By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 26, 2020

SILVER SPRING—The seventy-fifth anniversary of V-J Day—Victory over Japan Day, the day the Allies, including and mostly America, beat the Imperial Japanese Empire into announced surrender and submission to end World War II—should have been a true moment of somber yet hopeful reflection.  And yet, in the American press, overwhelmed by extremes of economic fallout, what feels like daily unprecedented political shenanigans (e.g., our own government sabotaging the U.S. Post Service), and deadly coronavirus antics that have exceeded the absurd and flirted with the dystopian—there was scant coverage.  I checked in on CNN—in some ways the flagship of American television news coverage—on and off throughout the day, and did not see one minute of coverage of the anniversary of the end of Pacific War and World War II overall.  There was not much online or social media either, at least, not much that was featured.  I will not say there was nothing on The New York Times homepage, but I did not notice any stories if there were and if so, they were not featured terribly prominently.

This felt even worse than the dearth of coverage for the one-hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I in Europe, on which I have previously written for the Modern War Institute at West Point.

It is, perhaps, sadly fitting that an American leadership that places little stock in international cooperation and alliances and has put the nation in such dire straits that its ability to pause and reflect on such a pivotal historical moment—one that was the forge of a nearly unprecedented era of alliances, peace, and cooperation—was compromised, but it is not at all surprising.  Leaders tend to be one of the major forces characterizing their nations’ culture while they lead, and the idea that America as a whole—its media overall, its people—would have been particularly reflective on this moment was, sadly, not realistic.

And yet, here we are, living in 2020 under an international order that in many ways is still defined by the final denouement of World War II in Japan, the immediate aftermath of that, and the “Long Peace,” to cite historian John Lewis Gaddis, that humanity as a whole has been extremely fortunate to live under since the end of the war.  On any day, then, it would be wise to reflect on the events and legacy surrounding V-J Day, but the passing of the seventy-fifth anniversary is an excuse to call for, and hopefully hold, the public’s attention on the subject.

Below are my own top takeaways as someone who has studied and written about history, policy, politics, security, and international affairs for two decades.

End Big for Better, and Long(er)-Term, Results

One of the more recent trends in armed conflict is that conflicts do not seem to end.  War has essentially been ongoing in Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Somalia, the Maghreb, and even with Mexico’s far-more-deadly-than-you-think drug war continuously for years.  War has been on-and-off in Libya, between Israel and various terrorist movements, in Iraq, in Colombia, between Turkey and Kurds, and in numerous other places on lesser scales throughout the world, conflicts that if are not active now have been recently and could be any day again; they may swing between civil war and insurgency and terrorism or any combination of these, and, increasingly, such conflicts seem intractable.

One of the many complex driving forces behind these dynamics is that the far-more connected and globalized world makes it much easier for extremists, weapons traffickers, and those wanting to join in a common cause in some way to have more ability than ever to come together.

A major related driver is the internet, which fuels this connectivity and extremism in general, both through the ease of the use of and accessibility of it and the way in which it and major tech companies foster extremism, division, hate, and violence along with a proliferation of misinformation and disinformation; both state and non-state actors further these extremist trends still more so.

Another major force behind longer-lasting conflicts is that the end of the Cold War, which suppressed many long-simmering conflicts from erupting, has allowed a good number of these conflicts to boil over.  Furthering this trend is the American and overall Western reluctance to intervene in foreign conflict after the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan under the Bush Administration.  The lessons of the possibilities of competently executed interventions, like those seen in Bosnia and Kosovo and East Timor in the last few decades in the wake of the world’s failure to act in Rwanda to prevent genocide there, seem to have currently been lost, as if there is not a sound middle ground between doing little-to-nothing, as in Rwanda, and in doing far too much, as in the case of Iraq in 2003.

What we are seeing now, more than anything else, is conflict in which both sides find some sort of foreign support—ranging from random volunteers identifying with the conflict to formal state support and intervention from foreign militaries—but in which the outside forces generally do not intervene forcefully enough or with enough resources to end the conflict; conflict in which the natural course of the conflict—if there is an imbalance of power, and in which one side would triumph enough over the other to end the conflict—seems to never take hold but where, instead, though foreign backers do not want to be terribly involved, they stay involved enough to keep the factions they support just powerful enough to keep on fighting, to keep either hope for their fighters alive or at least a sense they if they keep fighting they will be better off than capitulating or seeking peace.  And, as I have noted recently with Afghanistan, even if there is a short-term surge of forces, its effects will usually be limited and the enemy knows to simply wait it out until your surge of forces does what it will and leaves.

There are different ways to end a war big, but ending small or with lukewarm support and effort or with a short-term mentality, as has often been the case in the recent conflicts mentioned above, seems to almost invariably lead to further conflict in the future, unless one is dealing with the happy experience of a very limited conflict with very limited hatred and very limited goals where each side can walk way with a sense of success.  In contrast, ending a war big can often produce much more lasting results: in Bosnia, a massive Western bombing campaign essentially forged peace that still holds throughout the states of the former Yugoslavia, with the exception of Kosovo, where the subsequent bombing campaign not only took care of that issue, but also brought about the downfall of the main instigator of genocide and ethnic cleansing throughout the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic.  In Balkan cases, there was robust support from the international community after the war, with troops on the ground, and there is still peace there today.

We can say this model was even more robustly implemented in Japan, Germany, Italy, and other places at the end of World War II, perhaps none more forcefully or successful than in Japan.  That is not to say we should be ending most wars with a pair of atomic bombs and a massive occupation (nor to suggest accepting without question the use of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, cities filled with civilians), but without a doubt, there was a massive commitment in 1945 to rebuilding Japan as a nation of peace and as a partner and an ally.  And the planning for the postwar world, including Japan, began almost as soon as the war started: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt tasked top officials with postwar planning at the end of 1941 and it began seriously in early 1942.

Today, Japan is one of America’s closest allies, has experienced peace and mostly prosperity since the end of World War II, and currently has the world’s third-largest GDP, only losing the second spot to China a decade ago.  Japan did not turn out this way by accident: it was a result in many ways of long-term commitment and planning as well as considerable resources, and there are today still many U.S. troops—many thousands on multiple bases—in Japan, even seventy-five years after its surrender and the war’s end.  The same can be said for Germany, South Korea, Italy, and the UK, all still U.S. allies and some of the most prosperous, peaceful nations on earth since 1945.

Essentially, you get what you put in when it comes to ending conflicts and creating a new order. 

Peace Is a Result of Equal Parts Politics and Security

Von Clausewitz’s maxim that “War is the continuation of policy [or politics] by other means” was true long before his time, is true today, and should be true forever.  Before the Bush Administration took out Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime in 2003, there was a famous lack of both respect for and implementation of prewar postwar planning when it came to the top Bush Administration officials calling the shots for Iraq in the first few years of the war, notably Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and other top political appointees loyal to him.  While not everything was smooth in postwar Japan, there were comparatively robust military and political efforts in Japan at the beginning of its occupation and a well-resourced, consistent effort and leadership for years after the war ended, so that the formal occupation did not end until almost seven years after the war ended (and then the troops hardly all went home). 

There was also a unity of leadership under Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who, for all his flaws he would (especially soon) display, was a source of stability and strength for both America and Japan during the occupation, with MacArthur having the wisdom to make serious adjustments when necessary, most notably during the so-called “reverse course.”  In contrast, Sec. Rumsfeld had essentially run Iraq into the ground and anything like a “reverse course” only occurred after he was replaced.  And while Gen. MacArthur may have been a military man, he displayed a keen understanding of the local needs and sensibilities, prioritizing sweeping political, legal, social, and economic reform, hardly content to view his mission as just a security or military one.  For Clausewitz, as Clayton Dennison notes in the Journal of Military and Strategic Studies, public opinion is the key to managing counterinsurgency, but where MacArthur was sensitive in key ways to local public opinion, Rumsfeld and his ideologically kindred spirits carrying out his will in Iraq and Afghanistan were not.,

Such a comprehensive approach was incredibly successful in the end, bringing about sweeping reform and, while hardly perfect and certainly complicated, overall made remarkable progress for both American interests and the Japanese people, who formed a genuine, serious alliance with the American people that persists until this day.  In the end, American planners—MacArthur hardly the least among them—realized that security did not exist in a vacuum, that any military planner who wanted to achieve success could not ignore politics or leave it to others as some sort of unrelated phenomenon.  Military occupations that ignore politics on the ground end on one of a narrow number of possibilities, if not utter failure, then a level of violence and resistance that requires such overwhelming force it often leads to massive destruction, depopulation, war crimes, or massacres to break the population or requires such a revolutionary change of course (and that often comes so late) that the damage can take a generation to undo, with the occupier (eventually) simply giving up and going home.

Dennison quotes Clausewitz’s line that “Wwr is no pastime; it is no mere joy in daring and winning, no place for irresponsible enthusiasts,” then promptly labels Sec. Rumsfeld and his crowd as “irresponsible enthusiasts.”  On the same page, Dennison agrees with Clausewitz’s observation that war is a “serious means” and politics is its serious “goal,” and that war “can never be considered in isolation from” politics.  Thus, war cannot be carelessly entered into or carelessly exited from, only approached seriously, and any serious approach understands that equally serious political efforts must both precede and follow any military action.  We clearly understood this with our approach to World War II and Japan within it and clearly failed to take this approach with our launching of the Iraq War in 2003.  The lessons from V-J Day presented themselves then and in recent decades, yet for most of the twenty-first century, the United States has engaged in most of its military actions in ways that seem to forget Clausewitz’s keen understanding of the relationship between war and politics, much to our detriment and that of our allies and the world, much to the delight of our enemies.  But it was different in 1945, and we are still reaping the rewards of the V-J Day approach today.

Hate Never Has to Be Forever; Any Enemy Can Become a Friend

A strain of thought has become prominent in some influential circles in the West (especially among conservatives) ever since political scientist Samuel Huntington’s essay The Clash of Civilizations? was published back in 1993.  This was, overall, a regressive, backwards, reductionist view, and journalist Thomas Friedman and others would later recognize that “the real clash today is actually not between civilizations, but within them.”  The real takeaway from this debate is that there are no distinct civilizations with which we are wholly incompatible, destined for perpetual conflict and eternal hatred, but that, instead, we can make peace—and become friends and even allies—with anyone, that no conflict is so intractable that it cannot be transcended.  And in all of American history, there is no greater testimony to these ideas and ideals than our conflict and subsequent friendship and alliance with Japan.  In this tale, V-J Day is the seminal moment on which all those ideas and ideals hinge.

A pair of books by historian John Dower is essential, here: his 1986 War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War—which won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was an American (now National) Book Award Finalist—and his 1999 Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II—which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Bancroft Prize, among others.  In his work, Dower takes us from the darkest depths of racial and religious hatred, atrocity, and mass murder to respect, friendship, and alliance.  For anyone born after the war who has experienced Japan or the Japanese in recent decades, it is almost impossible to imagine this world or this conflict between our peoples as it was then.  But it was as real, vicious, hate-filled, and blood-soaked as just about any conflict in world history, as Dower shows, and the relationship today between Japan and America is living proof that, no matter the depths of hatred and killing, there can always be a light at the end of the tunnel if we allow ourselves to look for, and eventually see, such a light.  Our current conflicts—whether the cold war between Republicans and Democrats or the real war between our nation and the likes of ISIS—could most certainly benefit from understanding what Dower catalogs. 

For Dower, writing in his preface to War Without Mercy,

…race hates and merciless fighting…had been so conspicuous in the war in Asia and the Pacific…The war hates themselves, however, seemed to disappear almost overnight–so quickly, in fact, that they are easily forgotten now.

In a world that continues to experience so much violence and racial hatred, such a dramatic transformation from bitter enmity to genuine cooperation is heartening, and thus the fading memories of the war pose a paradox. It is fortunate that people on all sides can put such a terrible conflict behind them, but dangerous to forget how easily war came about between Japan and the Western Allies, and how extraordinarily fierce and Manichaean it was. We can never hope to understand the nature of World War Two in Asia, or international and interracial conflict in general, if we fail to work constantly at correcting and re-creating the historical memory. At a more modest level, the significance of the occupation of Japan and postwar rapprochement between the Japanese and their former enemies can only be appreciated against the background of burning passions and unbridled violence that preceded Japan’s surrender in August 1945.

He elaborates on the inspiration we can take from this moment in history in Embracing Defeat: “The ease with which the great majority of Japanese were able to throw off a decade and a half of the most intense militaristic indoctrination…offers lessons in the limits of socialization and the fragility of ideology that we have seen elsewhere in this century in the collapse of totalitarian regimes.”

Indeed, it is hard to dispute MacArthur’s 1951 claim that “the Japanese people, since the war, have undergone the greatest reformation recorded in modern history,” and while America certainly is responsible for much of this reformation, so, too, are the Japanese.  For Dower, “the ideals of peace and democracy took root in Japan—not as a borrowed ideology or imposed vision, but as a lived experience and a seized opportunity.”  He adds soon after that “what matters is what the Japanese themselves made of their experience of defeat, then and thereafter; and, for a half century now, most of them have consistently made it the touchstone for affirming a commitment to ‘peace and democracy.’  This is the great mantra of postwar Japan.”  And it is a huge part of the crucial legacy of what V-J Day still means as a historical moment.

This tradition of turning enemies into true friends and allies is a hallmark of some of the most successful societies to inhabit the earth, and most notably before us among these—as I have noted in multiple publications—was the ancient Roman Republic, which measured against we are only the second-most successful republic in history.  Thus, the most successful societies in history know when to fight and when to make peace, and that making the best possible peace involves turning one’s enemies into friends and allies.  The example of Japan and the pivotal moment that was V-J Day shows that even the bitterest of foes can soon become friends.

Alliances are the Best Form of Defense

As the failed vision and tyranny of Soviet Communist swiftly collapsed, all the European Soviet-“allied” satellite states and half the European former Soviet Republics—allies and part of the Soviet Union only through sheer military domination, totalitarian state terror, and attempted indoctrination—ran away quickly from Russia and have since of their own volition joined the EU and NATO, the military alliance that has been the bane of much of the Soviet Union’s and current Russian President Vladimir Putin’s existence.  In fact, of the members of the Warsaw Pact—the military alliance founded by the USSR in response to NATO’s formation—all except non-formally-Soviet states are now NATO members, and three of the six European Soviet Republics—Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania—are in NATO and the EU.  Of the other three, Ukraine has been trying to hard get into the EU and NATO, though dramatic, massive Russian interference in Ukrainian politics—which I have detailed in an eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics—has considerably delayed and jeopardized these aspirations; Moldova has expressed strong interest in joining the EU; and, while until recently, it seemed Belarus was pretty safe from leaning towards the EU or NATO and away from Russia, a possible revolution unfolding there now trying to oust longtime dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko may change this.  Even in the Caucuses, the former Soviet Republic of Georgia has been eager to join the EU and NATO—two of the causes of the 2008 war with Russia—and is technically on track do so with NATO, though a dormant track.

Thus, recent history proves that the strength of many of the Soviet Union’s alliances were little more than skin deep.  And that is a major reason why the U.S. won the Cold War, in contrasting parallel with America’s alliances, the strength of which has been bone-deep, as also proven by recent history.  And while NATO often gets credit for being “the“ linchpin of the post-World War II international system set up by the United States, a strong argument can be made that the U.S.-Japan alliance is just as important a component of the postwar order and is even more impressive in that it was made between two countries that were very different culturally in ways that were not the case with America’s European allies.  Whereas the Soviets’ and Russia’s most important alliances crumbled at the end of the Cold War, America’s have remained strong, intensified, and only grown more numerous, even through the disastrous 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and still intact after nearly a full-term of, by far, the most anti-alliance, anti-NATO, anti-EU American presidential administration since NATO and the EU came into existence.

These arrangements—the security, political, and economic ties that were forged during and just after World War II by America and most of its wartime allies and defeated enemies—have defined the modern world and have become the bedrock of much of what has made the world a better place than the world that saw two world wars almost within two decades.  Despite some myopic neo-Marxist critics referring to this achievement derisively as the “neoliberal” world order, this world order produced a level and duration of peace, prosperity, and stability not seen since before the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the late fourth and early fifth century C.E.  Not only are we living under one of the longest periods of relative peace in world history, but, literally, billions of human beings have been raised out of poverty as a result of this system.  And in the immediate years after World War II, with so much uncertainty and turmoil confronting the world, the establishment of such a firm alliance between the U.S. and Japan became a steady yet inspiring rock on the world stage, fairly unique in world history.

While Russia seems incapable of understanding that it is better to be loved (or at least liked) and feared than to be just feared, the U.S. realizes that, through our historic network of global allies, we are stronger than we could ever be alone and stronger than any enemy nation who would stand against our collective might.  The ancient Roman Republic owed much of its success to what Arthur Eckstein, in his groundbreaking Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome, termed its “skill at alliance management,” which, for Eckstein, was the distinguishing feature of Rome’s over the “fearsome” “militarism” it shared with most rivals.  He expanded on this theme:

In part it meant extraordinary Roman skill at managing an ever-increasing network of non-Roman (i.e., foreign) allies. But the ability to assimilate and integrate non-Romans in one way or another into a Rome-centered state structure meant in turn that Rome eventually came to possess an exceptional competitive advantage over other polities in the ferocious struggle for security and power ongoing in the ancient Mediterranean—namely the ability to mobilize very large-scale social resources at a great level of intensity.

No other state before or after would practice as well, or owe so much of its success to, this skill until the modern United States in World War II and the postwar era.  Today, like the case with ancient Rome, America’s foes face insurmountable odds when it activates its worldwide network of deep, longstanding relationships, of which our alliance with Japan is one of our oldest and strongest.

Disregarding V-J Day’s Precious Legacy

In his final sentence of War Without Mercy, Dower puts it as well as anyone can: “…World War Two in Asia has become central to our understanding not only of the past, but of the present as well.”  The legacy of V-J Day is as much a foundation of the modern world as anything, and in by far mostly overwhelmingly positive ways.  Misguided, short-sighted action by the Trump Administration threatens to destroy this precious, unique system supporting the modern world, of which the legacy of V-J day is so central, a lasting legacy such leaders would do well to consider more thoughtfully before abandoning the values on which it was built, has lasted, and still presently defines so many aspects of our daily lives for the better.

© 2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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Published on LinkedIn Pulse April 13, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) April 13th, 2018, a more in-depth version of this brief piece published by War Is Boring on April 11th, 2018, and both adapted from an article published April 8th, 2017

AFP-JIJI

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AMMAN — Almost exactly a year ago, I was working on a piece I had originally titled “Time to Put Up or Shut Up, Donald.” As I continued to write, though, reports that Trump was considering military strikes against Assad’s government for his horrific then-recent chemical weapons attack on civilians designed to terrorize his own people surfaced on Tuesday, April 4th, 2017; that ensuing Thursday, April 6th, it was time for your author here (finally) have some fun and go to a party, and by the time I got home, when I had already thought the odds of Trump eventually hitting Assad were greater than those of him not hitting him, the strikes had already been launched, necessitating something of a reworking of my article.

There was a lot to digest , and there still is now. With this latest chemical attack in Douma against civilians and its blatant timing (and in light of Trump’s recent announcement just days earlier that he was planning on withdrawing all U.S. forces from Syria a year later Assad seems to be deliberately testing, even daring Trump, as he had with Obama before him. Also like a year ago, Trump seems to very much be favoring a military strike or strikes as a response. There are few times when things so nearly completely repeat themselves like they are now, and my feelings on these issues remain the same.

*****

Can Trump (still) Succeed Where Obama Failed?

Full disclosure: I voted for Obama twice and enthusiastically but I would say the biggest mistake of his presidency (apart from his pitiful response in 2016 to Russian election interference, what I call the [First] Russo-American Cyberwar) was backing away from his “red line” on the use of chemical weapons after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used them to barbaric effect against his own people back in the fall of 2013. At that time, Assad and his forces were reeling and U.S. military action targeting his forces, especially the Syrian Arab Air Force, would have been decisive in changing the trajectory of the Syrian Civil War, especially since a robust Western entry and enforcement of no-fly zones would have prevented Russia’s subsequent robust entry in the fall of 2015.

In the spring of 2017, the situation was quite different: Assad had obliterated many of the rebel strongholds, most notably (and most tragically) Aleppo, and ISIS, too, had been severely weakened, facing its final days in Mosul, Iraq, one of its two last major strongholds, and in the process of being encircled in its other stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, its “capital;” furthermore, not only did Assad’s government have the of support of the Shiite Lebanese militia Hezbollah and of Iran’s military on the ground (among other Shiite militias), but it also enjoyed the robust military support of Russia and its vaunted air force. And even though Assad’s military had been whittled to down a shell of its former self(even his Syrian Arab Air Force is running low on parts and serviceable craft and can ill afford aircraft losses), with his allies, he was in far stronger position then than he was when Obama backed away from striking Syrian forces in 2013, even if heavily dependent on these allies.

Now, a year later in the spring of 2018, all this is even more so the case: ISIS is long out of Mosul and was pushed out of Raqqa back in October; Assad’s Syrian Arab Air Force saw 20% of its serviceable aircraft destroyed by Trump’s strike from a year ago; most recently the rebel enclave in Eastern Ghouta has fallen; and Russia is still shamelessly lying and covering up for Assad even after this latest attack, is functioning as Assad’s air force, and even felt bold enough to attack U.S. forces in early February (albeit with Russian mercenaries under the control of a key Putin oligarch-ally, Yevgeniy Prigozhin); that attack ended up going disastrously for the Russians, “hundreds” of whom were killed.

And still, the most powerful military force on the planet—that of the United States, which in 2016 spent more on its military than Russia and the other seven largest military spenders in the world combined and over half of those are close U.S. allies while none are Russian allies—can easily make a huge impact, and let those who employ the use of chemical weapons against civilians, or support those who do, know that there will be a cost for such actions. When trump hit Assad’s airbase a year ago, it seems a warning shot had then been fired to that effect. 

But now, a year later, the worst chemical attack in Syria since then is directly challenging the abstention of major chemical weapons attacks brought about that warning shot.

Before backing away from striking Assad, Obama spoke in the Rose Garden on August 31st, 2013, asking a question:

Here’s my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community: What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?

Make no mistake — this has implications beyond chemical warfare. If we won’t enforce accountability in the face of this heinous act, what does it say about our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules? To governments who would choose to build nuclear arms? To terrorist who would spread biological weapons? To armies who carry out genocide?

We cannot raise our children in a world where we will not follow through on the things we say, the accords we sign, the values that define us.

His words ring just as true today.

Obama sadly, and rather pathetically, did not put serious action behind his eloquent words about why we needed to support an international system where the use of such weapons of mass destruction not tolerated. The Republicans later skewered Obama for backing away—even as most of them hypocritically criticized his proposed military action at the time (many even signing a formal letter stating he needed authorization from Congress to act) before he backed away from it, a decision Obama made in part because they would not support him; Trump himself tweeted at Obama not to attack Syrian forces back then.

Since then, Republicans have proceeded to criticize Obama for having a weak strategy even while offering precious few specifics that differed from Obama’s strategy, as did Trump, who, just as hypocritically as the others in his newly adopted Republican Party, also repeatedly asserted Obama’s weakness was responsible for the continuing horrors in Syria, and, as president, he has continued to assert this after this latest chemical attack.

I figured that Trump, ever the narcissist, values his public perception as much as anything, and after beating up on Obama’s weakness for years, and given a chance to show himself to be the more “decisive” and “macho” “man” in a situation that had no choice but to be compared to Obama’s waffling in the fall of 2013, would most certainly at least be tempted to reverse his pro-Russia and somewhat pro-Assad policy and to act to punish Assad where Obama declined to do so. As I watched him speak on the issue over the past few days, Trump even seemed genuinely moved by the horrific images of dying babies and other civilians coming out of Idlib.

And putting aside these considerations of personality or motivations here, there are very good reasons for Trump to have done what he did and to do it again.

*****

Why Trump Was Right and Would Be Right Again

The Situation in Syria, March 17th, 2017

Before Trump fired cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield, Assad and his Russian backers were clearly feeling they could do anything they want and get away with it and feared no U.S. intervention; impunity would be their modus operandi, there would be no political settlements, no “peace negotiations;” no, Assad and his backers were going to continue to systematically exterminate any whiff of opposition, city by city, town by town, corpse by corpse. Concessions? To rebels? To terrorists? To “terrorists?” One must simply ask: why would he need to comply with the demands of the international community? What pressures existed that would actually constrain Assad or extract any concessions, especially when Russia—one of the most powerful nations in the world and with the most centralized power structure at the top of any major world power (except, perhaps, China with Xi now a president-for-life)—would just lie and claim “terrorists,” not at the Syrian military, were to blame for whatever atrocity Assad (or Russia) had perpetrated, or that the atrocity in question had not happened at all, as it has for years? Does anyone think rhetorical flourishes from the West, Turkey, and Arab League members would change anything? When Russia at the time had vetoed seven different United Nations Security Council resolutions against the Assad regime, with Russia’s ground, naval, and air forces (along with Iran and Hezbollah and other Shiite militias) inside Syria energetically empowering Assad to operate knowing there would be no substantive consequences no matter what atrocity he committed—even if he killed hundreds of thousands of people with indiscriminate attacks and the deliberate targeting of civilians, even if he used outlawed chemical weapons of mass destruction to kill his own people—what on earth is left to compel Assad to even feel the need to negotiate, let alone stop his mass slaughter of civilians?

