Provoked: The Russia-Ukraine War Is America’s Fault
How the U.S. Created, And Profits From, the Conflict
One year and two weeks after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, over eight thousand civilians have “officially” been killed (the true number is likely much higher), 82% of children are living in poverty, and 5.9 million people are internally displaced (see here for the official UN numbers). So far, there are no reliable estimates for how many soldiers have been killed, though it is at least plausible that combatant deaths number in the hundreds of thousands.
This needless loss of human life is obviously tragic. In absolute terms, it is nearly as bad as the ongoing Saudi-U.S.-sponsored genocide in Yemen. Unlike the Yemeni genocide, however, the War in Ukraine has been extensively covered by the Western media. As one reporter perspicaciously observed:
This isn’t a place, with all due respect, uh, like Iraq or Afghanistan that has seen conflict raging for decades, you know, this is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully too – city where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.
So, who’s to blame for the current conflict? As a matter of immediate proximate cause, Vladimir Putin is at least partially responsible. He launched the invasion after all. But the U.S. and its media stenographers would have you believe that history began on February 22, 2022, when the Russian president recognized the independence of the breakaway republics of Donetsk and Luhansk in the Donbass, or the next day, when invasion began in earnest.
But that, of course, would be foolish. The history is important. The current War was long in the making. And it was entirely preventable. Contrary to what it now claims, this War was provoked – on purpose – by the United States.
Among other things, over the last thirty years, the U.S. has done the following:
Expanded NATO eastward toward Russia’s borders, in clear violation of assurances it previously provided;
Torn up multiple nuclear treaties and installed dual-use nuclear-capable missile systems in Eastern Europe;
Orchestrated coups in former Warsaw Pact countries (including twice in Ukraine), overthrowing governments perceived as friendly to Russia; and
Spent years arming and training the Ukrainian military, funding it to the tune of billions of dollars, and preventing Ukraine’s leaders from adopting a conciliatory approach toward Russia.
All of this was done for money and influence. There was no other motive.
As I argued in an earlier post: War is a racket; all Wars are based on lies; and all Wars are fought at the expense of the many for the benefit of the very few. As I will show in this post, the same is true here.
But first, a little history (it’s actually quite long, but it’s important, so bear with me):
The Bush I / Clinton Years – The Fall of the Soviet Union, The Beginning of “Shock Therapy,” and NATO Expansion
In 1990, the Soviet Union was coming to an end (it would formally cease to exist on December 26, 1991, in what diplomat and Cold War containment architect George Kennan described as “the greatest bloodless revolution in history”).
As the Cold War was ostensibly ending, U.S. and Western leaders sought to reunify Germany and integrate it into NATO. That required Mikhail Gorbachev to agree to remove several hundred thousand Soviet troops that were stationed in East Germany. In exchange, then-Secretary of State James Baker assured his Soviet counterpart that NATO would not expand “one inch eastward.”1
NATO, for its part, was founded in 1949 as an alleged “collective defense” alliance “to create a pact of mutual assistance to counter the risk that the Soviet Union would seek to extend its control of Eastern Europe to other parts of the continent.” As of 1990, its members included the U.S., Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the UK, Greece, Turkey, West Germany, and Spain.
As we shall see, after the fall of the Soviet Union – the sole ostensible reason for NATO’s existence – NATO would expand over one thousand miles to the East, in direct contravention of the West’s assurances.
The Looting of Russia
But before that, in the early 1990s, after the Soviet Union fell, the U.S. sent the “Harvard Boys” - Lawrence Summers, Jeffrey Sachs, David Lipton, Andrei Shleifer, and Jonathan Hay, among others - to administer so-called “shock therapy” to the newly capitalist Russian economy.
This economic electro-shock treatment2 caused life expectancy to decline from 70 to 65 years during the first half of the 1990s, resulting in 1.6 million excess deaths. As Janine Wedel detailed in her 1998 article, “The Harvard Boys Do Russia”:
After seven years of economic “reform” financed by billions of dollars in U.S. and other Western aid, subsidized loans and rescheduled debt, the majority of Russian people find themselves worse off economically. The privatization drive that was supposed to reap the fruits of the free market instead helped to create a system of tycoon capitalism run for the benefit of a corrupt political oligarchy that has appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars of Western aid and plundered Russia’s wealth.
As Wedel explains, after the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the election of Boris Yeltsin as Russia’s first democratically elected President in 1991, Harvard Professor Jeffrey Sachs and other Western economists “teamed up with Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s first architect of economic reform, to promote a plan of ‘shock therapy’ to swiftly eliminate most of the price controls and subsidies that had underpinned life for Soviet citizens for decades.” This, unsurprisingly, produced hyperinflation that reached 2,500 percent, crushing the economy and destroying any savings of the Russian people and most potential capital for real investment. By the end of 1992, Gaidar was replaced by Anatoly Chubais, who “vowed to construct a market economy and sweep away the vestiges of Communism” in order to “privatize” Russia’s formerly 100% state-owned industries as soon as possible.
Mr. Chubais was helped by the U.S. Agency for International Development (“USAID”),3 which promptly handed over the task of developing Russia to the Harvard Institute for International Development ("HIID"), "with minimal oversight by the government agencies involved," as well as international financial institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, who offered multi-billion-dollar loans on the condition that Russia "privatize" its previously wholly state-owned industries.
