Military,” New York Times, May 24, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/05/24/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-
prisoners.html.
[1347] Iain Marlow and Michael Nienaber, “US and G-7 Allies Now Expect
War in Ukraine to Drag On for Years,” Bloomberg News, September 19,
2023, https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-19/us-allies-see-
ukraine-war-grinding-on-need-for-long-term-plan.

[1348] Alona Mazurenko, “Commander-in-Chief Zaluzhnyi asked Pentagon

chief for 17 million rounds of ammunition,” Ukrainska Pravda, December
4, 2023, https://pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2023/12/4/7431543.

[1349] Marc Bennetts, “Johnson embroiled in war of words over

‘sabotaged’ Ukraine peace deal,” London Times, January 10, 2024,
https://thetimes.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-ukraine-peace-talks-russia-war-
k220zcrvf.

[1350] Rose Gottemoeller and Michael Ryan, “Ukraine Has a Pathway to

Victory,” Foreign Policy, January 8, 2024,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/01/08/ukraine-russia-war-victory-stalemate-
strategy-weapons-congress-aid.

[1351] Simon Shuster, “‘Nobody Believes in Our Victory Like I Do.’ Inside
Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight,” Time,
October 30, 2023, https://time.com/6329188/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-
interview.

[1352] See above.

[1353] “Transcript – Ukraine in the Balance: A Battlefield Update on the

War in Ukraine,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, February
22, 2024, https://csis.org/analysis/ukraine-balance-battlefield-update-war-
ukraine.

[1354] Press Release, “Fact Sheet on US Security Assistance to Ukraine,”

US Defense Department, December 27, 2023,
https://media.defense.gov/2023/Dec/27/2003366049/-1/-1/1/ukraine-fact-
sheet-27-dec.pdf.

[1355] Christopher Hurd, “Strengthened Army industrial base doubles

artillery production,” US Army News Service, November 14, 2023,
https://army.mil/article/271572/strengthened_army_industrial_base_doubles
_artillery_production.

[1356] Max Colchester, “Alarm Grows Over Weakened Militaries and

Empty Arsenals in Europe,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2023,
https://wsj.com/world/europe/alarm-nato-weak-military-empty-arsenals-
europe-a72b23f4.

[1357] Deborah Haynes and Adam Parker, “Iran’s alleged ammunition for
Russia’s war in Ukraine: The secret journey of the cargo ships accused of
supplying invasion,” Sky News, March 8, 2023,
https://news.sky.com/story/irans-alleged-ammunition-for-russias-war-in-
ukraine-the-secret-journey-of-the-cargo-ships-accused-of-supplying-
invasion-12828039.

[1358] Hyonhee Shin, “North Korea has sent 6,700 containers of munitions
to Russia, South Korea says,” Reuters, February 27, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/north-korea-has-sent-6700-containers-munitions-
russia-south-korea-says-2024-02-27.

[1359] Katie Bo Lillis, et al., “Russia producing three times more artillery
shells than US and Europe for Ukraine,” CNN, March 11, 2024,
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-shell-
production-us-europe-ukraine/index.html.

[1360] Ben Armbruster, et al., “The Ukraine War at two years: By the
numbers,” Responsible Statecraft, February 22, 2024,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/russia-ukraine-war-avdiivka.

[1361] “Expert: Emily Harding,” Center for Strategic and International

Studies, https://csis.org/people/emily-harding.

[1362] Lara Seligman, et al., “Bombenomics: Biden admin circulates map

showing states that benefit from Ukraine aid,” Politico, November 29,
2023, https://politico.com/news/2023/11/29/biden-admin-map-states-
benefit-ukraine-aid-00129068; Jonathan Lemire and Jennifer Haberkorn,
“The White House is losing the messaging war on Ukraine. Now it’s
changing the message,” Politico, October 25, 2023,
https://politico.com/news/2023/10/25/biden-ukraine-aid-messaging-
00123466.

[1363] “Our Donors – Corporations,” Center for Strategic and International

Studies, Accessed March 18, 2024, https://csis.org/about/financial-
information/donors/corporations.
[1364] “Transcript – Ukraine in the Balance: A Battlefield Update on the
War in Ukraine,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, February
22, 2024, https://csis.org/analysis/ukraine-balance-battlefield-update-war-
ukraine.

[1365] Jamie Stengle and Josh Boak, “Biden wants people to know most of
the money he’s seeking for Ukraine would be spent in the US,” AP,
February 20, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/biden-ukraine-johnson-
factories-aid-62cbb83a184fd14b1573e25a73475767.

[1366] Transcript, “United States Secretary of State Antony Blinken Speaks

with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin,” CNBC Squawk on the Street, January
16, 2024, https://cnbc.com/2024/01/16/cnbc-exclusive-cnbc-transcript-
united-states-secretary-of-state-antony-blinken-speaks-with-cnbcs-andrew-
ross-sorkin-from-the-world-economic-forum-in-davos-switzerland-on-
squawk-on-the-street-today.html.

[1367] Tweet by Tom Elliot, “Victoria Nuland on More Ukraine Spending,”

CNN, February 24, 2024,
https://x.com/tomselliott/status/1761451250954989687.

[1368] Paul McLeary, “Vindman leads new push to send military

contractors to Ukraine,” Politico, February 2, 2023,
https://politico.com/news/2023/02/02/vindman-leads-new-push-to-send-
military-contractors-to-ukraine-00081016; Tweet by Alexander Vindman,
February 7, 2024, https://x.com/AVindman/status/1755414865915654342.
[1369] Tweet by Senator Mitch McConnell, September 7, 2023,
https://x.com/LeaderMcConnell/status/1699825906846437784.

[1370] Halyna Yanchenko, “US Aid to Ukraine Helps the American

Economy and Boosts US Jobs,” Woodrow Wilson Center, November 20,
2023, https://wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/us-aid-ukraine-helps-american-
economy-and-boosts-us-jobs; Sean Carberry, “Why Ukraine Assistance Is
US Assistance,” National Defense, December 18, 2023,
https://nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2023/12/18/budget-matters-
why-ukraine-assistance-is-us-assistance.

[1371] Rick Paulas, “Americans living in their cars are finding refuge in
‘safe parking lots,’” Guardian, January 5, 2024, https://theguardian.com/us-
news/2024/jan/05/safe-overnight-parking-lot-sleep-in-car-rv-homelessness-
housing-shelter.

[1372] President Joe Biden interview Transcript, Time, May 28, 2024,
https://time.com/6984968/joe-biden-transcript-2024-interview.

[1373] Kwan Wei Kevin Tan, “Russia’s army is now 15% bigger than when
it invaded Ukraine, says US general,” Business Insider, April 11, 2024,
https://businessinsider.com/russias-army-15-percent-larger-when-attacked-
ukraine-us-general-2024-4.

[1374] Richard Fontaine, “AUKUS: Securing the Indo-Pacific, A

Conversation with Kurt Campbell,” Center for a New American Security,
April 3, 2024, https://cnas.org/publications/transcript/aukus-securing-the-
indo-pacific-a-conversation-with-kurt-campbell.

[1375] Rebecca Kheel, “Russian Military Still a Formidable Threat Despite

Damaged Ground Forces, Defense Officials Say,” Military.com, April 26,
2023, https://military.com/daily-news/2023/04/26/russian-military-still-
formidable-threat-despite-damaged-ground-forces-defense-officials-
say.html.

[1376] Guy Faulconbridge, “Russia Says Its Production of Artillery Shells

Has Soared by Nearly 150% in a Year,” Reuters, March 21, 2024,
https://usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-03-21/russia-says-its-
production-of-artillery-shells-has-soared-by-nearly-150-in-a-year.

[1377] Julian Barnes, et al., “Russia Overcomes Sanctions to Expand

Missile Production, Officials Say,” New York Times, September 13, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/09/13/us/politics/russia-sanctions-missile-
production.html.

[1378] Georgi Kantchev, “Russia’s Economy Goes All In on War,” Wall

Street Journal, October 6, 2023, https://wsj.com/world/russia/putin-
redirects-russias-economy-to-war-production-1e14265f.

[1379] Georgi Kantchev, “Russia’s Economy Goes All In on War,” Wall

Street Journal, October 6, 2023, https://wsj.com/world/russia/putin-
redirects-russias-economy-to-war-production-1e14265f.

[1380] See Chapter Four.

[1381] Catherine Belton, “Khodorkovsky warns West of war with China if
Russia wins in Ukraine,” Washington Post, February 15, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2023/02/15/mikhail-khodorkovsky-
russia-opposition-oligarch.

[1382] Sharon Weinberger, “To Aid Ukraine in Fight Against Russia, Allies
Look to Security Model Like Israel’s,” Wall Street Journal, May 22, 2023,
https://wsj.com/articles/to-aid-ukraine-in-fight-against-russia-allies-look-to-
security-model-like-israels-8a05f0e5; Missy Ryan, et al., “NATO nations
look past Ukraine offensive to long-term deterrence pacts,” Washington
Post, June 1, 2023, https://washingtonpost.com/national-
security/2023/06/01/ukraine-nato-long-term-defense.

[1383] Missy Ryan, et al., “NATO nations look past Ukraine offensive to
long-term deterrence pacts,” Washington Post, June 1, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/01/ukraine-nato-
long-term-defense.

[1384] Samuel Charap, “An Unwinnable War,” Foreign Affairs,

July/August 2023, https://foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/unwinnable-war-
washington-endgame.

[1385] Henry Foy and Felicia Schwartz, “US opposes offering Ukraine a
‘road map’ to Nato membership,” Financial Times, April 6, 2023,
https://ft.com/content/c37ed22d-e0e4-4b03-972e-c56af8a36d2e.
[1386] Jeremy Herb, “Biden says war with Russia must end before NATO
can consider membership for Ukraine,” CNN, July 9, 2023,
https://cnn.com/2023/07/09/politics/joe-biden-ukraine-nato-russia-
cnntv/index.html.

[1387] “Vilnius Summit Communiqué,” NATO, July 11, 2023,

https://nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_217320.htm.

[1388] Tweet by President Volodymyr Zelensky, July 11, 2023,

https://x.com/ZelenskyyUa/status/1678707674811187200.

[1389] Toluse Olorunnipa, et al., “Zelensky slams NATO for omitting a

timeline for Ukraine to join,” Washington Post, July 11, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/07/11/zelensky-nato-ukraine-
membership-timeline.

[1390] Michael Birnbaum, “Zelensky’s angry tweet on NATO membership

nearly backfired,” Washington Post, July 13, 2023,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/07/13/zelensky-ukraine-
nato-invitation.

[1391] Alisa Orlova, “Ukrainian Lawmaker Claims Blinken Is Telling

Europe Not to Talk to Ukraine About NATO,” Kyiv Post, December 5,
2023, https://kyivpost.com/post/25062.

[1392] Jeremy Herb, “Biden says war with Russia must end before NATO
can consider membership for Ukraine,” CNN, July 9, 2023,
https://cnn.com/2023/07/09/politics/joe-biden-ukraine-nato-russia-
cnntv/index.html.

[1393] “Vilnius Summit Communiqué,” NATO, July 11, 2023,

https://nato.int/cps/en/natolive/official_texts_217320.htm.

[1394] Steven Erlanger, “What NATO Said About Ukraine: Highlights of

the Alliance’s Communiqué,” New York Times, July 11, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/07/12/world/europe/nato-ukraine-
membership.html.

[1395] Guy Faulconbridge and Vladimir Soldatkin, “Putin says we must

think how to stop ‘the tragedy’ of war in Ukraine,” Reuters, November 22,
2023, https://reuters.com/world/europe/putin-we-must-think-how-stop-the-
tragedy-ukraine-2023-11-22.

[1396] Anton Troianovski, et al., “Putin Quietly Signals He Is Open to a

Cease-Fire in Ukraine,” New York Times, December 23, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/12/23/world/europe/putin-russia-ukraine-war-
cease-fire.html.

[1397] Guy Faulconbridge and Darya Korsunskaya, “Putin’s suggestion of

Ukraine ceasefire rejected by United States, sources say,” Reuters, February
13, 2024, https://reuters.com/world/europe/putins-suggestion-ukraine-
ceasefire-rejected-by-united-states-sources-say-2024-02-13.

[1398] Courtney Kube, et al., “US, European officials broach topic of peace
negotiations with Ukraine, sources say,” NBC News, November 3, 2023,
https://nbcnews.com/news/world/us-european-officials-broach-topic-peace-
negotiations-ukraine-sources-rcna123628.

[1399] Simon Shuster, “‘Nobody Believes in Our Victory Like I Do.’ Inside
Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight,” Time,
October 30, 2023, https://time.com/6329188/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-
interview.

[1400] Seymour Hersh, “The Iron-Clad Piñata,” Seymour Hersh Substack,

March 21, 2024, https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/the-iron-clad-pinata.

[1401] “Vladimir Putin Interview with Dmitry Kiselyov,” Kremlin, March

13, 2024, http://kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/73648.

[1402] Ann M. Simmons, “Vladimir Putin Says He Is Ready for Peace in

Ukraine, but Only on His Terms,” Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2024,
https://wsj.com/world/russia/vladimir-putin-says-he-is-ready-for-peace-in-
ukraine-but-only-on-his-terms-0926a0ef.

[1403] Michael Hirsh, “The Biden Administration Is Quietly Shifting Its

Strategy in Ukraine,” Politico Magazine, December 27, 2023,
https://politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/27/biden-endgame-ukraine-
00133211; Katie Bo Lillis, et al., “Grim realization sets in over state of
Ukraine war as funding fight continues in Washington,” CNN, January 19,
2024, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/19/politics/grim-realization-ukraine-
washington-funding-fight/index.html.
[1404] Marc Santora, “Ukraine’s Deepening Fog of War,” New York Times,
February 24, 2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/02/24/world/europe/ukraine-
russia-war.html.

[1405] Steven Erlanger and David Sanger, “Hard Lessons Make for Hard
Choices 2 Years Into the War in Ukraine,” New York Times, February 24,
2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/02/24/world/europe/lessons-choices-war-
in-ukraine.html.

[1406] Liz Sly, “Zelensky says peace talks possible only when Russia is
pushed back,” Washington Post, May 6, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/06/russia-ukraine-war-news-
putin-live-updates/#link-HIV55SAQOVFSXCMRYZV27ZTVIE; Speech
by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, “Russia’s Strategic Failure and
Ukraine’s Secure Future,” US State Department, June 2, 2023,
https://geneva.usmission.gov/2023/06/02/russias-strategic-failure-and-
ukraines-secure-future-speech-secretary-blinken.

[1407] Emily Rauhala, et al., “In Munich, Zelensky urges US and other
allies not to abandon Ukraine,” Washington Post, February 17, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/17/munich-security-conference-
volodymyr-zelensky.

[1408] Jake Sullivan, “Remarks by APNSA Jake Sullivan and Head of the
Office of the President of Ukraine Andriy Yermak in Press Conference,”
March 20, 2024, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-
remarks/2024/03/20/remarks-by-apnsa-jake-sullivan-and-head-of-the-
office-of-the-president-of-ukraine-andriy-yermak-in-press-conference-kyiv-
ukraine.