The sad answer in our real world as it exists today is clear: one thing, and one thing only…

force exerted by the United States of America. 

Especially with Russia operating in Syria supporting Assad, only the United States could lead any kind of military force to challenge the above status quo. Nothing else could give Assad pause or cause him to consider restraint. But the United States showed Assad that even with the Russian military there, his forces were not safe if President Trump, the U.S. Military’s Commander in Chief, decided to strike, which he did. And, with Russia being dramatically weaker than the U.S. (especially with the U.S. many allies), there is little Russia can do to stop the U.S. (but more on that another time).

In this situation confronting Trump last year, there were two options: do nothing serious and allow a regime that has no interest, inclination, or reason in its mind to negotiate or concede anything to continue to kill anyone it pleases and destroy anything it wants anytime it pleases while facing no serious consequences, or the United States could have hit back, sent a message, and forced Assad to bend to the will of the world by behaving less barbarically towards his own people or face serious consequences, from warning punitive strikes to major degradation of his armed forces and beyond.

This is the same binary choice facing Trump today.

And contrary to what you might hear, this can be good for mitigating the conflict overall. After all, as I wrote five years ago, the current dynamics are clear: with Assad waging war on the people of Syria, nothing will stop the flow of refugees that risks further destabilizing Syria’s neighbors that include multiple major U.S. allies—a flow that has helped spur an explosion of right-wing insanity in both Europe (where Russia is “weaponizing” the refugee crisis to damage the EU) and America, a right wing insanity that feeds the rise of radical Islamic extremism even as the war in Syria does the same—unless the war stops and/or safe zones are established, as nothing will convince the more than 5.5 million Syrians who have fled Syria (and that number only counts those registered by the UN: Jordan alone is estimated to have around 800,000 unregistered Syrians, compared with only some 659,000 registered ones; this doesn’t even get to the more than 6.1 million internally displaced people, or IDPs, inside Syria) to return home as long as an impudent Bashar al-Assad feels he can kill at whim all while the world makes noise but ultimately does little more than shrugs its shoulders in response. These dynamics, too, also feed the growth in violent Islamic extremism worldwide and right-wing extremism in the West in a vicious feedback loop.

I hear and read too many “experts” present a false Sophie’s choice: either we let Assad win or ISIS wins/the war doesn’t end. Well, in case you’re missing it, ISIS has had its “caliphate” virtually destroyed—thanks to a slow but steady strategy of Obama’s that was clearly coming to penultimate fruition even before Trump was sworn in (a fact that won’t stop Trump from taking credit for it)—and history shows that non-intervention in brutal wars, especially involving mass killings (e.g., Cambodia and Rwanda) can allow the wars and killing to continue unabated for a long time and can lead to genocide, while well-executed intervention (e.g., WWII, Bosnia, and Kosovo) stops or at least partially halts and reduces mass killing. 

Now, of course, there is a possibility that the intervention will fail or make things worse—a possibility exaggerated by the recent memory of Iraq, more of an aberration of Western intervention in its relative mass incompetence than the post-Cold War norm—but any attempt to solve any problem in life risks making that problem worse, so that possibility is, by itself, an illogical reason to not intervene, a total cop-out, and a path to inhuman nihilism.

As one man—Kassem Eid—who survived the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack that nearly prompted Obama to attack Assad noted a year ago under the same circumstances:

If you really care about refugees, if you really care about helping us, please, help us stay in our country… we don’t want to become refugees, we want to stay in our country, help us establish safe zones…please take out Assad’s air forces so they won’t be able to commit more atrocities.

The United States and its allies are more than capable of doing just that, and if Trump’s action is not a one-off—and let’s be honest, this ego-driven narcissist with authoritarian, even fascistic tendencies has had his first real exercise of power and he will love it, not in the least because he has earned global praise for it (and only it),—the likelihood is more than not that this is all going to be mainly handled by professionals in the U.S. military, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis is no Donald Rumsfeld. As detestable and anti-refugee as Trump is, because of his decision, and especially if he follows through now with an even stronger response than that of last year, there could be a greater chance than at any time since 2013 for the much-needed establishment of safe-zones protected by the international community.

Trump striking Assad again and setting a clear line on the medium-to-large scale use of chemical weapons will also certainly make Iran question the cost of its support of Assad along with helping to limit the expansion of Hezbollah’s power, though Israel is already consistently acting on that front. 

Also, as I pointed out also back in 2013, there is still little risk to the U.S. and a high-probability of success in striking Assad’s air power, military bases, or heavy weapons, which are difficult or impossible to hide. Hezbollah, Assad, and ISIS have enough on their hands to devote much to any “response” to the U.S.

Finally—and again, I will repeat I thought Obama’s inaction (and the Republican-led Congress’s vocal lack of support) were major mistakes in 2013—there is an important difference between now and 2013. Back then, as I noted above, Assad’s forces were being pushed back and U.S. intervention may have led to the toppling of his government, and this not long after the disillusionment of the experience of Libya’s post-NATO-intervention problems (although I still would say that the intervention was successful in saving many lives and preventing a civil war from being prolonged, but more on that another time); no other major power had intervened in Syria and thus owned the conflict, to speak, and that was another solid argument Obama could have put out on the side of non-intervention, even if non-intervention was still the weaker overall argument. Today, Russia is heavily involved in Syria, far more than the U.S., and it is hard to imagine Putin simply pulling out and letting the situation devolve into chaos, a result that would be blamed in large part on Russia and that would hurt Putin’s prestige and his own credibility when it comes to Russia intervening anywhere. With another great power invested besides (and more so than) America, unlike in 2013, the idea that the toppling of Assad would result in anarchy and a terrorist safe haven is less of a likelihood, since now two great powers will be heavily invested in the outcome if the U.S. becomes more heavily involved and actions lead to Assad’s ouster (unlikely anytime soon) or weakening (more likely). If the U.S. wipes out the Syrian Arab Air Force, that Russia will have to do all the heavily (air)lifting for Assad, dramatically increasing the costs of Russian support and also further exposing Russian troops to risk. So even just striking Assad will also make Putin pay.

If you let your justifiable hatred of Trump get in the way of your support of even someone like him doing more than anyone has yet to help the long-term situation of Syrian refugees and Syrians still in Syria—if you refuse to understand that these strikes may this time be the first steps in creating paths for Syrians to safely return to Syrian soil and even if they aren’t will still make it harder for Assad to engage in mass killing—you care more about your personal feelings and personal politics than actually helping refugees and saving lives at worse, or are incredibly myopic at best.

Don’t get me wrong: there are things about this that worry me, and I will write more on that another time. But removing the issues of domestic U.S politics, the Russia investigation, and possible major conflicts with Iran and North Korea, as far as Syria is concerned, hitting Assad’s forces in response to this chemical attack and other outrages is easily the best, and right, thing to do.

In other words, yes, oppose trump in general, but when he does good, as rare as that it, take it as a gift.

*****

The U.S. Can Still Be a Force for Good in Syria

When it comes to Syria, the most important things are helping save as many lives as possible and allowing ways for refugees to return home free from of persecution. And as someone who truly hates Trump and sees him as the threat to democracy and the world order that he is, it is here that as a student of policy and a person who cares about saving lives and preserving international norms that it is easy for me to support this action enthusiastically, despite my misgivings for the man calling the shots behind it. I felt this way a year ago, and I feel this way now.

As with any operation, though, expectations need to be reasonable.

Even if Trump just engages in another one-off strike, the deterrent effects will save lives. But sustained enforcement of red-lines designed to protect civilians would obviously be better. But the idea that modest U.S. intervention would somehow change the course of the war now is absurd. But while Assad and Russia continue to mop up any resistance, how brutal they are to the civilian populations is something the U.S. can and should constrain, and by force if necessary; while it’s almost impossible to envision a rebel victory, the U.S. can put an extremely high price on acts of mass brutality and mass murder against civilians and of defying international norms on the use of weapons of mass destruction, chemical or otherwise. Assad may control most of Syria again soon, but how many Syrians are dead vs. alive is something the U.S. can still affect in meaningful ways if it is willing to act in moments like this. And even now, U.S. and allied air forces can, even in this late stage of the war, impose and safe zones in parts of Syria that will make it impossible for Assad and the Russians to use their very effective and very efficient air forces and heavy weapons in these areas without themselves suffering serious casualties. This will greatly increase the costs for both Assad and Putin and their allied forces and begin to make other options, including negotiations, more attractive and also safer for them. With more constraints on air support and the use of heavy weapons, the qualitative edge pro-Assad forces have over the rebels will shrink, as will their ability to efficiently kill civilians. This could create a more humane ending to one of the most brutal wars in recent memory, for, as this recent chemical attack is showing, Assad and the Russians are showing little restraint as their successes mount. Apart from saving lives, a less brutal end to the war will also sow the seeds of a more stable peace.

As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote in when Obama was wrestling with the same issues, “For all the risks of hypocrisy and ineffectiveness, it’s better to stand up inconsistently to some atrocities than to acquiesce consistently in them all.” Yes, mass murder by Assad’s and Putin’s forces have continued since Trump’s first strike last year, but medium-to-larger scale nerve gas attacks ceased for a year and the mass murder continued in other ways, that hardly means that future strikes won’t constrain the violence and give these mass murderers pause. Even just some pausing could the difference between life and death for many helpless Syrian civilians.

See related article by same author: Grading Obama’s Middle East Strategy II: Syria’s Civil War

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse April 8, 2017

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter@bfry1981) April 8th, 2017

Mohamed Al-Bakour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

AMMAN — I had originally titled this piece “Time to Put Up or Shut Up, Donald.” As I continued to write, though, reports that Trump was considering military strikes against Assad’s government for his horrific recent chemical weapons attack on civilians designed to terrorize his own people surfaced on Tuesday, April 4th; that ensuing Thursday, April 6th, it was time for your author here to (finally) have some fun and go to a party, and by the time I got home, when I had already thought the odds of Trump eventually hitting Assad were greater than those of him not hitting him, the strikes had already been launched, necessitating something of a reworking of my article.

There is a lot to digest here.

*****

Can Trump Succeed Where Obama Failed?

Full disclosure: I voted for Obama twice and enthusiastically but I would say the biggest mistake of his presidency was backing away from his “red line” on the use of chemical weapons after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used them to barbaric effect against his own people back in the fall of 2013. At that time, Assad and his forces were reeling and U.S. military action targeting his forces, especially the Syrian Arab Air Force, would have been decisive in changing the trajectory of the Syrian Civil War, especially since a robust Western entry and enforcement of no-fly zones would have prevented Russia’s subsequent robust entry in the fall of 2015.

Now, in the spring of 2017, the situation is quite different: Assad has obliterated many of the rebel strongholds, most notably (and most tragically) Aleppo, and ISIS, too, has been severely weakened, facing its final days in Mosul, Iraq, one of its two last major strongholds, and in the process of being encircled in its other stronghold in Raqqa, Syria, its “capital;” furthermore, not only does Assad’s government have the active of support of the Shiite Lebanese militia Hezbollah and of Iran’s military on the ground (among other Shiite militias), but it also enjoys the robust military support of Russia and its vaunted air force. And even though Assad’s military has been whittled to down a shell of its former self(even his Syrian Arab Air Force is running low on parts and serviceable craft and can ill afford aircraft losses), with his allies, he is in far stronger position now than he was when Obama backed away from striking Syrian forces in 2013, even if heavily dependent on these allies.

And still, the most powerful military force on the planet—that of the United States, which in 2015 spent more on its military than Russia and the other six largest military spenders in the world combined—can easily make a huge impact, and let those who employ the use of chemical weapons against civilians, or support those who do, know that there will be a costfor such actions. And it seems a warning shot has now been fired to that effect.

Before backing away from striking Assad, Obama spoke in the Rose Garden  on August 31st, 2013, asking a question:

Here’s my question for every member of Congress and every member of the global community: What message will we send if a dictator can gas hundreds of children to death in plain sight and pay no price? What’s the purpose of the international system that we’ve built if a prohibition on the use of chemical weapons that has been agreed to by the governments of 98 percent of the world’s people and approved overwhelmingly by the Congress of the United States is not enforced?

Make no mistake — this has implications beyond chemical warfare. If we won’t enforce accountability in the face of this heinous act, what does it say about our resolve to stand up to others who flout fundamental international rules? To governments who would choose to build nuclear arms? To terrorist who would spread biological weapons? To armies who carry out genocide?

We cannot raise our children in a world where we will not follow through on the things we say, the accords we sign, the values that define us.

His words ring just as true today.

Obama sadly, and rather pathetically, did not put serious action behind his eloquent words about why we needed to support an international system where the use of such weapons of mass destruction as well as mass killing were not tolerated. The Republicans later skewered Obama for backing away—even as most of them hypocritically criticized his proposed military action at the time (many even signing a formal letter stating he needed authorization from Congress to act) before he backed away from it, a decision Obama made in part because they would not support him; Trump himself tweeted at Obama not to attack Syrian forces back then.

Since then, Republicans proceeded to criticize Obama for having a weak strategy even while offering precious few specifics that differed from Obama’s strategy, as did Trump, who, just as hypocritically as the others in his newly adopted Republican Party, also repeatedly asserted Obama’s weakness was responsible for the horrors in Syria up through his recent April 4th press conference with King Abdullah of Jordan that took place just hours after the recent Syrian government chemical attack in the Idlib area of Syria.

I figured that Trump, ever the narcissist, values his public perception as much as anything, and after beating up on Obama’s weakness for years, and given a chance to show himself to be the more “decisive” and “macho” “man” in a situation that had no choice but to be compared to Obama’s waffling in the fall of 2013 , would most certainly at least be tempted to reverse his pro-Russia and somewhat pro-Assad policy and to act to punish Assad where Obama declined to do so. As I watched him speak on the issue over the past few days, Trump even seemed genuinely moved by the horrific images of dying babies and other civilians coming out of Idlib.

And putting aside these considerations of personality here, there are very good reasons for Trump to have done what he did.

*****

Why Trump Was Right

Before Trump fired cruise missiles at a Syrian airfield, Assad and his Russian backers were clearly feeling they could do anything they want and get away with it and feared no U.S. intervention; impunity would be their modus operandi, there would be no political settlements, no “peace negotiations;” no, Assad and his backers were going to continue to systematically exterminate any whiff of opposition, city by city, town by town, corpse by corpse. Concessions? To rebels? To terrorists? To “terrorists?” One must simply ask: why would he need to comply with the demands of the international community? What pressures existed that would actually constrain Assad or extract any concessions, especially when Russia—one of the most powerful nations in the world and with the most centralized power structure at the top of any major world power—would just lie and claim “terrorists,” not at the Syrian military, were to blame for whatever atrocity Assad (or Russia) had perpetrated, or that the atrocity in question had not happened at all, as it has for years? Does anyone think rhetorical flourishes from the West, Turkey, and Arab League members would change anything? When Russia has vetoed seven different United Nations Security Council resolutions against the Assad regime, with Russia’s ground, naval, and air forces (along with Iran and Hezbollah and other Shiite militias) inside Syria energetically empowering Assad to operate knowing there would be no substantive consequences no matter what atrocity he committed—even if he killed hundreds of thousands of people with indiscriminate attacks and the deliberate targeting of civilians, even if used outlawed chemical weapons to kill his own people—what on earth is left to compel Assad to even feel the need to negotiate, let alone stop his mass slaughter of civilians?

The sad answer in our real world as it exists today is clear: one thing, and one thing only…

Military force exerted by the United States of America. 

Especially with Russia operating in Syria supporting Assad, only the United States could lead any kind of military force to challenge the above status quo. Nothing else could give Assad pause or cause him to consider restraint. But the United States showed Assad that even with the Russian military there, his forces were not safe if President Trump, the U.S. Military’s Commander in Chief, decided to strike at him, which he did. And for all of Russia’s tough talk, its military and air force are far inferior in quality and numbers to their American counterparts, so the idea that Russia would risk a serious military confrontation with the United States over Syria is ludicrous because it would only result in devastating defeat at the hands of the United States with no chance of saving face and only a high cost as a result, much worse than any cost that could be inflicted on the U.S. After all, Putin is not stupid enough to engage in a nuclear war that would destroy both nations and likely the world over the likes of Bashar al-Assad. Thus, what was also demonstrated for the world to see how little Russian protection actually meant for Assad in the face of U.S. military might.

In this situation, there were two options: do nothing serious and allow a regime that has no interest, inclination, or reason in its mind to negotiate or concede anything to continue to kill anyone it pleases and destroy anything it wants anytime it pleases while facing no consequences, or the United States can hit back, send a message, and force Assad to bend to the will of the world by behaving less barbarically towards his own people or face serious consequences, from warning punitive strikes to major degradation of his armed forces to exile and/or the fall of his government.

And contrary to what you might hear, this can be good for mitigating the conflict overall. After all, as I wrote three years ago, the current dynamics are clear: with Assad and ISIS both waging war on the people of Syria, nothing will stop the flow of refugees that risk destabilizing Syria’s neighbors that include multiple major U.S. allies—a flow that has helped spur an explosion of right-wing insanity in both Europe (where Russia is “weaponizing” the refugee crisis to damage the EU) and America, a right wing insanity that feeds the rise of radical Islamic extremism even as the war in Syria does the same—unless the war stops and/or safe zones are established, as nothing will convince the more than five million Syrians who have fled Syria (and that number only counts those registered by the UN: Jordan alone is estimated to have around 800,000 unregistered Syrians, compared with only 633,000 registered ones; this doesn’t even get to the more than 6.3 million internally displaced people, or IDPs, inside Syria) to return home as long as an impudent Bashar al-Assad feels he can kill at whim and will while the world makes noise but ultimately shrugs its shoulders. These dynamics also feed the growth in violent Islamic extremism in a vicious feedback loop.

I hear and read too many “experts” present a false Sophie’s choice: either we let Assad win or ISIS wins/the war doesn’t end. Well, in case you’re missing it, ISIS is on the verge of having its “caliphate” destroyed—thanks to a slow but steady strategy of Obama’s that was clearly coming to penultimate fruition even before Trump was sworn in (a fact that won’t stop Trump from taking credit for it)—and history shows that non-intervention in brutal wars involving mass killings (e.g., Cambodia and Rwanda) can allow killing to continue unabated for a long time and can lead to genocide, while well-executed intervention (e.g., WWII, Bosnia, and Kosovo) stops or at least partially halts mass killing. 

Now, of course, there is a possibility that the intervention will fail or make things worse—a possibility exaggerated by the recent memory of Iraq, more of an aberration of Western intervention in its relative mass incompetence than the post-Cold War norm—but any attempt to solve any problem in life risks making that problem worse, so that possibility is, by itself, an illogical reason to not intervene, a total cop-out, and a path to inhuman nihilism.

As one man—Kassem Eid—who survived the 2013 Ghouta chemical attack that nearly prompted Obama to attack Assad noted yesterday:

If you really care about refugees, if you really care about helping us, please, help us stay in our country… we don’t want to become refugees, we want to stay in our country, help us establish safe zones…please take out Assad’s air forces so they won’t be able to commit more atrocities.

The United States and its allies are more than capable of doing just that, and if Trump’s action is not a one-off—and let’s be honest, this ego-driven narcissist with authoritarian, even fascistic tendencies has had his first real exercise of power and he will love it, not in the least because he has earned global praise for it (and only it), so it very likely will not be a one-off—the likelihood is more than not that this is all going to be mainly handled by professionals in the U.S. military, and Secretary of Defense James Mattis is no Donald Rumsfeld. As detestable and anti-refugee as Trump is, because of his decision, there is now a greater chance than at any time since 2013 for the much-needed establishment of safe-zones protected by the international community.

It will also teach Russia that its recent run giving the West the finger has not empowered it as much as it thinks actually and makes Russia even weaker, with Russia unable to prevent American intervention in Syria even with its military there and seeing its investment in expanding its power there destroyed, exposing its troops to risk while supporting a WMD-using thug and making it even more so one of the most hated countries in the world and especially hated by a Sunni Muslim population (most of Alawite/Shiite Assad’s victims are Sunni Muslims) with a tiny fringe more susceptible to violent radicalization than any other group at present, keeping in mind that Russia has an oppressed Sunni Muslim population that has produced a notable number of anti-Russian terrorists and terrorist incidents since Russia’s conflicts in the Russian republic of Chechnya, the Caucasus overall, and the country of Afghanistan before that). As I wrote before, Russia intervened from a position of desperation and weakness, and Russia’s weak hand has only improved marginally for all its efforts but has also saddled it with more responsibility.

Trump’s strike will certainly make Iran question the cost of its support of Assad along with helping to limit the expansion of Hezbollah’s power.

Also, as was I pointed out also back in 2013, there is still little risk to the U.S. and a high-probability of success in striking Assad’s air power, military bases, or heavy weapons, which are difficult or impossible to hide. Hezbollah, Assad, and ISIS have enough on their hands to devote much to any “response” to the U.S.

Finally—and again, I will repeat I thought Obama’s inaction (and the Republican-led Congress’s vocal lack of support) were a mistake in 2013—there is an important difference between now and 2013. Back then, as I noted above, Assad’s forces were being pushed back and U.S. intervention may have led to the toppling of his government, and this not long after the disillusionment of the experience of Libya’s post-NATO-intervention problems (although I still would say that the intervention was successful in saving many lives preventing a civil war from being prolonged, but more on that another time); no other major power had intervened in Syria and thus owned the conflict, to speak, and that was another solid argument Obama could have put out on the side of non-intervention, even if non-intervention was still the weaker overall argument. Today, Russia is heavily involved in Syria, far more than the U.S., and it is hard to imagine Putin simply pulling out and letting the situation devolve into chaos, a result that would be blamed in large part on Russia and that would hurt Putin’s prestige and his own credibility when it comes to Russia intervening anywhere. With another great power invested besides America, unlike in 2013, the idea that the toppling of Assad would result in anarchy and a terrorist safe haven is less of a likelihood, since now two great powers will be heavily invested in the outcome if the U.S. becomes more heavily involved and actions lead to Assad’s ouster or weakening.

If you let your justifiable hatred of Trump get in the way of your support of even someone like him doing more than anyone has yet to help the long-term situation of Syrian refugees—if you refuse to understand that these strikes may be the first step in creating paths for Syrians to safely return to Syrian soil—you care more about your personal feelings and personal politics than actually helping refugees at worse, or are incredibly myopic at best.

*****

Causes For Concern

Don’t get me wrong: there are things about this that worry me. 

I respect the U.S. military and Mattis and have faith in both of them, and it’s virtually impossible for a president to micromanage a major U.S. military operation without massive influence from his secretary of defense, and as awful as Trump is, at least in a situation like Syria today, I’d be more worried about a Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld combination than a Trump-Pence-Mattis combination (though unquestionably Bush is better individually than Trump), and I think Mattis will impress Trump with his competence as any operations unfold and will gain more influence in this way. 

Having said that, I’m also scared about a Trump that gets a taste of military success, and am especially terrified with a North Korea now acting up when military aggression as a U.S. response on the Korean Peninsula would initiate a bloodbath that would make Bush’s Iraq invasion look mild in comparison, and especially so if Trump feels military adventurism is a preferred course when he is having a miserable time in domestic politics, which could lead to who knows what down the road.

I also worry that Trump being seen as the savior of Syrian refugees would make people forget about how awful his refugee and immigration policies are. I’m further worried that this will make people lose interest in his Russian scandals and make the Republican Party feel it will have cover again to obstruct and distract from the investigation after such actions (see the drama of Devin Nunes) had cost them. And I’m worried that this action may partly legitimize Trump and his dangerous program when, apart from this action, he and his program are not worthy of legitimization, only opposition and resistance.

So I will continue to vigorously oppose Trump and his agenda overall. But because I care passionately about human rights, stopping mass killing and genocide, and seeking a long-term situation for refugees and the Syrian Civil War, I will support his efforts to to go against Assad.

Political Considerations

But the move made a tremendous amount of sense for Trump and his administration for political reasons, and the chance Assad gave him to act was also something of a political gift from heaven.

For one thing, Trump has had a miserable first few months on the domestic front, without a single major accomplishment he could take credit for thus far and nearing the end of his 100 days, with self-inflicted wound after self-inflicted wound resulting in likely the worst first 100 days of any president.

In other words, Trump might be looking at no chance of a major accomplishment whatsoever during his first 100 days; a domestic accomplishment still seems a remote possibility, leaving only the realm of something dramatic in foreign policy, which before Assad’s chemical attack, and during a week in which his team had signaled acceptance of Assad’s rule over Syria, there had seemed few openings of this type either. Acting against Assad would credibly give Trump a big “win” at a time he desperately needs one and might even be his only chance for one.

Speaking of desperate, Trump’s approval-rating average had dipped below 40%, a historic low for so early in a presidency; this opportunity was one of the only ways on the horizon for Trump to be able to bring his poll numbers up anytime soon.