Andrei Shleifer, a tenured professor at Harvard and protégé of Larry Summers, was named the director of HIID’s Russia project, and worked closely with former World Bank consultant Jonathan Hay, who “assumed vast powers over contractors, policies and program specifics.” Over the next several years, the HIID would receive hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. taxpayer financed grants and awards to implement and oversee various “privatization schemes” in Russia, all of which ended in disaster.4
As Forbes editor and PhD in Russian Studies Paul Klebnikov (who was later assassinated by partisans of oligarch Boris Berezovsky)5 stated in a 2002 interview, the Harvard Boys wreaked havoc on the Russian economy in the 1990s, including initiating the so-called voucher program in 1992, and then implementing the blatantly corrupt loan-for-shares program.
As Klebnikov states:
[T]he vast majority of industrial assets in Russia were state-owned and hence every citizen had an equal piece of those assets, the vouchers [giving each citizen a proportionate stake in the privatizing assets] would be the vehicle by which the state would promote equality in share ownership of those state-owned assets . . It all went terribly wrong . . . The so-called young reformers in the Yeltsin government, led by Anatoly Chubais and Yegor Gaidar, decided to carry privatization out too quickly. They made the fundamental mistake of putting too much of Russia's state-owned industrial and natural resource wealth onto the market at once. It's an elementary mistake that could be predicted by anyone with even a minimal understanding of how a market works. If you throw a huge quantity of products onto the market at once, your price is going to be very low because there's not that much demand for it at that point. Moreover, the face value of the voucher was very low. All this meant that the average citizen, after having received the voucher, said to himself, "this thing isn't worth anything." So most people immediately sold their voucher on the street for about seven dollars . . .
As a result, ultimately the value of these enterprises shrank to almost meaningless amounts. The vast majority of the Russian population got nothing out of the voucher privatization. The people who did benefit - the insiders and financial operators who bought up all the vouchers - ended up buying up control of the main enterprises at a fraction of their market value.
In discussing the implementation of the voucher program with respect to Russian oil and natural gas giant, Gazprom, Klebnikov states:
Gazprom, which is the natural gas monopoly of Russia, owns one-third of the global reserves of natural gas. If you valued it as an American company per cubic meter of reserves, it would be valued anywhere between $300 billion and $900 billion. Of course, it's not an American company and property rights in Russia are weaker and so forth. But even in the Russian context, this is a company that had a stock market value in 1997 of $40 billion. So, when the government decided to privatize 29 percent of Gazprom in the 1994 voucher auctions, what happened? First, they gave the right to design the whole voucher auction to the Gazprom management.
The general director of Gazprom, probably Viktor Chernomyrdidn, the Prime Minister of Russia (who was the former director of Gazprom), and the top 100 or 200 managers of Gazprom got together and did several things. First of all, people who wanted to buy shares could only buy them in the tiny Siberian and Arctic villages where Gazprom had its deposits. Secondly, Gazprom management reserved the right to buy your share if you were an outsider at a price it dictated. The result was that only Gazprom people ended up buying the shares, and of course it was the managers who had the money to buy the vast majority of those shares and who ended up benefiting from the auction. As a result, the price at which Gazprom was privatized in 1994 through the vouchers was $250 million, which is 160 times less than the price the stock market would put on the company a mere three years later. So it was less than 1 percent of the stock market value of the company. That makes it one of the great robberies of the century.
As Klebnikov describes, the gangsters and oligarchs who would end up owning Russia engaged in similar criminal schemes across a variety of industries:
One way or another, you get the managers of a state-owned company into your pocket - either by bribing them or placing your own subordinates in the controlling position of the management. Once you have your managers running the state-owned company, they then sign all these deals that surround the company with a whole series of your middlemen -- banks, financial advisers, consulting companies, marketing companies, equipment supply companies, etc. In other words, all the channels whereby that company interacts with the outside world become controlled by your particular little companies. They're usually unknown little enterprises that are registered either in Cyprus, Switzerland, Luxembourg or the Caribbean somewhere.
They then sign the contracts that result in elementary transfer pricing whereby all the profits, and most of the cash revenues, accumulate in those intermediaries. The cash cow -- the state-owned corporation -- becomes bankrupted, because it's bleeding all its cash out to these intermediaries. So the state and government end up with a bankrupt company and you end up tremendously wealthy [with all your ill-gotten gains stashed in offshore accounts].
These privatization schemes caused “huge capital flight out of Russa. No matter how many billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars were going into Russia through the IMF and other institutions, several times that amount was flowing out of Russia through these kinds of criminal schemes. That's the way the Russian state was bankrupted. It got no tax revenues. Russian enterprises were eviscerated, left short of capital because they had no money. The Russian currency eventually collapsed, because it had no foreign currency to back it up. All the foreign currency reserves were being stashed abroad by a handful of very unscrupulous traders.”
Even more cynical was the loans-for-shares program, in which Boris Yeltsin helped fundraise for his 1996 reelection campaign by offering loans to well-heeled Russian bankers convertible into a controlling amount of shares in state-owned enterprises, but only after election day. In 1995, Chubais, under the supervision of USAID, “decided to take the top 12 export-oriented companies in Rusia - mostly oil and gas producers and metals exporters - and privatize the controlling stakes . . . What Chubais did was gather a group of six to eight top Russian financiers - the crony capitalists who later would be called the ‘oligarchs.’ They agreed among themselves who would bid for which company and at what price.”
As NPR described the program, “the richest oligarchs loaned the government billions of dollars in exchange for massive shares of Russia's most valuable state enterprises.” When the government ultimately defaulted, “the oligarchs would walk away with the keys to Russia's most profitable corporations. In exchange, the government would get the money it needed to pay its bills, privatization would keep moving forward — and, most importantly, the oligarchs would do everything in their power to ensure Yeltsin was reelected.”