[1409] Serge Schmemann, “Ukraine Doesn’t Need All Its Territory to

Defeat Putin,” New York Times, December 27, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/12/27/opinion/ukraine-military-aid.html.

[1410] Doug Bandow, “Marco Rubio Desperately Plays the ‘Isolationist’

Card,” The National Interest, December 11, 2015,
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-skeptics/marco-rubio-desperately-plays-
the-isolationist-card-14588.

[1411] Marco Rubio on Fox News, Tweet by Aaron Maté, March 3, 2024,
https://x.com/aaronjmate/status/1764484934792528229.

[1412] Ivana Saric, “Majority of Republicans oppose Ukraine aid as

partisan divide grows: poll,” Axios, November 21, 2023,
https://axios.com/2023/11/21/republicans-gop-oppose-ukraine-aid-divide-
democrats.

[1413] Ann-Dorit Boy, et al., “A country is bleeding out,” Der Spiegel,

October 14, 2024, https://spiegel.de/ausland/ukraine-krieg-ein-land-vor-der-
zerreissprobe-kiew-erwaegt-erstmals-kompromisse-mit-russland-a-
e405617b-47aa-4d9b-942e-c9181f63e80c.

[1414] Guy Faulconbridge and Andrew Osborn, “Putin wants Ukraine

ceasefire on current frontlines,” Reuters, May 24, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/putin-wants-ukraine-ceasefire-current-
frontlines-sources-say-2024-05-24.

[1415] Tom O’Connor, “Russia’s Ambassador Reveals How Close Putin is

to Peace with Ukraine,” Newsweek, May 25, 2024,
https://newsweek.com/russias-ambassador-reveals-how-close-putin-peace-
ukraine-1904712.

[1416] Staff, “Four conditions for negotiations with Kiev: what Putin said at
Foreign Ministry,” TASS, June 14, 2024, https://tass.com/politics/1803575.

[1417] Marc Santora, “Long Battle for a Ruined City Takes a Desperate
Turn,” New York Times, August 6, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/08/06/world/europe/ukraine-war-donetsk-
toretsk.html.

[1418] Staff, “Kyiv pushes allies to create no-fly zone in western Ukraine,”
AFP, June 28, 2024, https://voanews.com/a/kyiv-pushes-allies-to-create-no-
fly-zone-in-western-ukraine/7676727.html.

[1419] Marcus Weisgerber and Tara Copp, “Here’s Why a Ukraine No-Fly
Zone’s a No-Go,” Defense One, March 1, 2022,
https://defenseone.com/threats/2022/03/heres-why-ukraine-no-fly-zones-
no-go/362631; Irene Entringer García Blanes, et al., “Poll: Experts Oppose
No-Fly Zone Over Ukraine,” Foreign Policy, March 16, 2022,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/16/poll-no-fly-zone-ukraine-zelensky-
speech-biden.
[1420] Justin Raimondo, “Why Governments Make War,” Antiwar.com,
October 26, 2011, https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/10/25/why-
governments-make-war; Justin Raimondo, “Looking at the ‘Big Picture,’”
Antiwar.com, November 11, 2011,
https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2011/11/10/looking-at-the-big-picture.

[1421] Jonathan Lemire and Alexander Ward, “White House anxiously

watches Ukraine’s counteroffensive, seeing the war and Biden’s reputation
at stake,” Politico, June 8, 2023,
https://politico.com/news/2023/06/08/biden-ukraine-counteroffensive-
00101088.

[1422] Peter Baker, “Biden Drops Out of Race, Scrambling the Campaign
for the White House,” New York Times, July 21, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/07/21/us/politics/biden-drops-out.html.

[1423] Ben Wolfgang, “Harris, Trump take sharply different approaches to

ending Russia conflict,” Washington Times, October 14, 2024,
https://washingtontimes.com/news/2024/oct/14/kamala-harris-donald-
trump-take-sharply-different; Staff, “Harris says if Trump were president:
‘Putin would be sitting in Kyiv,’” CBS 60 Minutes, October 9, 2024,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=G7nJ2ImXkeI.

[1424] Staff, “Putin rails against Ukraine as attacks mar Russian

presidential election,” Al Jazeera, March 15, 2024,
https://aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/15/putin-rails-against-ukraine-as-attacks-
mar-russian-presidential-election.
[1425] Staff, “Russia says 21 people killed in Ukrainian attack on
Belgorod,” Al Jazeera, December 30, 2023,
https://aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/30/russia-says-two-children-killed-in-
ukrainian-strike-on-belgorod.

[1426] Francesca Ebel, “Belgorod, in western Russia, hit hard as Ukraine

retaliates for airstrikes,” Washington Post, January 13, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/13/belgorod-russia-missile-
strike-ukraine.

[1427] Staff, “Seven killed in Ukrainian missile strike on Russia’s Belgorod

– governor,” Reuters, February 15, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/least-four-killed-ukrainian-missile-strike-
belgorod-russian-media-2024-02-15.

[1428] Henry Foy, “Kyiv has right to strike Russian targets ‘outside
Ukraine,’ says Nato chief,” Financial Times, February 22, 2024,
https://ft.com/content/175bd28f-1eb8-4f57-9cf4-110cca055747.

[1429] Yaroslav Trofimov, “Ukraine Is Striking Deeper Inside Russia—and

Reshaping the War,” Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2024,
https://wsj.com/world/europe/ukraine-is-striking-deeper-inside-russiaand-
reshaping-the-war-23e0174d.

[1430] George Washington, “Farewell Address,” Daily American

Advertiser, September 19, 1796,
https://senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/Washingtons_Farewel
l_Address.pdf.

[1431] Thibault Spirlet, “Russia appears to be creating a ‘buffer zone’ to

stop Ukraine raiding Russian towns, experts say,” Business Insider, May 14,
2024, https://businessinsider.com/russia-aims-to-create-buffer-zone-stop-
ukraine-raids-isw-2024-5.

[1432] Constant Méheut, “Advancing Russian Troops Threaten to Reverse

Some of Ukraine’s Hard-Won Gains,” New York Times, May 23, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/05/23/world/europe/ukraine-russia-battlefield-
gains.html; Guy Faulconbridge and Maxim Rodionov, “Russia says Ukraine
makes 62-drone attack on Russia, oil refinery halted,” Reuters, May 20,
2024, https://reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-ukraine-struck-crimea-
with-atacms-60-drones-shot-down-oil-refinery-2024-05-19.

[1433] Guy Faulconbridge, “Putin says Russia is carving out a buffer zone
in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region,” Reuters, May 17, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/putin-says-russia-is-carving-out-buffer-
zone-ukraines-kharkiv-region-2024-05-17.

[1434] Constant Méheut, “Ukraine Fights to Hold Off Fierce Russian

Assaults in Northeast,” New York Times, May 15, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/05/15/world/europe/ukraine-war-fighting-russia-
advance.html.
[1435] Jonathan Beale, “The Russians simply walked in, Ukrainian troops
in Kharkiv tell BBC,” BBC, May 13, 2024,
https://bbc.com/news/articles/c72p0xx410xo.

[1436] Laris Karklis, et al., “Russia seizes more land than Ukraine liberated
in 2023 counteroffensive,” Washington Post, May 17, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/17/russia-ukraine-front-line-
gains.

[1437] Isabelle Khurshudyan, et al., “Second Russian invasion of Kharkiv

caught Ukraine unprepared,” Washington Post, May 17, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/17/kharkive-defenses-ukraine-
russia-reinvasion.

[1438] Interview with author, Frank Ledwidge, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, May 21, 2024, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/5-16-24-frank-
ledwidge-on-what-its-like-in-ukraine-right-now.

[1439] Isabel Coles and Alan Cullison, “Russia Aims to Make Life
Unlivable in Ukraine’s Second City,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 2024,
https://wsj.com/world/europe/russia-aims-to-make-life-unlivable-in-
ukraines-second-city-29961183.

[1440] Staff, “Anti-corruption group reveals fake companies in Kharkiv

fortification contracts,” The New Voice of Ukraine, May 15, 2024,
https://english.nv.ua/nation/anti-corruption-activist-exposes-suspicious-
wood-supply-contracts-for-fortifications-in-kharkiv-obla-50418691.html;
Brian Dooley, “Locals Raise Corruption Issues Over Kharkiv Fortifications
As Russians Advance,” Human Rights First, May 20, 2024,
https://humanrightsfirst.org/library/locals-raise-corruption-issues-over-
kharkiv-fortifications-as-russians-advance.

[1441] Interview with author, Frank Ledwidge, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, May 21, 2024, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/5-16-24-frank-
ledwidge-on-what-its-like-in-ukraine-right-now.

[1442] Francesca Ebel and Serhii Korolchuk, “Russia, adapting tactics,

advances in Donetsk and takes more Ukrainian land,” Washington Post,
July 27, 2024, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/27/russia-
adapting-tactics-advances-donetsk-takes-more-ukrainian-land.

[1443] Anna Conkling, “This Could Be the Moment Putin Wins the War in
Ukraine,” Daily Beast, May 25, 2024, https://thedailybeast.com/this-could-
be-the-moment-putin-wins-the-war-in-ukraine.

[1444] Guillaume Ptak, “In a grinding battle far from the spotlight, weary
Ukrainian soldiers hold the line,” Washington Times, June 16, 2024,
https://washingtontimes.com/news/2024/jun/16/grinding-battle-far-
spotlight-weary-ukrainian-sold.

[1445] Staff, “The 3rd Assault Brigade revealed details of the offensive in
the Kharkiv region,” The Odessa Journal, August 22, 2024, https://odessa-
journal.com/public/the-3rd-assault-brigade-revealed-details-of-the-
offensive-in-the-kharkiv-region.
[1446] Staff, “Zelensky awarded the 3rd Separate Mechanized Brigade with
the ‘For Courage and Bravery’ award,” UNN, August 24, 2024,
https://unn.ua/en/news/zelensky-awarded-the-3rd-separate-mechanized-
brigade-with-the-for-courage-and-bravery-award.

[1447] Christopher Miller, “How Ukraine pulled off its biggest gamble:
invading Russia,” Financial Times, August 12, 2024,
https://ft.com/content/bc695adf-bd17-4242-b4bc-82235a97edbf.

[1448] Greg Myre, “Ukraine presses offensive inside Russia as Moscow

scrambles to respond,” NPR News, August 9, 2024,
https://npr.org/2024/08/09/g-s1-16131/ukraine-presses-offensive-inside-
russia-as-moscow-scrambles-to-respond.

[1449] Isabelle Khurshudyan and Anastacia Galouchka, “Ukraine appears

to expand Russia incursion, in morale boost for Kyiv,” Washington Post,
August 10, 2024, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/10/ukraine-
belgorod-kursk-russia-occupied-war.

[1450] Yaroslav Trofimov and Thomas Grove, “As Ukrainian Forces Grab
Russian Territory, the Kremlin Maintains It’s No Big Deal,” Wall Street
Journal, August 10, 2024, https://wsj.com/world/as-ukrainian-forces-grab-
russian-territory-the-kremlin-maintains-its-no-big-deal-0cebb891.

[1451] Staff, “Russia’s Lipetsk region hit by ‘massive’ drone attack,

governor says,” Reuters, August 9, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/russias-lipetsk-region-comes-under-
massive-drone-attack-governor-says-2024-08-09.

[1452] Staff, “Ukraine military: Western intelligence data used for cross-
border attack,” NHK, August 25, 2024,
https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20240826_09.

[1453] Christian Lowe, “Ukraine Says It Used US-Made Bomb to Hit

Target in Russia’s Kursk Region,” Reuters, August 22, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-says-it-used-us-made-bomb-hit-
target-russias-kursk-region-2024-08-22; Tom Balmforth, et al., “Ukraine
Says It Hits Pontoon Bridges in Kursk Region With US-Made Rockets,”
Reuters, August 21, 2024, https://reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-says-it-
hits-pontoon-bridges-kursk-region-with-us-made-rockets-2024-08-21.

[1454] Deborah Haynes, “British Challenger 2 tanks have been used inside
Russia by Ukrainian troops, Sky News understands,” Sky News, August 15,
2024, https://news.sky.com/story/british-challenger-2-tanks-thought-to-
have-been-used-inside-russia-by-ukrainian-troops-sky-news-understands-
13197260.

[1455] Staff, “Russian army destroys Ukrainian armored vehicles in Kursk

Region using loitering munitions,” TASS, August 7, 2024,
https://tass.com/defense/1826449.

[1456] Sabrina Singh, “Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh

briefs the news media at the Pentagon,” US Defense Department, August 8,
2024, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ylNecjNUYIc.

[1457] Lizzie Johnson and Serhiy Morgunov, “Ukraine’s Zelensky says

incursion into Russia part of plan to end war,” Washington Post, August 27,
2024, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/27/ukraine-russia-
zelensky-syrsky-kursk.

[1458] Jamie Dettmer, “Zelenskyy was urged not to invade Kursk. He did it
anyway,” Politico Europe, September 16, 2024,
https://politico.eu/article/kursk-russia-incursion-objections-war-in-ukraine-
volodymyr-zelenskyy.

[1459] Samya Kullab, “Putin accuses Ukraine of a ‘large-scale provocation’

with its raid in southwestern Russia,” AP, August 7, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-kursk-border-incursion-
e838343b88b2dd9827f5a40fbc5a1db7.

[1460] Ian Lovett and Nikita Nikolaienko, “As Ukraine Invades Russia,
Kyiv’s Troops Are in Trouble on the Eastern Front,” Wall Street Journal,
August 15, 2024, https://wsj.com/world/as-ukraine-invades-russia-kyivs-
troops-are-in-trouble-on-the-eastern-front-8a7b1686; Isobel Koshiw,
“Ukraine orders evacuation in east amid steady Russian gains,” Financial
Times, August 15, 2014, https://ft.com/content/12fd40a6-4821-4d24-ac63-
cb8a59373f5e.

[1461] Marie Jégo and Faustine Vincent, “How the Ukrainian army easily
entered Russia and is holding its positions,” Le Monde, August 15, 2024,
https://lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/08/14/how-the-ukrainian-
army-easily-entered-russia-and-is-holding-its-positions_6715079_4.html.

[1462] Thomas Grove, “How a General’s Blunder Left Russia’s Border

Vulnerable,” Wall Street Journal, August 21, 2024,
https://wsj.com/world/russia/russia-general-alexander-lapin-kursk-
9a624abd.

[1463] Jamie Dettmer, “Zelenskyy was urged not to invade Kursk. He did it
anyway,” Politico Europe, September 16, 2024,
https://politico.eu/article/kursk-russia-incursion-objections-war-in-ukraine-
volodymyr-zelenskyy.

[1464] Michael Clarke, “Ukraine ‘arm-wrestles’ Russia in final effort to

break forces before winter,” London Times, August 31, 2024,
https://thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/ukraine-arm-wrestles-
russia-in-final-effort-to-break-forces-before-winter-gkbkq5gpd.

[1465] Samya Kullab, “Poorly trained recruits contribute to loss of

Ukrainian territory on eastern front, commanders say,” AP, August 22,
2024, https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-new-recruits-pokrovsk-
ed2d06ad529e3b7e47ecd32f79911b83.