He was also about to host Chinese President Xi Jinping at a time when his administration was a disgrace and after months of bashing China; Trump’s strike immediately allowed him to move from a position of humiliation to one where he could project power while hosting Xi, who expressed private empathy for Trump ordering the strikes even as China did not offer public support. It will be interesting to consider what effect if any this will have on North Korea and on America’s efforts to enlist Chinese aid in dealing with North Korea.

And, of course, the elephant in the room for the entirety of Trump’s presidency so far has been the Trump Campaign and Trump Administration’s deeply disturbing ties to Russia, Putin, Russian money, and Russian organized crime, including Russia’s obvious efforts to help Trump defeat Clinton in the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar. Striking the Assad regime, Russia’s only true in-power ally outside of the states of the former Soviet Union, while Russia’s forces are actively engaged in supporting Assad has provided Trump with an excellent opportunity to take some of the heat off of him and his people as well as to demonstrate he is not beholden to or being controlled by the Russians amid hardly-purely-speculative accusations and suspicions be might be. In other words, Trump could go on offense in his weakest area, deflecting attention away from his biggest scandal—and possibly the biggest scandal in American history—and acting in a way that could reassure some of his less strident critics and give his supporters some much needed-assistance and cover to be able to, in turn, provide cover for him (though, substantively, nothing he has done here does anything to address the possible realities of past issues with ties to Russia, but perception is very powerful in politics and this move certainly affects perception in Trump’s favor).

In other worse, Trump personally had so much to gain and so little to lose with competently executed, limited strikes at this stage. 

In addition, at least some of Trump’s people must realize that the Democratic Party is still far less extreme that the Republican Party; unlike the Democrats, who said no to a takeover by the Bernie Sanders wing, the Republican Party has been hijacked by extremists for years, and, as I have noted, Democrats have been far more bi-partisan in their support of presidential foreign policy and national security than Republicans, so there was a good chance many Democrats would support this move in addition to Republicans and it seems that this is the case thus far.

Thus, politically, it was the best move Trump could have made with no other good options in sight. In some ways, it could even be called a no-brainer. If I were one of Trump’s political advisors, I would definitely have recommended this action.

*****

Apart from the political considerations, the far more important considerations involve the actual policy and substantive non-domestic-political considerations and the human lives affected by this strike. And as someone who truly hates Trump and sees him as the threat to democracy and the world order that he is, it is here that as a student of policy and a person who cares about saving lives and preserving international norms that it is easy for me to support this action enthusiastically, despite my misgivings for the man calling the shots behind it.

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse September 15, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) September 15th, 2016

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

AMMAN — I’ve written repeatedly about 9/11 before: what it meant for me, what it should mean for Americans, how we have failed to properly honor the memory of the victims, how our nation has become worse, not better, since that fateful day, about all the missed opportunities. I think today it’s pretty clear that we as a nation still have not honored the memory of the victims through proper action, but what I could write about that now would be nothing new that I and others have not written before.

I’m not sure if it would make me feel better or worse to be able to write an article saying “9/11 helped to ruin us by starting a new style of politics that is ruining us.” In any case, I can’t, for while in many ways 9/11 must still clearly be regarded as a watershed, cataclysmic event in world history, let alone American politics and history, that sad truth is that the disgusting political gamesmanship of sucking in foreign policy and national security issues into the partisan maelstrom in the same manner as any other issue is not something that began (or ended) with 9/11, with the politics of 9/11 marking more continuity than change, just a larger example of growing partisanship amidst a rising tide of partisanship in post-Cold War America.

The big move towards consistent politicization in any significant way started almost exclusively with the Republican Party just a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, beginning with its withering partisan criticism of Bill Clinton’s efforts in Somalia in 1993, criticism that was wildly inconsistent and undermined U.S. policy.  When Republicans began using 9/11 as a partisan wedge issue in the run-up to the Iraq invasion of 2003 and in the 2004 presidential election, this was merely a continuation of the post-Cold War modus operandi of the Republican Party, which is only more extreme today. It is worth going through some of this history to better understand this dynamic besetting America today.

Bipartisanship During the Cold War, But Not For Bill Clinton

Somalia

In 1991, Somalia’s longstanding dictator, short of international support when he was no longer “needed” after the Cold War had drawn to a close, was overthrown, and the country fell into anarchy and warlordism. The political and security situation combined with a famine into one of the first great humanitarian disasters of the post-Cold War era. With the UN Security Council supporting a relief mission, and the Democratic-led U.S. Congress, including Republicans, urging support for such a mission, Republican President George H. W. Bush, though he had just lost re-election nearly two months earlier, announced on Dec. 4th, 1992, that he would send 28,000 U.S. troops as part of a peacekeeping force intended to ensure the distribution of food to hundreds of thousands of Somalis on the verge of starvation, a move supported by President-Elect Clinton. 

Not long after Clinton became president, though, Republicans especially began voicing strong criticism of Clinton’s efforts to sustain the mission, contradicting their earlier support for the mission under George H. W. Bush; while criticism was by no means coming from Republicans alone, they were generally particularly vocal and harsh in their criticism, exaggerating and distorting what was going on and using hyperbolic language to criticize a mission they were perfectly happy to support when commanded by a Republican president only a few months earlier. The mixed support of WWII veteran (and soon-to-be-Republican presidential nominee in 1996) Bob Dole was more the exception, rather than the rule, as Republicans were generally unified in opposing Clinton and succeeded in undermining public support and confidence in the mission, calling for an end to the mission and constantly threatening to cut off funding for the mission even while U.S. troops in the field were carrying it out, a mission that was far from a disaster and hardly a failure. Even when President Clinton announced a withdrawal date after the unfortunate October 1993 “black hawk down” incident, in which U.S. forces tangled with warlord forces and incurred relatively substantial casualties, many Republicans, rather than accept the withdrawal announcement as a sufficient political victory, pushed for a faster withdrawal than the one Clinton had called for; whatever Clinton did, these Republicans were sure to meet it with scorn and criticism. 

In the end, hundreds of thousands of Somali lives were saved by the mission, for all its faults. But Republicans seemed to be in lock-step with Osama bin Laden as viewing the mission as an American failure (even before the “black hawk down” incident), and sure helped to move public opinion in that direction despite the significant achievements of the mission. Perhaps even more hauntingly, the experience was a major influence on Clinton’s decision not to intervene during the Rwandan genocide that occurred only months later, in the spring of 1994.

Bosnia

Clinton was already clashing with Congress over the war in the disintegrating Yugoslavia in 1993, as well, as more and more reports of Serbs committing atrocities against Bosnian Muslims dominated the headlines. It was an odd mixture of Republicans and Democrats who said the Clinton Administration was doing too little, and Republicans and Democrats who argued the Administration was doing too much. Such wide-ranging bi-partisan criticism reflected how complex and difficult the situation was in the Balkans as Europe’s first real test of the post-Cold War era unfolded; against a backdrop of confused and divided U.S. lawmakers, European governments were nervous that any aggressive U.S. action would endanger their peacekeeping forces, already on the ground in the Balkans. In other words, there were no easy solutions and no single plan had widespread, bipartisan support or even strong agreement within one party. As president, Bill Clinton was in an unwelcome and lonely position in trying to craft a position on the conflict. This situation more or less continued through 1994, though after the November midterm elections, at least the leadership of the victorious Republicans signaled a desire for more forceful action.

But somewhat conflictingly, even as Republicans seemed to want to end the arms embargo to help arm the Bosnians (unwise for multiple reasons, e.g., that escalation could have prompted Russia to arm their Serbian friends, could have weakened the NATO alliance and prompted the UK and France to withdraw their forces from the region and force America’s hand in filling the void, measures that nonetheless also had some significant support from some Democrats; still, Clinton correctly noted that “…unilaterally lifting the arms embargo will have the opposite effects of what its supporters intend. It would intensify the fighting, jeopardize diplomacy and make the outcome of the war in Bosnia an American responsibility” and increased air strikes against the Serbs. But Republicans mostly balked when Clinton publicly weighed the idea of U.S. ground forces either assisting beleaguered UN peacekeepers or helping to enforce an eventual peace; thus, Republicans slammed him for not doing enough even while slamming him for raising the possibility of what would likely help the most. They also later balked at Clinton’s efforts to help support a new UN plan to create a rapid-reaction force of European troops to help the thinly-spread peacekeeping forces already on the ground.

When a cease-fire was finally negotiated in October 1995, and the U.S. held talks in November, a more partisan nature to opposing the president came into being, just when it was most crucial to achieve peace in the Balkans for Congress to support a long-term peace plan. Nearly every Republicans in the Senate but only one Democrat sent a letter to Clinton asking him to ask Congress for approval before committing any U.S. troops to a peacekeeping force; this was done just days before formal peace talks were to begin in the U.S., undercutting the president’s team’s negotiating authority at a crucial moment. Next, nearly the entire House Republican caucus voted on a successfully-passed (non-binding) resolution that spurned and disavowed Clinton’s promise to provide 20,000 troops as part of an eventual peacekeeping force, undermining the prospects of an agreement and an end to the war, but a majority of Democrats opposed this resolution even as a substantial minority voted with the Republicans. 

With negotiations between the warring parties underway on U.S. soil, House Republicans voted to prevent the deployment of U.S. troops without Congress specifically authorizing money to do so in what was largely a partisan vote, and even after the peace treaty was signed, House Republicans only narrowly failed in a bid to cut off funding for the mission (210-218) and Senate Republicans barely failed to pass a vote condemning the mission but “supporting” the troops (47-52). Another partisan vote passed just before the peace treaty was signed condemned Clinton’s decision to deploy troops, and another vote that would have offered language supporting the troops but not criticizing Clinton’s plan failed to pass pretty much along party lines the very day the treaty was signed. And in 1996, many Republicans rather myopically criticized both Clinton’s decision to provide substantial reconstruction aid for Bosnia and an extension of the peacekeeping mission. Despite Republican opposition, U.S. forces in Bosnia undoubtedly played a key and decisive role in forging and maintaining peace and stability in Bosnia and, in a larger sense, the Balkans and southeastern Europe.

Kosovo

Just a few years later, Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic was again threatening massive numbers of civilians, this time the mainly Muslim Kosovar Albanians in Serbia’s province of Kosovo. In response to a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, NATO launched airstrikes against Serb forces threatening Kosovar Albanians. House Republicans, in particular, engaged in behavior that could reasonably (certainly) be said to have undermined the Clinton Administration’s efforts during the crisis. Not long before NATO began its airstrikes, a substantially large majority of Republicans in the Republican-dominated House voted to bar the use of American ground troops: “American soldiers have been trained to be warriors, not baby sitters,” was how House Majority Whip and Republican Tom DeLay put it. The measure was defeated by nearly every Democrat and a minority of Republicans teaming up to vote down the amendment. Even after the airstrikes began, a tie vote in the House failed to give public backing to the airstrikes. While Republican leaders tended to prevent direct challenges to the president in these cases, especially in the Senate, it was clear that many rank-and-file congressional Republicans, including a clear majority in the House, felt differently. Thus, when George W. Bush ran for president in 2000 and campaigned on pulling out of the peacekeeping efforts in the Balkans—making it clear how much value he placed on the missions in Bosnia and Kosovo—that position was not terribly surprising.

Of course, after 9/11, the Balkans receded greatly in importance in America…

9/11: More Continuity Than Change

Most people would have missed the fact that The 9/11 Commission Report, while produced ostensibly at a time when the nation was trying to heal and explicitly avoiding leveling particular blame with one administration or political party, nevertheless does make it clear how lax, unmotivated, and ill-prepared George W. Bush and his Administration were to deal with the crisis, and a careful reading (one which the general public did not even attempt or would even have been capable of attempting) showed that, while the Clinton Administration had not done everything it possibly could have done to go after bin Laden (after years of partisan Republican criticism whenever it had tried to act forcefully elsewhere!), it had increasingly focused on bin Laden as a threat over time and stridently recommended to Bush’s team during the 2000-2001 presidential transition to make bin Laden a top priority, advice which Bush’s people just as stridently refused to accept. Here is just one glaring example that exemplified both the Commission’s unwillingness to point fingers but willingness to still lay the clear picture there for those intelligent enough to follow the evidence:

“In May, President Bush announced that Vice President Cheney would himself lead an effort looking at preparations for managing a possible attack by weapons of mass destruction and at more general problems of national preparedness. The next few months were mainly spent organizing the effort and bringing an admiral from the Sixth Fleet back to Washington to manage it. The Vice President’s task force was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack occurred.” (6.5 The New Administration’s Approach)

Specifically, President Bush’s announcement that Cheney’s task force would be coming came May 8th, but presumably some thought and groundwork had occurred prior to this date. Then from May 8th until September 11th—more than four full months after Bush’s announcement—Cheney’s group had, famously, not met once; “The Vice President’s task force was just getting under way when the 9/11 attack occurred” is about as polite and diplomatic a way as possible to say that next-to-nothing had been done in those four months. One finds such an understated approach throughout the report, and an ability to look past it makes it clear a partisan gap, not in favor of senior Republican officials, in regards to the attention paid to bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Much like after the terrorist attacks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983, that killed 258 Americans (among others), after 9/11 Democrats supported the Republican president—tending to give President Bush the benefit of the doubt, including then-Sen. Hillary Clinton—and conspicuously avoided playing a partisan political blame-game in the wake of a major attack against Americans even though the way both Presidents Reagan and his administration and Bush and his administration handled the events leading up to and surrounding the respective attacks in 1983 and 2001 were objectively ripe for criticism.

Of course, none of this mattered to Republicans in general, who were quick to blame 9/11 on Bill Clinton, continued to do so for years and still do so today, and who were also quick to politically weaponize foreign policy and national security as a partisan club with which to beat down Democrats into submission and defeat.  Especially as debate on potential and then actual war in Iraq intensified, those who raised questions, doubts, or criticism about the decision to go to war or even how the war was being prosecuted were loudly shouted down as “unpatriotic” and/or “not supporting the troops” (I had a reputation as one of the few liberals on my small conservative college campus back in the day, and late one night at a party in 2003 one drunken Republican angrily asked me “Why do you hate the troops?”). This happened in spite of the fact that the decision to invade Iraq in 2003 and the prosecution of the Iraq war were far more deficient and problematic than the H. W. Bush/Clinton Somalia intervention and Clinton’s two Balkan interventions. Democrats also did not really intensify their opposition until it was quite clear that Iraq was going from bad to worse and the promised WMDs that were the main ostensible pretext for the invasion never materialized.

The rancor of the debate in 2002 and 2003 was just a warmup for the 2004 general election campaign between Democratic Senator John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam war veteran who was wounded twice in action, and incumbent President George W. Bush, whose stateside service in the Texas Air National Guard was largely understood as a way to keep him out of having to serve in Vietnam. A group calling itself “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” attacked Kerry on his very Vietnam record, disputing his heroism, his accounts of what happened during his service, and his worthiness of receiving any of the medals he did receive with a bevy of shamefully false and misleading accusations, most notably displayed on prominent television ads and myopic media coverage that damaged Kerry’s candidacy greatly with various segments of the public and maybe was the greatest single factor contributing to his defeat at the hands of Bush that November. Lies, not truth, prevailed in 2004. Some of the impetus behind those attacks on Kerry had to do with the fact that Kerry, then as a recently decorated combat veteran, famously and prominently came out against the Vietnam War just after he had served in it and while that war was still very much ongoing. Even years after the election, Kerry found that he was still having to defend his reputation against those 2004 lies about his service in Vietnam. The attacks were so damaging that the term “swift boat” came to be a phrase commonly used to describe extreme and false political attacks.

This was just another chapter in the right’s attempts to both “own” national security as an issue to the exclusion of Democrats and serving up caricatures of liberals as haters-of-the-military and extremist hippies, caricatures that served as straw-man phantoms and that bore little resemblance to reality. Other recent chapters had been 1992’s and 1996’s attempts by the Republicans to portray Bill Clinton as a raging antiwar pot-smoking draft-dodging hippie unfit to be Commander-in-Chief.

Recently, It’s Just Getting Worse

Jonathan Ernst / Reuters

While the rise of Obama occurring hand-in-hand with an increasing, newly dominant anti-war feeling in America meant such fault-lines, concerns, and lines of attack would recede as they became increasingly ineffective (especially after the Obama Administration successfully took out Osama bin Laden; Mitt Romney barely mentioned, or challenged Obama on, foreign policy during the campaign homestretch in 2012), when the Arab Spring really turned for the dramatically worse and ISIS burst into view, Republicans, once again, found effective returns from investing in familiar tactics.

Yes, back were the days of Republicans using national security and foreign policy in hyperpartisan politicized attacks during Obama’s second term. The baseless, repeatedly-proven-to-be-false accusations trying to pin the blame on Hillary Clinton for the Benghazi attacks that killed four Americans in Benghazi, Libya—including our then-Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens—is perhaps the best example of this shameful disgrace of abuse of the concepts of oversight and political discourse (especially when contrasted with how Democrats responded to the 1983 Beirut and 2001 9/11 attacks, as discussed above). Other great recent examples of Republican weaponization of foreign policy and national security politics include trying to blame Obama for both the rise and success of ISIS, both accusations being quite factually incorrect, as well as pretty much the entire Republican/Trumpian critique on immigration and the despicable demonization of Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s refugee policies (and refugees, for that matter; the previous five links are to my own detailed rebuttals of each criticism). The irony is lost on Republicans, too, as they criticize Obama both for being feckless on Syria but for doing too much on Libya, when criticism of one of those policies begs the very response of the one they are criticizing in the other, take your pick; the same can be said when they try to blame Obama for Ukraine’s crisis, even though Russia’s Putin also invaded and annexed parts of Georgia under W. Bush’s watch. The irony in their criticism is also lost on Republicans because they themselves either have terrible alternative “policies,” if they have any at all, a reality simply augmented terribly by their terrible candidate for the presidency but a reality that is very much the status quo in today’s Republican Party even without Trump.

Conclusion

Linda Davidson/The Washington Post

One thing that is certain is that the trend of Republicans hyperpartisanizing and politicizing national security issues as a party began under Clinton in the 1990s with Somalia, not with 9/11. To a very large extent, national security and foreign policy were bipartisan issues during the Cold War, but that did practice not survive after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Ancient republican (small “R!”) Roman historian Sallust hits the nail right on the head with the hammer describing this dynamic some 2,000 years ago in his Roman Republic:

“…the pattern of routine partisanship and factionalism, and, as a result, of all other vicious practices had arisen in Rome… It was the result of peace and an abundance of those things that mortals consider most important. I say this, because, before the destruction of Carthage, mutual consideration and restraint between the people and the Roman Senate characterized the government. Among the citizens, there was no struggle for glory or domination. Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity…In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and the Republic, which had been our common ground, was mutilated.” ( The Jurgurthine War 41.1-5)

With the U.S., we can simply replace Rome with ourselves and Carthage with the Soviet Union, and that’s pretty much where we are today. While we faced the more-or-less existential threat of the Soviet Union, bipartisanship governed much (though hardly all) of our politics when it came to foreign policy and national security, and American victory in the Cold War was largely the result of decades of bipartisan policy and internal Soviet dynamics, hardly just because of the efforts of one man named Reagan, as many conservatives would have you believe.   Since then, largely because of the Republican Party (at least until the rise of the Bernie Sanders crowd), good practices are very much on the decline, not least of all in terms of how politics and issues of both foreign policy and national security have become toxically mixed, and we can’t blame this on 9/11, for it was a disease already growing in our body politic years before.

Today, there is hardly anybody left in a Republican leadership position who is someone like Bob Dole, who, though often opposing Clinton, put American interests and productive outcomes in foreign affairs ahead of partisanship and political gain, often acting to reign in his unruly Party members. There does not seem to be any new blood among Republicans who are capable of leading and cooperating like Dole, which means this untenable status quo of today is something with which we will be stuck for some time to come.

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981), and here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg. If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content, or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

Sudden, shocking, disturbing, and largely self-propelled trends in America and Europe are doing more damage to Western democracy today than Soviet armies or nuclear missiles ever did during the Cold War

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 17, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) March 17th, 2016

Clockwise: Photo/Agencies, Cheryl Evans/The Republic, AP

AMMAN — Roughly a quarter-century ago, the world seemed poised for a triumph of democracy and human rights unprecedented in human history. As Francis Fukuyama famously noted in “The End of History,” the end of the Cold War marked the end of thousands of years of ideological struggle, and the spread of Western democratic capitalist ideals all around the world was inevitable with the demise of the Soviet Union. It was the end of history as we knew it: nothing could stand anymore in the way of the West and its triumphant march forward through history.

Except, apparently, the West itself.

*****

Not a New Problem

The West and democracy being their own worst enemy is hardly a new thing.

As one historian wrote:

“The pattern of routine partisanship and factionalism, and, as a result, of all other vicious practices had arisen…It was the result of peace and an abundance of those things that mortals consider most important. I say this, because, before the destruction of…[our chief rival power], mutual consideration and restraint between the people and the…[governing elites] characterized the government…Fear of a foreign enemy preserved good political practices. But when that fear was no longer on their minds, self-indulgence and arrogance, attitudes that prosperity loves, took over. As a result the tranquility they had longed for in difficult times proved, when they got it, to be more cruel and bitter than adversity…every man acted on his own behalf, stealing, robbing, plundering. In this way all political life was torn apart between two parties, and [our political system], which had been our common ground, was mutilated…And so, joined with power, greed without moderation or measure invaded, polluted, and devastated everything, considered nothing valuable or sacred, until it brought about its own collapse.”

The above quotation is not from a Western historian of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries; rather, it is the ancient Roman historian Sallust writing in the first century B.C.E. in his The Jurgurthine War (41.1-10). He was writing of the slow self-destruction of the democratic Roman Republic, which lasted nearly 500 years, after its final triumph over Carthage. He lived to see his Republic crumble politically, dying a few years before Octavian would become first of the Roman emperors.

HBO

American Founding Father and (second) President John Adams wrote in the early nineteenth-century of democracy being its own worst enemy:

“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy. It is not true, in fact, and nowhere appears in history. Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”

*****

“Flet victus, victor interiit” (The conquered mourns, the conqueror is undone)—Latin proverb

Much like ancient Rome, the West today exercised relative restraint in domestic affairs when faced with a mighty foe as the Soviet Union functioned as its Carthage. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, the United States seemed poised to dominate the world for the foreseeable future and the European Union was on its way to producing a unified Europe that would also be a dominant global power, working in tandem with the United States to spread and maintain peace, democracy, and capitalism.

Lionel Cironneau/AP

Just a few decades later, in 2016, that vision appear to be fading.

In the United States, the presidency of George W. Bush squandered a massive budgetary surplus, the result of a prosperity not seen since the years after WWII, when Eisenhower gave America a globally-unprecedented highway system and a military that ensured it would be the dominant player in the Cold War; Bush opted to use America’s prosperity to pay for lopsided tax cuts for the wealthy and then prosecuted two disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose costs he added to the deficit and debt, and the latter of which destabilized the Middle East more than any event since the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after WWI.

At home, his administration (and other officials) failed miserably in addressing Hurricane Katrina as it humbled and partly destroyed New Orleans, a great American city, and did nothing to prevent the onset of the greatest global financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression (barely managing to address it in time to prevent a possible total meltdown of the global financial and economic systems).

Now, America’s first non-white president, Barack Obama, has encountered a level of obstructionism and partisanship from Congress unseen since the Civil War; the elation and hope of the election results of 2008 has given way to a level of dysfunction and gridlock that calls into question America’s ability to govern itself regardless of who sits in the White House.  As of now, the U.S. may have a vacant seat on its Supreme Court for close to, or more than, a year, the longest vacancy since the 1840s and the result of partisan obstruction on the part of the Republican Party.

Over the last few months, that Republican Party, one of America’s two main political parties since the elections of 1856, appeared on the verge of melting down in the face of the candidacy of businessman and TV personality Donald Trump; just a few days ago, it seems it reluctantly accepted that he is near-certain to be its nominee. In a few months, the United States might be able to be said to have gone in a mere-quarter century from victor of the Cold War to electing a President Trump.

Jan Kruger/Getty Images

In Europe, even in the 1990s it was demonstrated twice in the Balkans that Europe was incapable of dealing with major conflicts in its own backyard without help and, more importantly, leadership from the United States. Since then, it has failed to effectively deal with conflict in Libya, Ukraine, and Syria, all within or near its periphery. The situation in Syria has led to refugee and migrant crises unseen in the world or Europe since WWII; Europe’s response has been grossly inadequate and the influx of refugees has been one of the main catalysts for the dramatic rise all over Europe of far-right political parties that border on being fascist; they are often against the European Union and are forcefully hostile to immigrants and refugees.

Leaders like Angela Merkel of Germany, trying to show kindness and compassion to refugees, may be ousted sooner by politics rather than later for her troubles, and other governments balk at attempts to coordinate regional refugee and economic policies. In France, a rising far-right party funded by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government may possibly come to control France in the coming years. Poland seems to be in the process of destroying its democracy.