As Klebnikov further details:
Each of these companies then fell into the hands of the oligarch who had been chosen to get the company. The prices they paid were anywhere from 10 to 30 times less than the price at which these companies were selling on the market in the mid-1990s. In other words, the insiders bought these companies at these rigged auctions at anywhere from 3 to 10 percent of their market value.
This was a very cynical ploy by Mr. Chubais to sacrifice the interests of the state of Russia, the interests of the national treasury and therefore of the citizens of Russia for political purposes. The reason was that he wanted to get the oligarchs' support for reelecting Yeltsin in 1996. He essentially gave them Russia's dozen best exporters in return for an ironclad commitment that these people would support Yeltsin and finance his campaign in 1996.
According to Janine Wedel, “the only foreign entitles allowed to participate” were “the Harvard Management Company (H.M.C.), which invests the university’s endowment, and billionaire speculator George Soros,” who became “significant shareholders in Novolipetsk, Russia’s second-largest steel mill, and Sidanko Oil, whose reserves exceed those of Mobil.”
It was ultimately determined that the various HIID projects “were never adequately monitored by [USAID] . . . In early 1996, [USAID’s] inspector general received incriminating documents about [HIID’s] activities in Russia and began investigating.” Shleifer and Hay were alleged to have been “engaged in activities ‘for private gain,’” allegedly using their “positions to profit from investments in the Russian securities markets and other private enterprises,” and were investigated. They were ultimately cleared on all counts.
Below is a chart comparing the auction value of the vouchers and loans prior to the oligarchs’ consolidation with the implied value after consolidation, once the companies were listed on the Russian stock exchange in 1997:
That was Russia in the 1990s. A handful of oligarchs - with the assistance of American bureaucrats and academics - looted the country’s wealth, consolidated power, and immiserated a people who had just mounted “the greatest bloodless revolution in history” by throwing off the yoke of 70 years of Communism. And what did the people who renounced total Communism and ended the Cold War get in exchange from America? Their stake in the country’s industry confiscated, a massive loss of life expectancy, and crony, gangster capitalism imposed by the Harvard Boys. We could have helped our new friends in Russia get on their feet; we looted their homeland instead. So much for rising tides and all those boats.
Meanwhile, NATO Expands and Destroys a Country
Amid all this Russian misery, America was doing reasonably well. People were talking about a “peace dividend,” and there was even talk of reducing military spending now that the great Red Menace was no more.
As journalist Andrew Cockburn details in his book, Spoils of War, the collapse of the Soviet Union was an “existential threat” to the War industry. “By the early 1990s, research and procurement contracts had fallen to about half what they’d been in the previous decades.” In 1993, William Perry, Clinton’s deputy defense secretary, “summoned a group of industry titans to an event that came to be known as the Last Supper.” At that meeting, he informed the defense contractors and weapons manufacturers that “ongoing budget cuts mandated the drastic consolidation.” So “Northrop brought Grumman, Raytheon bought E-Systems," “Boeing bought Rockwell’s defense division,” and Martin-Marietta merged with Lockheed, becoming the “largest arms company on earth.”
Military spending did in fact briefly decrease in the early/mid 1990s in the U.S. So what did the U.S. War merchants do? They sought out new markets abroad. One “especially promising” market was Eastern Europe and the former members of the now dissolved Warsaw Pact. The only problem was the Bush I administration’s promise that NATO would not expand into Eastern Europe.
That problem didn’t last for long. In 1996, the Congress passed the NATO Enlargement Facilitation Act, which declared it was now U.S. policy to “assist the transition to full membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) of emerging democracies in Central and Eastern Europe.” Specifically, the Act named “Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, Moldova, and Ukraine,” as well as “Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic” as countries in need of U.S. “support [for] the full and active participation of these countries in activities that will qualify them for NATO membership.” Why this support was needed, and how NATO membership would “promote security” rather than undermine it, was not specified.
U.S. President, alleged rapist, Iran-Contra drug dealer (see also here), murderer (see also here and here), and Jeffrey Epstein associate (see also here, here, and here), Bill Clinton gave a speech that same year in which he stated (emphasis added below):
We have to resist those who believe that now that the Cold War is over the United States can completely return to focusing on problems within our borders and basically ignore those beyond our borders.
That escapism is not available to us because at the end of the Cold War, America truly is the world's indispensable nation. There are times when only America can make the difference between war and peace, between freedom and repression, between hope and fear. We cannot and should not try to be the world's policeman. But where our interests and values are clearly at stake, and where we can make a difference, we must act and lead.
. . .
Nowhere are our interests more engaged than in Europe. When Europe is at peace, our security is strengthened. When Europe prospers, so does America . . . With our help, the forces of reform in Europe's newly free nations have laid the foundations of democracy. They have political parties and free elections, an independent media, civilian control of the military. We've helped them to develop successful market economies, and now our moving from aid to trade and investment.
Look at what has been achieved by our common efforts. In the seven years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, two thirds of Russia's economy has moved from the heavy grip of the state into private hands [a very few hands]
. . .
The bedrock of our common security remains NATO . . . I came to office convinced that NATO can do for Europe's East what it did for Europe's West: prevent a return to local rivalries, strengthen democracy against future threats, and create the conditions for prosperity to flourish. That's why the United States has taken the lead in a three part effort to build a new NATO for a new era. First, by adapting NATO with new capabilities for new missions. Second, by opening its doors to Europe's emerging democracies. Third, by building a strong and cooperative relationship between NATO and Russia.