[1466] Michael Clarke, “Ukraine ‘arm-wrestles’ Russia in final effort to

break forces before winter,” London Times, August 31, 2024,
https://thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/ukraine-arm-wrestles-
russia-in-final-effort-to-break-forces-before-winter-gkbkq5gpd.
[1467] Christopher Miller, “Volodymyr Zelenskyy faces backlash over
Russia’s breach of eastern defenses,” Financial Times, August 29, 2024,
https://ft.com/content/e63ce931-d3a1-4b4a-8540-e578d87873e5.

[1468] David Axe, “Bloody Russian Assaults In Kursk Leave Behind At

Least Three Graveyards For BTR-82 Vehicles – And Their Passengers,”
Forbes, November 10, 2024,
https://forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/11/10/bloody-russian-assaults-in-
kursk-leave-behind-at-least-three-graveyards-for-btr-82-vehicles-and-their-
passengers.

[1469] Marc Santora, “200 Clashes a Day as Russia Races to Break

Ukrainian Strongholds,” New York Times, September 26, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/09/26/world/europe/ukraine-eastern-front-
line.html.

[1470] Marc Santora, “Ukraine Withdraws From Mining Town That Long
Defied Russian Attacks,” New York Times, October 2, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/10/02/world/europe/ukraine-withdraws-
vuhledar.html.

[1471] Alex Horton (no relation) and Serhii Korolchuk, “Ukraine’s east
buckling under improved Russian tactics, superior firepower,” Washington
Post, October 2, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/02/ukraine-russia-advance-
pokrovsk-vuhledar.
[1472] Constant Méheut, “Ukraine’s Donbas Strategy: Retreat Slowly and
Maximize Russia’s Losses,” New York Times, October 5, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/10/05/world/europe/ukraine-donbas-strategy-
russia-war.html.

[1473] Ivana Kottasová and Kostya Gak, “Outgunned and outnumbered,

Ukraine’s military is struggling with low morale and desertion,” CNN,
September 8, 2024, https://cnn.com/2024/09/08/europe/ukraine-military-
morale-desertion-intl-cmd/index.html.

[1474] Constant Méheut and Josh Holder, “Russia’s Swift March Forward
in Ukraine’s East,” New York Times, October 31, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/31/world/europe/russia-gains-
ukraine-maps.html.

[1475] Staff, “Ukraine is now struggling to cling on, not to win,” The
Economist, October 29, 2024,
https://economist.com/europe/2024/10/29/ukraine-is-now-struggling-to-
cling-on-not-to-win.

[1476] Constant Méheut and Josh Holder, “Russia’s Swift March Forward
in Ukraine’s East,” New York Times, October 31, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/31/world/europe/russia-gains-
ukraine-maps.html.

[1477] Staff, “Why Volodymyr Zelensky may welcome Donald Trump’s

victory,” The Economist, November 7, 2024,
https://economist.com/europe/2024/11/07/why-volodymyr-zelensky-may-
welcome-donald-trumps-victory.

[1478] Ben Hall, et al., “Ukraine faces its darkest hour,” Financial Times,
October 1, 2024, https://ft.com/content/2bb20587-9680-40f0-ac2d-
5e7312486c75; Ben Hall, “Ukraine, Nato membership and the West
Germany model,” Financial Times, October 5, 2024,
https://ft.com/content/b70972d6-3e7f-4a87-8bc5-ac0699f6e7fc.

[1479] Tom O’Connor, “Russia’s Lavrov Warns of ‘Dangerous

Consequences’ for US in Ukraine,” Newsweek, October 7, 2024,
https://newsweek.com/exclusive-russias-lavrov-warns-dangerous-
consequences-us-ukraine-1964468.

[1480] Staff, “Russia Speeds Up Advance in Ukraine as Mood Darkens in

Kyiv,” Bloomberg News, November 1, 2024,
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-01/russia-speeds-up-advance-
in-ukraine-as-mood-darkens-in-kyiv.

[1481] Ben Hall, et al., “Ukraine faces its darkest hour,” Financial Times,
October 1, 2024, https://ft.com/content/2bb20587-9680-40f0-ac2d-
5e7312486c75.

[1482] Staff, “Putin previews Russia’s updated nuclear doctrine,” TASS,

September 25, 2024, https://tass.com/politics/1847759.

[1483] Staff, “Putin launches drills of Russia’s nuclear forces simulating

retaliatory strikes,” AP, October 29, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/russia-
putin-nuclear-drills-5dfa6b742e95907caac3938a3a807e62.

[1484] Daniel Michaels, “Nuclear Weapons Always Stopped Invasions.

Then Ukrainian Troops Poured Into Russia,” Wall Street Journal,
September 1, 2024, https://wsj.com/world/nuclear-weapons-always-
stopped-invasions-then-ukrainian-troops-poured-into-russia.

[1485] Isabelle Khurshudyan, “Ukraine’s offensive derails secret efforts for

partial cease-fire with Russia, officials say,” Washington Post, August 17,
2024, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/17/kursk-ukraine-russia-
energy-ceasefire.

[1486] Editor, “Ukraine’s Kursk offensive has killed off momentum for
ceasefire talks,” BNE IntelliNews, August 15, 2024,
https://intellinews.com/ukraine-s-kursk-offensive-has-killed-off-
momentum-for-ceasefire-talks-338831.

[1487] Erin Banco, et al., “White House finalizing plans to expand where
Ukraine can hit inside Russia,” Politico, September 11, 2024,
https://politico.com/news/2024/09/11/white-house-weapons-ukraine-
00178673.

[1488] Staff, “Long-range Arms OK Would Put NATO At ‘War With

Russia’: Putin,” AFP, September 12, 2024, https://barrons.com/news/putin-
long-range-arms-ok-would-mean-nato-at-war-with-russia-54b18645.

[1489] Alexander Ward, et al., “US ‘Unimpressed’ With Ukraine’s Victory

Plan Ahead of Biden-Zelensky Meeting,” Wall Street Journal, September
25, 2024, https://wsj.com/world/u-s-unimpressed-with-ukraines-victory-
plan-ahead-of-biden-zelensky-meeting-23e87bff.

[1490] Michael Shear and David Sanger, “Meeting With Biden, British
Leader Hints at Ukraine Weapon Decision Soon,” New York Times,
September 13, 2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/09/13/us/politics/biden-
starmer-ukraine-russia-missiles.html; Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes,
“US Intelligence Stresses Risks in Allowing Long-Range Strikes by
Ukraine,” New York Times, September 26, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/09/26/us/politics/us-ukraine-strikes.html.

[1491] Alexander Ward, et al., “US ‘Unimpressed’ With Ukraine’s Victory

Plan Ahead of Biden-Zelensky Meeting,” Wall Street Journal, September
25, 2024, https://wsj.com/world/u-s-unimpressed-with-ukraines-victory-
plan-ahead-of-biden-zelensky-meeting-23e87bff.

[1492] Adam Entous and Julian E. Barnes, “US Intelligence Stresses Risks
in Allowing Long-Range Strikes by Ukraine,” New York Times, September
26, 2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/09/26/us/politics/us-ukraine-
strikes.html.

[1493] Oleh Pavliuk and Yevhen Kizilov, “US says Ukraine will not be
invited to join NATO ‘in short term,’” Ukrainska Pravda, October 16, 2024,
https://pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/10/16/7480006.

[1494] Siobhán O’Grady and Kostiantyn Khudov, “Zelensky reveals

Victory Plan, calls for NATO membership,” Washington Post, October 16,
2024, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/16/zelensky-victory-plan-
ukraine-nato-russia.

[1495] Kim Barker, et al., “With Limited Options, Zelensky Seeks a Path
Forward for Ukraine,” New York Times, October 29, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/10/29/world/europe/ukraine-zelensky-russia-
war.html; Veronika Melkozerova, “Zelenskyy blasts White House for
leaking secret missile plan to The New York Times,” Politico, October 30,
2024, https://politico.eu/article/volodymyr-zelenskyy-confirms-tomahawk-
missiles-victory-plan-blasts-us-for-giving-away-secrets-ukraine-white-
house-russia-war-leak.

[1496] Staff, “A fresh Russian push will test Ukraine severely, says a senior
general,” The Economist, May 2, 2024,
https://economist.com/europe/2024/05/02/a-fresh-russian-push-will-test-
ukraine-severely-says-a-senior-general.

[1497] Mark Hannah, et al., “The New Atlanticism: Where Americans and
Western Europeans Agree and Disagree,” Institute for Global Affairs, June
2024, https://instituteforglobalaffairs.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/IGA-
Modeling-Democracy-2024-The-New-Atlanticism.pdf.

[1498] Anton Hrushetskyi, “Perceptions of the course of Russia’s war

against Ukraine after nearly two years of large-scale invasion,” Kyiv
International Institute of Sociology, https://kiis.com.ua/?
lang=eng&cat=reports&id=1372.
[1499] Staff, “Germany’s Scholz Calls for Renewed Push for Peace in
Ukraine,” Reuters, September 8, 2024,
https://usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-09-08/germanys-scholz-calls-
for-renewed-push-for-peace-in-ukraine.

[1500] “Russia targets Ukrainian energy facilities with new barrage of

missiles,” CBS News, June 22, 2024, https://cbsnews.com/news/russia-
ukraine-air-strike-energy-facilities; Veronika Melkozerova, “Russia
pummels Ukraine’s energy infrastructure with drones and missiles,”
Politico Europe, August 26, 2024, https://politico.eu/article/russia-launch-
attack-drone-missile-ukraine-kyiv-kursk-energy-infrastructure; Pavel
Polityuk, “The Russian attacks that have pounded Ukraine’s power
facilities,” BBC, June 20, 2024, https://bbc.com/news/articles/czvvj4j4p8ro.

[1501] “Ukraine: Over 6 Million Refugees Spread Across Europe,” UN

Regional Information Centre for Western Europe, September 11, 2024,
https://unric.org/en/ukraine-over-6-million-refugees-spread-across-europe.

[1502] Staff, “Ukraine’s birth rate plummets to 300-year low as country’s

population collapses,” BNE IntelliNews, April 17, 2024,
https://intellinews.com/ukraine-s-birth-rate-plummets-to-300-year-low-as-
country-s-population-collapses-321317.

[1503] Tamar Jacoby, “Will Ukraine’s Refugees Want to Go Back Home?”

Wall Street Journal, January 11, 2024, https://wsj.com/world/europe/will-
ukraines-refugees-want-to-go-back-home-a6a9832a.
[1504] Anastasiia Mosorko, “Ukraine has highest mortality rate and lowest
birth rate in the world,” Ukrainska Pravda, September 13, 2024,
https://pravda.com.ua/eng/news/2024/09/13/7474848.

[1505] Myroslava Gongadze, “Can the Minsk Accords be Implemented?”

Voice of America, February 10, 2022, https://voanews.com/a/can-the-
minsk-accords-be-implemented-/6436806.html.

[1506] Owen Matthews, “Putin’s ‘peace’ is a partitioned Ukraine,” The

Spectator, January 6, 2024, https://spectator.co.uk/article/putins-peace-is-a-
partitioned-ukraine.

[1507] Bruno Waterfield, “US urged to put nuclear weapons on Polish soil,”
London Times, April 4, 2022, https://thetimes.co.uk/article/us-urged-
nuclear-weapons-polish-soil-nato-ukraine-war-gqrk6s06h.

[1508] Stephen Grey, et al., “Years of miscalculations by US, NATO led to

dire shell shortage in Ukraine,” Reuters, July 19, 2024,
https://reuters.com/investigates/special-report/ukraine-crisis-artillery.

[1509] Felicia Schwartz, “Ukraine war pushes US to review arms

stockpiles,” Financial Times, February 16, 2023,
https://ft.com/content/a3c943e9-9071-49b8-9f6d-2b82e1f8167b.

[1510] Jeremy Stern, “A Devastating Moment of Clarity in Ukraine,”

Tablet, March 2, 2023,
https://tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/devastating-moment-clarity-
ukraine.
[1511] Guy Faulconbridge, “Russia warns of nuclear, hypersonic
deployment if Sweden and Finland join NATO,” Reuters, April 14, 2022,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/russia-warns-baltic-nuclear-deployment-
if-nato-admits-sweden-finland-2022-04-14; Staff, “Russia Warns of Nuclear
Buildup If Finland, Sweden Join NATO,” Bloomberg News, April 14, 2022,
https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-14/russia-threatens-nuclear-
buildup-if-finland-and-sweden-join-nato.

[1512] Press Release, “Finland joins NATO as 31st Ally,” NATO, April 4,
2023, https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_213448.htm; Steven Erlanger,
“Sweden Enters NATO, a Blow to Moscow and a Boost to the Baltic
Nations,” New York Times, March 7, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/03/07/world/europe/sweden-nato-neutrality.html.

[1513] President Joe Biden, “Remarks by President Biden on Continued

Support for Ukraine,” White House, January 25, 2023,
https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-
remarks/2023/01/25/remarks-by-president-biden-on-continued-support-for-
ukraine.

[1514] Transcript, “Opening remarks by NATO Secretary General Jens

Stoltenberg at the joint meeting of the European Parliament’s Committee on
Foreign Affairs (AFET) and the Subcommittee on Security and Defence
(SEDE),” NATO, September 7, 2023,
https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_218172.htm.
[1515] Staff, “Ukraine War: Russia warns Sweden and Finland against Nato
membership,” BBC, April 11, 2022, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-
61066503.

[1516] Andrew Roth, “Putin issues fresh warning to Finland and Sweden on
installing Nato infrastructure,” Guardian, June 30, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/29/russia-condemns-nato-
invitation-finland-sweden.

[1517] Press Release, “Allies prepare for collective defence exercise in

Nordic environment,” NATO, February 27, 2024,
https://ac.nato.int/archive/2024/NordicResponse24_announcement.

[1518] Paul Godfrey, “Putin says he will re-deploy troops along Finland
border in response to NATO accession,” UPI, March 13, 2024,
https://upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2024/03/13/Putin-threatens-
Finland-border-troop-redeployment/2751710329197.

[1519] Brendan Cole, “What Is Iskander-M? Russia’s Nuclear-Capable

Launchers Head for NATO Border,” Newsweek, April 22, 2024,
https://newsweek.com/russia-iskander-nato-nuclear-1892673.

[1520] Henry Ridgwell, “Russian media: Kremlin plans to deploy ballistic

missiles on Finnish border,” Voice of America, April 23, 2024,
https://voanews.com/a/russian-media-kremlin-plans-to-deploy-ballistic-
missiles-on-finnish-border-/7581224.html.
[1521] Interview of John Mearsheimer by Steve Clemons, “Why Ukraine
won’t be joining NATO anytime soon,” Al Jazeera, July 13, 2023,
https://aljazeera.com/program/the-bottom-line/2023/7/13/why-ukraine-
wont-be-joining-nato-anytime-soon.

[1522] Staff, “Defence deal with Finland will give US access to 15 military
bases on Russian border,” Telegraph, December 15, 2023,
https://telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2023/12/15/us-deal-finland-15-military-
bases-on-russian-border.