A series of complacent governments in places like Greece, Italy, and Spain set off dramatic economic, finance, and debt crises that have severely weakened confidence in the European Union as well. There was, and still is, talk of a Greek exit (“Grexit”) from the EU. Now, there is talk of a “Brexit,” as, even after unprecedented concessions by the EU to Britain (concessions that severely undermined the EU), Britain’s public may still vote to leave the EU in a matter of months. The United Kingdom itself only recently narrowly avoided disintegration by secession from it by Scotland, a possibility which, it was just announced, will be pursued again.

AP

Even in Israel, considered a bastion of Western democracy in the Middle East, the public and government are becoming increasingly okay with the erosion of democratic values and a deeply undemocratic military occupation of the West Bank as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict stifles Israel’s left and drives its people further to the right. The assault on democratic norms in Turkey by its government is far worse. Still worse in that region, the Arab Spring has, in general, become a massive tragedy.

Archive

Additionally, democracy by no means appears stable or secure overall in either Sub-Saharan Africa or in Latin America.

Failing the Test?

Fighting in Ukraine in 2015—Mstyslav Chernov/Wikimedia Commons

As The Economist pointed out, Europe has its “little Trumps;” America might install its Trump as president. A deeply divided American public is desperate for functionality from its government, but seems incapable of electing a Congress that can produce this; after only a few years of near-total gridlock, it may turn to Trump. If there is an ensuing period of longer dysfunction, it is terrifying to imagine what Americans might opt for then.

Likewise, in Europe, as leftist leaders are challenged, weakened, and/or ousted one-by-one and are replaced by governments whose missions are resisting pressures of EU policy, as racial, ethnic, and religious tension, fears of Islamic terrorism, nativism, and demagogues become ever more commonplace, it is terrifying to envision its future, too. An autocratic Russia sits on Europe’s edge, poking and prodding from the outside, funding right-wing extremist parties in Europe that look to Putin’s Russia as a model, even while that democratic model has become a farce.

Make no mistake, Western Democracy is on trial; if Hillary Clinton does not enter the White House this next January, who or what, then, will encourage Europe to rethink its own rightward march, and what will keep America’s Trump-led “house divided against itself” from following, even encouraging, Europe’s lead? What will that ultimately mean for democracy and its viability worldwide as this century progresses? 

That is not to say that it is certain Mrs. Clinton can solve all of these problems.  But at least with her, there will be a sincere effort from the most powerful nation on earth to push back against the downward spiral on both sides of the Atlantic; with Mr. Trump, that downward spiral will only be encouraged and accelerated.

AP

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Here are many more articles by Brian E. Frydenborg.  If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to him! Feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981)

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse August 3, 2015 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) August 3rd, 2015

Reuters

This piece has also been published by the Russian International Affairs Council (RIAC).

Those who argue that the Obama Administration’s overall Middle East strategy is a total failure have no sense of strategy themselves and dangerously substitute tactical-here-and-nows and pointless posturing for real strategy (especially Republicans). That’s not to say some of the Obama Administration’s Middle East policies aren’t lacking, but overall the Administration has more progress and sound approaches to point to than failures and mismanagement. Below, all of the Obama Administration’s major Middle East policies are broken down and given a letter grade. Here, then, is a look at all the major efforts of the Obama Administration in the Middle East, and as it covers a lot of territory this has been broken up into three parts, this being Part II and covering the Syrian Civil War.

Other articles in this series:

Grading Obama’s Middle East Strategy (Sensibly): Part I

4.) Dealing with Syria’s Civil War

AMMAN — Amidst a sea of Middle Eastern conflicts, the civil war raging in Syria is currently the largest and deadliest. Here, as in other situations, we have a crisis in which we must be careful not to blame Obama too much but must also note the missed opportunities where his substantive leadership could have made a huge difference, though not without some risk involved. So, right from the start, it must be acknowledged both that America could have done a lot more in regards to Syria, potentially helping to dramatically lessen the violence and perhaps even ending the war on the one hand, but, on the other, that America bears little responsibility for causing or contributing to the overall Syrian tragedy.

First, let’s examine the history of this war and the Obama Administration’s response to it, starting from the very beginning.

Of Arms and Assad I Sing

REUTERS/Mahmoud Hassano

Once upon a time in 2011, there was an uprising in Syria of many of the country’s own people who wanted Syria’s President (dictator) Bashar al-Assad to step down so they could change the system and have more freedom. They were inspired by their Arab brethren in the happier days of the Arab Spring in 2011. This was, generally, a struggle for freedom, representation, human rights, and democracy in a country ruled by an authoritarian, repressive, undemocratic Syrian regime with an Alawite (a word describing a subsect of Shia Islam that is only roughly 12% of Syria’s population) ruling family and many other Alawites at the top, ruling over mostly Sunni Muslims, though the regime and its supporters are by no means exclusively Alawite. While in 2011, people power brought down long-ruling autocrats in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, and American-led NATO intervention rescued a revolution in Libya from massacre and disaster and helped overthrow Libya’s dictator, Muammar el-Qaddafi, Syria had no such luck with its people power or Western intervention. Qaddafi, alone and isolated and ruling over a far smaller population, was a relatively easy target. Compared to Qaddafi’s regime, Assad’s military was much stronger and, unlike Qaddafi’s, had strong patrons in Russia and Iran who would complicate and increase the costs of any Western intervention and made the prospects of any success for the Syrian people on their own quite dim.

Some powers talked of intervening in Syria, but with the U.S. signaling no appetite for direct military involvement, no other Western governments put their militaries in action against the Assad regime, nor did any regional governments. Still, Obama did call for Assad to step down in August 2011, and moved to increase sanctions and economic pressure on the regime at the same time. There was also a robust debate within the Obama administration about arming the Syrian rebels. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, then-CIA chief and later Gates’ successor Leon Panetta, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (also former president Bill Clinton) all agreed on arming significant numbers of moderate Syrian rebels, but they were unable to persuade President Obama in the end. If moderate rebels had been robustly supported early in the conflict, when an increasing stream of Syrian Army officers(including generals) and soldiers were defecting to the rebel cause, perhaps the regime could have been brought to its knees and would have been willing to enter serious negotiations; perhaps Assad would have been willing to leave if given immunity. The U.S. and West could have made a huge difference in the conflict with direct intervention by degrading the Assad regime’s military capabilities and limiting the shipments of weapons into Syria with a combination of naval blockades, no-fly-zones, and the U.S. specifically partnering with its allies Iraq and (NATO member) Turkey to use drones, reconnaissance flights, and other high-tech monitoring equipment to lock down Syria’s land borders with both nations. NATO could have played a significant role in such an operation, too, not terribly dissimilar to its role in the operation in Libya.

Karam Al-Masri/AFP/Getty Images

But no serious action was taken along these lines and in this absence of action, into the fray came Islamist extremist jihadists—including ISIS—even more murderous than Assad’s thugs. Suddenly, the moderate homegrown Syrian revolutionary rebels, who were having a difficult enough time holding their own with little international support against Assad’s well-and-Russian-armed forces, found themselves having to compete with and also fight well-armed, well-funded foreign jihadist extremists. Many of the moderate rebels lost heart and quit; still others defected to the more successful and more robustly-backed Islamists. At the same time, other Shiites were coming to the aid of Assad’s Shiite Alawite-led regime: the Iranian government was sending some of its elite military units and leaders, while Lebanese Hezbollah’s well-trained militia forces were also coming and making a big difference in favor of Assad at this time, each supporting and fighting for Assad on Syrian soil.

Instead of being supported by the international community and slowly and surely gaining territory, credibility, and influence, the Syrian moderates were themselves losing territory, credibility, and influence to the better-supported Islamists and their more extreme tactics. Almost all the factions became more radicalized, more violent. A major attack in July 2012 in Damascus that killed top regime insiders, including the defense minister and Assad’s brother-in-law—still the most spectacular attack to date carried out against the regime—was claimed by both moderate and extremist rebels, with some noting evidence that pointed to Islamists, and still others saying it was an inside job of the regime itself.

Narciso Contreras, Associated Press

Whoever carried it out, after this bombing, the conflict became even more deadly and brutal in Syria, with both 2012 and 2013 each seeing extreme escalations in violence and lethality. Foreign Shiite militias joined the Iranian government’s and Lebanese Hezbollah’s well-trained militia forces (both Shiite as well) already aiding and fighting for Assad in Syria. As the situation kept deteriorating, at some points in 2012 the CIA began helping U.S. allies Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar vet and identify rebels moderate enough to recommend them for military support and Obama secretly authorized both covert non-lethal support from the U.S. for some Syrian rebels and a program to militarily train some of them, too, though these efforts were to be very limited in nature; even when they were “sharply increased” early and later in 2013, respectively, the programs had been so small to begin with that they still remained very limited.  Obama also politically recognized Syria’s main opposition group (the Syrian Opposition/National Coalition) at the end of 2012, though without recognizing it as the legitimate government of Syria. But when the rebels suffered serious losses, in the middle of 2013 the Obama Administration and select Congressional Committees finally decided to have America itself arm Syrian rebels with “lethal military aid,” allowing the CIA to arm vetted Syrian rebels directly (though not with any advanced or heavy weaponry), and those weapons finally began to be delivered at the very end of the summer of 2013.

As the conflict continued to worsen and concerns about Assad’s chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program—one of the largest in the world—were raised, Obama even repeatedly and publicly warned Assad that if his regime was found to be readying or using “a whole bunch” of chemical weapons that this would constitute a “red line” that would mean a severe response from the U.S., even possibly including military action. Throughout this period, rumors and reports of the use of chemical weapons use began to trickle out of Syria, culminating in the summer of 2013 with reports of a massive chemical WMD sarin gas attack—the largest chemical attack in the world in a quarter-century since Saddam Hussein gassed Iraqi Kurds in 1988—near Damascus. Unlike previous reports, these highlighted an attack that was both of an unprecedented scale for this conflict—it killed about 1,400 people—and confirmed publicly by several major Western governments (including that of the United States), Human Rights Watch, and later by the United Nations. As to who was the culprit, as I pointed out at the time, the signs clearly pointed to elements of the Assad regime carrying out the attack.

To Strike or Not to Strike, That Was the Question

Horrified by the attack and seeing this “red line” crossed with impunity, first Kerry and then Obama made an impassioned case to the American people that a military response against Assad’s regime was both necessary and proper and began to move the machinery of the American government and its allies towards this end. Yet the American people, weary of war after the disasters of the (W.) Bush Administration, began to see Obama’s moves to engage in limited strikes in Syria as all too similar to Bush’s moves to invade Iraq; they failed to see, as I myself made clear, that Syria 2013 was not Iraq 2003, and that Obama is not Bush, for despite the support of both the top Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, Speaker of the House John Boehner, and the top Democrat in the same body, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, few others of either party in Congress emerged to support Obama’s plan to strike Assad’s regime and far more came out against it. Even as opposition began growing at home, the House of Commons of the British Parliament shockingly rejected Prime Minister David Cameron’s motion to support pending American strikes and then Cameron himself stated he would respect the vote and not join the U.S.were it to initiate strikes against Assad’s regime. Soon after this setback, opposition to the Obama Administration’s plans for military strikes gained traction very quickly both at home and abroad.

With Obama himself never too eager to intervene militarily and with both his own party and America’s most stalwart foreign ally for military interventions uncharacteristically declining to join the fray, Obama publicly announced he would seek Congressional approval. In some ways, this could be considered a welcome move, coming after the Bush Administration often showed little more than contempt for opposition sentiment in Congress after the early months of near unquestioning-support from much of Congress just after the September 11th attacks faded to the more acrimonious, partisan atmosphere that characterized the end of Bush’s first term and all of his second (this poisonous political atmosphere only got worse after Obama was elected). Furthermore, if Obama was able to muster Congressional support, it would empower him that much more in the public and political senses. And yet, Obama’s putting so much power and influence in the hands of Congress on so crucial an action showed that he had learned almost nothing at all from his previous interactions with Congress, whether with insecure Democrats nervous about retaining their seats or with an implacable Tea Party-driven Republican majority in the House that was determined to avoid cooperation with the president at nearly all costs. To allow Congress to vote against his plan was to invite it to be weakened and to drive any international support to significantly lower levels, if not destroying it entirely. That President Obama did not realize that this outcome was far more likely from the beginning reveals a remarkable naïveté for a president in his second term dealing with factions that had more than established who they were and how they would behave. Never mind that Obama was perfectly within his Constitutional and legal rights to do so, and that there are ample precedents in American history dating back to the Administrations of Presidents Adams (for military action short of war) and Jefferson (for military action overseas without Congressional authorization), our second and third presidents, respectively, because being undermined in such a serious way politically would itself carry grave real-world consequences.

Obama’s s attempt to rally support failed miserably, as in the days that followed public opposition in the U.S. became widespread, vocal, and bipartisan. Obama’s idealistic attempt to engage the elected representatives of the people weakened his position considerably, for, despite some support from the most relevant Committees in Congress, the overall trends in both the House and the Senate showed that the Obama Administration had little to no chance of either the full House of the full Senate passing a resolution either approving or authorizing military action in Syria against Assad. Basically, instead of leading decisively, Obama decided to say “wait, let’s have a discussion” at this critical juncture after there had already been weeks of mulling over what to do, preferring to pass at least some of the responsibility and maybe even some of the authority from the Executive Branch to the Legislative Branch. Even the rebels and the government in Syria both strangely united in questioning this move of Obama’s. Again, such an action is one that works better in the abstract than in practice, and it was at such a juncture, with the very presidency stalling and losing altitude on such a critical military issue, that Russia and Vladimir Putin waded into the fray, seizing on a single comment by Secretary of State John Kerry—that Assad could avoid strikes if he gave up his chemical WMD—to propose a plan facilitate just that. This was, to use my own label, after Russia’s long stint as the obstructionist Tea Party of international politics and also after Putin’s farcical, blithely hypocritical New York Times op-ed calling for a diplomatic, non-violent solution even though, less than a year later, he sent Russian troops pouring into Ukraine, when violence as a means suited his ends there, and did the same five years earlier in Georgia. Still, while virtually anything that would significantly reduce Assad’s WMD stockpile has to be objectively seen as a positive, on one level the ensuing deal left Obama and the U.S presidency significantly emasculated. On another level, it was clear that the threat of U.S. strikes was the only thing that prodded Russia into doing anything that was either significant or productive in relation to this conflict. And yet, as I wrote at the time, on another, grander level, Putin’s move was entirely in his self-interest, as the deal itself was something of an insurance policy he took out on Assad’s regime, a significant ally of Russia’s that was both a major buyer of Russian arms and the host of Russia’s only military base outside of the former Soviet Union.

In any event, after Obama declined to strike the Assad regime and Russia’s proposal—which had become the UN’s—was accepted by Syria, seeing Syria’s 1,300 tons of declared chemical weapons painstakingly removed from Syria (there is now, disturbingly, new evidence that Assad may have kept some undeclared top-grade chemical WMD hidden from inspectors to be used in more desperate times), what I predicted—that this would do nothing to stem the drivers of the conflict and that the war in Syria would only continue and continue to get worse like some sort of vortex—came to pass, with 2014 being the deadliest year of the conflict thus far and no end in sight. Now, Syria truly is a vortex, becoming inflated and conflated with so many other conflicts that it has metastasized into one big megaconflict. Syria’s neighbors, as I predicted in the fall of 2013, are also suffering from an increasingly destabilizing burden as a result of the conflict—none more so than Iraq as ISIS broke off from al-Qaeda and proceeded to shock the world with its march from Syria into Iraq in 2014—and the more than four million registered refugees it has produced.

UNHCR

Still, as mentioned, even before the chemical weapons attacks, the Obama Administration had signaled and had taken steps—albeit very miniscule ones—to support rebels fighting to overthrow Assad’s regime. Yet, in addition to Obama’s natural caution and the lack of political and public support for robust involvement in Syria, a classified 2012-2013 CIA study found very little success with past CIA covert armings of rebel groups in various conflicts over nearly seventy years unless Americans were on the ground working with rebels where they were fighting (something the Obama Administration was clear it wanted to avoid at the time); this means that even up through the publishing of this article at the beginning of August 2015, the Administration’s anti-Assad efforts when it comes to supporting rebels actively fighting against Assad have been half-hearted, tepid, and ineffective at best. As the CIA training program for vetted moderate rebels encountered difficulties, stalled, produced limited results, and is now having a significant part of its funding cut, the Obama Administration began to shift responsibility to the U.S. Military by giving it a new program to train Syrian rebels; but whereas the CIA program was concocted to produce forces to fight Assad’s regime, the U.S. Military’s program will focus on producing fighters to go after ISIS. Obama asked Congress to approve $500 million in funding for the new program in the summer of 2014, and by the end of the year, Congress had approved an over $720 million package for the program, demonstrating both the shift in the U.S. view from Assad to ISIS as the major threat and the seriousness with which ISIS was being viewed (Assad may even be playing into this shift by deliberately aiding ISIS in an effort to empower the terrorist group as a way to further deflect Western attention away from itself to ISIS and stoke further fears of what would happen should the Assad regime fall, making leaders more reluctant to push for his ouster). The military training program began this spring, but as of early July had only managed to train less than sixty rebels, a paltry figure by any standards. To make matters worse, even before the end of July, al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria and ISIS rival, Jabhat al-Nusra/the Nusra Front, had embarrassingly captured one of the U.S-trained-rebels’ senior commanders and his deputy and then later attacked the U.S.-trained rebel group.  Another embarrassing development is that the Assad regime has been resorting to the regular use of makeshift chemical weapons—the regime’s infamous barrel bombs with chlorine gas added to their payload—against civilians. While these more improvised chlorine chemical weapons do not reach the level of lethality of the WMD attack from the summer of 2013 (an attack that multiple investigations confirmed involved highly-deadly sarin gas), the blatant and repeated violation of the international norm against the use of chemical weapons without any serious consequences is a development that begs their future use by both Assad’s regime and others who share its lack of concern for international norms and human life.

Additionally, just over the past week, after Turkey’s long opposition to Assad by way of supporting Islamist extremists—including, at least tacitly (and sometimes more directly), ISIS and the al-Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front—backfired recently with the worst terrorist attack in Turkey against civilians in years and carried out by a Turkish citizen with reported tied to ISIS, there is, apparently, a new level of cooperation between Turkey and the United States, including plans to establish a “safe zone” corridor in Syria along the country’s border with Turkey using American air power and both Turkish and rebel ground forces. The plan reportedly calls for ISIS to be cleared from a zone inside Syria extending sixty miles from Turkey’s border and which would also serve as a safe haven for civilians, though U.S. officials later denied such a plan has been agreed upon. I called for at least a similar robust corridor back in the fall of 2013 as a starting point from which moderate rebels, supported by the West, could further expand control and as one of the only realistic ways for an intervention to have an impact on driving down the drivers of conflict and moving in any way towards an end to the Syrian Civil war and the mass killing associated with it (as neither Assad’s chemical weapons nor ISIS are the reasons behind the Syrian Civil War and its perpetuation). However, it remains to be seen if this talk will turn into action and enough of such action to make a real difference. Especially with Obama close to leaving office and an election season well underway, there are reasons to doubt this safe corridor will actually come into being anytime soon if at all, at least in a significant way. Then again, Obama has shown a boldness and a willingness to take the risks required for big payoffs in recent months, most especially with Cuba and Iran, so such talk should also not be immediately written off. Furthermore, there is at least a chance that the recent agreement with Iran will spur further cooperation between Iran and the United States, with Syria perhaps being the most pressing and obvious case for such cooperation apart from the problem of ISIS. Only time will tell, especially given the conflicting messages coming out of media and official sources. But if some sort of a safe-zone is established by two (or more) NATO countries like the U.S. and Turkey, it could be a game changer for Assad, and not to his benefit. If such action expands, the successful NATO air-war in Kosovo could be seen as something of a loose blueprint. A Syria free of Assad and with ISIS tamed could be a starting point for peace and a new future for the Syrian people. What is happening now is a starting point for nothing but death and destruction.

While the U.S. may be significantly and substantively stepping up the fight against ISIS in Syria, having now been directly striking ISIS targets inside Syria with a respectable-sized coalition of air power for some time (and reportedly maybe indirectly communicating with Assad’s regime about those strikes), and while talk of creating a humanitarian corridor is certainly welcome, even allowing for those developments, there is very little of substance the U.S. has done to stem the long-term drivers of the Syrian Civil War and thus, very little it has done little to bring about an end to this conflict and a stop to the mass killing involved with it. As peace talks pushed by the U.S. between the regime and the opposition, each with goals wholly incompatible to the other, have accomplished nothing and seem all but certain to go nowhere for the foreseeable future, the focus on ISIS and on chemical weapons has obscured the fact that the Assad regime and the war in general slaughters civilians on a mass scale and that little has been done to stop this by anyone.

Bold “What Ifs” vs. “Do No Harm”

Having traced the Syrian Civil War from its inception through now and the U.S. role (or lack thereof) in it during this same period, how the U.S. could even be judged or graded on its involvement must also be discussed.

Since the United States: 1.) was not, an occupying power in Syria—like France was was from the end of WWI through 1946—and bears no serious responsibility for the initial homegrown protests in Syria that prompted a brutal, murderous government response that, in turn, provoked an uprising which led to the Syrian Civil War, 2.) was not even not the among first Western nations formally recognizing the opposition, 3.) has been very lightly involved compared with other major international meddlers in this conflict (e.g. Russia, Iran, Hezbollah, the Gulf states…), and 4.) since the overall post-2003 Iraq mess, for which the U.S. does bear a majority of overall responsibility, was actually at its best levels of security all throughout the first two years of the protests/fighting in Syria, we cannot even begin to argue that the U.S. destabilizing Iraq is one of the major reasons why the Syrian Civil War got so out of control. If anything, the situation in Syria eventually did much more to destabilize Iraq than the other way around. That is no to say that our actions in Libya (which will be discussed in Part III) did not possibly serve to foster a hope within dissident Syrians that the U.S./NATO/the West would intervene on their behalf, but using that possibility to assign major blame to the U.S. for Syria’s conflict falls far short of a logical conclusion.

Reuters/Muzaffar Salman

However, as demonstrated, the U.S. had major opportunities to help make major differences and assist the Syrian people and their homegrown revolutionaries in overthrowing Assad. This the U.S. (and the world) declined to do, except in only very minor ways and quite belatedly, making the war in Syria a heavyweight fight between Ba’athist authoritarianism and jihadist theocracy, with the local Syrian moderates being left to waste away in the face of multiple competing factions and multiple threats. As in otherrelatively recent situations of mass killing (e.g., Rwanda, Bosnia, the Congo, the ongoing genocide in Darfur), it is disappointing that, absent U.S. leadership, no other nation stepped up to lead and significantly help the people (in this case local, moderate rebels), and that so many people have, are, and will continue to die as a result, so the blame for inaction on Syria is hardly on the U.S. alone. But especially after Obama’s waffling and inaction on his chemical weapons “red line” (a true low point of Obama’s presidency, which even his then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta acknowledges was a huge mistake) and after Russia’s Syrian WMD deal, Assad has felt secure and undaunted when it comes to the West, while the extremist jihadists are ascendant at the expense of the moderate rebels as much as at the expense of the regime, if not more so. And it seems, sadly, that, without U.S. leadership, there is no end to this brutal war in sight.

But with less than eighteen months left in Obama’s presidency, and with ISIS now being the priority target before Assad (though Obama reiterated earlier in July that it still his and the U.S. Government’s official position that Assad needs to step down), it is very unlikely that Assad will be gone before Obama leaves office in January 2017 or anytime soon after that, given the lack of real action the U.S. and other world powers have taken to bring this about. Obama’s current Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, bluntly admitted this recently during a Senate hearing. Still, the new U.S. training program for moderate rebels and new talk of a “safe zone” should not be prematurely dismissed, although nor, conversely, should any chicks be counted before the eggs are hatched.

But one final point must also be made: given America’s recent decade-and-then-some of misadventures, Obama does deserve some credit for notinserting America in a huge, destructive, or counterproductive way into the morass of the Syrian Civil War.

Grade: Overall C, more recently C+

Baraa Al-Halabi

For these reasons, the Obama Administration cannot be given lower than a C on Syria because, as discussed, the U.S. has not been a major player in Syria historically or recently and therefore cannot be said to be one those parties most at fault for the creation or perpetuation of the Syrian Civil War or its frightening metastasization and mass casualties totaling nearly a quarter of a million killed. Furthermore, contrary to recent years, the U.S. now has avoided inserting itself blunderingly and destructively into a major quicksand-like ground role in the war. It also avoided its Cold War modus operandi of blindly aiding extremist groups killing many civilians and committing many atrocities.  So, to its credit, the Administration avoiding a repeat of Iraq in 2003 as well as many of America’s misadventures from the Cold War. Yet so much more could have been done to mitigate or possibly end the war over the last four years, so many tens of thousands (or more) of lives could have been saved, and though the U.S. is far from alone in being blamed for inaction, it still could have done so much more than the very, very little it ended up doing, its embarrassing “red line” moment perhaps the most obvious example of this, when the correct and better arguments for intervention quickly fell to the side without the wind of political will to keep them aloft. To be fair to the Obama Administration, these winds of political will were absent from all significant concerned parties, with the U.S. hardly being the party with either the most responsibility to act or the most interests at stake. While recent reports suggest a very belated better-far-too-late-than-never increase in efforts to help moderate rebels, the results and the seriousness of these efforts remain to be seen, and as moderate rebels generally stand now, they have been all but pushed aside and are languishing in near-irrelevance as the conflict has devolved mainly into a conflict between Assad’s autocratic, oppressive regime and Islamist extremists intent on building a caliphate. So, even as the Administration cannot be given lower than a C, it also cannot be given higher than a C. Thus, an “average” grade of C it is, with + being added for the more recent months on the hope that recent moves, deliberations, and talk prove more fruitful and productive than the meager and disappointing efforts of the Obama Administration thus far.