At the same time, a new lobbying group had emerged onto the scene - the Committee to Expand Nato. Founded in 1995, its President, Bruce P. Jackson, was a former Army intelligence officer, Pentagon official, and investment banker. He also - coincidentally - was the vice president for strategy and planning at Lockheed Martin (also coincidentally, Bruce P. Jackson would later serve as Chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which was formed in 2002 as “a distinguished group of Americans [lobbyists, Warhawks, and similar sickos and freaks with a financial interest in War]” who wanted to “free Iraq from Saddam Hussein [and make billions of dollars doing so]”).
The purpose of Bruce Jackson’s group was aptly summarized in the headline of a New York Times article published in 1997, titled “Arms Makers See Bonanza In Selling NATO Expansion.”6
The article quotes our friend, Bruce Jackson, and notes that, “Defense contractors are acting like globe-hopping diplomats to encourage the expansion of NATO, which will create a huge market for their wares. Billions of dollars are at stake in the next global arms bazaar: weapons sales to Central European nations invited to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.”
The article goes on to note that arms sales were already being consummated by the biggest weapons manufacturers in anticipation of NATO’s imminent expansion: “Lockheed Martin wants its F-16 fighters to replace the old Soviet-made MIG-21’s in the hangars of Central Europe. Norman R. Augustine, Lockheed Martin’s chief executive, toured Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania and Slovenia in April, drumming up business and supporting the largest possible expansion of NATO. In Bucharest, following through on an $82 million radar contract, he supported Romania’s entry.”
In May, “Bell Helicopter Textron’s chairman, Webb Joiner, also promoted Romania’s bid as he sealed a $1 billion deal to sell the Romanians marine attack helicopters.”
These purchases - by poor countries subsisting off IMF loans - were of course subsidized and partly financed by the American taxpayer.
Not everybody was thrilled about NATO’s proposed expansion at the time. Indeed, as Bruce Jackson himself acknowledged in an interview years later:
When we started in 1995, around 70% of editorial boards and 80% of think-tanks were on the record as being opposed to NATO expansion. There was concern Russia would go ballistic if we did expand NATO east . . . [I]t took us considerable amounts of work. We organized well over 1,000 meetings with senators and Congress. By 1999, we won 89% of the vote. With the second round, almost all the effort came from the countries themselves, trying to accelerate their own reforms and not be left out.
It was not just editorial boards and think-tanks that opposed NATO expansion. On June 26, 1997, a group of 50 prominent foreign policy experts, former Senators, retired military officers, diplomats, and Dwight D. Eisenhower’s granddaughter penned an open letter to the Clinton administration, in which they stated “that the current U.S. led effort to expand NATO, the focus of the recent Helsinki and Paris Summits, is a policy error of historic proportions.”
The authors went on:
NATO expansion will decrease allied security and unsettle European stability, [in part because such expansion] continues to be opposed across the entire [Russian] political spectrum, will strengthen the nondemocratic opposition, [and] undercut those who favor reform and cooperation with the West . . . Russia does not now pose a threat to its western neighbors and the nations of Central and Eastern Europe are not in danger. For this reason, and the others cited above, we believe that NATO expansion is neither necessary nor desirable and that this ill-conceived policy can and should be put on hold.
George Kinnan similarly warned the same year “that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era . . . Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered by the end of the cold war, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom in some?” (Emphasis added).
George Kinnan further complained in an interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (emphasis added below):
I think it is the beginning of a new cold war . . . I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely . . . I think it was a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else . . . 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.
Even William Perry, Clinton’s defense secretary, would admit years later:
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. At that time we were working closely with Russia and they were beginning to get used to the idea that Nato could be a friend rather than an enemy . . . but they were very uncomfortable about having NATO right up on their border and they made a strong appeal for us not to go ahead with that.
Of course, NATO expansion happened anyway. The Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland were admitted into the “defensive” alliance on March 12, 1999. Barely two weeks later, on March 24, NATO - after failing to obtain authorization from the UN Security Council - began a relentless 78-day bombing campaign against Serbia, in which it dropped cluster bombs and depleted uranium in a “humanitarian intervention” that killed at least two thousand civilians, blew up a “passenger train, a religious procession, a refugee column, a vacuum cleaner factory, marketplaces, apartment courtyards, the Swiss embassy in Belgrade and the Chinese embassy as well.”
This indiscriminate, offensive NATO bombing was justified on alleged claims of genocide by Russia’s ally, Serbia, which were later debunked by the UN World Court. In conducting that illegal bombing, NATO was allying itself with the al Qaeda and bin Ladenite-infested Kosovo Liberation Army (the “KLA”) (in the 1990s, “the Pentagon flew thousands of al-Qaeda mujahideen, often accompanied by US Special Forces, from Central Asia to Europe to reinforce Bosnian Muslims as they fought the Serbs . . . when the Bosnian war ended in 1995 the United States, the United States was faced with the problem of thousands of Islamist warriors on European soil. Many of them joined the burgeoning Kosovo Liberation Army.”)
NATO forces occupy Kosovo to this day. Russia was said to have perceived NATO’s actions there “as a deliberate humiliation.” Those actions more importantly set the precedent that outside powers can attack a sovereign country and redraw its borders under the guise of protecting local populations, which was the same justification proffered by President Vladimir Putin in his invasion of Ukraine.
NATO (remember, this is supposedly a defensive organization) would undertake similar aggressive action in the years to come, including invading and occupying Afghanistan from 2001 to 2021 (as a result of that 20 year occupation in which thousands have died, the U.S. and NATO succeeded in replacing the Taliban with the Taliban) and destroying Libya and bombing its civilians in 2011 (NATO's humanitarian intervention in that country resulted in the return of open air slave markets to the erstwhile most prosperous country in Africa).7
The Bush II Years - More NATO Expansion, Coups, and More Militarism
George W. Bush ran on the promise of a “humble” foreign policy, in contrast to Clinton’s policies that he correctly criticized as “overcommitting our military around the world.”