[1523] Staff, “NATO to hold biggest drills since Cold War with 90,000
troops,” Reuters, January 19, 2024, https://reuters.com/world/europe/nato-
kick-off-biggest-drills-decades-with-some-90000-troops-2024-01-18;
“Steadfast Defender 24,” NATO, March 8, 2024,
https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/222847.htm.

[1524] Staff, “NATO Says Over 300,000 Troops Now on High Readiness,”
AFP, June 13, 2024, https://thedefensepost.com/2024/06/13/nato-troops-
high-readiness.

[1525] Joe Barnes, “Nato land corridors could rush US troops to front line
in event of European war,” Telegraph, June 4, 2024,
https://telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2024/06/04/nato-land-corridors-us-
troops-european-war.

[1526] “Finnish parliament unanimously approves defence agreement with

USA,” YLE, July 1, 2024, https://yle.fi/a/74-20097360.
[1527] “Russia Says It Will Respond to Finland Giving US Access to
Bases,” Reuters, July 3, 2024, https://reuters.com/world/europe/russia-says-
it-will-respond-finland-giving-us-access-bases-2024-07-03.

[1528] Staff, “Ukraine will eventually join NATO, Blinken says,” Reuters,
April 4, 2024, https://reuters.com/world/europe/us-secretary-state-blinken-
says-ukraine-will-be-nato-member-2024-04-04.

[1529] Press Release, “Washington Summit Declaration,” NATO, July 10,

2024, https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_227678.htm; Sabine
Siebold, “NATO Members Pledge 40 Billion Euros in Military Aid for
Ukraine, Diplomats Say,” Reuters, July 3, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/nato-members-agree-40-bln-financial-
pledge-ukraine-diplomat-2024-07-03.

[1530] James Acton, et al., “At NATO’s Summit, the Alliance Should Not
Move Ukraine Toward Membership,” Politico, https://politico.com/f/?
id=00000190-7a1f-db0b-a39e-fa5fbcdb0000.

[1531] Staff, “A visit to the Northwest Passage,” The Week, November 5,

2023, https://theweek.com/culture-life/travel/a-visit-to-the-northwest-
passage.

[1532] Staff, “Russia,” The Arctic Institute,

https://thearcticinstitute.org/country-backgrounders/russia.

[1533] Holly Ellyatt, “Russia is dominating the Arctic, but it’s not looking
to fight over it,” CNBC, December 27, 2019,
https://cnbc.com/2019/12/27/russias-dominance-in-the-arctic.html.

[1534] “2024 Arctic Strategy,” US Defense Department, June 21, 2024,

https://media.defense.gov/2024/Jul/22/2003507411/-1/-1/0/DOD-ARCTIC-
STRATEGY-2024.PDF.

[1535] Mike Baker, “With Eyes on Russia, the US Military Prepares for an
Arctic Future,” New York Times, March 27, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/03/27/us/army-alaska-arctic-russia.html.

[1536] Max Hauptman, “NORAD intercepts Russian and Chinese bombers

off coast of Alaska,” USA Today, July 25, 2024,
https://usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/07/25/norad-intercept-russian-
chinese-aircraft-alaska/74546764007.

[1537] Staff, “Russia claims it intercepted US fighter jets over the Arctic,”
Al Jazeera, July 21, 2024, https://aljazeera.com/news/2024/7/21/russia-
claims-it-intercepted-us-fighter-jets-over-the-arctic.

[1538] Staff, “Russia to give military help to North Korea if it comes under
attack—senior diplomat,” TASS, October 15, 2024,
https://tass.com/politics/1856501.

[1539] Andrew Salmon, “In Hanoi, Putin warns NATO, South Korea as his
Asian tour, agreements face potential blowback,” Washington Times, June
21, 2024, https://washingtontimes.com/news/2024/jun/21/in-hanoi-putin-
warns-nato-south-korea-as-his-asian.
[1540] Michelle Ye Hee Lee, “North Korea’s elite troops are in Russia to
fight Ukraine: What we know,” Washington Post, October 29, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/2024/10/29/north-korea-elite-troops-
russia-ukraine-war; Julian E. Barnes, et al., “50,000 Russian and North
Korean Troops Mass Ahead of Attack, US Says,” New York Times,
November 10, 2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/11/10/us/politics/russia-
north-korea-troops-ukraine.html.

[1541] Valerie Hopkins, “Putin Appears to Say That North Korean Troops
Are in Russia,” New York Times, October 24, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/10/24/world/europe/putin-north-korean-troops-
russia.html.

[1542] Army Maj. Wes Shinego, “North Korean Presence Underscores

Russia’s Struggle, Pentagon Press Secretary Says,” DOD News, October
29, 2024, https://defense.gov/News/News-
Stories/Article/Article/3949781/north-korean-presence-underscores-russias-
struggle-pentagon-press-secretary-says.

[1543] “Doorstep statement by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte

following the North Atlantic Council briefing on the DPRK’s troop
deployment to Russia,” NATO, October 28, 2024,
https://nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_230105.htm.

[1544] See above.

[1545] Andrew Osborn, “Russia’s Putin orders army to become second
largest after China’s at 1.5 million-strong,” Reuters, September 16, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/putin-orders-russian-army-grow-by-
180000-soldiers-become-15-million-strong-2024-09-16.

[1546] Annie Jacobsen, Nuclear War: A Scenario (New York: Dutton,

2024).

[1547] Irina Vilcu and Aine Quinn, “Why Moldova’s Breakaway

Transnistria Region Is Asking Russia for Protection,” Bloomberg News,
February 29, 2024, https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-
29/transnistria-why-moldova-breakaway-region-asked-russia-for-
protection.

[1548] Walter Landgraf, “The Fire That Didn’t Burn: Transnistria’s

Unanswered Call for Russian Support,” FPRI, March 15, 2024,
https://fpri.org/article/2024/03/the-fire-that-didnt-burn-transnistrias-
unanswered-call-for-russian-support.

[1549] Staff, “US Closely Watching Moldovan Breakaway Region After

Request for Russian Help,” Reuters, February 28, 2024,
https://usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-02-28/us-closely-watching-
moldovan-breakaway-region-after-request-for-russian-help.

[1550] Staff, “Officials in Moldova’s breakaway Transnistria blame

Ukrainian drone strike after military site blast,” AP, March 17, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/moldova-transnistria-drone-strike-
7517ec7a4b1b7fca38be834a8eb33850.

[1551] Stephen McGrath, “How events in Moldova’s breakaway

Transnistria region raised fears of Russian interference,” AP, March 27,
2024, https://apnews.com/article/transnistria-moldova-russia-ukraine-war-
99575f5e67c222edced149031417bd5a.

[1552] Liza Brovko, “In Moldova, the date of presidential elections and a
referendum on joining the EU has been determined,” Babel, April 16, 2024,
https://babel.ua/en/news/106124-in-moldova-the-date-of-presidential-
elections-and-a-referendum-on-joining-the-eu-has-been-determined.

[1553] Sarah Rainsford and Laura Gozzi, “Moldova says ‘Yes’ to pro-EU
constitutional changes by tiny margin,” BBC, October 21, 2024,
https://bbc.com/news/articles/c1wnr5qdxe7o.

[1554] Staff, “Serbia receives another arms delivery from Russia despite
international sanctions over Ukraine,” AP, February 14, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/serbia-russia-arms-deliveries-embargo-
fb63352c3a76404f7f4f13dd0358b187.

[1555] Interview with author, Nebojsa Malic, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, January 16, 2024, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/1-11-24-
nebojsa-malic-on-bidens-aggressive-posturing-towards-the-bosnian-serbs.

[1556] Ivana Sekularac, “Bosnian Serb leader tempers secession talk as US

exerts pressure,” AP, January 8, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/bosnian-serb-leader-tempers-secession-
talk-us-exerts-pressure-2024-01-08.

[1557] Dunja Mijatović, “Letter: Bosnia and Herzegovina: the authorities of

Republika Srpska should refrain from further restricting the rights of
NGOs,” Council of Europe, September 21, 2023, https://rm.coe.int/letter-to-
the-president-of-the-national-assembly-of-republika-srpska-b/1680ac9b22.

[1558] Zoran Radosavljevic, “Bosnian Serb entity adopts ‘foreign agents’

law, denounced by EU,” Euractiv, September 29, 2023,
https://euractiv.com/section/politics/news/bosnian-serb-entity-adopts-
foreign-agents-law-denounced-by-eu.

[1559] Staff, “US fighter jets to fly over Bosnia in warning to ‘secessionist’
Serbs,” Reuters, January 8, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/04/01/world/middleeast/world-central-kitchen-
strike-gaza.html.

[1560] Andrew Gray, “Kosovo still ‘highly volatile’ after May clashes,
NATO commander says,” Reuters, September 6, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/kosovo-still-highly-volatile-after-may-
clashes-nato-commander-2023-09-06.

[1561] Bjarke Smith-Meyer, “US, EU allies scold Kosovo for escalating

tensions with Serbia,” Politico Europe, May 27, 2023,
https://politico.eu/article/us-eu-allies-scold-kosovo-for-escalating-tensions-
serbia.
[1562] Fatos Bytyci, “NATO to deploy more troops to Kosovo to curb
violence,” Reuters, May 30, 2023, https://reuters.com/world/europe/nato-
soldiers-guard-kosovo-serb-town-following-clashes-2023-05-30.

[1563] Staff, “Vučić says he will not recognise Kosovo’s independence,”

Euractiv, May 31, 2021,
https://euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/vucic-says-he-will-not-
recognise-kosovos-independence; Talha Ozturk, “West increases pressure
on Serbia to recognize Kosovo: President,” Anadolu Ajansi, March 3, 2024,
https://aa.com.tr/en/europe/west-increases-pressure-on-serbia-to-recognize-
kosovo-president/3154032.

[1564] Massimo Calabresi, “Inside the White House Program to Share

America’s Secrets,” Time, February 29, 2024,
https://time.com/6835724/americas-intelligence-secrets.

[1565] Edith M. Lederer, “Leaders of Serbia and Kosovo spar at the UN

over the latter’s ban of the Serbian dinar,” AP, February 9, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/serbia-kosovo-un-dinar-
85bdbefc7fb40ddab8b17fdba8f93dbc.

[1566] Sophiko Megrelidze and Dasha Litvinova, “Georgia to drop foreign

agents law after massive protests,” AP, March 9, 2023,
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-parliament-foreign-agents-law-protests-
ed95daddc365d6877596cfeac8534df7.
[1567] The same French woman they brought in as foreign minister after
the Rose Revolution of 2003. See Chapter Three.

[1568] Staff, “Thousands Clash With Police In Georgia After Parliament

OKs First Reading Of ‘Foreign Agents’ Law,” RFERL, March 7, 2023,
https://rferl.org/a/georgia-ngos-reject-foreign-agent-law/32307031.html.

[1569] “Brawl erupts in Georgia parliament over ‘Russian-inspired’ foreign

agent law,” Reuters, March 6, 2023,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/fistfight-erupts-georgia-parliament-over-
russian-inspired-foreign-agent-law-2023-03-06.

[1570] Justyna Mielnikiewicz and Evan Gershkovich, “Georgia Rocked by

Protests Over Russia-Style Foreign-Agents Bill,” Wall Street Journal,
March 8, 2023, https://wsj.com/articles/georgia-rocked-by-protests-over-
russia-style-foreign-agents-bill-cf57260d; Tweet by Shame Movement,
March 2, 2023,
https://x.com/Shamemovement/status/1631335821516185600; Nata
Koridze, “Polarization is a Symptom, Not Disease,” Civil.ge, March 6,
2023, https://civil.ge/archives/528914.

[1571] Staff, “Georgian police use tear gas to halt protest against ‘foreign
agents’ law,” Reuters, March 7, 2023, https://reuters.com/article/georgia-
politics-foreignagents-idAFKBN2V91HK.

[1572] Anastasia Pechenyuk, “Protesters in Georgia storm the parliament

building: security forces fight back (video),” Ukraine Today, March 8,
2023, https://ukrainetoday.org/2023/03/08/protesters-in-georgia-storm-the-
parliament-building-security-forces-fight-back-video.

[1573] See Chapter Three.

[1574] Zach Evans, “Georgia 2021,” National Endowment for Democracy,

February 20, 2022,
https://web.archive.org/web/20220524162121/https://ned.org/region/eurasia
/georgia-2021.

[1575] Interview with author, Kit Klarenberg, Scott Horton Show radio
archive, March 18, 2023, https://scotthorton.org/interviews/3-17-23-kit-
klarenberg-on-the-georgia-uprisings-and-the-national-endowment-for-
democracy; Kit Klarenberg, “Dare Call It A Coup? CIA Front Threatens
Color Revolution in Georgia,” MintPress News, March 14, 2023,
https://mintpressnews.com/coup-cia-foreign-agent-law-color-revolution-
georgia/283992.

[1576] Ivan Nechepurenko and Andrew Higgins, “The Explosive Roots of

the Georgia Protests,” New York Times, March 8, 2023,
https://nytimes.com/2023/03/08/world/europe/georgia-protests-russia.html.

[1577] Rayhan Demytrie, “Thousands protest at Georgian ‘foreign agent’

bill,” BBC, March 7, 2023, https://bbc.com/news/world-europe-64882475.

[1578] “US Embassy Statement on Parliament’s Rushed Advancement of

Kremlin-Inspired Legislation on So-Called ‘Foreign Influence,’” US
Embassy Tbilisi, March 7, 2023, https://ge.usembassy.gov/u-s-embassy-
statement-on-parliaments-rushed-advancement-of-kremlin-inspired-
legislation-on-so-called-foreign-influence.

[1579] Staff, “Georgian police use tear gas to halt protest against ‘foreign
agents’ law,” Reuters, March 7, 2023, https://reuters.com/article/georgia-
politics-foreignagents-idAFKBN2V91HK.

[1580] Gabriel Gavin and Jakob Hanke Vela, “Georgians fighting for
Europe fear Brussels missing in action,” Politico Europe, May 16, 2024,
https://politico.eu/article/georgia-europe-brussels-eu-flags-protests-foreign-
affairs-russia-bill.

[1581] “Press Briefing by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and United

States Trade Representative Katherine Tai,” White House, May 14, 2024,
https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2024/05/14/press-
briefing-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-and-united-states-trade-
representative-katherine-tai.

[1582] Horton, Enough Already, 158–60.

[1583] Tweet by Samantha Power, March 2, 2023,

https://x.com/PowerUSAID/status/1631356011024900103.

[1584] Staff, “Russian Law is not the will of Georgia,” Open Society
Georgia Foundation, February 21, 2023, https://osgf.ge/en/russian-law-is-
not-the-will-of-georgia.
[1585] Sophiko Megrelidze and Dasha Litvinova, “Georgia to drop foreign
agents law after massive protests,” AP, March 9, 2023,
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-parliament-foreign-agents-law-protests-
ed95daddc365d6877596cfeac8534df7.

[1586] Henry Foy and Anastasia Stognei, “EU to freeze Georgia’s accession
bid if it enacts Russia-inspired law,” Financial Times, May 15, 2024,
https://ft.com/content/3493da7e-ea39-4e82-9539-527280706647.

[1587] Staff, “US pressures Georgia government to ditch ‘foreign agent’

law,” Euronews, May 25, 2024, https://euronews.com/my-
europe/2024/05/25/us-pressures-georgia-government-to-ditch-foreign-
agent-law.