Narciso Contreras/Associated Press

That’s it for Part II, coming up next the (overall) Arab Spring, ISIS, reducing America’s dependency on Mideast oil, and Iran (saving the more positive for last). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this content please do not hesitate to reach out to me! Please feel free to share and repost on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at@bfry1981)

(Russian/Русский перевод) Author’s note: the odyssey of “Nastya Rybka”—real name Anastasia Vashukevich—has only recently become even more complex with her deportation from Thailand and rough apprehension, detention, and shady release by authorities in Russia at the apparent behest of Russian billionaire oligarch and close Putin ally Oleg Deripaska, who clearly felt threatened enough by her to take drastic action to silence her. That it was also recently revealed that Manafort shared internal polling data during the 2016 campaign (i.e., collusion) with Konstantin Kilimnik, a longtime Manafort partner with clear ties to Russian intelligence and who was acting as a go-between for Manafort and Deripaska, only adds to the importance of this saga withing the Trump-Russia saga.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse February 19, 2018

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) Updated April 26, 2022, to use the more sensitive term “sex-worker;” UPDATE: Instagram bowed to Kremlin pressure and removed the content in question

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AMMAN—While I am proud of the following analysis, I want to point out that the brave Russian dissident, Alexey Navalny, deserve the real credit: he is placing his career as an activist and would-be politician, his family, his freedom, and his very health and life at risk in exposing the blatant, sordid truth about Putin and his henchmen and, in this case, their ties to Trump.

Navalny, who was trying to run against Putin for the presidency but whom Russian authorities have barred from competing in the election and have charged with bogus crimes, has been famous for some time for creating incredibly sharp YouTube videos exposing the corruption of top Russian officials à la Bill Browder (English/Russian Русский) of Magntisky Act fame.

One of Navalny’s latest videos was sparked by a group of apparent call girls who descended upon his office and tried to manufacture controversy for Navalny; this effort backfired as one of the young women, a sex-worker who calls herself “Nastya Rybka,” was easily identifiable from social media, and the much of the rest of the information presented in this video was from her online posts and a book she wrote. Navalny was able to put together what seems to be incontrovertible proof from public data and the verifiable information provided by “Rybka” to place her, Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, and a special guest on a yacht in Scandinavian waters in August of 2016.

If Deripaska’s name sounds familiar, it is because he is at the center of a good chunk of the intrigue surrounding Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections. He is a fabulously wealthy Russian billionaire, an aluminum magnate and close Putin ally who has his own history with organized crime that has prevented him from getting a U.S. visa (even with 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole lobbying on his behalf). Deripaska partnered for years with Paul Manafort, Trump’s Campaign Chairman when Trump as a candidate closed out the Republican primaries and accepted the nomination at the Republican National Convention, and Rick Gates, a longtime aide to Manafort, on a number of shady multimillion-dollar shadow deals. One scheme involved a failed effort at trying to bend the tiny Balkan nation of Montenegro to Moscow’s will (interesting in light of an apparent recent Russian-backed failed coup attempt there late in 2016).

Another one of their projects involved Deripaska paying Manafort millions for promoting Putin’s and Russia’s interests, and a third, which Rick Gates joined, involved laundering millions for then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and his inner circle, who were living astoundingly exorbitant lifestyles with the funds. That third caper eventually left Manafort and Gates in a messy financial dispute with Deripaska in the Cayman Islands, and after NBC News revealed the existence of a previously unknown $26 million loan with which Deripaska has graced Manafort, the level of publicly known business dealings between the two men rose to some $60 million. So one could say that Manafort, and to a lesser extent Gates, owed Derispaska bigtime after their joint work helping Putin and Yanukovych.

The pro-Russian Yanukovych was then-outgoing-Ukrainian (also pro-Russian) President Leonid Kuchma’s chosen successor back in 2004, and Kuchma tried to rig the election in Yanukovych’s favor, sparking Ukraine’s Orange Revolution that ended up seeing more pro-Western, more anti-Russian leaders come to power. After this, it would be the task of Manafort (with the help of Gates) to restore Yanukovych’s image and electoral prospects. Yanukovych was essentially Putin’s stooge in a dramatic stage play that eventually helped to subvert Ukraine to the Kremlin’s will, increasing the power of Yanukovych’s pro-Russian political party—the Party of Regions—and finally seeing Yanukovych emerge as the victor in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election. This remarkable comeback was accomplished with a massive political and lobbying effort—run by Manafort with Gates’s help—on behalf of Yanukovych and his Party of Regions (and its successor)—conducted side-by-side with an even more massive alleged money laundering scheme worth billions involving Ukrainian-Russian gas deals and the Russian mafia. Manafort is alleged to have played key roles in this operation, too, working with oligarchs and the Russian mafia to launder money through sham New York real estate deals. The proceeds of this overall scam allegedly went to fund Yanukovych and his political party and to bribe and control other Ukrainian politicians in order to bring them along to the Russian way of thinking at a time when the U.S. was working hard to strengthen its relations with Ukraine, meaning Manafort and Gates were acting against U.S. interests. This work of theirs continued until just before they ended upon Trump’s presidential campaign in 2016. They have now both been indicted by Special Counsel Robert Mueller in part because of money laundering related to this work in Ukraine. 

In putting the pieces together, Navalny was able to show that Deripaska was in close consultation on Russian policy with that special guest on his yacht: one of Russia’s deputy prime ministers, Sergei Prikhodko, a rare longtime survivor in Russia’s top leadership (one of the only major players from the days of Boris Yeltsin, Putin’s predecessor, to still be in place) who has a tremendous amount influence over Russian foreign policy, even greater than Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, according to Navalny. 

Navalny was able to piece all this together because that particularly entrepreneurial Russian escort, who claims to be Deripaska’s mistress, captured pictures and videos of the two Russian giants talking over such matters on board Deripaska’s yacht, enjoying a holiday in Scandinavian waters with the company of young escorts. In one of “Rybka’s” videos, Deripaska and Prikhodko and were discussing that favorite Russian punching bag, Victoria Nuland, a prominent former U.S. State Department official known for fighting against Russian geopolitical schemes, and the intrepid escort notes that they talked about many other political issues. She alleges in her book that Prikhodko (named only as “Papa” in the book) engaged in aggressive sexual harassment against her and others, and that Deripaska (given the moniker “Ruslan”) did not lift a finger to stop it, the only person to which the billionaire gave that kind of deference. 

Manafort reached out to Deripaska on July 7th, 2016, when he was still Trump’s Campaign Chairman, offering to brief him on Trump’s presidential campaign, presumably because of Deripaska’s closeness to Putin and senior Russian government officials. Deripaska’s yacht trip with Prikhodko began on August 6th, less than a month after Manafort offered to brief Deripaska. 

This is direct evidence that Deripaska was in contact with senior Russia government officials, discussing policy, at roughly the same time that Manafort was reaching out to him, and makes an even more compelling argument that Deripaska is still acting as an intermediary for the Kremlin and that Manafort’s relationship with Deripaska is one that could have compromised national security and American interests. 

Russia is already trying to block Navalny’s video in Russia and Deripaska is threatening to sue media outlets that report on it, and in an attack on Navalny in response to his video, Prikhodko referred to Deripaska as “my friend,” hardly denying their closeness.

Correction appended: this article originally misstated that Manafort’s home was raided by the FBI July 26th, 2016, but it was actually 2017.

See related article: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

© 2018 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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Sometimes seeing the bigger picture requires enough steps back to realize there are parts you didn’t even know were there, and in an age of 140-character Tweets, information overload, fake news, short attention spans, and a frequency and scale of scandals unheard of in the history of Western democratic politics, seeing that big picture can be harder than ever, even with the most-covered story in the world. 

Yet in Putin’s cynical salsa with Team Trump, when so many people connected to Trump and Putin are involved in similar money laundering schemes involving Russians and the Russian mafia and each other and Trump properties, we pass out of the realm of allowing for reasonable doubt and suspicion to the point where the crimes become so obvious that what remains to be answered is no longer “if” but simply “how much” these people are guilty and/or stupid.

Below you have the deepest exploration of the big picture of Trump’s crooked Russian business ties you can get from any single account, with a significant amount of information reported here not reported in this context by anyone else, and every detail is from a publicly available, credible, and cited source.

January 23rd, 2019. Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 27, 2017 (over 77,000 unique views) and republished by Ir.net March 15, 2018 (over 36,000 unique views); many major updates in my Nov, 2020, eBook A Song of Gas and Politics,  available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook (preview here) 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 27th, 2017

Built on part on these earlier pieces from: July 30/31 2016: Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

November 4, 2016: EXCLUSIVE: Top Trump Aides’ Deeper & Linked Roles in Putin Agenda Revealed; Russian Mafia Nexus With Trump & Aides Goes Back Years

March 28, 2017: Trump’s Russia & Mafia Dealings Expose Him As Fool or Criminal (Traitor?) or Both: Biggest Scandal in U.S. History, Too Many Ties to Be Nothing

Also, see his related piece from December 7, 2016: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Support Brian’s work by donating here

AMMAN—This story of 1.) DONALD TRUMP, 2.) VLADIMIR PUTIN, and their operatives is exceedingly complex, so I ask readers’ patience in going through this historic tale of political cunning and intrigue, conspiracies and crimes.

CLICK HERE TO ZOOM IN ON CHART

1990s: Laying Foundations

Russian mafia “boss of bosses” 3.) SEMION (Semyon) MOGILEVICH makes moves in North America. Throughout this piece, remember that MOGILEVICH, also known as “the Brainy Don,” has an economics degree and is famous for designing elaborate financial schemes that are extremely difficult, even impossible, to detect, the planning and setup of which can take years and involve a wide range of people in various positions of power whose roles/identities are sometimes never even discovered.

MOGILEVICH starts up a fake company called YBM Magnex International in Pennsylvania in 1995 that would be used to perpetrate a massive stock fraud worth $150 million on the Toronto Stock Exchange. The ostensible “CEO” of YBM was 4.) Jacob (Yakov) Bogatin. His brother, 5.) David Bogatin, had served in the Soviet Army in an anti-aircraft battery in North Vietnam during the Vietnam War, targeting U.S. aircraft; in the mid-1980s, Donald 1.) TRUMP had personally sold David five apartments in I.) Trump Tower, and by the 1990s, he was, like his brother, a key figure in MOGILEVICH’s mafia organization’s presence in the U.S. Another major MOGILEVICH lieutenant who would rise to be one of the senior Russian mobsters in America, 6.) Vyacheslav Ivankov, also lived in I.) Trump Tower, had the Trump Organization’s private contact numbers in his address book, and also loved frequently spending time—along with other Russian mobsters—at TRUMP’s VIII.) Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, NJ.

Another alleged (according to an apparently uncorroborated U.S. Supreme Court writ of certiorari) 3.)MOGILEVICH lieutenant, 7.) Mikhael Sheferovsky (aka Michael SATER), had a son named 8.) FELIX SATER (sometimes Satter), who ended up having, predictably, ties to the Russian mafia; FELIX SATER was involved in an at least $41 million (and up to $60 million) stock fraud and money laundering scheme and ran it in the mid-1990s from an office in II.) 40 Wall St., another TRUMP-owned property. We know this scheme involved the Russian mafia, but the details of that case remain sealed because SATER later cooperated with the U.S. government on national security issues (there is currently a court fight to get this information released on the grounds that it is a national concern, now that TRUMP is president, and some details about SATER have been released in previous court fights, including his father’s alleged link to MOGILEVICH, which I was the first to report). It must also be mentioned that—as 3.) MOGILEVICH was already heavily engaged in money laundering with the Russian mafia in North America and he was already very powerful in that very hierarchical organization, already had a history of close Russian mafia associates linked to TRUMP-owned entities, and would already have known 8.)SATER if hewas the son of one of his own mafia captains as a U.S. Supreme Court writ of certiorari alleges—it would be far more likely than not that MOGILEVICH was somehow involved in 8.) SATER’s scheme.

3.) MOGILEVICH was also connected to a Russian émigré living in Canada, 9.) Boris Birshtein, who ran a number of ostensible businesses under the Seabeco name that were staffed heavily by Russians and others from former Soviet republics. In 1995, Birshtein hosted a meeting in Tel Aviv at which 3.) MOGILEVICH and another major Russian mafia godfather—10.) Sergei Mikhailov (Mikhaylov), also a close business partner of Birshtein and who would later develop his own relationship with Russia’s political elite—were present, as were other Russian and former-Soviet-republic mob bosses. They discussed joint plans for their Ukrainian operations, plans that may have set the stage for much of what is discussed below and that would likely have included MOGILEVICH’s moves that acquired influence over significant chunks Ukraine’s economy, particularly the energy sector. This was all related to corrupt relationships and arrangements with Ukraine’s president—then 11.) Leonid Kuchma, close with 2.) PUTIN—and other major Ukrainian politicians, including some $5 million sent by Birshtein and his Seabeco associates to Kuchma’s campaign manager, 12.) Oleksandr (Alexander) Volkov, known for his ties to Russian organized crime. Two men who would come to dominate large parts of Kazakhstan’s natural resource sector and forge very close ties with that country’s corrupt political leadership as two members of a Kazakh “Trio” of oligarchs, 13.) Alexander Mashkevich (sometimes Machkevich)and 14.) Patokh Chodiev, would meet at Seabeco and work for it throughout the 1990s. At the same time, Russian-born Canadian 15.) Alexander Shnaider (Shneider) began working for Seabeco in 1991 while in law school; he would eventually marry his boss’s daughter, 16.) Simona Birshtein Shnaider, and he rose quickly in Seabeco’s steel sector. Shnaider and a partner founded a company, Midland Resource Holdings, which began aggressively buying up the Ukrainian government’s shares in Ukraine’s fourth largest steel mill, Zaporizhstal; they were clearly well-funded and well-connected to be able to do so.

Another Ukrainian, 17.) Dmitry (Dmytro) Firtash, went into business in post-Soviet Ukraine and quickly amassed a fortune through his commodities business, KMIL. This would eventually bring him into the region’s natural gas business by the late 1990s, when he began trading commodities for gas. At this time, Firtash’s KMIL was struggling and would be absorbed into the soon-to-be-Cyprus-based Highrock Holding, a front for none-other than 3.) MOGILEVICH; one Ukrainian associate of MOGILEVICH, who was a senior executive in his YBM front, was also helping to run Highrock in the late 1990s: the Ukrainian 18.) Igor Fisherman. Firtash came to direct Highrock in 2001, running it along with MOGILEVICH, who also controlled a significant chunk through a shell company run by his ex-wife until Firtash took that over, too, in 2003, giving him a strong majority control of Highrock. 

As Firtash was transitioning to Highrock, Ukrainian businessman 19.) Viktor Topolov ran a construction company, Kyiv-Donbas, that by the late 1990s employed multiple Russian mobsters, including 20.) Leonid Roytman, a 3.) MOGILEVICH hitman, who is employed as a vice-president and who said that the company regularly functioned to set up mafia meetings. It seems Topolov was also involved in a scandal involving money laundering and embezzling with Ukrainian state gas company Naftogaz, the Russian state gas company Gazprom, and a Ukrainian football team CSKA Kiev, which he ran at the time before handing the team off to 21.) Andrii (Andriy/Andrey) Artemenko in 1999, who was also involved in, and later took much of the fall for, the scandal.

2000s: Advanced Plots in Motion

By at least 2000, 11.) Kuchma seemed to tacitly approve of, or at least not try to block, whatever designs 3.) MOGILEVICH & co. had for Ukraine (designs that had apparently been discussed in Tel Aviv). At this time, Kuchma was also aware that MOGILEVICH had a relationship with 2.) PUTIN that went back years, and that the two were already plotting together for some time (even today, PUTIN is shielding MOGILEVICH in Russia from U.S. and other international authorities’ extradition requests).

17.) Firtash was also rising in his gas role. It was he who established (with 3.) MOGILEVICH’s lawyer 22.) Zeev Gordon aka Vladimir Averbukh) and ran Eural Trans Gas (ETG) in 2002, a joint project with Gazprom and Naftogaz (Naftogas/Naftohaz), the state-run gas companies of Russia and Ukraine, respectively; immediately after ETG’s creation, it played the role of the dominant intermediary for Russian/Eurasian gas deals for Ukraine, a role previously played by the company ITERA, whose leader, 23.) Igor Makarov, would now be a partner of Firtash’sin Highrock.

Also of note: in the years immediately after this, MOGILEVICH enlisted the lawyerly services of 24.) William Sessions (a Republican who was the only FBI director to be fired until TRUMP fired James Comey, firing him in relation to an investigation into what is discussed herein) in an effort to get his criminal charges cleared with the U.S. Government; the middleman for that effort was consultant 25.) Neil Livingstone , whose firm GlobalOptions was heavily staffed by Russians and people from former Soviet republics (fun/suspicious fact: Livingstone ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for Montana’s 2012 governor’s race with 26.) Ryan Zinke, now the TRUMP Administration’s Secretary of the Interior, as his running mate); two-time Mississippi governor and major Republican operative 27.) Haley Barbour founded a consulting firm that introduced Livingstone’s GlobalOptions to Highrock, which engaged GlobalOptions in at least two contracts, one of which was mysteriously referenced in a lawsuit involving an unnamed member of Ukraine’s government (notice how MOGILEVICH and Firtash are working hand-in-hand, just a bit removed from each other).

As (pro-Russian) President 11.) Kuchma’s second term was coming to end, he made a major deal with his ally 2.) PUTIN in 2004 to replace ETG with a new company, Swiss-registered RosUkrEnergo (RUE), to facilitate an ostensibly joint venture between the countries to bring in gas from Turkmenistan and in much the same role as ETG, but, in reality, the shady deals around this were orchestrated by Gazprom, the gas would pass through Gazprom-owned pipes and Russian territory, and 50% of RUE was owned by Gazprom, with 45% was owned through a complex arrangement of shell companies owned by Firtash acting, in part, as a front for MOGILEVICH.

But as I’ve detailed repeatedly before, this was about far more than gas.

While RUE was being set up, Kuchma was also grooming a potential successor in 28.) Viktor Yanukovych, Kuchma’s already-scandal-mired prime minister. 

Enter 29.) PAUL MANAFORT, who had already done informal work for TRUMP at the turn of the century as a partner of Nixon devotee Roger Stone in controversially lobbying against a Mohawk casino that would have competed with TRUMP’s casinos, lobbying that TRUMP failed to properly disclosed and for which he was fined; MANAFORT was an old-hand Republican operative with a specialty for consulting for unscrupulous Third World dictators. At this point, MANAFORT was ostensibly in Ukraine to do work for 30.) Rinat Akhmetov, Ukraine’s richest man for much of the past decade and major patron of Yanukovych; in reality, he was there to run the political campaign of Yanukovych and his political party, the pro-Russian Party of Regions, also heavily backed by Akhmetov. In the process, MANAFORT would become acquainted, and partner with, a whole host of Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs and operatives connected to PUTIN and working for Yanukovych, including 3.) MOGILEVICH and 17.) Firtash.

As is now famously known, Kuchma tried to fix the 2004 election for Yanukovych through widespread fraud; the people rose up and took to the streets and Ukraine’s Supreme Court demanded a redo, one which Yanukovych would lose in what would become known as the Orange Revolution. But MANAFORT would stick around, trying to rehabilitate Yanukovych over the years and work his political magic for Yanukovych’s Party of Regions. In these efforts, MANAFORT brought in his protégé, 31.) Richard “Rick” Gates.

On multiple projects, 29.) MANAFORT would partner with Russian aluminum oligarch and close 2.) PUTIN ally 32.) Oleg Deripaska, who has his own history with organized crime that has prevented him from getting a U.S. visa (even with 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole lobbying on his behalf); one scheme involved a shady effort trying to bend Montenegro to Moscow’s will, another one of their projects involved Deripaska paying MANAFORT millions for promoting PUTIN’s and Russia’s interests, and another, which involved 31.) Rick Gates, involved laundering millions for 28.) Yanukovych and his inner circle, who were living astoundingly exorbitant lifestyles with the funds.

On one level, MANAFORT and his protégé Gates ran the politics for 28.) Yanukovych and his Party of Regions working with various Yanukovych and PUTIN allies; on another level they all worked with 17.) Firtash and 3.) MOGILEVICH in one of the most elaborate and complex money laundering schemes in history, and perhaps the one with the most far-reaching consequences. If it seemed strange that RUE was so strongly controlled by Gazprom and Firtash, there was a reason for that: Gazprom sold gas at a relatively low price to Firtash via RUE, who then sold the gas directly to Ukraine at a much higher rate; the profits were then used to bribe and control Ukrainian politicians to bend them PUTIN’s will and get them to back Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, and while Firtash was the public face of RUE and other related shell companies, MOGILEVICH was moving the money behind the scenes. Billions were laundered in this way in order to hide the money being used to corrupt Ukraine’s political system and pull Ukraine towards Russia. 

17.) Firtash was also given billions in credit from 2.) PUTIN-linked banks so that Firtash could buy up valuable sectors of industries that controlled Ukraine’s natural resources, allowing him and his allies to further tighten their grip on Ukraine and wield even greater influence. Other allies of 28.) Yanukovych and/or PUTIN, like 30.) Akhmetov, were also moving to make big acquisitions in important sectors of Ukraine’s economy at the time.

Obviously, this arrangement did not sit well with many Ukrainians, and politicians not in PUTIN’s pocket resisted. This led to a major dispute over the gas deals in January, 2006, in which Russia shut off the flow of gas into Ukraine. A new deal was struck that would make RUE the exclusive, direct supplier of all Russian and Central Asian gas imports, one that would, along with Gazprom and Gazexport (Gazprom’s subsidiary selling non-Russian produced gas), sell to a new joint venture between RUE and Naftogaz called UkrGazEnergo (or UkrGaz-Energo) that would sell all gas going to Ukraine’s industrial customers while RUE would sell to Naftogaz to sell to Ukraine’s residential and municipal customers. This dramatically increased the markup opportunities and laundering involving Ukraine’s gas. 

Another part of the deal—which I was the first, and apparently only journalist, to point out in the context of this larger scheme—involved the major Russian state-owned power company RAO UES: RAO would pay for and import Ukrainian-generated electricity to sell in Russia; Ukraine would provide this power from the gas Ukraine was paying RUE for that had been bought by UkrGazEnergo to sell within Ukraine; Ukraine would deliver the electricity to RAO in return for the gas needed to generate it, with RUE or another Firtash company, apparently, buying the gas from UkrGazEnergo and the gas then being sent to Ukrainian power plants, which would then generate the electricity that would go to RAO, which would then sell that electricity in Russia. Obviously, this scheme would give Firtash additional points at which he could mark up prices and generate a profit, and it is telling that gas already being transited by Russia’s Gazprom pipelines into Ukraine through RUE—itself half-owned by Gazprom—was being used, after it was paid for by Ukraine for a high price, to generate electricity that would be used in Russia. This makes no logistical sense, as it would be easier for Russia to just bring gas from Gazprom to RAO through Russia, but when viewed through the prism of generating illicit funds used to dominate Ukraine politically, then it makes sense.

An American named 33.) Carter Page is key here: he moved to Moscow in 2004 to set up Merrill Lynch’s office there, working there until 2007. During this period he advised both Gazprom and RAO on major deals, and, despite his warped worldview, he is clearly steeped in knowledge of the energy sector and regional geopolitics, possessing a master’s degree and a PhD from highly prestigious universities; he very likely knew what was going on, at least to some degree, with the whole Eurasian gas scheme detailed above, as he was advising not just one but two major entities involved on opposite ends of the corrupt process.

As two Americans on different sides of this, did MANAFORT and Page connect at this time? As both men became involved in the 1.) TRUMP campaign in 2016 and since we still aren’t sure who hired Page to work for TRUMP’s presidential campaign, this question is certainly a valid one to ask.

14.) Chodiev and the third member of that aforementioned Kazakh “Trio,” 34.) Alijan Ibragimov, had already partnered with Gazprom, too, and, the most famous member of the “Trio,” 13.) Mashkevich, had, since his days at Birshtein’s Seabeco, risen to be close to Kazakhstan’s ruling family and to be a kingpin himself in the world of Kazakh natural resources as head of Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation (ENRC), including the realm of gas for a time when a lot of business was going down with 23.) Makarov’s ITERA, just before Makarov handed off that role to 17). Firtash and joined him at Highrock; this was also a time when newly-elected-PUTIN was having Gazprom set the stage for deep relationships with the Kazakh and Central Asian gas industries. At the time, Mashkevich  and the rest of the “Trio” came under investigation by Belgian authorities for money laundering related to gas deals in a longstanding case that was eventually settled. Mashkevich was also a dominant player in aluminum, and orchestrated a huge deal with 32.) Deripaska in 2004.