Less than a year into his first term, however, Bush launched a full-scale invasion (jointly with NATO) into Afghanistan after the September 11, 2001 attacks, which were planned in Malaysia, Yemen, Hamburg, Germany, and the United States, and were carried out by fifteen Saudis, two Emiratis, an Egyptian, and one guy from Lebanon.
That same year, Bush unilaterally withdrew the United States from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty that had been signed by the Soviet Union and the U.S. in 1972. The purpose of that treaty was to end the arms race by “limiting homeland missile defenses, thus reducing pressures on the superpowers to build more nuclear weapons.” The aim of that treaty was a good one, as the use of less than one percent of the world’s nuclear weapons “could disrupt the global climate and threaten as many as two billion people with starvation in a nuclear famine,” and an all-out exchange between the U.S. and Russia would destroy all organized human life on earth.
But Bush tore up that treaty, absurdly stating that it “hinders our government’s ability to develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue-state missile attacks.”
The Bush administration also launched a series of so-called “color revolutions” in a number of countries in Russia’s backyard, including the Rose Revolution in Georgia in 2003 (see also here), the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, and the (failed) Denim Revolution in Belarus in 2005.
As the Washington Post acknowledged in the 1990s (see footnote 3 below), these so-called “revolutions” are really just U.S.-sponsored coups backed by the CIA, the NED, USAID, the Open Society Foundation, and other U.S. government-backed NGOs.
Indeed, writing in 2004 about the Orange Revolution in Ukraine - which ousted the Russia-friendly elected president Victor Yanukovych in favor the Western-friendly Viktor Yushchenko - Michael McFaul, former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and absolute psycho, acknowledged as much, writing:
Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. 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. The U.S. Agency for International Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance Foundation did the same.
As an article in the Guardian in 2004 similarly acknowledged:
[T]he campaign [in Ukraine] is an American creation, a sophisticated and brilliantly conceived exercise in western branding and mass marketing that, in four countries in four years has been used to try to salvage rigged elections.
. . .
Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.
Richard Miles, the US ambassador in Belgrade, played a key role. And by last year, as US ambassador in Tbilisi, he repeated the trick in Georgia, coaching Mikhail Saakashvili in how to bring down Eduard Shevardnadze.
Ten months after the success in Belgrade, the US ambassador in Minsk, Michael Kozak, a veteran of similar operations in central America, notably in Nicaragua, organised a near identical campaign to try to defeat the Belarus hardman, Alexander Lukashenko.
That one failed. "There will be no Kostunica in Belarus," the Belarus president declared, referring to the victory in Belgrade.
But experience gained in Serbia, Georgia and Belarus has been invaluable in plotting to beat the regime of Leonid Kuchma in Kiev.
The operation - engineering democracy through the ballot box and civil disobedience - is now so slick that the methods have matured into a template for winning other people's elections.
Bush also went back on his daddy’s promise, adding Russia’s neighbors Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia to NATO’s ranks in 2004. He also announced plans to build so-called “missile defense” systems in Poland and the Czech Republic, which defense experts universally acknowledge are dual-use and can easily be outfitted with Tomahawk cruise missiles tipped with nuclear payloads.
And in 2008, in the last days of his presidency, Bush “vowed” to “press for Ukraine and Georgia to be allowed to start the process of joining NATO despite resistance from Russia and skepticism from the alliance’s European members.”
Speaking at a NATO summit in Bucharest in April 2008, Putin addressed the proposed expansion, and warned (emphasis added below):
But if I speak about Georgia and Ukraine, it is clear that the matter concerns not only security issues . . . [I]n Ukraine, one third are ethnic Russians . . . There are regions, where only the Russian population lives, for instance, in the Crimea. 90% are Russians. Generally speaking, Ukraine is a very complicated state. Ukraine, in the form it currently exists, was created in the Soviet times, it received its territories from Poland – after the Second World war, from Czechoslovakia, from Romania – and at present not all the problems have been solved as yet in the border region with Romania in the Black Sea. Then, it received huge territories from Russia in the east and south of the country. It is a complicated state formation. If we introduce into it NATO problems, other problems, it may put the state on the verge of its existence. Complicated internal political problems are taking place there. We should act also very-very carefully. We do not have any right to veto, and, probably, we do not pretend to have. But I want that all of us, when deciding such issues, realize that we have there our interests as well. Well, seventeen million Russians currently live in Ukraine. Who may state that we do not have any interests there? South, the south of Ukraine, completely, there are only Russians.
. . .
We have been calm and responsible about these problems. We are not trying to provoke anything, we have been acting very carefully, but we ask our partners to act reasonably as well.
Putin also spoke to President Bush directly when Bush visited him at his Black Sea resort at Sochi. There, he reportedly told Bush: “the push to offer Ukraine and Georgia NATO membership was crossing Russia’s ‘red lines.’” He also stated that “Russia viewed ‘the appearance of a powerful military bloc’ on its borders ‘as a direct threat’ to its security. ‘The claim that this process is not directed against Russia will not suffice,’ Mr. Putin said. ‘National security is not based on promises.’”
Russia’s claims of “red lines” regarding Ukraine were taken seriously inside the administration, even though they were ultimately ignored. In a leaked cable from 2008 titled “Nyet Means Nyet: Russia’s NATO Enlargement Redlines, current CIA director William Burns wrote (emphasis added below):
Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains "an emotional and neuralgic" issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. Additionally, the GOR and experts continue to claim that Ukrainian NATO membership would have a major impact on Russia's defense industry, Russian-Ukrainian family connections, and bilateral relations generally.