[1588] Staff, “Thousands protest in Georgia over the weekend against

‘Russia-style’ law on foreign influence,” AP, May 13, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-protests-bill-foreign-influence-russia-
f38630d7bbd9e91f3ee4e9423cd928e2.

[1589] “World NGO Day,” Georgian Civil Society Sustainability Initiative,

February 27, 2021, https://eu4georgia.eu/the-world-ngo-day.

[1590] Vadim Nikitin, “Georgia Dreaming: Is Another Color Revolution

About to Kick Off?” The Nation, May 20, 2024,
https://thenation.com/article/world/georgia-dream-protests-ngo-color-
revolution.
[1591] Brad Pearce, “The South Caucasus at a Crossroads,” Wayward
Rabbler, May 19, 2024, https://thewaywardrabbler.com/p/the-south-
caucasus-at-a-crossroads.

[1592] Sergio Cantone, “Q&A: After years of intimidation, a Georgian pro-

democracy NGO faces the ultimate threat,” Euronews, May 15, 2024,
https://euronews.com/2024/05/15/after-years-of-intimidation-a-georgian-
pro-democracy-ngo-faces-the-ultimate-threat.

[1593] “FMs of Latvia, Estonia, Iceland and Lithuania joined May 15

protesters against ‘Russian Law,’” Georgia Today, May 16, 2024,
https://georgiatoday.ge/fms-of-latvia-estonia-iceland-and-lithuania-join-
protesters-against-russian-law.

[1594] Staff, “Georgia’s president vetoes controversial ‘foreign agents,’

bill,” Al Jazeera, May 18, 2024,
https://aljazeera.com/news/2024/5/18/georgias-president-vetoes-
controversial-foreign-agentsbill.

[1595] Staff, “Georgian parliament overrides presidential veto of the

divisive ‘foreign influence’ bill,” Le Monde, June 3, 2024,
https://lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2024/05/28/georgian-parliament-
overrides-presidential-veto-of-the-divisive-foreign-influence-
bill_6672920_4.html.

[1596] Helen Andrews, “Georgia’s ‘Foreign Influence’ Law Is Reasonable,”

The American Conservative, May 3, 2024,
https://theamericanconservative.com/georgias-foreign-influence-law-is-
reasonable.

[1597] See Chapter Three.

[1598] Staff, “NDI, IRI International Observer Mission Preliminary

Assessment of Georgian Elections,” Civil.ge, October 27, 2024,
https://civil.ge/archives/631413.

[1599] Staff, “EU urges probe into Georgia’s vote ‘irregularities’; PM

rejects accusations,” Al Jazeera, October 27, 2024,
https://aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/27/eu-urges-probe-into-georgias-vote-
irregularities-pm-rejects-accusations.

[1600] Georgi Kantchev, “Ruling Party Claims Victory in Former Soviet

State Tilting Back Toward Moscow,” Wall Street Journal, October 27, 2024,
https://wsj.com/world/former-soviet-state-reaches-moment-of-truth-russia-
or-the-west-63a710d0.

[1601] Emma Burrows, “Tens of thousands rally in Georgia to denounce the

parliamentary election they say was rigged,” AP, October 29, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-election-russia-european-union-protests-
f6667dd64b537bd2082bfc5396f4a955.

[1602] Gabriel Gavin, “Uncertainty grips Georgia as opposition street

protests end in anticlimax—for now,” Politico Europe, October 28, 2024,
https://politico.eu/article/georgia-streets-protest-dream-party-nationwide-
election-violence-movement-salome-zourabichvili.
[1603] Matthew Miller, “Department Press Briefing,” US State Department,
October 28, 2024, https://state.gov/briefings/department-press-briefing-
october-28-2024.

[1604] Connor Freeman, “State Department Threatens Georgia With

‘Consequences,’ Amid Rigged Election Claims,” Libertarian Institute,
October 29, 2024, https://libertarianinstitute.org/foreign-policy/state-
department-threatens-georgia-with-consequences-amidst-claims-of-rigged-
elections.

[1605] Laura Kelly, “Biden calls for investigations into country of

Georgia’s election results,” The Hill, October 29, 2024,
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/4960117-biden-georgian-
dream-election.

[1606] Gabriel Gavin, “Uncertainty grips Georgia as opposition street

protests end in anticlimax—for now,” Politico Europe, October 28, 2024,
https://politico.eu/article/georgia-streets-protest-dream-party-nationwide-
election-violence-movement-salome-zourabichvili.

[1607] Staff, “Armenia freezes participation in Russia-led security bloc –

Prime Minister,” Reuters, February 23, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/armenia-freezes-participation-russia-
led-security-bloc-prime-minister-2024-02-23.

[1608] Bassem Mroue, “The fall of an enclave in Azerbaijan stuns the

Armenian diaspora, shattering a dream,” AP, September 29, 2023,
https://apnews.com/article/armenia-azerbaijan-diaspora-beirut-los-angels-
nagornokarabakh-dc00e20d1c684877e5b0e67d3de76388.

[1609] Andrew Kramer, “Facing Military Debacle, Armenia Accepts a Deal

in Nagorno-Karabakh War,” New York Times, November 9, 2020,
https://nytimes.com/2020/11/09/world/middleeast/armenia-settlement-
nagorno-karabakh-azerbaijan.html.

[1610] Krzysztof Strachota and Andrzej Wilk, “Russia is withdrawing its

forces from Nagorno-Karabakh,” Center for Eastern Studies, April 19,
2024, https://osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2024-04-19/russia-
withdrawing-its-forces-nagorno-karabakh.

[1611] Staff, “What will become of the Zangezur corridor? Comments from
Azerbaijan and Armenia,” JAM News, April 21, 2021, https://jam-
news.net/what-will-become-of-the-zangezur-corridor-comments-from-
azerbaijan-and-armenia.

[1612] Staff, “Azerbaijani president doubles down on demand for ex-Soviet

exclaves’ return,” Eurasianet, January 12, 2024,
https://eurasianet.org/azerbaijani-president-doubles-down-on-demand-for-
ex-soviet-exclaves-return.

[1613] Staff, “Armenia returns four border villages to Azerbaijan,” AFP,

May 24, 2024, https://voanews.com/a/armenia-returns-four-border-villages-
to-azerbaijan-/7626051.html.

[1614] See Chapters Two and Three.

[1615] Staff, “Armenian Leader Again Threatens To Leave Russian-Led
Defense Bloc,” RFERL, March 12, 2024, https://rferl.org/a/armenian-
leader-again-threatens-to-leave-russia-led-defense-bloc/32858863.html.

[1616] Staff, “Moscow Warns Armenia Against Leaving Russian-Led

Defense Bloc,” RFERL, March 13, 2024,
https://azatutyun.am/a/32980410.html.

[1617] Frank Gardner, “Narva: The Estonian border city where Nato and
the EU meet Russia,” BBC, May 25, 2022, https://bbc.com/news/world-
europe-61555691.

[1618] Andrius Sytas, “Lithuania Begins Construction of Base for German

Troops Near Russian Border,” Reuters, August 19, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/lithuania-begins-construction-base-
german-troops-near-russian-border-2024-08-19.

[1619] Emily Feng and Kateryna Malofieieva, “Meet the Chechen battalion
joining Ukraine to fight Russia – and fellow Chechens,” NPR News,
September 5, 2022, https://npr.org/2022/09/05/1119703328/chechens-
ukraine-russia.

[1620] Marcin Mamon, “Abdul Hakim: Don’t think of us as terrorists,”

Dziennik Polski, January 13, 2023, https://plus.dziennikpolski24.pl/abdul-
hakim-nie-myslcie-o-nas-ze-jestesmy-terrorystami/ar/c1-17197663.

[1621] Tweet by Defense Intelligence of Ukraine, January 7, 2023,

https://x.com/DI_Ukraine/status/1611644490976055297.
[1622] Haid Haid, “With Russia in their sights, Chechens depart Syria for
Ukraine,” Asia Times, March 10, 2023, https://asiatimes.com/2023/03/with-
russia-in-their-sights-chechens-depart-syria-for-ukraine.

[1623] Neil Hauer, “The End of Chechen Jihadis in Syria,” Syndication

Bureau, August 24, 2021, https://syndicationbureau.com/chechen-jihadi-
syria; Aslan Doukaev, “Chechnya’s Veteran Fighters Have Their Backs to
the Wall,” Jamestown Foundation Eurasia Daily Monitor, Vol. 18, No. 122
(August 2, 2021), https://jamestown.org/program/chechnyas-veteran-
fighters-have-their-backs-to-the-wall.

[1624] Andrew Kramer, “CIA Helped Thwart Terrorist Attack in Russia,

Kremlin Says,” New York Times, December 17, 2017,
https://nytimes.com/2017/12/17/world/europe/putin-trump-cia-
terrorism.html; Staff, “Putin Thanks Trump for Helping Foil Terrorist Acts
in Russia,” AP, December 30, 2019, https://apnews.com/general-news-
2fdc2e014480cc9c384b79636dcd17da.

[1625] Ben Wolfgang, “US Embassy in Moscow warns of ‘imminent’

extremist attack,” Washington Times, March 8, 2024,
https://washingtontimes.com/news/2024/mar/8/us-embassy-in-moscow-
warns-of-imminent-extremist-a.

[1626] Julian Barnes and Eric Schmitt, “US Says ISIS Was Responsible for
Deadly Moscow Concert Hall Attack,” New York Times, March 22, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/03/22/world/europe/isis-moscow-attack-concert-
hall.html; “Death toll from concert hall attack in Russia’s Moscow region
rises to 144,” Anadolu Agency, March 29, 2024,
https://web.archive.org/web/20240330062453/https://aa.com.tr/en/asia-
pacific/death-toll-from-concert-hall-attack-in-russia-s-moscow-region-rises-
to-144/3178519.

[1627] Antonio Pequeño IV, “ISIS Claims Responsibility For Moscow

Shooting That Left 40 Dead,” Forbes, March 22, 2024,
https://forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2024/03/22/isis-claims-
responsibility-for-moscow-shooting-that-left-40-dead.

[1628] “ISIS-affiliated media publish graphic body-cam footage from

Moscow terrorist attack,” Meduza, March 24, 2024,
https://meduza.io/en/news/2024/03/24/isis-affiliated-media-publish-
graphic-body-cam-footage-from-moscow-terrorist-attack.

[1629] Paul Sonne, “Why Russia’s Vast Security Services Fell Short on
Deadly Attack,” New York Times, March 28, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/03/28/world/europe/russia-concert-attack-
security-failures.html.

[1630] Borhan Osman, “The Islamic State in ‘Khorasan’: How It Began and
Where It Stands Now in Nangarhar,” Afghan Analysts Network, July 27,
2016, https://afghanistan-analysts.org/the-islamic-state-in-khorasan-how-it-
began-and-where-it-stands-now-in-nangarhar; Tahir Khan, “Senior TTP
Commander Daud Khan ‘Switches Loyalty’ to Daesh,” Daily Times
(Pakistan), July 31, 2017, http://dailytimes.com.pk/pakistan/31-Jul-
17/senior-ttp-commander-daud-khan-switches-loyalty-to-daesh.
[1631] Joshua Keating, “The Pentagon Is Not Happy With John Kerry or
His Syria Cease-Fire,” Slate, September 14, 2016, https://slate.com/news-
and-politics/2016/09/the-pentagon-is-not-happy-with-john-kerry-or-his-
syria-cease-fire.html; Gareth Porter, “How the Pentagon Sank the US-
Russia Deal in Syria – and the Ceasefire,” Antiwar.com, September 26,
2016, https://original.antiwar.com/porter/2016/09/25/pentagon-sank-us-
russia-deal-syria-ceasefire.

[1632] Horton, Enough Already, 1–49.

[1633] James Bamford, The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the
Eavesdropping on America (New York: Knopf, 2009), 7–99.

[1634] Staff, “Shoe-Bomber Has ‘Tactical Regrets’ Over Failed American

Airlines Plot,” NBC News, February 3, 2015,
https://nbcnews.com/news/us-news/shoe-bomber-has-tactical-regrets-over-
failed-american-airlines-plot-n296396.

[1635] Josh Rogin, “State Department official: IC Intel guys wanted

underwear bomber to come to the US?” Foreign Policy, January 11, 2010,
https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/01/11/state-department-official-ic-intel-
guys-wanted-underwear-bomber-to-come-to-the-u-s.

[1636] Staff, “Al Qaeda affiliate claims cargo plane bomb plot,” France 24,
November 5, 2010, https://france24.com/en/20101105-al-qaeda-affiliate-
claims-cargo-plane-bomb-plot-yemen-ups.
[1637] Mariah Blake, “Internal Documents Reveal How the FBI Blew Fort
Hood,” Mother Jones, August 27, 2013,
https://motherjones.com/politics/2013/08/nidal-hasan-anwar-awlaki-emails-
fbi-fort-hood.

[1638] Scott Horton, “Pensacola: Blowback Terrorism,” Antiwar.com,

December 9, 2019, https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2019/12/08/pensacola-
blowback-terrorism.

[1639] Howard Altman and Geoff Ziezulewicz, “FBI identifies suspect

identified in NAS Corpus Christi shooting it believes is ‘terrorism related,’”
Navy Times, May 21, 2020, https://navytimes.com/news/your-
navy/2020/05/21/security-forces-member-at-nas-corpus-christi-injured-
during-active-shooter-situation-shooter-neutralized-officials-say.

[1640] Mallory Shelbourne, “One Explosive Device Responsible for Deaths

of 13 US Service Members in Kabul Attack, Pentagon Says,” US Naval
Institute News, February 4, 2022, https://news.usni.org/2022/02/04/one-
explosive-device-responsible-for-deaths-of-13-service-members-in-kabul-
attack.

[1641] Mohammad Yunus Yawar, “Two Russian embassy staff dead, four
others killed in suicide bomb blast in Kabul,” Reuters, September 5, 2022,
https://reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/afghan-police-report-suicide-bomb-
blast-near-russian-embassy-kabul-2022-09-05.
[1642] Staff, “IS group releases picture of bomb it says downed Russian
plane over Egypt,” AP, November 18, 2015,
https://apnews.com/article/df25949c342340659058a5f07cd97786.

[1643] James Jeffrey, “US Air Support for Iran in Tikrit: The Right
Decision,” WINEP, March 26, 2015, https://washingtoninstitute.org/policy-
analysis/us-air-support-tikrit-right-decision; Aamer Madhani, “US warned
Iran that ISIS-K was preparing attack ahead of deadly Kerman blasts, a US
official says,” AP, January 25, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/kerman-us-
warning-isisk-bombings-bcb47f04165b3eb7b9bc7b4868c8399c.

[1644] Staff, “Iraq’s Fallujah ‘almost cleared’ of Islamic State:

Commander,” AFP, June 22, 2016, https://firstpost.com/world/iraqs-
fallujah-almost-cleared-of-islamic-state-commander-2850286.html; Luis
Martinez, et al., “US airstrike in Baghdad kills militia leader behind attacks
on American forces,” ABC News, February 8, 2024,
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-conducts-airstrike-baghdad-high-target-
officials/story?id=107039296; Timour Azhari and Moayed Kenany, “Five
Iraqi soldiers killed in ISIS attack on army post in eastern Iraq, two security
sources say,” Reuters, May 13, 2024, https://reuters.com/world/middle-
east/five-iraqi-soldiers-killed-isis-attack-army-post-eastern-iraq-two-
security-2024-05-13.