Jumping to 9.) Birshtein’s son-in-law 15.) Shnaider: by 2001, he, along with his partner, had acquired a 93 percent stake in Ukraine’s Zaporizhstal steel mill for some $70 million; he managed to do this at a time when steel was Ukraine’s biggest industry, accounting for about 25% of the country’s GDP, and by 2006, Shnaider was turning down a $1.2 billion offer for the mill.

There is another set of Ukrainian business dealings that are of interest to our narrative here for multiple reasons. Let us return to 19.) Topolov, who ran into problems, along with 21.) Artemenko, with a money laundering scheme involving Gazprom and a Kiev football team at the turn of the century, as previously described. Topolov had a “longtime” business partner named 35.) Alex Oronov, whose daughter, 36.) Oksana (Oxana) Oronov Cohen, was at this point married to 37.) Bryan Cohen. And Bryan was brother to 38.) Michael Cohen (also married to a Ukrainian), whose uncle ran a catering establishment once popular with the Russian mafia. Before his rise, Michael was a personal injury lawyer who also ran a taxi business. He helped run a failed casino boat business in Florida that ended in dozens of lawsuits and whose lawyer, David Goldstein, was well-connected to the mob. One of Cohen’s major partners, Ukrainian Arkady Vaygensberg, ran another casino, and among the managers were 39.) Tatiana Varzar and her husband Michael Varzar; Michael had served prison for mob-related activity, while Tatiana was a Russian immigrant and a pillar of the Russian immigrant community in America who ran nightclubs in Brooklyn and South Florida that are hubs for that community; her restaurant in Brighton Beach—an area notorious for its Russian mafia presence—burned down in highly suspicious circumstances in 2003; New York State found her guilty of tax evasion worth over $230,000 for the years 2004-2006; and 1.) TRUMP himself is known to have patronized one of her clubs in Florida, while she also opened a catering service in one of his Florida properties.

Back to 38.) Michael Cohen: Beginning in 2001, he started buying sets of apartments in multiple TRUMP properties, got his family to buy TRUMP condos as well, and was a big fan of TRUMP, having read his The Art of the Deal twice. As is generally the case with TRUMP, he warmed up to an admirer and brought Cohen in to help with a dispute he was having in 2006 with some of the owners in one of his buildings. Cohen was so helpful that TRUMP quickly brought him on officially as a key advisor, giving him an office close to his own inside I.) Trump Tower, and he has been with TRUMP ever since. Also at this time, Michael and 37.) Bryan joined Bryan’s father-in-law, 35.) Oronov, in a Ukrainian ethanol business venture, one in which 3.) MOGILEVICH-linked 19.) Topolov—now a powerful Ukrainian politician—was Oronov’s co-partner; in 2006, the Cohen brothers tried to get Americans to invest in building a factory for the business and failed to do so (but they met Topolov in the process), but others funded the investment to the tune of millions, which is rather strange considering no ethanol was ever produced by the ensuing factory. 

38.) Michael wouldgo on to be an important public face of 1.) TRUMP’s presidential campaign (remember the infamous “Says who?” incident?, and two days after it, Cohen’s vehement denials were shown to be hollow) and was named in a partially unverified dossier compiled by ex-British MI6 intelligence official Christopher Steele as having met one or more Russian officials in Prague during the 2016 campaign season to discuss the Russian hacking efforts against TRUMP’s opponents. Cohen would also carry out unofficial diplomacy for TRUMP after he was inaugurated president: 38.) Cohen teamed up with 8.) SATER (whose relationship with TRUMP had already mushroomed, as noted below) and 21.) Artemenko in a meeting in Manhattan organized by none other than 35.) Oronov, who was also a major “partner, mentor, teacher and friend” to Artemenko, as Artemenko described him one month later, this March, after Oronov had mysteriously died. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a “peace” plan for Ukraine with support from senior 3.) PUTIN aides, one that would cede to Russia official control over Crimea for a 50 or 100-year “lease.” At the meeting were also discussed ways to undermine Ukraine’s current anti-PUTIN president, Petro Poroshenko. Cohen personally delivered the proposal to National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, shortly before Flynn resigned because of his own Russian entanglements.

Going back to the ethanol venture, it is important to remember that 35.) Oronov’s partner 19.) Topolov had strong ties to 3.) MOGILEVICH and was already linked to a money-laundering scheme involving Gazprom, and that when 38.) Michael and 37.) Bryan Cohen met Topolov, MOGILEVICH was actively trying to launder billions involving Gazprom as part of his Ukraine/Eurasian gas scheme; at the very least, the money involved in the ethanol venture and all profits Michael made from it—including any he may have invested in TRUMP properties—need to be traced, if possible.

As for all the gas scheme money going to fuel the rise of 28.) Yanukovych and the Party of Regions, his now extremely well-funded Party was winning more and more seats under 29.) MANAFORT’s leadership, taking power away from pro-Western, pro-US politicians. This did not sit well with the pro-Western Yulia Tymoshenko, who rose to be Ukraine’s Prime Minister in 2007 and directed her oversight powers against her rivals Yanukovych and 17.) Firtash, trying to close off the spigot of corrupt Russian money and influence that was twisting her country’s political system. With her using her office to fight this scheme, laundering its funds became even more integral to said scheme’s success, and anyone doing business with its perpetrators could have been involved, knowingly or not.

29.) MANAFORT and 31.) Gates were also personally involved in laundering money as part of this overall gas scheme through several deals in 2008 involving Manhattanproperties, one involving the b.) Drake Hotel and another the c.) St. John’s Terminal. These deals would never be finalized, but would easily serve their main purpose of laundering money away from Ukrainian and other authorities, and MANAFORT may even have engaged in additional money laundering, which may have included his cash purchase of a multi-million I.) Trump Tower apartment in 2006.

In fact, those Manhattan money laundering scams fit a pattern of transactions that included other shady deals that exploited lax regulations in the U.S. and Canadian real estate markets and that involved 1.) TRUMP and Russians at a time when he was finding other investors and investment hard to come by. As I have noted before, by the mid-2000s, TRUMP had been abandoned by every major Wall Street bank as an unreliable and difficult partner, and was hurting for money, especially after he had to declare a bankruptcy for one of his businesses in 2004; the one exception to the Wall Street bank boycott was Deutsche Bank, which would later be involved in massive Russian money laundering scandals (see below).

By 2008, 40.) Donald Trump Jr. was able to publicly remark that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and that “we [the Trump Organization] see a lot of money pouring in from Russia;” yes, this was a time when TRUMP was aggressively courting Russian business.

Apart from the aforementioned 5.) Bogatin, 6.) Ivankov, and 8.) SATER from before the 2000s, other notables as far as our tale is concerned later rented apartments from TRUMP: 41.) Vasily Salygin, who would later become an official in Ukraine’s Party of Regions at the same time 29.) MANAFORT was advising it, would buy an apartment in New York City’s IX.) Trump World Tower in a deal orchestrated by another Ukrainian, 42.) Semyon “Sam” Kislin, who had done business with Trump decades earlier.

In fact, a report from Reuters from March noted nearly $100 million was invested by Russians (some “politically connected” elites) in seven Trump properties in South Florida, and that over a third of the units in the seven properties were owned by LLCs often designed to mask their owners’ identities.

Over part of the last decade, 43.) Igor Zorin, a Russian government official, once owned three units in Trump Palace in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida, valued at some $5.4 million, which, with his modest government salary, screams money laundering; two were likely paid for in cash and one unit was mysteriously transferred to him by former F.S.B. intelligence officer 44.) Svyatoslav Mangushev, who does business with Zorin and who helped found a Russian biker group named after Russian Spetsnaz special forces and that was trying to associate with a PUTIN-linked biker group active in hostilities in Ukraine known as the Night Wolves and subject to U.S. government sanctions; Zorin seems to have transferred that condo to one of Mangushev’s relatives for $1.5 million, and Mangushev was arrested for beating his wife in 2014, though charges were later dropped.

Other deals were far more complex, far more scandalous, and involved TRUMP far more directly; here we get into the next phase of 1.) DONALD TRUMP’s relationship with 8.) FELIX SATER, of multiple deals with Sater’s company, Bayrock, which I have discussed in great detail before.

TRUMP had been acquainted with 45.) Tamir Sapir, from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, who had decades ago established ties to numerous important Soviet officials after immigrating to the U.S., who may have very well (once) been part of—or even come to the U.S. secretly working for—the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (at whose academy he had apparently studied), whose sources of his extremely unlikely and massive wealth had long been objects of rumor-fueled suspicion, and whose former business partner had pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges spanning 13 years with the Gambino crime family. Sapir had done some business with 1.) TRUMP decades ago, selling him some 200 televisions with then-business partner 42.) Kislin. By the 2000s, Sapir would own a $5 million apartment in I.) Trump Tower and TRUMP would call Sapir and his family “great friends.”

It was 45.) Sapir who introduced 1.) TRUMP to Bayrock, ostensibly a real-estate firm led by 46.) Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan whose rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable, where 8.) SATER was then Chief Operating Officer and eventually the dominant force within Bayrock, the office of which was even in I.) Trump Tower itself. SATER repeatedly directly partnered with Trump throughout this period, trying to help him land real estate deals in Moscow, even showing 47.) Ivanka Trump and 40.) Donald Trump Jr. around the city in 2006 and introducing the Trumps to influential Russians. None of these potential Moscow deals ever went through, but some spectacularly scandalous deals did go further in the U.S.

One of Bayrock’s partnerships with TRUMP in Fort Lauderdale was originally conceived of as V.) the Trump International Beach Club; an initial $2 million in capital was provided by 46.) Arif in 2003, and from that point, 8.) SATER and Arif conned a friend of Arif’s who was also SATER’s landlord, Elizabeth Thieriot, lying about the value of the club, hiding their own investment in the project, and convincing her to provide a $1 million investment for a mere 4% of the Club, 12 times what they had paid for that percentage and allowing them to make a 1,125% profit on her investment; they illegally labeled the investment a loan to avoid paying taxes on it and were using their fraud to hide skimming $1 million off the top; on top of that, when there was income finally generated in 2005, they defrauded their partner Thieriot of her rightful share; eventually Theiriot figured out some of what was going on and sued her scammers in court in 2006, and they pulled similar scams on other investors/members in the Club. The project was apparently eventually reconceived of as the Trump Las Olas Beach Resort, but was suspended in a declining market by TRUMP himself in October 2007.

Bayrock’s most famous partnership with 1.) TRUMP was an infamous deal to develop a SoHo property in Manhattan. The deal was concocted in 2006 by TRUMP, 8.) SATER, 46.) Arif, and 45.) Sapir. In a move specifically approved by Trump, it turns out that the SoHo deal had a significant portion of its SATER/Arif facilitated financing—some $50 million for it and three other projects—flow from a firm in Iceland—FL Group—linked to the Panama Papers revelations and apparently a hub for money of wealthy Russians “in favor with Putin.” Financing for these projects was also secured from 13.) Mashkevich, whom we may recall from earlier: was connected to 9.) Birshtein, 15.) Shnaider, and possibly 3.) MOGILEVICH through his work at Seabeco, had a history of money laundering related to gas deals, and had done business with Gazprom and 32.) Deripaska. Besides the above financing, some of the transactions involving the property were clearly carried out by shell corporations for the purpose of laundering money and from which Trump profited. Specifically, there was investment for the purpose of money laundering linked to Mashkevich involving the family of prominent Kazakh politician 48.) Viktor Khrapunov. Furthermore, the III.) Trump SoHo deal was structured to cheat authorities out of tens of millions in taxes, as the investments were illegally set up as loans to avoid paying hefty taxes on them, loans that would also give FL Group a big chunk of theoretical future profits over time.   In the end, the deal went terribly for 1.) TRUMP, who was sued for fraud along with his children 49.) Eric Trump and 47.) Ivanka, who had inflated the level of interest in order to attract buyers, and in a 2011 settlement, Trump refunded 90% of the deposits for the building’s condos; the property went into foreclosure in 2014.

Even as construction on Trump SoHo began in 2007, a second of the TRUMP/Bayrock projects with the FL Group financing was rising in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; this one, the IV.) Trump International Hotel & Tower, would also result in disaster and lead to over a dozen lawsuits, with over 100 condo buyers suing for $7.8 million. The project was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2007 but fell way behind schedule; 8.) SATER and his Bayrock partners secretly and seemingly cashed out their stakes in this project and the three FL Group-linked others—including the SoHo project—in an arrangement made with FL Group for $50 million, equal to the initial “investment”/”loan.” 1.) TRUMP eventually pulled his name from the project, and when its buyers learned this in May, 2009, this only increased their outrage and added to lawsuits already in motion accusing TRUMP and Bayrock of fraud. As in the SoHo deal, confidential settlements, this time with dozens of buyers, ensued, and TRUMP refused to accept any responsibility, blaming the problems on the economic crises. Florida courts declined to rule that TRUMP or his partners had committed fraud, including a state appeals court just last year. The project finished years late, cost some $200 million, and was eventually sold for merely $115 million at a foreclosure auction. And while the evidence of money laundering in this case is not as explicit or solid as the information publicly reported on in the SoHo deal, it is still a similarly structured deal with the same partners that led to a similarly dubious result, making it more likely, not less, that similar laundering was taking place.

A third deal among the four which received FL Group financing was a failed project that never even got off the ground in Phoenix, Arizona. 1.) TRUMP began eyeing the Camelback area of Phoenix, Arizona, for a luxury residential tower back in late in 2003, a project similar to the others; Trump’s team, and then TRUMP himself, met with the mayor, who wasn’t impressed with TRUMP, and at a meeting in January, 2005, when plans were unveiled, local residents showed up to argue against the development, yet by September, the appropriate city bodies had approved the plans. It seems 8.) SATER’s people organized intimidation, bribery, and deception as tactics to deter residents from gathering enough signatures to force a public referendum that could have overridden the city bodies’ approval; under this pressure, the city council voted to reverse its decision and pressed the developers and the neighborhood association to reach a compromise, at which point TRUMP himself abandoned the project, not wanting to be part of anything that would be scaled down any further in scope and ambition. Ernie Mennes, the owner of the VI.) Camelback propertywho had gone into a partnership with the Bayrock/TRUMP developers, sued Bayrock in 2007 in federal court, accusing SATER of both threatening to “cut off his legs and leave him ‘dead in the trunk of his car’” and of stealing money from the project. The judge oversaw a settlement and the case was sealed, likely because of SATER’s special relationship with the government. This property was part of the $50 million pseudo-offloading to Iceland’s FL Group, and by June of 2009, Bayrock was relieved of the property, which it had left $36 million in debt, when it was “sold out from under” the company at a trustee auction for a mere $10 million.

The final in the group of four projects of Bayrock tied to the $50 million “investment” of FL Group was a.) a Waterpointe property in Queens that apparently did not involve TRUMP beyond his approval of the FL Group financing but is still illustrative of the rest of their deals. Bayrock bought the property in 2008 for $25 million, but the soil was contaminated and had to be replaced, which Bayrock did with other soil that was even more contaminated and thus was fined $150,000 for doing so; when Bayrock defaulted on a loan in 2011, the lender took over Waterpointe and sold it for roughly $11 million, less than half what Bayrock had paid for it.

As for FL Group, it failed in spectacularly 2008, along with Iceland’s other major banks/funds and many others in the world during the great global financial meltdown.

In a lawsuit filed with the NY State Supreme Court in May of 2013 rising from a process that began in 2008 in Delaware, former business partners of SATER’s at Bayrock—Jody Kriss and Michael Ejekam—sued 8.) SATER and his accomplices for damages and nonpayment related to SATER’s hiding of his past and his use of Bayrock primarily as a criminal organization for criminal activities, especially money laundering and fraud; in this suit, 1.) DONALD and 47.) Ivanka Trump and the Trump Organization  are named as defendants and the federal government is accused of illegally concealing SATER’s past and crimes in a way that defrauded previous victims from his 1998 Wall Street scam—including Holocaust Survivors—and subsequent victims of his other schemes discussed above of many millions in restitution. The NY State Supreme Court removed the Trumps and their Organization from the suit; they had been the lowest levels of defendants and the plaintiffs had only sought declaratory relief in regards to them, i.e., they asked the court to determine what liability, if any, the Trumps had in regards to the case, and they were removed “without prejudice,” meaning that the removal was in no way a comment on their guilt, responsibility, or innocence and that the plaintiffs were free to sue them on the same grounds in the future. A version of the lawsuit is still an ongoing case in federal court. 

For the same earlier-discussed reasons that it would be a smart bet to consider it likely that 3.) MOGILEVICH was linked to SATER’s 1998 scam, we can also make the same bet in regards to the Bayrock deals with 1.) TRUMP but for several additional reasons, namely that these deals were going down at a time when 3.) MOGILEVICH and his people involved in the Ukraine gas plot(including 29.) MANAFORT, who had his own history with Trump) were eager to launder billions of dollars out of Ukraine as part of that scheme and at a time when they were facing increased scrutiny from Prime Minister Tymoshenkoand her allies in the Ukrainian government; under such conditions, why wouldn’tMOGILEVICH reach out to SATER, who had: experience in real estate and laundering money, such a close alleged family connection in his father, his father’s penchant for organized crime, and the protection of the U.S. Government? It was also clear at this point that Trump and the people around him were hardly rigorous vetters, let alone eager to turn down deals coming in from people with suspicious business practices and questionable, even criminal pasts, so selecting Trump as either an unwitting or even willing conduit for money that needed to be laundered was pretty much a no-brainer, especially since his playboy celebrity status made it much easier to attract additional partners (or dupes).

What is even more incriminating for 1.) TRUMP is that after 8.) SATER left Bayrock in 2008, none of this stopped him from being brought into the Trump Organization in 2010 as a “SENIOR ADVISOR TO DONALD TRUMP” even after TRUMP was made aware of SATER’s criminal past, and circumstantial evidence points to SATER still being connected to the Russian mafia. For his part, Trump has issued his typically contradictory and slippery statements—more aptly called lies—in regards to these dealings and, in particular, his relationship to SATER, with TRUMP lying repeatedly about it and his ties to Bayrock in an attempt to falsely minimize them. And there is no distancing TRUMP from Bayrock: one of Bayrock’s flagship presentations from as late as 2008 lists three of the Trump-named projects discussed above before all others, lists the Trump Organization as its first “strategic partner” (followed by FL Group), and lists DONALD TRUMP as its first “reference” and “I.) Trump Tower” in New York as its address.

It was also recently discovered this March that 8.) SATER owns three shell companies—Global Habitat Solutions (GHS), United Biofuels Company LLC, and Sands Point Partners GP LLC—that are apparent fakes that “sell no products and have no customers,” ideal for being used to launder money; GHS had collaborated with another company named Titan Atlas in promoting itself, a company co-founded by 40.) Donald Trump Jr. and in which Trump Jr. also invested; SATER used promotional images from Titan Atlas’ website for GHS’s own after Trump Jr. introduced him to Titan Atlas’ other co-founder, Jeremy Blackburn (with an unsurprisingly troubled corporate past), and Titan is now owned by another company controlled by the Trump Organization, run by Trump Jr. since his father became president.

8). SATER even donated the maximum amount allowed to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign before he was selected to help run back-channel Ukrainian “diplomacy” in 2017, as mentioned before. He is also currently engaged in a nasty fight with 46.) Arif over legal fees, and threatened to reveal dirt both about Arif’s relationship with 8.) TRUMP (“The headlines will be, ‘The Kazakh Gangster and President Trump,’” wrote SATER) and Arif’s ties to organized crime. 

As for 46.) Arif, he was arrested in Turkey in September 2010 when he was at a sex party with both 13.) Mashkevich and apparently underage girls on board a yacht (which had been once belonged to none other than Atatürk) under suspicion of running a complex prostitution and human trafficking ring in a scheme of which it seems Mashkevich was also a part, though Arif was later acquitted under mysterious circumstances and Mashkevich was not charged.    

Another major scandalous deal would involve a major property development in Toronto. But to understand this, we must first go back to Ukraine, where we left 15.) Shnaider (son-in-law of 9.) Birshtein,who had in the past partnered closely with 3.) MOGILEVICH, other Russian/Ukrainian mafia figures, and also with 13.) Mashkevich), in charge of Ukraine’s huge Zaporizhstal steel mill. In 2007, Shnaider and 1.) TRUMP began building the VII.) Trump International Hotel and Tower, Toronto. And in 2008, FL Group, interestingly, loans Shnaider  €45.8 million for a yacht. After investors were hit hard during the ensuing global financial crises, Shnaider sought to sell his company’s near-total stake in Zaporizhstal to help finance his TRUMP project, which he did in 2010 for some $850 million through five shell companies to an ?.) unknown Russian buyer acting on behalf of the Russian government, who, in turn, was funded by the Russian state-run bank VEB (Vnesheconombank), whose chairman of its board at that time was none other than 2.)PUTIN. Of course, this fit into PUTIN’s scheme of trying to extend Russian influence over Ukraine’s industry and natural resources in tandem with the likes of 17.) Firtash and 30.) Akhmetov. And, like the other deals just discussed, it fell into the same pattern of coming apart amid scandal and lawsuits from dozens of investors saying they were misled and who are suing both 1.) TRUMP and 15.) Shnaider. Late in 2016, the property was placed into bankruptcy receivership, and just last month Trump’s stake in the project was totally bought out, his name taken off the building about a week ago. Akhmetov had also apparently narrowly missed out on acquiring Zaporizhstal from Shnaider back in 2010, but was able to gain majority ownership in July, 2011, when he was a sitting member of Ukraine’s parliament with the Party of Regions; Akhmetov, though, now seems caught in the middle of the war in Ukraine, with Zaporizhstal itself becoming a flashpoint.

One must wonder why FL Group and their very likely Russian investors and VEB were so eager to invest so much in these projects, and if it was more of an excuse to launder money, rather than an actual investment, as was the case with the Manhattan deals led by 29.) MANAFORT and aided by 31.) Gates for 3.) MOGILEVICH, 17.) Firtash, and 28.) Yanukovych; that MANAFORT Manhattan model would seem to be repeated by Bayrock again and again in deals involving 1.) TRUMP and seems also to fit the mold of 15.) Shnaider’s ill-fated venture, even if his intent may be less suspect.

Actually, the performance of these partners was so bad, one would not be faulted for concluding they cared little about performance. And that could be right on the mark: it seems, if anything, these schemes were designed to move large amounts of money, often Russian-tied, into temporary projects that never came to fruition and that would benefit 2.) SATER, 46.) Arif, 1.) and/or TRUMP, but rarely the partners they recruited outside their circle; it seems these other swindled partners and especially TRUMP would lend an air of respectability to clearly criminal schemes. When you look at these deals as if their primary impetus was for RICO money laundering (in the complaint against Bayrock, the word “launder” or one of its derivatives appears 39 times), these deals that were once seemingly mind-bogglingly stupid and miserably executed all of a sudden make a lot of sense. Furthermore, since FL Group was a stupendously bad performer even by the standards of the 2008 financial crisis, and given its close ties to Kremlin-connected Russian money, one could also be forgiven for thinking that they were acting more out of Kremlin interests than business ones.

Taken together, these examples amount to a clear pattern of catastrophic losses, colossal mismanagement, gross negligence, and stupendous incompetence of 1.) TRUMP and his partners at best; he might have been aware of some of what was going on and turned a willful blind eye or he might have been in on it, and though there is no evidence to support this other than his considerable and risky efforts to obstruct investigations into these dealings, the sheer number of them is enough to suggest some level of complicity on TRUMP’s part personally, the only other reasonable explanation being that he is a gigantic fool.

There is yet another case of Russian money laundering would be tied to 1.) TRUMP, albeit in different ways. The roots of the case go back over a decade to Russia, and for a thrilling read on its origins, you can pick up Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder and One Man’s Fight for Justice, by Bill Browder. Browder was running the wildly successful Hermitage Capital Management in Russia throughout the late 1990s and the 2000s. But when he fell out of favor with the Russian Government for trying to take on the corrupt system of doing business in Putin’s Russia, 2.) PUTIN started playing hardball, having Browder deported in late 2005 through the hands of the F.S.B. and labeling Browder, essentially, an enemy of the Russian state. In 2007, Hermitage’s Moscow offices were raided, one of its employees roughed-up; soon after, Browder’s intrepid lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, eventually helped to uncover a massive $230 million tax refund fraud scheme in Russia, the largest tax scam in Russian history and one carried out through collusion between senior Russian government officials and members of the Russian mafia. Together, they conspired to use profitable companies like Browder’s by seizing control of them on false legal pretexts, throwing a bunch of fake lawsuits at them, and then erasing the companies’ profits from the books and claiming the taxes those companies had paid as a refund since the profits generating those taxes had magically disappeared.