. . .
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 . . . 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.
As former CIA Director, Robert Gates, acknowledged, “trying to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO was truly overreaching.” It was a case of “recklessly ignoring what the Russians considered their own vital national interests.”
Obama and Trump - Another Coup, More Escalation
The Obama administration was essentially a continuation of Bush II’s, especially with respect to the U.S.’s policy of instigating color revolutions and bombing the Middle East.
Obama added Albania and Croatia to NATO in 2009, and in 2014, his administration backed another violent coup in Ukraine, in which the democratically elected president Viktor Yanukovych (who the U.S. had successfully ousted back in 2004), was ousted yet again and forced to flee for his life.
As set forth in detail in Branko Marcetic’s Jacobin article, “A US-Backed, Far Right-Led Revolution in Ukraine Helped Bring Us to the Brink of War,” Ukraine in 2013 was “in a tricky spot.” The EU was urging Yanukovych to take a multi-billion-dollar IMF loan as a condition for further integration into Europe, though that loan came with onerous conditions, including freezing wages and pension increases, and cutting public spending and gas subsidies. Putin stepped in and offered a similarly sized loan with no strings attached, which Yanukovych quickly accepted.
Yanukovych’s rejection of the EU/IMF deal sparked protests in Kyiv’s Maidan square. Importantly, however, the protestors did not have majority support. The Russian-speaking East of Ukraine supported Yanukovich and his deal with Russia. After an initial crackdown on the protestors by the Yanukovich regime, the protestors responded with violence themselves, and the movement was quickly hijacked by far-right, neo-Nazi groups like the Svoboda party and Right Sector. These groups occupied government buildings, mounted organized attacks on police, and engaged in sniper attacks against protestors and police alike (see also here). In one instance, right wing protestors stormed a building occupied by Pro-Yanukovich counter-protestors, lit it on fire, and burned 31 people alive (see also here).
As Marcetic reports, “US officials, unhappy with the scuttled EU deal, saw a similar chance [as with the 2004 Orange Revolution] in the Maidan protests. Just two months before they broke out, the NED’s then president . . . wrote that ‘the opportunities are considerable, and there are important ways Washington could help.’ In practice, this meant funding groups like New Citizen, which the Financial Times reported ‘played a big role in getting the protest up and running.’”
Senators John McCain and Chris Murphy traveled to Ukraine and met with the fascist leader of the Svoboda party, while our old friend Victoria Nuland (see my prior post on U.S. bioweapons here) passed out cookies.
A leaked phone call between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador Jeffrey Pyatt in early 2014 shows the two of them single-handedly picking the post-coup government (“Yats is the guy . . . Fuck the EU,” said Nuland, referring to Arseniy Yatsenyuk, who coincidentally was installed as Prime Minister of Ukraine on February 27, 2014). The video of the call is here, so you can listen for yourself.
Ever since, Ukraine has been embroiled in a Civil War, which prior to Russia’s invasion had killed 14,000 people (mostly as a result of shelling of the Russia-supporting Donbass region in the East by the post-coup regime). Russia annexed Crimea in 2015 to secure its naval base from NATO control after a somewhat dubious referendum in which Crimea voted to join Russia.8 Notably, the people of the Donbass held their own referendum as well, in which they overwhelmingly voted to secede from the country and regime that had just deposed their elected president.
In an attempt to put an end to the violence in the East, France, Germany, and Russia brokered the Minsk Accords in 2014-2015. This agreement was designed to lead to a ceasefire, the withdrawal of weapons from the frontlines, and the granting of self-government to the Donbass. The Kyiv government never abided by the Minsk Accords; they just kept shelling.
As Benjamin Abelow describes in his book, How the West Brought War to Ukraine,9 "After Russia took control of Crimea, the U.S. began a massive program of military aid to Ukraine. According to the Congressional Research Service, approximately $4 billion (mostly through the State Department and the Department of Defense) were funneled to Ukraine between 2014 and 2022. One objective of this funding was to improve interoperability with NATO.”
In 2016, the U.S. installed an anti-ballistic missile system in Romania. “Though ostensibly defensive, the ABM system uses the Mark-41 ‘Aegis’ missile launchers, which can accommodate a variety of missile types . . . [including] nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile,” which has “a range of 1,500 miles, [and] can strike Moscow and other targets deep inside Russia.” Another Aegis site is currently under construction in Poland.
As Abelow writes, “[t]he American response to Mr. Putin’s concerns about the ABM sites has been to assert that the United States does not intend to configure the launchers for offensive use. But this response requires the Russians to trust America’s stated intentions, even in a crisis, rather than to judge the threat by the potential of the systems” (emphasis added). Given the years of broken promises and expansionary aggression, it is difficult to blame Russia for its distrust.
After Trump assumed the U.S. presidency, U.S. and NATO escalation continued. For the first time, in 2017, the U.S. began to sell lethal weapons to Ukraine, which President Obama had refused to do.
When Trump threatened to pause those lethal weapons sales, the House of Representatives impeached him for it. As House Impeachment Manager, Representative Adam Schiff, stated during the impeachment proceedings, “the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there and we don’t have to fight Russia here.”
This was before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Gee, I wonder what those dual-use Aegis launchers are really for?
If anyone had any doubts as to the U.S.’s true intentions for Russia, in 2019, the RAND Corporation (a U.S. government-funded “think tank”) published a paper titled “Overextending and Unbalancing Russia,” in which it argued that the U.S. should impose “geopolitical cost-imposing measures,” including:
“Providing lethal aid to Ukraine”; and
“Increasing support to the Syrian rebels” (though RAND also observed that this “could jeopardize other U.S. policy priorities, such as combating radical Islamic terrorism, and could risk further destabilizing the entire region”).