[1645] Asharq Al Awsat, “ISIS Claims Deadly Syria Attacks on Pro-

government Forces,” Al Aawsat, November 11, 2023,
https://english.aawsat.com/arab-world/4661466-isis-claims-deadly-syria-
attacks-pro-government-forces.
[1646] Seymour Hersh, “The Redirection,” The New Yorker, February 25,
2007, https://newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-redirection.

[1647] Mark Perry, “US generals: Saudi intervention in Yemen ‘a bad

idea,’” Al Jazeera America, April 17, 2015,
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/4/17/us-generals-think-saudi-
strikes-in-yemen-a-bad-idea.html.

[1648] Nadine Yousif, “Taliban kill IS leader behind Kabul airport

bombing,” BBC, April 25, 2023, https://bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-
65382277.

[1649] Ben Wolfgang, “It’s complicated: Terror group ISIS-K targets US –

and its worst enemies,” Washington Times, March 21, 2024,
https://washingtontimes.com/news/2024/mar/21/its-complicated-terror-
group-isis-k-targets-us-and.

[1650] Horton, Enough Already.

[1651] Nancy Youssef and Shane Harris, “US Spies Root for an ISIS-Russia
War,” Daily Beast, November 9, 2015, http://thedailybeast.com/us-spies-
root-for-an-isis-russia-war.

[1652] “Bill Clinton Goes ‘On the Record,’” interviewed by Greta Van
Susteren, Fox News, June 7, 2005,
http://foxnews.com/story/2005/06/07/bill-clinton-goes-on-record.html.
[1653] “Russian region of Dagestan holds a day of mourning after attacks
kill 19 people,” AP, June 24, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/dagestan-
militant-attacks-church-synagogue-police-
84b57fbaa2d087eeb4ef87fa73b65f74.

[1654] Mike Morell, “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” CIA, August
6, 2001, https://irp.fas.org/cia/product/pdb080601.pdf.

[1655] Ali Soufan, “Islamic State Khorasan Determined to Attack in US,”

The Soufan Center, June 19, 2024, https://thesoufancenter.org/intelbrief-
2024-june-19.

[1656] How about this time I cite the videos? Scott Horton and Gus
Cantavero, Enough Already: Time to End the War on Terrorism, the Video
Series, Scott Horton Show YouTube Channel, January 31, 2021,
https://youtube.com/playlist?
list=PLq2qhcVwTVJRQuCWXMVUM8SG2qYDFoPZA.

[1657] Julian E. Barnes, “CIA Warning Helped Thwart ISIS Attack at

Taylor Swift Concert in Vienna,” New York Times, August 28, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/08/28/us/politics/cia-isis-warning-taylor-swift-
concert.html.

[1658] Ken Dilanian, et al., “Pakistani man charged with murder-for-hire

plot against US politicians, potentially including Trump,” NBC News,
August 6, 2024, https://nbcnews.com/investigations/pakistani-man-charged-
murder-plot-us-politicians-potentially-trump-rcna165433; Lee Smith, “The
FBI Entraps Another Fake Assassin,” Tom Klingenstein, October 3, 2024,
https://tomklingenstein.com/the-fbi-entraps-another.

[1659] Peg Tyre, “An Icon Destroyed,” Newsweek, September 11, 2001,
https://newsweek.com/icon-destroyed-152127.

[1660] Dan Gifford and Mike McNulty, Waco: The Rules of Engagement
(New York: Fifth Estate Productions, 1997), https://youtube.com/watch?
v=iZ08dd6XKqc.

[1661] Gina Bennett, “The Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous,”

US State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research Weekend
Edition, August 21–22, 1993,
http://nationalsecuritymom.com/3/WanderingMujahidin.pdf.

[1662] Seymour Hersh, “The Redirection,” The New Yorker, February 25,
2007, https://newyorker.com/magazine/2007/03/05/the-redirection.

[1663] Osama bin Laden, “Declaration of Jihad Against the Americans

Occupying the Land of the Two Holiest Sites,” August 23, 1996,
https://ctc.westpoint.edu/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Declaration-of-Jihad-
against-the-Americans-Occupying-the-Land-of-the-Two-Holiest-Sites-
Translation.pdf; Dan Williams, “Israeli nationalist leader in spotlight over
1996 Lebanon attack,” Reuters, January 6, 2015,
https://reuters.com/article/world/israeli-nationalist-leader-in-spotlight-over-
1996-lebanon-attack-idUSKBN0KF13U; Miriam Berger, “What to know
about Naftali Bennett, Israel’s new prime minister,” Washington Post, June
14, 2021, https://washingtonpost.com/world/2021/06/01/naftali-bennett-
israel-prime-minister-netanyahu; Brad Dress, “Close to 70 percent of Gaza
war fatalities children, women: UN Human Rights Office,” The Hill,
November 8, 2024, https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4980505-gaza-war-
fatalities-majority-women-children-united-nations-report; Staff, “Israeli
attack on Lebanon’s Almat kills 23, including seven children,” Al Jazeera,
November 10, 2024, https://aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/10/israeli-attack-
on-almat-lebanon-kills-several-people-including-children.

[1664] Arathy Somasekhar and Marianna Parraga, “Factbox: US imports of

Russian oil and refined products,” Reuters, March 8, 2022,
https://reuters.com/business/energy/us-imports-russian-oil-refined-products-
2022-03-08.

[1665] Marcia Smith, “US-Russian-Ukrainian Space Mission Launches

Successfully Despite Terrestrial Tensions,” Space Policy Online, February
19, 2022, https://spacepolicyonline.com/news/u-s-russian-ukrainian-space-
mission-launches-successfully-despite-terrestrial-tensions.

[1666] Richard Luscombe, “US and Russia agree to fly each other’s
astronauts to the ISS as tensions thaw,” Guardian, July 15, 2022,
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/15/us-russia-astronauts-
international-space-station.

[1667] Kenneth Chang, “SpaceX Launches to Space Station With Russian

Astronaut Among Crew of 4,” New York Times, October 5, 2022,
https://nytimes.com/2022/10/05/science/spacex-launch-russia-crew5.html.
[1668] Staff, “A Soyuz craft with 2 Russians and 1 American docks at the
International Space Station,” AP, September 11, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/russia-soyuz-space-station-american-russians-
bddf1750a5d8ba4b17d7bc43f8ffff0e.

[1669] Not that India was a Soviet-style dictatorship, but they have had a
very burdensome socialist economy. Sadanand Dhume, “Communism’s
Long Shadow Over India,” Wall Street Journal, November 16, 2017,
https://wsj.com/articles/communisms-long-shadow-over-india-1510871365.

[1670] Michael Corbin, “BRICS signals shift from US dominated financial

system,” Responsible Statecraft, October 23, 2024,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/brics-new-world-order.

[1671] Thomas Graham, “What Russia Really Wants,” Foreign Affairs,

October 9, 2023, https://foreignaffairs.com/asia/what-russia-really-wants.

[1672] Harry Yorke, “Ukraine: arms prices are soaring, we need £800
billion to beat Putin,” London Times, June 16, 2024,
https://thetimes.com/uk/defence/article/why-are-arms-dealers-hiking-prices-
for-ukraine-92hqdtlx2.

[1673] Press Release, “Updated Ukraine Recovery and Reconstruction

Needs Assessment,” World Bank, March 23, 2023,
https://worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2023/03/23/updated-ukraine-
recovery-and-reconstruction-needs-assessment.
[1674] Staff, “Iowa man sentenced for failing to file income tax returns,”
KCCI Des Moines, August 2, 2022, https://kcci.com/article/iowa-man-
sentenced-for-failing-to-file-income-tax-returns-des-moines-
wapello/40786071.

[1675] Pedro L. Gonzalez, “How Trump Saved Ukraine Aid,” Contra, April
24, 2024, https://readcontra.com/p/how-trump-saved-ukraine-aid; Vivian
Salama, “Why Donald Trump Didn’t Sink Mike Johnson’s Ukraine-Aid
Bill,” Wall Street Journal, April 22, 2024,
https://wsj.com/politics/policy/why-donald-trump-didnt-sink-mike-
johnsons-ukraine-aid-bill-81fe8d11.

[1676] Anna Conkling, “Frontline Ukrainians Fear New Aid From US Will
Be a Disaster,” Daily Beast, April 25, 2024,
https://thedailybeast.com/frontline-ukrainians-fear-new-aid-from-us-will-
be-a-disaster.

[1677] Alexander Ward, “Biden admin isn’t fully convinced Ukraine can
win, even with new aid,” Politico, April 24, 2024,
https://politico.com/news/2024/04/24/biden-ukraine-russia-war-aid-
00154143.

[1678] See Chapter Five.

[1679] Julian Barnes and Steven Lee Myers, “Russian Disinformation

Videos Smear Biden Ahead of US Election,” New York Times, May 15,
2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/05/15/us/politics/russia-disinformation-
election.html.

[1680] Julian Barnes, “Russia Steps Up a Covert Sabotage Campaign

Aimed at Europe,” New York Times, May 26, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/05/26/us/politics/russia-sabotage-campaign-
ukraine.html.

[1681] Paul Sperry, “Secret Report: How CIA’s Brennan Overruled

Dissenting Analysts Who Concluded Russia Favored Hillary,”
RealClearInvestigations, September 24, 2020,
https://realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2020/09/24/secret_report_how_c
ias_brennan_overruled_dissenting_analysts_who_thought_russia_favored_
hillary_125315.html; See Chapter Five.

[1682] Matt Taibbi, et al., “CIA ‘Cooked The Intelligence’ To Hide That
Russia Favored Clinton, Not Trump, In 2016, Sources Say,” Public,
February 15, 2024, https://public.news/p/cia-cooked-the-intelligence-to-
hide.

[1683] Tal Kopan, “Polygraph panic: CIA director fretted his vote for
communist,” CNN, September 15, 2016,
https://cnn.com/2016/09/15/politics/john-brennan-cia-communist-
vote/index.html.

[1684] Eric Tucker, “US disrupts Russian government-backed

disinformation campaign that relied on AI technology,” AP, July 9, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/russia-disinformation-fbi-justice-department-
50910729878377c0bf64a916983dbe44.

[1685] David Ingram, “Russia operated nearly 1,000 sock puppet accounts
on X, Justice Department says,” NBC News, July 9, 2024,
https://nbcnews.com/tech/misinformation/russia-operated-nearly-1000-
sock-puppet-accounts-x-justice-department-rcna161004; Dan De Luce,
“Russia aims to undermine Biden in November election, intel officials say,”
NBC News, July 9, 2024, https://nbcnews.com/investigations/russia-aims-
undermine-biden-november-election-intel-officials-say-rcna161011.

[1686] Sean Lyngaas, “US intel officials warn Russia plans to target swing
states in 2024 election with influence operations,” CNN, July 11, 2024,
https://cnn.com/2024/07/09/politics/russia-2024-election-influence-
operations-intelligence/index.html.

[1687] Julian E. Barnes, “US Announces Plan to Counter Russian Influence

Ahead of 2024 Election,” New York Times, September 4, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/09/04/us/politics/russia-election-influence.html.

[1688] Adam Hayes, “YouTube Stats: Everything You Need to Know In

2024!” September 6, 2024, https://wyzowl.com/youtube-stats; David Ch,
“TikTok Statistics: Revenue & Usage,” September 2024,
https://sendshort.ai/statistics/tiktok.

[1689] USA v Kostiantyn Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva, September 5,

2024, https://justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1366251/dl.
[1690] Disclosure: The author has been a guest on the Tim Pool Show and
skated his mini ramp.

[1691] Matt Taibbi, “Embracing the Joy,” Racket News, September 6, 2024,
https://racket.news/p/embracing-the-joy; Eric Tucker, et al., “With charges
and sanctions, US takes aim at Russian disinformation ahead of November
election,” AP, September 4, 2024, https://apnews.com/article/russia-justice-
department-election-foreign-influence-
4888f4bfc61e46173101060ad0321d2f.

[1692] Koh Ewe, “Right-Wing Influencers Tied to Russian Disinfo

Campaign Say They Are ‘Victims,’” Time, September 5, 2024,
https://time.com/7018028/conservative-influencers-react-russia-
disinformation-indictment-tenet-victims.

[1693] “Scott Horton on Russia Today,” RT, August 21, 2010,

https://youtube.com/watch?v=4GRsHlY-J18; “Scott Horton on Russia
Today,” RT, September 23, 2010, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=B8XNX5ozy24; “Scott Horton on Russia Today,” RT, November 3,
2010, https://youtube.com/watch?v=uPeIV6b-X4A.

[1694] Scott Horton, “The Teetering Empire,” Antiwar.com, April 5, 2005,

https://original.antiwar.com/scott/2005/04/05/the-teetering-empire; Staff,
“Our Anti-Imperialist Heritage: Murray N. Rothbard on War,” Reason,
February 1973, https://antiwar.com/orig/rothbard_on_war.html; Bill
Kauffman, Ain’t My America: The Long, Noble History of Antiwar
Conservatism and Middle-American Anti-Imperialism (New York:
Metropolitan Books, 2008).

[1695] Not that anyone should hold it against Americans who do appear on
RT or Sputnik. That’s the point. No one cares.

[1696] Ethan Craig, “Understanding Mis-, Dis-, and Malinformation,” OTH

Solutions, November 7, 2022, https://othsolutions.net/understanding-mis-
dis-and-malinformation.

[1697] Sheera Frenkel, et al., “How Russia, China and Iran Are Interfering
in the Presidential Election,” New York Times, October 29, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/10/29/technology/election-interference-russia-
china-iran.html.

[1698] See Chapter Four.

[1699] Karoun Demirjian and Marc Santora, “Ukraine Aid Falters in Senate
as Republicans Insist on Border Restrictions,” New York Times, December
5, 2023, https://nytimes.com/2023/12/05/us/politics/ukraine-aid-zelensky-
congress.html.

[1700] President Joe Biden interview Transcript, Time, May 28, 2024,
https://time.com/6984968/joe-biden-transcript-2024-interview.

[1701] President Vladimir Putin, “Visit to Russian Federation Defence

Ministry’s 344th Centre for Combat Employment and Retraining of Army
Aviation Pilots,” Kremlin, March 27, 2024,
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/73749.

[1702] “Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community,”

Office of the Director of National Intelligence, February 5, 2024,
https://dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2024-Unclassified-
Report.pdf.

[1703] President Joe Biden, “State of the Union Address,” White House,
March 7, 2024, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-
remarks/2024/03/07/remarks-of-president-joe-biden-state-of-the-union-
address-as-prepared-for-delivery-2.

[1704] David Sanger and Lara Jakes, “Biden Looks to Move Past His
Troubles, Opening NATO Summit With Warning to Putin,” New York
Times, July 9, 2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/07/09/us/politics/nato-
summit-biden.html.