Naturally, it made sense for the culprits to launder this money in order to hide it, and that they did; the U.S. government was able to find enough evidence to accuse a Cyprus-based apparent real estate company Prevezon Holdings of being one of the beneficiaries of the $230 million Russian tax scheme. In charges filed by then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara in a lengthy complaint submitted in September, 2013 (final amended complaint here), the U.S. Government affirmed Magnitsky’s findings and accused Prevezon of receiving, through a convoluted series of transactions involving shell companies through 2007-2008, at least (roughly) $2 million (possibly more) of the $230 million of Russian scam money related to what Magnitsky had uncovered, some of which Prevezon then laundered through the purchase of luxury Manhattan real estate properties.

If the name Preet Bharara sounds familiar, it should: he was fired by TRUMP this March, and rather controversially, as TRUMP had told Bharara that he would not be firing him. As I have written before, a number of past, current and potential cases involving Trump fell, fall, and would fall under Bharara’s jurisdiction, and Bharara had a solid history of going after corporate crime, the Russian mafia, and Russian government operatives—including a whole spy ring—while a U.S. Attorney, and that history involved the arrest of Russian mobsters in I.) Trump Tower. In this case, 3.) MOGILEVICH-associated Russian mafia boss and apparent all-around celebrity 50.) Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov was overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring for wealthy clientele that in part operated out of I.) Trump Tower in New York. Among other prolific activities, Tokhtakhounov had gained notoriety for apparently fixing 2002 Olympic ice skating matches to help get a gold medal for a fellow Russian, as well as one for a pair of French skaters in exchange for a French visa, but was soon after in Russia and safe from prosecution. The gambling ring connected to Trump Tower, run by two of his capos, 51.) Vadim Trincher and 52.) Anatoly Golubchik, was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine, and besides the gambling ring, they also engaged in some $100 million in money laundering. Trincher himself in 2009 bought an apartment in Trump Tower just below an apartment owned by 1.) TRUMP himself, in which he nearly held a fundraiser for Newt Gingrich (later enthusiastic TRUMP supporter) two years later, but had to cancel because of a mold problem and a water leak; it was from this apartment that Trincher ran a branch of said gambling ring. Another linked gambling/laundering ring was run by one of Trincher’s sons, who owned an entire floor in Trump tower, and another son of Trincher’s ran multiple illegal poker rooms throughout New York City. 52.) Golubchik owned a unit in a TRUMP building in Florida, where 53.) Michael Sall, a Russian mobster in the very same outfit, also owned a unit. An indictment naming 50.) Tokhtakhounov and his people was filed by Bharara that led to a 2013 raid on 51.) Trincher’s I.) Trump Tower apartment, and arrests made there and elsewhere nabbed 29 suspects. A mere seven months after he was indicted, a nonchalant Tokhtakhounov was a red-carpet VIP guest at 1.) TRUMP’s 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, a city where, to this day, he is regularly seen at trendy public places.

Going back to Magnitsky, he was arrested for his efforts on trumped-up charges, and, once in custody, was beaten by guards and denied medical care in Russian prison, dying from his wounds and deliberate lack of medical attention in 2009. Magnitsky’s death turned Browder into a crusader to expose 2.) PUTIN and his operatives and to honor Magnitsky’s memory; in 2012, when a Russian whistleblower named Alexander Perepilichnyy who had already moved to the UK to escape persecution in Russia began working with Browder to help, he mysteriously died while jogging near his home, almost certainly the victim of a Kremlin operation, with an investigation into his death still underway. This mirrored the death and murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a former K.G.B./F.S.B. operative who turned on PUTIN and the Kremlin when he began speaking out against them and exposing some of their dirty deeds; in particular, he elaborated on tape about 2.) PUTIN’s “good relationship”with 3.) MOGILEVICH, about whom Litvinenko “knew too much;” because of this, in part, he was poisoned by radioactive polonium-210 by Kremlin agents in November 2006 and died later that same month; he and Perepilichnyy are just two of fourteen suspected hits by Russian government operatives on UK soil in recent years alone.

Browder bravely continued his efforts by pushing the U.S. Congress to pass the Magnitsky Act in 2012, allowing for harsher punishments and sanctions of Russian officials involved in these crimes, and pushing the EU to pass a similar law in 2014. This infuriated 2.) PUTIN, and when the U.S. applied sanctions to dozens of Russians under the authority of the new law in 2013, he responded by banning Americans from adopting Russian children and barring 18 U.S. current and former officials, including Bharara. And among those who would end up helping Bharara with his case against Prevezon’s money laundering was Browder. The lawyer working against the Kremlin on behalf of Magnitsky’s family, Nikolai Gorokhov, was thrown out of his fourth-story Moscow apartment window on March 21st of this year, just one day before a major Russian court appearance concerning the same crimes (such “accidents” are not uncommon with Putin critics); Gorokhov suffered severe head injuries, but has since vowed to fight on; he had provided key evidence for Bharara’s prosecution team and was set to be a star witness in the trial that was to start May 15th. Unsurprisingly, Bharara and his team were actually very concerned that something exactly like this would happen to Gorokhov and submitted a formal letter expressing that concern to the presiding judge back in October 2015.

Keeping all this I mind, I noted at the time (in a piece censored in Russia!) that it was odd that Bharara’s successor had chosen, just two months after Bharara’s firing and not even three full days before the trial would have started, to settle with Prevezon for a small fine and no admission of wrongdoing; I didn’t (and don’t) question his motives, but I did and still do want to know the exact reasons why that was the decision and if anyone in the Trump Administration pressured or suggested this move when, after people had been murdered or nearly murdered by Kremlin agents to obstruct this investigation and related ones, it is hard to imagine Bharara settling after so much effort, cost, blood, and risk.

There is also the number of related “coincidences” that involve the Prevezon case that get to be a bit astounding: the essential head of Prevezon is 54.) Denis Katsyv, the son of 55.) Petr (Pyotr) Katsyv, a former Russian government minister who currently helps to run Russia’s state-owned Russian Railways, which until recently was led by 56.) Vladimir Yakunin, a close PUTIN ally with a history of corruption who began publicly backing TRUMP’s presidential candidacy since at least June 2016; Yakunin and Petr Katsyv ran Russian Railways together for about a year. 56.) Yakunin had also partnered with 54.) Denis Katsyv and Republican Congressman 57.) Dana Rohrbacher in 2016 to lobby against a stronger version of the Magnitsky Act under consideration that would expand to cover any government officials around the world involved in human rights abuses, with this version known as Global Magnitsky; the efforts to fight it included promoting a controversial “documentary” trashing Magnitsky and Browder and accusing them of orchestrating the tax fraud, which is Russia’s official version of who is responsible for the $230 million fleecing of Russian taxpayers. Rohrbacher was even specifically given instructions from the office of Russia’s Prosecutor General 58.) Yury (Yuri) Chaika, a point-man for the Kremlin’s anti-Magnitsky/Browder efforts, as to how to proceed in these tasks. Rohrbacher also met this May with an old Soviet military counterintelligence officer-turned 1.) PUTIN lobbyist named 59.) Rinat Akhmetshin (not to be confused with 30.) Rinat Akhmetov) and specifically discussed the Prevezon case with him; the two had also worked with 54.) Katsyv on opposing Global Magnitsky. Just a few days ago, Browder actually filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) against 57.) Rohrbacher and one of his staffers, Paul Behrends, for violations of the Magnitsky Act.

Additionally, one of the Katsyv family/Prevezon lawyers was a woman named 60.) Natalia Veselnitskaya, who is very active as an anti-Magnitsky lobbyist and who has strong ties to the Russian government, including having the F.S.B as a client, a friendship with 58.) Chaika, and a former marriage to 61.) Alexander Mitusov, who was big in Russian law enforcement circles before serving as deputy to 55.) Petr Katsyv. When Veselnitskaya had that infamous June, 2016, meeting with 40.) Donald Trump Jr., then-TRUMP-campaign-manager-29.) MANAFORT, and 62.) Jared Kushner (1.) TRUMP’s son-in-law and top advisor and 47.) Ivanka’s husband), it was Chaika who seems to have provided the supposed information on Hillary Clinton that Veselnitskaya was offering; she was also accompanied by 59.) Akhmetshin and 63.) Ike Kaveladze, from the former Soviet republic of Georgia, who has been linked by a U.S. congressional investigation to major money laundering efforts from a few decades ago. And literally just before that meeting, 60.) Veselnitskaya was at a courthouse in New York for legal proceedings of the Prevezon case. Trump Jr. repeatedly lied about the meeting with Veselnitskaya, and both MANAFORT and Kushner failed to previously mention the meeting in interviews and/or disclosure forms. The meeting itself arose from 1.) TRUMP’s relationships with Russian real estate oligarch 64.) Aras Agalarov and his son, pop star 65.) Aras Agalarov, who are close to 1.) PUTIN and who partnered with TRUMP to bring his Miss Universe Pageant to Moscow in 2013, with Emin’s publicist Rob Goldstone reaching out to Donald Jr. about the Veselnitskaya meeting.

Also of interest are that 62.) Kushner has notable contacts with both Deutsche Bank and VEB (the two banks have a “cooperation agreement” with each other)¸ as well with famous Israel diamond oligarch from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan 66.) Lev Leviev.

Leviev is close to and apparently friends with 2.) PUTIN and was also close with 45.) Sapir and his family: Leviev’s “right-hand man,” 67.) Rotem Rosen, married Sapir’s daughter, 68.) Zina Sapir, in 2007; the wedding was held at 1.) TRUMP’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, hosted by TRUMP himself; the next year, TRUMP and 62.) Kushner attended the couple’s bris for their newborn. Leviev and Russian aluminum oligarch 69.) Roman Abramovich were two of the world’s largest supporters of the Jewish organization Chabad and had cooperated in helping 1.) PUTIN gain influence over Russia’s Jewish community, with Abramovich being particularly close to PUTIN, having gifted PUTIN a $35 million yacht and even helping PUTIN in his rise to power, apparently being the first to recommend PUTIN to Boris Yeltsin as a successor. Abramovich himself rose to fortune in part through shady dealings with Russia’s underworld, his relationship with PUTIN, and the bloody “aluminum wars” of post-Soviet Russia. He is also close with and a major business partner of PUTIN-linked 32.) Deripaska, who came out even more on top after the “aluminum wars.” Not incidentally, when Litvinenko was assassinated in the UK in 2006, he was helping both British and Spanish intelligence look into both money laundering and organized crime ties surrounding Abramovich. 47.) Ivanka Trump and 62.) Kushner would marry in 2009, and while she would become very close with 70.) Dasha Zhukova, 69.) Abramovich’s wife, during this period, Kushner would cultivate ties to Leviev. Leviev, whose company Israel Africa Investments’ U.S. operations were registered as being at TRUMP’s II.) 40 Wall St. property, was a business partner of 54.) Katsyv through Prevezon, with Prevezon buying stakes in some of Leviev’s subsidiaries and Leviev selling to Prevezon some condos in Manhattan at d.) 20 Pine St., condos that the U.S. said Prevezon was using to launder the Magnitsky money; this would mean that PUTIN had allies in Katsyv and Leviev on BOTH sides of that transaction that was used for money laundering that helped the Russian government cover up a massive crime; both Prevezon’s stakes in Leviev’s subsidiaries and the condos Leviev sold to Prevezon were held by authorities while Prevezon was charged by the U.S. Attorney’s office until the settlement was reached a few months ago. Prevezon was also able to go through with the Magnitsky-related laundering partly because of $90 million in financing from Deutsche.

66.) Leviev and a partner company, Five Mile Capital, also sold 62.) Kushner a major piece of Manhattan real estate in May, 2015, for $296 million, one month before Trump announced his run for the presidency; the sale price was suspiciously below what Leviev had paid for it back in 2007, and Deutsche would provide Kushner a suspiciously generous $285 million loan a month before the 2016 presidential election as part of a refinancing effort for the property that amounted to $74 million more than what was paid for it; 62.) Kushner initially failed to disclose the loan when he joined the Trump Administration. When Leviev and Five Mile sold to Kushner in 2015, they were represented by Trump lawyer 71.) Marc Kasowitz’s firm, which also represents Russia’s largest state-owned bank, Sberbank and from which another firm partner, David Friedman, was chosen as the U.S. Ambassador to Israel and another partner, Edward McNally, is apparently under consideration to replace the fired Bharara. In fact, it seems Kasowtiz was personally instrumental in having 1.) TRUMP fire Bharara, with Kasowitz telling TRUMP “This guy is going to get you” and bragging to his friends about getting Bharara ousted. At the time, Bharara was said to be looking vigorously into Deutsche’s dealings, particularly those involving Russian money laundering.

Deutsche had been 1.)TRUMP’s sole major Wall Street lender for years, and has loaned TRUMP over $300 million since 2012, a sum that is still owed. This amount presented a major conflict of interest for the newly inaugurated President TRUMP in late January 2017, because Deutsche was under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for orchestrating $10 billion in illegal fake trades from 2011-2015 that seem to have been part of a massive Russian money laundering scheme; U.S. and UK officials levied $630 million in massive fines against Deutsche at the end of January 2017, separate from DoJ’s investigation. Deutsche is also under pressure to allow an independent investigation into its TRUMP family accounts.

It was revealed just this March that Deutsche was also involved in another major laundering scam of Russian money for some $24 million, including the specific division that Trump owes $300 million, part of a massive global Russian laundering scheme with many banks involving $20-$80 billion from 2010-2014; among those involved in the scheme include Russian oligarchs and the F.S.B., and some of the money in the scheme was apparently being used to further PUTIN’s and Russia’s interests.

62.) Kushner had also met in December, 2016, with then-VEB Chairman 72.) Sergei (Sergey) Gorkov—a graduate of the F.S.B.’s academy—in New York, at a time when the Russian state-owned bank was under U.S. sanctions because of Russia’s actions in Ukraine, a meeting which, like the meeting with 60.) Veselnitskaya, the Deutsche loan, and many other things, he had initially failed to properly disclose; in his recent disclosure, Kushner noted “I have not relied on Russian funds to finance my business activities in the private sector;” relied, of course, does not mean he did not receive any Russian funds…

*****

While many of TRUMP’s deals were falling apart and while Prevezon was laundering money from Russian’s massive tax scam, the MOGILEVICH-MANAORT-Firtash-led efforts in Ukraine to serve 28.) Yanukovych, his Party of Regions, and 2.) PUTIN were coming to fruition. Despite some success for Tymoshenko in cracking down on those efforts, early in 2010, Yanukovych won the presidential election, defeating Tymoshenko in the runoff, the culmination of years of work with 29.) MANAFORT and the whole gas scheme crew. Not long after, Tymoshenko lost her position as prime minister in a vote of no-confidence. Meanwhile, in the wake of his victory, Yanukovych worked to restore the gas scam and undo many of the Orange Revolution reforms. Most notably, in December, 2010, Tymoshenko was retroactively charged with abusing her power during her recent stint as prime minister, and, after a widely condemned (including by the U.S.) politically-motivated show trial, was sentenced to prison in October 2011.

29.) MANAFORT and 31.) Gates actually lobbied U.S. lawmakers on behalf of 28.) Yanukovych’s government from 2012-2014, defending the imprisonment of Tymoshenkoand trying to discredit her, as well as trying to improve the image of Yanukovych and Ukraine, lobbying paid in part by 30.) Akhmetov; they did this without disclosing their lobbying activities as required by U.S. law. But the spirited Tymoshenko would fight back; during her trial and from prison, she filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan in April 2011; in it she names 17.) Firtash, 29.) Manafort, 31.) Gates, 3.) MOGILEVICH, 28.) Yanukovych, and others, arguing that the proceeds from their crimes, including the Manhattan real estate scams, were used to harm her, resulting in her defeat and imprisonment. A fourth and final version of the suit was rejected in September, 2015, on largely jurisdictional grounds and that the higher-than-average RICO standards were not met, but in a longer ruling, it was noted that “the Court accepts as true the allegation that some of the money that passed through the U.S. Enterprise was ‘funneled back to Ukraine’ — albeit by unidentified actors — and somehow used as ‘financing’ for Tymoshenko’s ‘persecution.’”

Interestingly, after 28.) Yanukovych was ousted in the 2014 (Euro)Maidan protests—the grassroots reaction to the years of successful schemes described above—17.) Firtash fled Ukraine to Austria and is wanted by U.S. authorities for other crimes, but the U.S. is competing with Spain, which also wants to try Firtash; it would be very interesting to know just how hard the Trump Administration is trying to extradite Firtash.

In the end, 29.) MANAFORT came to run 1.) TRUMP’s campaign during the crucial stretch where TRUMP closed out the primaries, clinched the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, and began the general election against Clinton; he also brought with him 31.) Gates, who infamously ended up being in charge of Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech, which was largely plagiarized from a speech Michelle Obama gave at the 2008 Democratic National Convention; this was after both men had been working for years in Ukraine and on Russia-related work, and though both were forced to eventually resign from their Trump work because of these ties, both men seem to, one way or another, still have access to TRUMP. After advising two major Russian companies involved in the Ukraine gas scam, 33.) Carter Page was one of a handful of foreign policy advisors TRUMP was able to name in 2016, and Page, whose views are closely aligned with the Kremlin’s, was under a FISA-warrant FBI surveillance investigation, having had numerous meetings with Russian officials while attached to TRUMP’s campaign. That campaign was the most pro-Russian campaign of any major party nominee since the end of WWII, and the only changes that it insisted be made to the 2016 Republican Party Platform were to weaken statements of support for Ukraine in relation to its conflict with Russia. 38.) Michael Cohen and 71.) Marc Kasowitz, each with numerous ties to the issues in question, are both still representing TRUMP. And, since coming to power, the Trump Administration has pushed for policies favorable to Russia and PUTIN’s agenda, even when seemingly going against U.S. interests.

Taking a step back and knowing what we know about “the Brainy Don,” it seems that 3.)MOGILEVICH had been making moves to control Ukrainian gas with Gazprom and money laundering that could at least go back to the late 1990s with 19). Topolov and 21.) Artemenko and their Kiev football team and would seem to go back even earlier, which lends credibility to the idea that the 1995 Tel Aviv meeting hosted by 9.) Birshtein—in which he, MOGILEVICH, and other top Russian and Ukrainian gangsters met to discuss their Ukraine plans—was a catalyst for the events discussed above (you don’t put that many wanted men in one place at the same time except for something big). That big Ukraine scheme would unfold all while MOGILEVICH-linked mobsters were engaging TRUMP.

That is hardly to suggest that in 1995, a plot to install Trump in the White House was hatched. But it does seem that around then, a massive plot was hatched that came to pass over time in Ukraine, and that to some degree the machinery and personnel behind this plot devoted some of its collective energy to engaging TRUMP, laundering money through his businesses and, eventually, trying to infiltrate and/or manipulate and/or collude with him and/or some of his senior associates during his presidential campaign and/or later during his presidency.  

We can be sure that Special Counsel Mueller is digging into all of this…

What’s important to keep in mind here is that viewing these components apart, you miss the real story; they must be seen as a whole, a massive series of related plots, part of something between an overall conspiracy and a targeted strategy in which Trump was a prime target along with Ukraine. In this light, the overall picture paints a dramatically darker, far more incriminating portrait that erases all doubt that something massive and nefarious was going on involving both Trump and Putin. Clearly, Trump is either breathtakingly stupid or is less stupid than that and is guilty of some degree of treason.

Yes, this is an overwhelming number of ties, deals, relationships, and criss-crossing threads, incredibly confusing and complex, not easy to understand or explain in a tweet or a soundbite; at first glance, it all sounds insane. Yes, the forces that prevailed in these plots bet not on our ability to be able to sift through the noise but on our ability to be consumed by it. Though initial skepticism would be a sensible responsible reaction to such a story and it takes a lot of effort to understand or explain it, the day we lose the ability to overcome these challenges to understand the truth is the day we lose our right to be respected as worthy of our free institutions, for the day we allow complexity to deter us from the path of truth-seeking is the day we surrender the very sovereignty of our minds and, in essence, our nation to those cynically betting on our laziness and credulity, whether agents of Putin’s Kremlin or our own agents of chaos, cynicism, disinformation, and misinformation.

Correction appended to note the alleged nature of the claim that Sater’s father was tied to Mogilevich- 11/30/2018

For some of the latest in Brian’s analysis putting related pieces together, see his eBook from late 2019, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes and Noble Nook (preview here) and its related articles: Ukrainegate Proves the Media Has Learned Almost Nothing from 2016, The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma, and Time to Play Hardball with Russia

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here

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© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

*****

EXCLUSIVE analysis of information not yet reported in the necessary context shows that Trump the businessman, at best, was an unwitting tool used for Russian (mafia and government-tied) money laundering and that Trump the president is, at best, an unwitting tool for Vladimir Putin; at worst, Trump the businessman was a partner in Russian (organized and governmental) crime and Trump the president is the biggest scandal in American history. Even if Trump is an extraordinarily stupid leader with spectacularly terrible judgment and he is totally innocent of knowing what was really going on, it has been clear for some time that key associates of Trump are far less likely to be innocent when it comes to complicity and collusion and therefore treason, with the latest reports only confirming fire when the smoke was already suffocating. However the fire finally comes to light and whatever his personal involvement, since the best case scenario is that Trump is easily duped and manipulated, Trump is clearly unfit to be president.

Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse March 28, 2017 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981) March 28th, 2017 (Updated 4/3; Update of my pre-election piece.); War is Boring version in two parts

Built on part on these earlier pieces from July 30/31 2016: Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

November 4, 2016: EXCLUSIVE: Top Trump Aides’ Deeper & Linked Roles in Putin Agenda Revealed; Russian Mafia Nexus With Trump & Aides Goes Back Years

See major follow-up piece:July 27, 2017: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

Also, see his related piece from December 7, 2016: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Trump, Tevfik Arif, & Felix Sater (of whom Trump testified under oath: “If he were sitting in the room right now, I really wouldn’t know what he looked like”) © Mark Holden/WireImage

AMMAN — This information concerns business dealings over the last decade and then some of Donald Trump, who at the time was hurting for investors and investment as Wall Street had all but shut down its loaning operations to him; this information involved criminal dirty money laundering coming from Russia, Russian organized crime, and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin at a time Putin, his government, his close associates, and future associates of Trump—most notably Paul Manafort, his future Campaign Chairman—were involved in a massive Eurasian natural gas and criminal money laundering scheme worth billions of dollars that was part of Putin’s grand plan to control Ukraine. Updates also discuss context involving lobbying efforts, financing for Trump’s projects, and new or related developments that, in terms of Russian intrigue, incriminate even further both associates of Donald Trump and his successful presidential campaign (and, therefore, perhaps even his very presidency).

At best, Trump himself may have had no knowledge of this money laundering and these ties, but even this scenario highlights serious deficiencies in Trump’s judgment in terms of who he did business and politics with and how he did business and politics, pillars of his management style and of urgent interest to the American people as Trump manages the nation as president.   

While there is no direct proof of Trump’s knowing involvement or collusion in any single aspect of these dealings when it comes to laundering money or tilting a U.S. election with Russian help, the sheer number of them over a period of years and his close association with a number of key players in these crimes, combined with his positions and public statements as a presidential candidate that are the most pro-Russian of any major presidential candidate or sitting president, create a picture that stinks to high heaven and makes it more likely—not less—that something nefarious is going on between Team Trump and Team Putin. 

We may never know exactly what happened or exactly who is responsible or exactly what Trump was and wasn’t aware of, but, despite ludicrous claims to the contrary, this has nothing to do with the media or with irresponsible speculation; with so many questionable people, actions, and circumstances, the only sane and responsible course forward is to continue to vigorously demand more answers to the questions Trump and his associates have raised because of their actions and no one else’s, especially since their accounts of these events and people keep shifting as more and more evidence comes to light. After all, contrary to American civil criminal law, in the court of public opinion, the burden is on a sitting President with so many questionable connections to shed light on his dealings and to clear any hint of suspicion if he wants to earn the benefit of the doubt.

Time to go over what we do know, and what, when put together and given proper context, what that information makes clear and what it suggests.

Executive Summary

In earlier work, I revealed significantly deeper relationships than previously understood from all other previous public reporting between associates of Donald Trump, his presidential campaign, and entities related to them on one hand and associates of Russian President Vladimir Putin, his Russian government, and entities related to them on the other hand, relationships concerning efforts to advance the Putin’s interests, Russian government interests, and Russian organized crime interests. 

Two figures in particular, former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump campaign foreign policy advisor Carter Page, were involved in major geopolitical events and entities that convulsed Ukraine beginning in 2004 with the Orange Revolution and through a massive Eurasian gas and money laundering scheme designed to facilitate Russian dominance of Ukraine whose effects are still being directly felt up through today with the war in Ukraine. 

Manafort and Page were linked by lines of power and influence connecting them through a short chain of major players and entities, and their presence and roles in the region overlapped in key areas for several years as they worked for Putin’s key allies to enact a plan designed to corrupt and dominate the Ukrainian state and to serve the purposes of Vladimir Putin’s anti-Western, anti-American agenda. 

Page operated on one end as an advisor not only to the Russian energy giant Gazprom, whose pipes much of the gas involved in the scheme passed through on its way to Ukraine (a fact well-reported), but also to another major Russian company, a large domestic power company called RAO UES (which I was the first to report in the context of Putin’s gas scheme) that ended up using some of the Gazprom gas—after passing through Putin-allied middlemen—to power its Russian power plants in a circular scheme returning the fruits of the gas to their country of origin.