RAND also recommended:
“Diminishing faith in the Russian electoral system”;
“Encouraging domestic protests and other nonviolent resistance”;
“Reposturing bombers within easy striking range of key Russian strategic targets”; and
“Deploying additional tactical nuclear weapons to locations in Europe and Asia.”
Trump also followed Bush II’s lead and tore up some more arms control treaties, this time, the 1987 Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty and the 1992 Open Skies Treaty.
As President Putin stated prior to his invasion (emphasis added):
After the U.S. destroyed the INF Treaty, the Pentagon has been openly developing many land-based attack weapons, including ballistic missiles that are capable of hitting targets at a distance of up to 5,500 km.
If deployed in Ukraine such systems will be able to hit targets in Russia’s entire European part. The 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.
It is like a knife to the throat.
In addition to tearing up decades old, world-stabilizing, nuclear-War-preventing treaties, the Trump administration and NATO in 2020 conducted a live-fire training exercise 70 miles from Russia’s border in Estonia. Similar exercises would be conducted by Biden in 2021.
Biden - Things Reach a “Boiling Point”
As Abelow describes, “in July 2021, Ukraine and America co-hosted a major naval exercise in the Black Sea region involving navies from 32 countries. Operation Sea Breeze almost provoked Russia to fire at a British naval destroyer that deliberately entered what Russia considers its territorial waters.”
NATO conducted another exercise in Estonia in 2021 in which it fired rockets to simulate an attack on air defense targets inside Russia.
In a June 2021 meeting, NATO issued a joint statement in which it stated, “We reiterate the decision made at the 2008 Bucharest Summit that Ukraine will become a member of the Alliance.”
As John Mearsheimer wrote in the Economist, “Unsurprisingly, Moscow found this evolving situation intolerable and began mobilizing its army on Ukraine’s border to signal its resolve to Washington. But it had no effect . . . As Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister, put it: ‘We reached our boiling point.’”
Writing in Foreign Policy in December 2021, the Russian Ambassador to the U.S. warned that “[t]he situation is extremely dangerous,” and further stated:
Everything has its limits. If our partners [the U.S. and NATO countries] keep constructing military-strategic realities imperiling the existence of our country, we will be forced to create similar vulnerabilities for them. We have come to the point when we have no room to retreat. Military exploration of Ukraine by NATO member states is an existential threat for Russia.
Mearsheimer explained what happened next:
Russia demanded a written guarantee that Ukraine would never become a part of NATO and that the alliance remove the military assets it had deployed in eastern Europe since 1997. The subsequent negotiations failed, as [U.S. Secretary of State] Mr. Blinken made clear: “There is no change. There will be no change.” A month later, Mr. Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine to eliminate the threat he saw from NATO.
It’s All About Money
So, that’s the history. As you can see, the current conflict is entirely unnecessary and could have been easily avoided if the U.S. had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns and agreed to the reasonable request to take Ukraine’s NATO membership off the table. (In fact, Ukraine’s Zelensky and Vladimir Putin had tentatively agreed to do just that just two months into the invasion, but NATO sent Boris Johnson to scuttle the deal because “the West isn’t ready for the war to end.” (see also here)). NATO serves no purpose now that the Soviet Union no longer exists, and Russia and the U.S. have enough nuclear weapons between them to destroy the world many times over, so there is no point to any such alliance anyway (Russia technically has more nukes). Better yet, the U.S. could have simply left the region entirely, stopped meddling in other countries’ affairs, especially in Russia’s backyard, and just left everybody the hell alone. But there’s no money in that.
So, who’s making money?
Well, the military contractors and weapons manufacturers are sure to make out all right. Our old friend Bruce Jackson and his Committee to Expand NATO certainly got what they wanted. NATO expanded, and with the outbreak of the War in Ukraine there is a steady demand for the products of the manufacturers of War.
As Sarah Lazare noted in a column on January 27, 2022, “[i]n calls with investors, Raytheon and Lockheed Martin boasted that the worsening conflict is helping profits.” After the War broke out, Business Insider revealed that “[a]t least 20 federal lawmakers or their spouses hold stock in Raytheon Technologies and Lockheed Martin, which manufacture the weapons Western allies are sending Ukraine to fight Russian invaders . . . The stock holdings by members of Congress come as Congress, on Thursday, approved $40 billion in defense and other aid to Ukraine. Both companies' stock — especially that of Lockheed Martin — have risen since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24.”
In observing that Raytheon had been awarded a $624 million contract for 1,400 Stinger missiles, and Lockheed had similarly won a $309 million contract for Javelin missiles, Investor’s Business Daily noted on July 8, 2022 that “NOC [Northrop Grumman] stock is up 20%, LMT [Lockheed Martin] stock is up about 17%, and RTX [Raytheon] is up 11% so far this year, while the broader stock market has struggled.”
Perhaps that explains why the invitations for a party hosted by the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington D.C., on December 8, 2022, looked like this:
But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was definitely unprovoked.
The War in Ukraine - and the geopolitical and historical context in which it takes place - is the single most important issue in the world. The current conflict poses an existential threat not just to Ukraine or to Russia, but to all of humanity. We narrowly avoided a full-scale nuclear exchange in 1962. Let us hope we can do the same here. It is time to end this conflict now. It should have never happened in the first place. Until we change the incentives and dismantle the military-industrial complex that creates, sustains, and benefits from these conflicts, however, everything points toward more escalation and brinksmanship - all in the name of profits for the very few at the expense of the very many, including most directly innocent civilians in Ukraine. Of course, all of us are at risk, including those very few, who, blinded by greed and indifferent to human life, are dragging us all toward Armageddon.