[1705] “Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community,”

Office of the Director of National Intelligence, February 5, 2024,
https://dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ATA-2024-Unclassified-
Report.pdf.

[1706] Sabine Siebold, “Exclusive: NATO will need 35-50 extra brigades
under new defence plans,” Reuters, July 8, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/nato-will-need-35-50-extra-brigades-under-new-
defence-plans-source-says-2024-07-08.
[1707] Julian Barnes and Eric Schmitt, “US Officials Say Russia Is
Unlikely to Take Much More Ukrainian Territory,” New York Times, July 9,
2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/07/09/us/politics/russia-ukraine-nato.html.

[1708] Missy Ryan, et al., “NATO vows lasting support for Ukraine but
won’t promise membership,” Washington Post, July 9, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/07/09/nato-biden-
ukraine-membership.

[1709] Staff, “Read the Full Transcript of President Joe Biden’s Interview
With TIME,” Time, June 4, 2024, https://time.com/6984968/joe-biden-
transcript-2024-interview.

[1710] Max Hunder and Angelo Amante, “Italy and Canada sign security
deals with Ukraine,” Reuters, February 24, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/europe/italy-canada-sign-security-deals-with-
ukraine-2024-02-24; Staff, “Security guarantees for Ukraine: Poland joins
G7 declaration,” Ukrainska Pravda, January 22, 2024,
https://news.yahoo.com/security-guarantees-ukraine-poland-joins-
125852634.html; Sudip Kar-Gupta, “Ukraine’s Zelenskiy and Belgium PM
Sign Security Pact,” Reuters, May 28, 2024,
https://usnews.com/news/world/articles/2024-05-28/ukraines-zelenskiy-
and-belgium-pm-sign-security-pact.

[1711] “Bilateral Security Agreement Between the United States of

America and Ukraine,” White House, June 13, 2024,
https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-
releases/2024/06/13/bilateral-security-agreement-between-the-united-states-
of-america-and-ukraine.

[1712] James Risen and Ken Klippenstein, “The CIA Thought Putin Would
Quickly Conquer Ukraine. Why Did They Get It So Wrong?” Intercept,
October 5, 2022, https://theintercept.com/2022/10/05/russia-ukraine-putin-
cia.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter 7: Trump II

[1] David Gilmour, “Joe Biden ‘Angry’ At Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi,
Chuck Schumer Over ‘Ouster’: Report,” Mediaite, August 14, 2024,
https://mediaite.com/news/joe-biden-angry-at-barack-obama-nancy-pelosi-
chuck-schumer-over-ouster-report.

[2] “CNN Presidential Debate: President Joe Biden and former President
Donald Trump,” CNN, June 27, 2024, https://youtube.com/watch?v=-v-
8wJkmwBY.

[3] Robert Yoon, “Harris wins Democratic presidential nomination in

virtual roll call. Here’s how the process worked,” AP, August 6, 2024,
https://apnews.com/article/kamala-harris-nomination-virtual-roll-call-
explainer-c42bbf87ac85f359b84607ea55d1ca4a.

[4] John Ismay, “Photo Appears to Capture Path of Bullet Used in

Assassination Attempt,” New York Times, July 14, 2024
https://nytimes.com/2024/07/14/us/politics/photo-path-trump-
assassination.html.

[5] Tweet by @GeminiRooster, September 15, 2024,

https://x.com/geminirooster/status/1835501822368260291; Tweet by Max
Blumenthal, September 16, 2024,
https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1835552460481478829.
[6] Justin Scheck and Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “Stolen Valor: The US
Volunteers in Ukraine Who Lie, Waste and Bicker,” New York Times, March
25, 2023, https://nytimes.com/2023/03/25/world/europe/volunteers-us-
ukraine-lies.html; Thomas Gibbons-Neff, “I interviewed the accused
gunman for a story on volunteers in Ukraine,” New York Times, September
15, 2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/09/15/us/politics/trump-routh-ukraine-
interview.html; Adam Goldman, et al., “Suspected Gunman Said He Was
Willing to Fight and Die in Ukraine,” New York Times, September 15, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/09/15/us/politics/trump-shooting-suspect-
routh.html; Without resorting to any speculation about their role in the
attempt on Trump’s life, it is still worth noting that Routh had been pictured
and filmed at a rally held by the Azov movement in Ukraine on April 30,
2022: Staff, “Fact Check: Video shows suspected Trump gunman Ryan
Routh in Ukraine, not BlackRock ad,” Reuters, September 30, 2024,
https://reuters.com/fact-check/video-shows-suspected-trump-gunman-ryan-
routh-ukraine-not-blackrock-ad-2024-09-30.

[7] Tanya Lukyanova and Ben Smith, “In 2023 interview, alleged Trump
plotter decried hurdles to get foreign soldiers for Kyiv,” Semafor,
September 15, 2024, https://semafor.com/article/09/15/2024/alleged-trump-
plotter-ryan-routh-complained-of-obstacles-to-getting-foreign-soldiers-to-
ukraine.

[8] Madeline Halpert, “Gunman lurked for hours before Trump’s last-
minute game of golf,” BBC, September 16, 2024,
https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgwwqkgzx0o.
[9] Interview of Ryan Wesley Routh, Newsweek, June 14, 2022,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=FUyInDGLFlo.

[10] Jane Lytvynenko, “US Authorities Were Warned About Suspected

Trump Gunman,” Wall Street Journal, September 16, 2024,
https://wsj.com/us-news/u-s-authorities-were-warned-about-suspected-
trump-gunman-153dab6f.

[11] “Examination of US Secret Service Planning and Security Failures

Related to the July 13, 2024 Assassination Attempt Interim Joint Report,”
US Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs,
September 25, 2024,
https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/c9d32bdeb3114ce7/3
be66b40-full.pdf.

[12] Madeline Halpert, “Gunman lurked for hours before Trump’s last-
minute game of golf,” BBC, September 16, 2024,
https://bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgwwqkgzx0o.

[13] Jonathan Capehart, “Trump’s MSG rally draws comparisons to 1939

pro-Nazi rally,” MSNBC, October 27, 2024, https://msnbc.com/jonathan-
capehart/watch/trump-s-msg-rally-draws-comparisons-to-1939-pro-nazi-
rally-222807621632; David Rothkopf, “Donald Trump’s Racist NYC Rally
Was Vile. It Was Also Political Suicide,” Daily Beast, October 28, 2024,
https://thedailybeast.com/donald-trumps-racist-nyc-rally-was-vile-it-was-
also-political-suicide; Andy Sullivan and Susan Heavey, “Arizona
prosecutor investigating Trump for saying Cheney should face gunfire,”
Reuters, November 1, 2024, https://reuters.com/world/us/trump-suggests-
liz-cheney-should-face-firing-squad-her-foreign-policy-stance-2024-11-01;
Barack Obama, “My Remarks at a Harris-Walz Rally in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin,” Barack Obama on Medium, November 3, 2024,
https://barackobama.medium.com/my-remarks-at-a-harris-walz-rally-in-
milwaukee-wisconsin-a35a7944b07a; Ariel Zilber, “Rachel Maddow
‘worried’ Trump will send her to ‘camps’ if he’s elected president,” New
York Post, June 11, 2024, https://nypost.com/2024/06/11/media/rachel-
maddow-worried-trump-will-send-her-to-camps-if-elected; Samantha
Putterman, “In ad, Harris says Trump would gut Medicare and preexisting
condition coverage. Here are the facts,” Politifact, October 30, 2024,
https://politifact.com/article/2024/oct/30/in-ad-harris-says-trump-would-
gut-medicare-and-pre.

[14] Devlin Barrett and Perry Stein, “New Trump indictment tries to
salvage case after Supreme Court ruling,” Washington Post, August 27,
2024, https://washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/08/27/trump-dc-
indictment-new-charges-jan-6.

[15] Edward Helmore, “Sweep of swing states rubs salt in Democrats’

wounds as Trump prepares to meet Biden,” Guardian, November 10, 2024,
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/10/trump-arizona-swing-states-
sweep.

[16] Post by former President Donald Trump, July 19, 2024,

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/112815440435929028.
[17] Marc Santora, “Asked if He Wants Ukraine to Defeat Russia, Trump
Doesn’t Say Yes,” New York Times, September 11, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/09/11/us/politics/trump-debate-ukraine-war-
russia-putin-harris.html.

[18] Bruno Maçães, “How Palantir Is Shaping the Future of Warfare,” Time,
July 10, 2023, https://time.com/6293398/palantir-future-of-warfare-ukraine;
Jeffrey Dastin, “Ukraine is using Palantir’s software for ‘targeting,’ CEO
says,” Reuters, February 1, 2023, https://reuters.com/technology/ukraine-is-
using-palantirs-software-targeting-ceo-says-2023-02-02.

[19] Renée Schomp, “Thiessen Watch: A REAL expert calls Marc out on
torture,” Human Rights First, March 4, 2010,
https://humanrightsfirst.org/library/thiessen-watch-a-real-expert-calls-marc-
out-on-torture; Tony Camerino, aka Matthew Alexander, “Courting Fear,”
Slate, March 3, 2010, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2010/03/a-former-
military-interrogator-unearths-the-errors-and-fear-mongering-in-marc-
thiessen-s-courting-disaster.html.

[20] Anders Hagstrom, “Trump describes how he could solve Russia-

Ukraine conflict in 24 hours,” Fox News, July 16, 2023,
https://foxnews.com/politics/trump-describes-how-he-could-solve-russia-
ukraine-conflict-24-hours.

[21] Marc A. Thiessen, “Trump wants to make deterrence and (really) legal
immigration great again,” Washington Post, September 30, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/09/30/donald-trump-2024-
interview-immigration-ukraine.

[22] Robert C. O’Brien, “The Return of Peace Through Strength,” Foreign

Affairs, July/August 2024, https://foreignaffairs.com/united-states/return-
peace-strength-trump-obrien.

[23] Post by President-elect Donald Trump, November 9, 2024,

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113455540757405917.

[24] Felicia Schwartz, “Jared Kushner rules out joining next Trump
administration,” Financial Times, November 7 2024,
https://ft.com/content/2512e5cb-603c-4980-98f9-83395c55e37b.

[25] Staff, “Trump confirms pro-Israel Rep. Elise Stefanik job as US

ambassador to UN,” Jerusalem Post, November 11, 2024,
https://jpost.com/breaking-news/article-828491.

[26] “H.R. 6395: William M. (Mac) Thornberry National Defense

Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021,” US House of Representatives, July
21, 2020, https://govtrack.us/congress/votes/116-2020/h152.

[27] Connor O’Brien, “House panel backs requiring women to register for
the draft,” Politico, September 1, 2019,
https://politico.com/news/2021/09/01/women-register-military-draft-house-
panel-508781.
[28] Mason Letteau Stallings, “Trump Taps Rep. Waltz as National Security
Advisor,” The American Conservative, November 11, 2024,
https://theamericanconservative.com/trump-taps-rep-waltz-as-national-
security-advisor.

[29] “Rubio Repeats Himself 4x In Epic Debate Fiasco,” Rebel HQ,

February 7, 2016, https://youtube.com/watch?v=cOOs-ft7S2c.

[30] Marco Rubio, “Restoring America’s Strength – My Vision for US

Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2015,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2015-08-04/restoring-
america-s-strength; Alex Isenstadt, “Rubio takes lead in Sheldon Adelson
primary,” Politico, April 23, 2015,
https://politico.com/story/2015/04/marco-rubio-takes-lead-in-sheldon-
adelson-primary-117268#ixzz3Y8Cx5KtE; Daniel R. DePetris, “Marco
Rubio: The Neocon Man,” The National Interest, February 29, 2016,
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/marco-rubio-the-neocon-man-15348.

[31] Staff, “What they’re saying about Obama’s plan to withdraw troops
from Afghanistan,” Los Angeles Times, June 23, 2011,
https://latimes.com/archives/blogs/top-of-the-ticket/story/2011-06-
23/opinion-what-theyre-saying-about-obamas-plan-to-withdraw-troops-
from-afghanistan; Marco Rubio, “America Must Stand With The Libyan
People” US Senate, February 24, 2011, https://rubio.senate.gov/icymi-
america-must-stand-with-the-libyan-people; Staff, “Marco Rubio on War &
Peace,” On the Issues, June 15, 2016,
https://ontheissues.org/2016/Marco_Rubio_War_+_Peace.htm; Thomas
Kaplan and Wilson Andrews, “Presidential Candidates on Syrian No-Fly
Zone,” New York Times, October 19, 2015,
https://nytimes.com/interactive/2015/10/19/us/elections/presidential-
candidates-on-syria-no-fly-zone.html.

[32] Post by President-elect Donald Trump, November 13, 2024,

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113477453460742213.

[33] Filip Timotija, “Kinzinger: Rubio pick as Trump secretary of State

‘pretty good,’” The Hill, November 12, 2024,
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4985585-adam-kinzinger-donald-
trump-marco-rubio-secretary-of-state.

[34] Tweet by Michael Tracey, November 12, 2024,

https://x.com/mtracey/status/1856502082032767089.

[35] Tweet by Dan McKnight, November 12, 2024,

https://x.com/troopshomeus/status/1856493024634892542.

[36] Defend the Guard, https://DefendTheGuard.us.

[37] See Chapter Five.

[38] Katie Bo Lillis, “Intelligence agencies, already anxious over Trump,

find some solace in Ratcliffe pick for CIA,” CNN, November 13, 2024,
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/11/13/politics/intelligence-agencies-john-
ratcliffe/index.html.
[39] Post by President-elect Donald Trump, November 13, 2024,
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/113477477588190723.

[40] Jesse Watters, “Americans right to be concerned as Biden plays

‘chicken’ with Russia, Gabbard warns,” Fox News, June 6, 2024,
https://foxnews.com/media/americans-right-concerned-biden-plays-
chicken-russia-gabbard-warns.

[41] Horton, Enough Already, 199.

[42] Alexander Ward, “Trump Promised to End the War in Ukraine. Now
He Must Decide How,” Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2024,
https://wsj.com/world/trump-presidency-ukraine-russia-war-plans-
008655c0.

[43] The author swears he was just joking. But then the Times brought it up
in all seriousness: “Any negotiations involving Trump officials before he
takes office could be illegal under the 1799 Logan Act.” Anton Troianovski
and Valerie Hopkins, “Putin Lavishes Praise on Trump, Saying Russia Is
‘Open’ to Restored Ties,” New York Times, November 7, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/11/07/world/europe/trump-putin-russia-ukraine-
war.html.

[44] See Chapter Five.

[45] Tom O’Connor, “Donald Trump’s North Korea Deal Fell Apart
Because of John ‘Bomb- ’Em’ Bolton, Experts Say,” Newsweek, February
28, 2019, https://newsweek.com/donald-trump-north-korea-john-bolton-
1348442.

OceanofPDF.com
 Chapter 8: Good Night and Good Luck

[1] Rep. Jodey Arrington, “US National Debt Surpasses $35 Trillion,” US
House of Representatives Budget Committee, July 29, 2024,
https://budget.house.gov/press-release/us-national-debt-surpasses-35-
trillion.

[2] “Treasury Department Fiscal Year 2024 Budget Proposal,” C-SPAN,

March 16, 2023, https://c-span.org/video/?526623-1/treasury-department-
fiscal-year-2024-budget-proposal.