U.S. diplomats and politicians have spent decades lying about these assurances, claiming that they were either never given or that they didn’t count because they weren’t written down. But recently declassified records in George Washington University’s National Security Archive (available here) show that a “cascade of assurances” against NATO expansion were given by multiple officials in multiple countries, at the highest levels, including George H.W. Bush, Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, among others.
Journalist and Russia expert Anne Williamon provided the best overview and analysis of the “bruising economic rape carried out by corrupt Russian politicians and businessmen, assisted by Bush and (especially) Clinton administrations engaged in political payoffs to Wall Street bankers and others, and by ineptitude and greed on the part of the U.S. Treasury and the Harvard Institute for International Development, assisted by fellow travelers and manipulators at Nordex, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Federal Reserve.” She testified before the Committee on Banking and Financial Services of the U.S. House of Representatives on September 21, 1999. That testimony is available here.
As Washington Post columnists, and consummate deep state insider, David Ignatius wrote in 1991, the old dirty covert work of the CIA had been “privatized” after the end of the Cold War: “That’s especially true in the realm of what used to be called ‘propaganda’ and can now simply be called information. The CIA worked hard in the old days to draw foreign newspapers and magazines into its web, so as to counter Soviet disinformation. Frank Wisner, the head of CIA covert operations during the mid-1950s, once remarked that he could play his media assets like a ‘mighty Wurlitzer.’ Today, the mighty Wurlitzer actually exists. It’s called CNN.” As Ignatius reported, in this age of “overt” action, non-governmental organizations (“NGOs”) such as “the American Committee on U.S. Soviet Relations,” “the Soros Foundation,” “the Center for East-West Security Studies,” the “Atlantic Council,” “the National Endowment for Democracy [NED],” and other entities that are “funded by the U.S. Congress [including USAID]” do a lot of the work out in the open that the CIA once did in the shadows. As Allen Weinstein, founder of the Center for Democracy was quoted in that article, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”
During the privatization era, many of the Harvard Boys exploited their ties with Chubais and the government to enrich themselves at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer and the Russian people. Hay, for example, used his influence to set up his girlfriend, Elizabeth Hebeter, with a mutual fund, Pallada Asset Management, in Russia (the first to be licensed in the country), and Shleifer helped his wife, Nancy Zimmerman, set up a Russian bond trading firm.
Klebnikov was particularly critical of Berezovsky, who himself was instrumental in the subsequent rise of current Russian President Vladimir Putin. Among other things, Klebnikov exposed Berezovsky’s looting of Russian air carrier Aeroflot: “What Berezovsky did, specifically, is set up a company that would pay Aeroflot’s foreign bills. Aeroflot had fuel bills, landing fees at foreign airports, leasing fees for foreign aircraft, etc. This little company owned and set up by Berezovsky and his top manager at Aeroflot paid Aeroflot's bills in the West. The money they did that with was considered a loan with an effective dollar-based annual interest rate of 50 percent. But they weren't satisfied with that profit margin, so they in turn contracted with another company, also owned by Berezovsky and his top managers, and registered in Ireland. They had this company give a loan to the first company, charging an interest rate of 30 percent. Effectively, you had a kind of daisy chain of ridiculous, extortionate loans being granted to Aeroflot. You ended up with Aeroflot having to pay a 95 percent dollar-based interest rate on hundreds of millions of dollars of completely unnecessary loans given to it by financial companies owned and operated by Berezovsky and top Aeroflot managers.”
The Times piece was co-authored by Tim Weiner, who wrote a reasonably good, in-depth book on the history of the CIA.
As Vice News reported following the Wikileaks disclosures of thousands of State Department cables, the alleged humanitarian concerns that prompted NATO and the U.S.’s intervention in Libya were completely fake: “An April 2, 2011 memo titled ‘France's client/Q's gold’ quotes ‘knowledgeable individuals’ with insider information about French President Nicolas Sarkozy's motivation for bombing Libya. The military campaign, the anonymous sources say, was designed to quash plans by Gaddafi to use $7 billion in secret gold and silver to prop up a new African currency. The French worried the move would undercut the currency guaranteed by the French treasury, known as CFA franc, that's widely used in West Africa and acts as a strong link between France and many of its former African colonies. After French intelligence officials got wind of this secret plan, the Blumenthal memo reports, Sarkozy freaked out: ‘This was one of the factors that influenced [his] decision to commit France to the attack on Libya.’”
Hillary Clinton later boasted upon learning of Gaddafi’s capture, sodomization, and assassination by al Qaeda-affiliated rebels, stating, “We came, we saw, he died [cackle, cackle cackle]!” (see video here). It is commonly acknowledged that Barack Obama was persuaded to intervene in that country on the insistence of three of his most hawkish female advisors, Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, and Susan Rice. Barack Obama later stated the destruction of Libya was the “worst mistake” of his presidency. Hillary Clinton has been making the rounds arguing for more War with Russia; Samantha Power is currently the director of USAID; and Susan Rice - having accomplished so much in the area of foreign policy - is now the White House’s Domestic Policy Advisor.
As John Mearsheimer wrote about Russia’s annexation of Crimea (citing Michael McFaul): “Mr. Putin’s seizure of Crimea was not planned for long: it was an impulsive move in response to the coup that overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian leader . . . Once the crisis [of Crimea] started, however, American and European policymakers could not admit they had provoked it by trying to integrate Ukraine into the West. They declared the real source of the problem was Russia’s revanchism and its desire to dominate if not conquer Ukraine.”
See specifically Chapter 2 for the period 2014 through 2022.