[3] Jeff Cox, “Interest payments on the national debt top $1 trillion as
deficit swells,” CNBC, September 12, 2024,
https://cnbc.com/2024/09/12/interest-payments-on-the-national-debt-top-1-
trillion-as-deficit-swells.html.

[4] Laura Beck, “Here’s How Much Grocery Prices Have Increased Since
the Last Election,” Yahoo Finance, May 5, 2024,
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/much-grocery-prices-increased-since-
140029491.html; John Kelly, “CBS News price tracker shows how much
food, gas, utility and housing costs are rising,” CBS News, October 10,
2024, https://cbsnews.com/news/price-tracker; Erin Nolan, “These Small
Towns Have a Big City Problem: The Rent Is Way Too High,” New York
Times, February 18, 2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/02/18/nyregion/rent-
housing-prices-hudson-valley.html; Jasmine Cui, “Middle-class
homeowners are increasingly squeezed by housing costs,” NBC News,
October 14, 2024, https://nbcnews.com/data-graphics/middle-class-new-
homeowners-cost-burdened-house-poor-rcna163853; Alexandre Tanzi, “US
Homeowners See Biggest Property Tax Rise in Five Years,” Bloomberg
News, April 4, 2024, https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-04/us-
homeowners-see-biggest-property-tax-rise-in-five-years.

[5] Andrew Cockburn, “Our Real National Security Budget – $2 Trillion,

Here We Come,” Spoils of War, March 14, 2024,
https://spoilsofwar.substack.com/p/our-real-national-security-budget.

[6] Robert Kagan, “What We Can Expect After Putin’s Conquest of

Ukraine,” Washington Post, February 21, 2022,
https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/02/21/ukraine-invasion-putin-
goals-what-expect.

[7] Robert Kagan, “The Price of Hegemony,” Foreign Affairs, May/June

2022, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/ukraine/2022-04-06/russia-ukraine-
war-price-hegemony.

[8] Robert Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon, “The ghost at the feast: America
and the collapse of world order, 1900-1941,” Brookings Institution, January
13, 2023, https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZE9LuFqy9Wg.

[9] “Victoria Nuland on Russia-NATO relations, peace negotiations with

Ukraine, and the US elections,” Mikhail Zygar, September 3, 2024,
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HiS2dg_atfc.
[10] Secretary of State John Quincy Adams, “An Address . . . Celebrating
the Declaration of Independence,” July 4, 1821,
https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/speech-on-independence-day.

[11] Robert Kagan and William Kristol, “Toward A Neo-Reaganite Foreign

Policy,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 1996,
https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/1996-07-01/toward-neo-reaganite-
foreign-policy.

[12] Keith Gessen, “The Quiet Americans Behind the US-Russia

Imbroglio,” New York Times Magazine, May 8, 2018,
https://nytimes.com/2018/05/08/magazine/the-quiet-americans-behind-the-
us-russia-imbroglio.html.

[13] Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Toward a Global Realignment,” The American

Interest, April 17, 2016, https://the-american-
interest.com/2016/04/17/toward-a-global-realignment.

[14] Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Henry Kissinger: Ukraine must give

Russia territory,” Telegraph, May 23, 2022,
https://telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/05/23/henry-kissinger-warns-against-
defeat-russia-western-unity-sanctions.

[15] Laura Secor, “Henry Kissinger Is Worried About ‘Disequilibrium,’”

Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2022, https://wsj.com/articles/henry-
kissinger-is-worried-about-disequilibrium-11660325251.
[16] Henry Kissinger, “How to avoid another world war,” The Spectator,
December 17, 2022, https://spectator.co.uk/article/the-push-for-peace.

[17] Walter Russell Mead, “The End of the Wilsonian Era,” Foreign Affairs,
January/February 2021, https://foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-
states/2020-12-08/end-wilsonian-era.

[18] Fiona Hill, “Lennart Meri Lecture 2023,” March 13, 2023,
https://lmc.icds.ee/lennart-meri-lecture-by-fiona-hill.

[19] Michael Holden, “UK judge rejects extraditing Julian Assange to US

over ‘suicide risk,’” Reuters, January 3, 2021,
https://reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/uk-judge-rejects-extraditing-julian-
assange-us-over-suicide-risk-2021-01-04.

[20] Vladimir Pozner, “How the United States Created Vladimir Putin,”
Yale University, September 27, 2018, https://youtube.com/watch?
v=8X7Ng75e5gQ.

[21] “Transcript of President Bush’s Address on the State of the Union,”

New York Times, January 29, 1992,
https://nytimes.com/1992/01/29/us/state-union-transcript-president-bush-s-
address-state-union.html.

[22] Col. Gian Gentile, Wrong Turn: America’s Deadly Embrace of

Counterinsurgency (New York: The New Press, 2013), 13.
[23] Nick Hawton, “Hunt for CIA ‘black site’ in Poland,” BBC, December
28, 2006, https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/6212843.stm.

[24] Tim Sebastian, “When did Sikorski know about CIA torture?” DW
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v=qjosWra6Zgk.

[25] Vnovak, “Military Donors Prefer Ron Paul,” Open Secrets, January 5,
2012, https://opensecrets.org/news/2012/01/military-donors-still-prefer-
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[26] John T. Correll, “The Weinberger Doctrine,” Air Force Magazine,

March 1, 2014, https://airandspaceforces.com/article/0314weinberger.

[27] Peter Nicholas, et al., “Trump-aligned ‘America First’ Holdouts Don’t

Follow GOP in Backing Ukraine,” NBC News, March 20, 2022,
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holdouts-dont-follow-gop-backing-ukraine-rcna20180.

[28] Melissa Quinn, “McConnell says ‘vast majority’ of Republicans

‘totally behind’ Ukraine,” CBS News, March 20, 2022,
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nation.

[29] Not that one could trust prominent astroturf, pretended America First
organizations such as the America First Policy Institute or Edmund Burke
Foundation’s National Conservative Conference: Michael Tracey,
“‘America First’ Hawks Admit US Weapons in Ukraine are Plunging Down
a ‘Black Hole,’” MTracey.net, August 1, 2022,
https://mtracey.net/p/america-first-hawks-admit-us-weapons; James W.
Carden and Douglas Macgregor, “Neoconservatism by Another Name,” The
American Conservative, July 19, 2024,
https://theamericanconservative.com/neoconservatism-by-another-name.

[30] María Paula Mijares Torres and Steven T. Dennis, “McConnell Signals
He’ll Be Speed Bump to Trump Isolationism,” Bloomberg News,
November 6, 2024, https://bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-
06/mcconnell-signals-he-ll-be-speed-bump-to-trump-isolationism.

[31] Aaron Sobczak, “Fewer Americans willing to fight and die for other
countries,” Responsible Statecraft, August 21, 2024,
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/america-polling-interventionism; Gil
Barndollar and Matthew C. Mai, “America isn’t ready for another war—
because it doesn’t have the troops,” Vox.com, September 1, 2024,
https://vox.com/future-perfect/368528/us-military-army-navy-recruit-
numbers; Ethan Brown, “The Ghost of GWOT Haunting the Military
Recruiting Crisis,” Modern War Institute, December 28, 2023,
https://mwi.westpoint.edu/the-ghost-of-gwot-haunting-the-military-
recruiting-crisis.

[32] Henry Foy, “Vladislav Surkov: ‘An overdose of freedom is lethal to a

state,’” Financial Times, June 18, 2021, https://ft.com/content/1324acbb-
f475-47ab-a914-4a96a9d14bac.
[33] Dan De Luce and Kevin Collier, “Russia’s 2024 election interference
has already begun,” NBC News, February 26, 2024,
https://nbcnews.com/news/investigations/russias-2024-election-
interference-already-begun-rcna134204; Manuel Roig-Franzia, “The Steele
dossier author promises more Trump dirt. Will anyone buy it?” Washington
Post, October 7, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/books/2024/10/07/steele-dossier-christopher-
steele-book.

[34] Erin Banco and John Sakellariadis, “The prospect of a second Trump
presidency has the intelligence community on edge,” Politico, February 26,
2024, https://politico.com/news/2024/02/26/trump-intelligence-agency-
national-security-00142968.

[35] Harry Browne, “What We’re Up Against,” HarryBrowne.org, June

2001,
https://web.archive.org/web/20020602200418/https://harrybrowne.org/2000
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[36] Michael Froman, “Email to John Podesta,” WikiLeaks, October 6,

2008,
https://web.archive.org/web/20170223020043/https://wikileaks.org/podesta
-emails/emailid/8190; Michael Froman, “Email to Barack Obama,”
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https://web.archive.org/web/20170222030238/https://wikileaks.org/podesta
-emails/emailid/15560.
[37] “New Poll: More than Two-Thirds of Americans Support Urgent US
Diplomacy to End Ukraine War,” Quincy Institute, February 16, 2024,
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americans-support-urgent-u-s-diplomacy-to-end-ukraine-war.

[38] Peter Baker, “Trump’s NATO Threat Reflects a Wider Shift on

America’s Place in the World,” New York Times, February 15, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/02/15/us/politics/trump-nato-threat.html.

[39] Charles M. Blow, “When Patriarchy Trumps Race,” New York Times,
October 16, 2024, https://nytimes.com/2024/10/16/opinion/black-men-
harris-trump.html.

[40] “Israel,” OECD Better Life Index, October 2024,

https://oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/israel.

[41] Mykhailo Tkach, “Volunteer in a Lamborghini: The Story of Great

Success During a Great War,” Ukraine Front Lines, July 23, 2024,
https://ukrainefrontlines.com/opinion/investigations/volunteer-in-a-
lamborghini-the-story-of-great-success-during-a-great-war/?swcfpc=1.

[42] Megan Henney, “Evictions are rising fastest in these 5 American

cities,” Fox Business, July 16, 2024,
https://foxbusiness.com/economy/evictions-surging-rising-fastest-5-
american-cities.

[43] Malcom Kyeyune, “Hurricane Helene is America’s Chernobyl

moment,” UnHerd, October 4, 2024, https://unherd.com/2024/10/hurricane-
helene-is-americas-chernobyl-moment.

[44] Gram Slattery and Andrea Shalal, “Trump to meet Ukraine’s Zelenskiy
after Harris pledges support,” Reuters, September 26, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/biden-announces-8-billion-military-aid-ukraine-
2024-09-26.

[45] “Press Gaggle by Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and Secretary of

Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas En Route Greenville, SC,” White
House, October 2, 2024, https://whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-
briefings/2024/10/02/press-gaggle-by-press-secretary-karine-jean-pierre-
and-secretary-of-homeland-security-alejandro-mayorkas-en-route-
greenville-sc.

[46] Stuart A. Thompson, “FEMA Chief: Hurricane Misinformation Is

‘Worst That I Have Ever Seen,’” New York Times, October 8, 2024,
https://nytimes.com/2024/10/08/weather/hurricane-milton-disinformation-
fema.html; Interview of Adam Aton, “How hurricane misinformation will
haunt Americans longterm,” Politico, October 10, 2024,
https://politico.com/video/2024/10/10/how-hurricane-misinformation-will-
haunt-americans-longterm-1462436.

[47] Li Zhou, “Donald Trump’s many, many lies about Hurricane Helene,
debunked,” Vox.com, October 8, 2024,
https://vox.com/politics/376982/trump-hurricane-helene-fema-lies-
debunked; Rhona Tarrant, “Misinformation has surged following Hurricane
Helene. Here’s a fact check,” CBS News, October 7, 2024,
https://cbsnews.com/news/hurricane-helene-fact-check-misinformation-
conspiracy-theories.

[48] Maxine Joselow, “Helene response hampered by misinformation,

conspiracy theories,” Washington Post, October 5, 2024,
https://washingtonpost.com/weather/2024/10/05/hurricane-helene-
conspiracy-theories-rumors.

[49] Andrew Solender, “Dems beg tech platforms for hurricane misinfo
crackdown,” Axios, October 11, 2024,
https://axios.com/2024/10/11/democrats-hurricane-milton-helene-
misinformation.

[50] Matt Taibbi, “The Hurricane Speech Panic is Here,” Racket News,
October 12, 2024, https://racket.news/p/the-hurricane-speech-panic-is-here.

[51] Daphne Psaledakis and Jarrett Renshaw, “Biden announces new rule to
remove all US lead pipes in a decade,” Reuters, October 8, 2024,
https://reuters.com/world/us/final-rule-epa-requires-removal-all-us-lead-
pipes-decade-2024-10-08.

[52] Staff, “US Government Defense Spending 1990–2023,” Ycharts,

March 31, 2024,
https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_government_defense_spending; Andrew
Cockburn, “Our Real National Security Budget – $2 Trillion, Here We
Come,” Spoils of War, March 14, 2024,
https://spoilsofwar.substack.com/p/our-real-national-security-budget.
[53] Max Ehrenfreund, “Black budget leaked by Edward Snowden gives
details of agencies beyond CIA, NSA,” Washington Post, August 30, 2013,
https://washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/black-budget-leaked-
by-edward-snowden-gives-details-of-agencies-beyond-cia-
nsa/2013/08/29/a7f20890-10f0-11e3-bdf6-e4fc677d94a1_story.html; Dylan
Matthews, “America’s secret intelligence budget, in 11 (nay, 13) charts,”
Washington Post, August 29, 2013,
https://washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/08/29/your-cheat-sheet-
to-americas-secret-intelligence-budget.

[54] Andrew Cockburn, “Our Real National Security Budget – $2 Trillion,

Here We Come,” Spoils of War, March 14, 2024,
https://spoilsofwar.substack.com/p/our-real-national-security-budget.

[55] Some would cite Iraq War I. The author disagrees. Enough Already,
21–49.

[56] Michael Phillis, “Decades after the dangers of lead became clear, some
cities are leaving lead pipe in the ground,” AP, July 8, 2023,
https://apnews.com/article/toxic-lead-pipes-epa-providence-health-
bc793dea64ab59d26e27620d3c2338c9.

[57] Garrett, 139.

[58] Staff, “EU represented 15.2% of world’s GDP in 2021,” Eurostat, May
30, 2024, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-
20240530-2.
[59] Rep. Ron Paul, “A Republic, If You Can Keep It,” US House of
Representatives, January 31 and February 2, 2000,
https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/a-republic-if-you-can-keep-it.

[60] Ron Paul, “I advocate the same foreign policy the Founding Fathers
would,” New Hampshire Union Leader, October 8, 2007,
https://web.archive.org/web/20071011221042/http://unionleader.com/article
.aspx?
headline=Rep.+Ron+Paul%3A+I+advocate+the+same+foreign+policy+the
+Founding+Fathers+would&articleId=cc287b0f-941c-4b07-88e9-
9e992810f700.

[61] Thomas Jefferson, et al., “The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen

united States of America,” Continental Congress, July 4, 1776,
https://archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.

[62] President Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” White House,

March 4, 1801, https://scotthorton.org/fairuse/thomas-jeffersons-first-
inaugural-address.

[63] George Washington, “Farewell Address,” Daily American Advertiser,

September 19, 1796,
https://senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/Washingtons_Farewel
l_Address.pdf.

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