Manafort’s part—far more pivotal, central, and direct than Page’s—was working with pro-Russian, pro-Putin Ukrainian political elites (especially Ukrainian on-and-off-again President Viktor Yanukovych, which the Orange Revolution had exposed and deposed, and his Party of Regions, for whom Manafort was the top political advisor) and business elites (especially oligarch Dmitry Firtash) and with Russian political and business elites (especially oligarch Oleg Deripaska); Firtash was linked to Putin friend and Russian mafia godfather Semion Mogilevich, who worked together to launder billions to profit themselves, Yanukovych, and Yanukovych’s political allies so they, flush with cash, could be bribed to do Putin’s bidding, bribe others to do the same, outspend rivals, and thus, overall, dominate Ukraine’s political system.

Manafort himself worked with Firtash and Mogilevich to set up a massive money laundering scheme in 2008 involving a Manhattan development project that defrauded its partners of millions and for which all of them were later sued by the former Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, whose loss in Ukraine’s 2010 presidential race to Viktor Yanukovych and subsequent politically motivated imprisonment at the hands of his government were facilitated in part by the Manafort-led Manhattan scheme. Manafort also worked with Deripaska to help launder millions in order to hide/protect the personal fortunes of Yanukovych and his allies. For these efforts, Manafort was paid many millions. A partner of Manafort’s—Richard “Rick” Gates—was also involved with burnishing his efforts there and in efforts to lobby U.S. official to help Yanukovych’s comeback government and hurt the imprisoned Tymoshenko’s reputation.

Manafort, Gates, and Page ended up on Trump’s campaign, from which they are easily among the prime suspects responsible for Trump’s and his campaign’s unprecedented pro-Putin, pro-Russian positions that have made them the most pro-Russian (and pro-Putin) candidate and campaign in American history.

Additionally, but hardly of least concern, Mogilevich is the link from the realm of the first scandal set to another roughly concurrent scandal set that ties directly to Trump at the time it unfolded (a fact not reported elsewhere before my earlier piece): a series of at least three real estate deals—one in Manhattan, one in Fort Lauderdale, and one in Phoenix—all spearheaded by a company called Bayrock and that all ended in scandal and disaster. One of the point-men for Trump on all of these deals was the son of Mikhael Sheferovsky—AKA Michael Sater—an alleged Mogilevich capo (an allegation not reported by any major news outlet before my previous piece); this son, one Felix Sater, has a mysterious but clearly Russian mafia-linked violent criminal past of his own that may have even involved working for Mogilevich. Sater and his Bayrock business partner Tevfik Arif helped bring in significant financing and financiers who were either Russians/former Soviets with Putin and/or Soviet ties and/or people with shady and/or criminals pasts, often tied to money laundering, especially Tamir Sapir, Alexander Mashkevich and the now-notorious FL Group of Iceland.   

Through Mogilevich and cores of illicit Russian funding and financiers, then, three international illegal money laundering schemes—the Ukrainian Eurasian laundering plot, its related Manhattan money laundering deal, and the series of Bayrock deals with Trump that all either involved, likely involved, or were likely set up for money laundering—are all linked together at roughly the same time for the first time here.

But in this case the devil—and the Trumps—are in the details.

Setting the Stage in Ukraine: Page & Manafort Arrive

To begin to understand the big picture, one has to go back to 2004.

In 2004, Carter Page moved to Moscow and set up Merrill Lynch’s branch there. His bio on the website of Global Energy Capital LLC, which Page founded and where he is currently a managing partner, states that “[h]e spent 3 years in Moscow where he was responsible for the opening of the Merrill office and was an advisor on key transactions for Gazprom, RAO UES and others.”

As Page was setting up shop in Moscow, Paul Manafort began running Victor Yanukovych’s political life. 

Yanukovych is a notorious, scandal-ridden Ukrainian politician that first attracted global attention in the Ukrainian presidential election of 2004. Leonid Kuchma, the outgoing president during these elections, had appointed Victor Yanukovych as his prime minister late in 2002 and had backed him as a pro-Russian (and pro-Putin) candidate in the 2004 election, even to the point of trying to rig and steal the election for Yanukovych, which sparked the Orange Revolution that, in turn, led to the Ukrainian Supreme Court-ordered redo election that resulted in the defeat of Yanukovych and victory for the more pro-Western Viktor Yushchenko, who had almost been killed by a mysterious poisoning incident (with poisoning hardly an unheard-of fate for opponents of the Kremlin and Putin). 

Yanukovych had already developed a reputation for extreme corruption by this time, but that did not stop Paul Manafort from running Yanukovych’s campaign late in 2004 for the redo election. Despite the loss, Manafort stuck around and was hired to take charge of both rehabilitating the disgraced Yanukovych and strategizing for his political party, the Party of Regions, helping them helping them over the ensuing years to gain power at the expense of Ukraine’s pro-U.S., pro-Western, post-Orange Revolution government.

This type of work was hardly out of the ordinary for Manafort, as his client list includes dictators like the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (then Zaire’s) Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia’s Siad Barre, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi; other clients include Jonas Savimbi (the leader of the Angolan human-rights-abusing rebel guerilla group UNITA), and the Kashmiri American Council (a front for the terrorist-dealing Pakistani government intelligence service ISI that had helped create the Taliban, among other nefarious activities).

Interestingly enough, the Associated Press (AP) just a few days ago revealed a bombshell of a story in which it was revealed that Manafort proposed (through a formal memo, no less) a massive lobbying effort designed to discreetly help promote Putin, the Russian government, and their agenda while undermining their critics, with efforts concentrated in the United States, Europe, and former-Soviet republics and targeting government officials, political groups, the news media and journalists, and businesses by acting to “influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and the former Soviet republics to benefit the Putin government.”

The proposal was pitched to Oleg Deripaska in 2005, a fabulously wealthy Russian oligarch with ties to Russian organized crime who has a very close, generally good—if not always great—relationship with Putin and who, as I noted before, was then working with Manafort to promote Russian interests in Montenegro in a campaign designed to get Montenegro to secede from its union with Serbia and allow greater Russian (and Deripaskan) influence with that result (Montenegro would secede anyway in 2006 but not under Russian auspices, and it is quite telling that only a few months ago a Russian plot to overthrow Montenegro’s government and assassinate its prime minister, who is now trying to join NATO, was exposed and foiled). 

Under the terms Manafort proposed, a contract was agreed upon in 2006 and lasted until at least 2009, one in which Manafort was paid $10 million a year and Manfort used a Delaware shell company—LOAV Ltd.—of his to conduct official business and transactions.

AP obtained numerous documents, memos, and wire transfer records to corroborate its story. 

Later, as I also wrote about before, Deripaska and Manafort had a dramatic falling out c. 2014 that resulted in a Cayman Islands court battle over $19 million related to their efforts to launder money for Yanukovych and his allies, but not before the aforementioned working relationship was well established. The recent AP story broke just hours before CNN reported that FBI officials have information describing how “associates of President Donald Trump communicated with suspected Russian operatives to possibly coordinate the release of information damaging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign.,” and AP soon after reported that U.S. Treasury officials are investigating Manafort’s offshore financial dealings. 

If these interactions seem dramatic, Manafort’s machinations involving Ukraine are even more so.

Criminal Scheme #1: Part I: Manafort & Putin Allies Oversee Flooding of Ukraine with Dirty Gas Money to Establish Russian Dominance

Court documents allege that Manafort first became acquainted with Yanukovych in 2003, a time when he also began cozying up to some of Ukraine’s and Russia’s most powerful oligarchs, at least ones allied with Yanukovych and Putin. Throughout the rest of the decade, Manafort entered into a variety of shady business deals with some of these oligarchs and others, deals that generally seemed to have some ulterior motive in advancing Putin’s agenda in the background. In particular, around the same time he began interacting with Yanukovych, Manafort befriended Ukrainian oligarch, natural gas businessman, and Putin ally Dmitry (Dmytro) Firtash, according to court documents. Firtash, featured in the Panama Papers revelations, had been the main middleman bringing in both Russian and Central Asian natural gas to Ukraine since 2002 and was linked to the essential head, or “boss of bosses”, of the Russian mafia, Semion Mogilevich, also a friend of Putin’s and on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list from 2009-2015.

A Swiss-registered company called RosUkrEnergo (RUE) was created in mid-2004 by the outgoing pro-Russian Ukrainian President Kuchma and the not-going-anywhere Putin to replace the company represented by Firtash that was handling Ukraine’s Russian-related natural gas imports. The imports ostensibly came from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan but through shady deals that seemed mostly orchestrated and subsidized by Gazprom, the Russian gas giant company then dominated, and soon to be majority-owned, by the Russian Government and close Putin allies; additionally, the gas traveled through pipes wholly owned by Gazprom that went mostly through Russian territory. But not much changed with RUE in that Firtash ended up owning 45% of the new company, a stake that is partially a front for Mogilevich to control the company. A total of 50% of RUE was owned by Gazprom, making clear the incestuous nature of the entire arrangement.

But there was a bigger picture, a greater purpose, to all these machinations than just Gazprom dominance of the region’s gas industry, and the specifics of the deal make the following scheme quite easy to understand: Gazprom would basically sell billions of dollars of gas to Firtash through RUE at a steal of a price; Firtash would then sell billions of dollars of the gas at hiked-up prices to Ukraine; the profits would then be used to fund pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine with billions of dollars; and, finally, bankers that were close Putin allies would open up lines of credit for Firtash in the billions of dollars so that Firtash could buy key Ukrainian assets and multiply his influence even further.

It’s no coincidence that this scam came into being not long after Yanukovych’s defeat at the hands of a more pro-Western candidate and as that candidate-turned-president’s relatively pro-Western government was trying to limit Russian influence in Ukraine. Unsurprisingly, some of the disputes between Ukraine and Russia involved fighting over gas deals. This all culminated in a January, 2006, shut-off of Russia’s gas flow into Ukraine and therefore into much of Europe as well, which received the vast majority of its gas from pipes passing through Ukrainian territory. 

Soon after the shutoff, a new arrangement was made: RUE would now be the exclusive and direct supplier of all natural gas coming from Central Asia (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan) and Russia, and, along with Gazprom and Gazexport (Gazprom’s export subsidiary selling non-Russian produced gas), it would sell to the Ukrainian market to all of its industrial customers through a joint venture with Naftogaz Ukrainy, Ukraine’s state-owned energy company, the joint venture being called UkrGazEnergo (or UkrGaz-Energo), and would sell gas to Naftogaz to distribute among Ukrainian households and municipalities.

But there was another key factor in the deal: RAO UES—Russia’s major and majority-state-owned power company—would buy and import Ukrainian-generated electricity into European Russia, with the Ukrainian government providing that energy from the gas that RUE was being paid by Ukraine to import from Turkmenistan into Ukraine that had been purchased by the joint-venture UkrGazEnergo to sell within Ukraine; the government of Ukraine would deliver the electricity to RAO in exchange for the gas needed to generate it, with RUE (or another Firtash firm) apparently acting as the intermediary, buying the gas from UkrGazEnergo; that gas would then be delivered to Ukrainian power plants, which would produce the electricity that would then be sold to RAO to sell in Russia. One of the reasons for this confusing complexity is that at each stage along the way there was the possibility of marking up or down the price when it suited the purposes of those who set up the system in the first place.

Naturally, this overall deal was so unpopular with Ukrainians—who felt cheated at getting sold gas at hiked-up prices and allowing entities with little (or no?) supervision in a process that presented opportunities for massive corruption—that Ukraine’s parliament voted against the deal, albeit it ended up being a nonbinding vote and the agreement went ahead anyway. This arrangement would last from 2006 through early 2009, when another dispute derailed it.

A Page-Manafort Connection Through Gazprom, RAO UES, Firtash, & Mogilevich?

It is important here to note that Carter Page’s tenure at Merrill Lynch was from 2004-2007; the only two companies his aforementioned current bio mentions in relation to this tenure are Gazprom and RAO EUS, claiming that he was an advisor on “key transactions” of theirs; it is hard to imagine transactions more “key” than those involving gas being transported from Central Asia and Russia to Ukraine and Europe and being sold to both, than the creation of RUE, than RAO’s subsequent deal with Ukraine; if Page is telling the truth about his role, it is virtually inconceivable—considering that he advised both Gazprom and RAO and the way they would be tied together starting in 2006—that he would not be aware of what was going on. 

After all, as someone with a PhD and an MBA and a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy, Page would certainly have been aware of the geopolitics of these deals and that they went against American interests at a time when Ukraine was trying to align itself with America and Europe and thus escape the stranglehold of the Kremlin.

However, Julia Ioffe’s profile of Page raises important questions about whether Page is exaggerating his role, and is filled with anecdotes from people knowledgeable about these types of deals who had never heard of Page and people who did know (of) him suggesting he was actually a nobody (though the veracity of their claims are unverifiable as well, some perhaps being of the sour-grapes variety, others perhaps not wanting information on him to get out and acting to throw the curious off his trail, others saying nothing to confirm that they had actually worked closely or directly alongside Page); maybe Page himself deliberately kept a low profile, staying under the radar purposefully. Without a more formal investigation, it is impossible to know what the full picture is; even if Page exaggerated his role, if he was still talking to people at both Gazprom and RAO at this time—even if his discussions interactions may have been more informal than formal (he was apparently often tasked with meeting and greeting, setting up meetings and seeing them through, presenting opportunities for many informal conversations and meetings)—it is certainly a realistic possibility that he still knew a lot and performed an advisory role, one that was perhaps unknown by his colleagues at Merrill.

Finally (and I raised this possibility last July), if he knew what was going on and was involved, there is certainly a possibility of interest being piqued if he came to know that another American in Manafort was involved on the other side of these deals, with the same being able to be said of Manafort, and that interest on either side could have led to either one making contact with the other, contact that may have led to some sort of coordination.

This is admittedly speculative, but a real possibility nonetheless, and is certainly not one bit less speculative than an enormous portion of the mainstream media discussion and reporting on both the e-mail/server situation with Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Foundation. The question of about a possible Manafort and Page link, and the fact that they were involved on one level or another in the massive Eurasian gas scheme, deserve more official scrutiny and need to be answered through a formal investigation because it is clear that those in question have no intention of sharing the truth.

Criminal Scheme #1: Part II: Manafort & Putin Allies Use Dirty Gas Money to Prep Yanukovych Comeback

Russian Government

As for the dispute that derailed the 2006 gas deal, the foundations were laid with the popularly unpopular 2006 deal itself. 

A former prime minister and gas tycoon in her own right and a co-leader of the Orange Revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko, rose to become prime minister again in December 2007, and it was clear that she was on a mission to drive out Russian domination of the whole gas system and push against Russian influence in Ukraine overall: this meant taking on Firtash, Mogilevich and the Russian mafia, and RUE. 

The first step was to get rid of UkrGazEnergo, run by RUE and Naftogaz, but then Tymoshenko set her sights on taking RUE and Firtash (and thus Mogilevich and the mafia) out of the loop, an admittedly more ambitious step, which lead to a series of hostile exchanges between Russia and Ukraine. But in October of 2008, Tymoshenko finally worked out a deal with Putin to remove RUE from Ukrainian gas deals, but they were subsequently unable to agree on pricing, leading to another shutdown on the part of Russia of gas going into Ukraine, and by extension, most of Europe, for almost three weeks in January. But on January 19th, a long-term, ten-year agreement was reached, and only a few days later normal flows were restored, much to the relief of not only Ukraine, but also Europe, as it was the middle of winter; additionally, the parties agreed to take future disputes to arbitration in an international commercial dispute court in Stockholm, Sweden.

If it seemed the players of Team Putin gave up too easily on having RUE taken out of the game, they had other plans in motion to counter Tymoshenko’s effort to limit Russian influence in Ukrainian politics…

Criminal Scheme #2: Manafort Key Agent in Laundering Dirty Gas Money to U.S. During Crackdown

Even before Putin agreed to let Tymoshenko kill RUE, his agents—including Firtash, Mogilevich, and Yanukovych (the latter with Manafort acting as his right-hand man)—were already putting in place plans to go around and escape her efforts; some of these involved setting up a fake U.S. investment fund that was initially capitalized with $100 million; Firtash (acting on behalf of himself and Mogilevich) paid Manafort and his people—including Rick Gates, (who had joined Manafort’s efforts as part of his consulting firm in 2006)—$1.5 million to handle the money. The main purpose of said fund was to act as a conduit to launder money from the Firtash/Mogilevich gas dealings that were being scrutinized by the Tymoshenko government.

Among the various fraudulent deals they went into was one in 2008 for $895 million for the site of the famous Drake Hotel on Park Avenue in New York, with Firtash wiring $25 million towards the project to make it look legitimate, and a further $25 million was later laundered through the project, but rather than truly move forward and apply the money to the project, the Drake property was never actually purchased: the deal, like their other deals, never closed and eventually fell through after many third parties had spent a lot of time and money trying to close it out and after many employees were not paid, but not before Manafort, Firtash, Mogilevich, Yanukovych, and their allies were able to keep substantial funds away from the prying eyes of Tymoshenko and Ukrainian authorities during crucial periods of her time as prime minister (remember this model, it will return…).

Unfortunately for Firtash, Mogilevich, and their backers, unlike money, natural gas is not something that can be laundered: in early 2009, Tymoshenko orchestrated a seizure by Ukraine’s own state-run Naftogaz—a seizure allowed under the agreement she made with Putin—of 11 billion cubic meters of gas from RUE’s gas stockpiles, a quantity worth billions of dollars at the time; Timoshenko had effectively cut out the middlemen who had been hiking up prices and using those profits to poison and pollute Ukrainian politics for Putin’s plans. 

Playing a longer-term game, Firtash initiated a lengthy arbitration process through Stockholm…

Other planted crops were already bearing fruit: unfortunately for Tymoshenko, though she had risen to be Prime Minister late in 2007, in that election and even in the prior 2006 parliamentary elections, Manafort had groomed Yanukovych’s Party of Regions into a party that campaigned using modern, highly effective techniques and tactics; in both elections, the Party of Regions ended up having the most seats in parliament of any single party by significant margins, but ended up being in the opposition because of alliances made between Tymoshenko’s bloc and other parties. Of course, Manafort and The Party of Regions were operating with a gigantic advantage: the enormous amount of money flowing from the massive Eurasian gas scam. All this meant that Yanukovych’s opposition was certainly within striking distance of taking over the government, and that even by 2006 Manafort and the gas scheme had already achieved great success in rehabilitating Yanukovych and his party and in making them together a smoother political machine with more power and influence.

The distance would close, and that strike would happen, in 2010.

Uniting Criminal Schemes #1 and #2: the Downfall of Tymoshenko & Setting the Stage for War

Early in 2010, Yanukovych won the presidential race (with a lot of money from Firtash, who had made over $3 billion from these crooked gas deals), defeating Tymoshenko in a runoff election, the culmination of over five years of work with Manafort and the whole gas scheme crew. Not long after, Tymoshenko lost her position as prime minister in a vote of no-confidence. Meanwhile, in the wake of his victory, Yanukovych worked to undo many of the Orange Revolution reforms, curbing democratic freedoms in areas ranging from the courts to the press. Most notably, in December, 2010, Tymoshenko was retroactively charged with abusing her power during her recent stint as prime minister, and, after a widely condemned(including by the U.S.) politically-motivated show trial, was sentenced to prison in October 2011. 

Manafort and Gates actually lobbied American lawmakers on behalf of Yanukovych’s government from 2012-2014, defending the imprisonment of Tymoshenko and trying to discredit her, as well as trying to improve the image of their client and his government; they did this without disclosing their lobbying activities as required by U.S. law. Incidentally, in these efforts—paid in part by Rinat Akhmetov: Ukraine’s wealthiest man for the last eight years, one of Yanukovych’s main patrons, and a client of Manafort’s since Manafort’s earliest days in Ukraine and for whom Manafort helped arrange a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney—they utilized the services of two Washington, DC, lobbying firms, including Podesta Group Inc., run by the brother of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign Chairman and later victim of Russian-government hacking and WikiLeaks disclosures (the day after this information was made public in mid-August, 2016, Manafort resigned from his role as the Campaign Chairman of the Trump campaign during a week in which his role had already been eclipsed by the addition of Kellyanne Conway and extreme-right-wing Breitbart News’s Stephen Bannon to run the Trump campaign; as for Gates, it was unclear at the time if he had stayed on board or left and the Trump campaign was refusing to clarify the matter). 

Lobbying efforts throughout this period for this circle were also hardly limited to Manafort and Gates, with those efforts for years having for years been tied to prominent Republicans in the United States.

Perhaps most prominent among the lobbyists, former Senator and 1996 Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole—for whom Manafort had been a strategist—was paid over half a million to lobby for Deripaska, who was then, and is still, denied a U.S. visa for his links to the Russian mafia. 

Yuri Boyko, a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician who is a close Yanukovych ally, former minister of several energy related sections of Ukraine’s government, and was heavily involved in setting up the Eurasian gas scheme, paid nearly $100,000 to a Washington lobbyist to meet with top Republicans. 

Barbour Griffith & Rogers, co-founded by the former Republican Governor of Mississippi and major GOP insider/activist Haley Barbour, was paid over $800,000 for lobbying efforts by a lawyer who “structured” the legal aspects of the Eurasian gas scheme. 

Though he had been on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted List, Mogilevich strangely enough has been able to retain the lawyerly services of Republican William Sessions, who was the FBI director from 1987-1993, to lobby on Mogilevich’s behalf for deals with the U.S. government to clear his charges; those talks, which failed, were arranged by Neil Livingstone, a prominent consultant whose firm, GlobalOptions, serviced many Russians and former-Soviet-republic-businessmen; GlobalOptions was introduced by Barbour Griffith & Rogers to a shell company called Highrock Holding(s) used by none other than Firtash as a prominent vehicle for his money laundering in the Eurasian gas scheme; Highrock paid GlobalOptions for at least two projects, one a mysterious “special operation” as named in a subsequent lawsuit for an unnamed member of the Ukrainian government. And just to give one example of Firtash’s European outreach, Firtash’ relationship with several Conservative MPs in the UK may prompt an official investigation.

For his part in engineering Yanukovych’s comeback and Tymoshenko’s downfall, Firtash also got some $3 billion in gas assets returned to him that had been seized by Tymoshenko’s government as a result of proceedings at the arbitration court in Sweden, as once Yanukovych was in power, Ukraine and Firtash essentially became the same party in the case, with Ukraine’s lawyers dropping opposition to Firtash’s attempts to recover the seized gas, now only too happy to see $3 billion in gas go from the ownership of the Ukrainian people back to Firtash; it was clear in this matter that the Yanukovych government was willing to fight for the interests of Putin and Firtash, but not its own people; without Ukraine’s representatives making any case whatsoever, the court simply sided with Firtash in June of 2010. 

Firtash also got his aforementioned credit lines from Putin’s bankers not long after Yanukovych’s victory, specifically some $11 billion in credit from a consortium of banks arranged by Gazprombank, the flagship banking arm of Gazprom (the corruption is so blatant that the companies apparently do not care that their names announce it to the whole world); Gazprombank would not disclose which other banks were part of this arrangement, but by itself it lent him $2.2 billion, the largest possible amount under Russian law and almost one-quarter of the bank’s total capital, making him Gazprombank’s single largest individual borrower; Firtash used this cash to expand his holdings (especially in the chemical and fertilizer industries) and power in Ukraine, all while staying close to Yanukovych. These moves actually made him the fifth-biggest fertilizer maker in Europe and helped him establish relationships with politicians throughout Europe; when reporters asked him where all the money came from to enable him to do all this, he coyly replied: “It’s a secret.” From January 2011 on, Firtash was again buying Gazprom gas at a discount through shady international front companies, then selling that gas back at a far higher price to his new assets, to the tune of billions in questionable profits to his shell companies, in something of a return to the old system before Tymoshenko had rocked the boat.

But the spirited Tymoshenko was not content to only be on defense during this period; during her trial and from prison, she filed a lawsuit in a U.S. District Court in Manhattan in April 2011; in it she names Firtash, Manafort, Mogilevich, Yanukovych, and their front companies as defendants, including initially RUE (but RUE was switched out to name the front companies that controlled it for Firtash and Mogilevich in later amended complaints); the suit accused them of setting up a series of racketeering, fraud, and money laundering enterprises in the U.S. designed to keep dirty gas money away from Ukrainian authorities when she was prime minister and that such activities resulted in material harm for her since they contributed to the downfall of her government and her unjust trial and imprisonment. After being rejected several times, a fourth and final version of the suit was rejected in September, 2015; while not ruling out criminal wrongdoing on the part of the defendants, the judge ruled that the higher-than-average standards for convictions under the RICO statute were not met; still, in the longer ruling rejecting the third complaint, it was noted that “the Court accepts as true the allegation that some of the money that passed through the U.S. Enterprise was ‘funneled back to Ukraine’ — albeit by unidentified actors — and somehow used as ‘financing’ for Tymoshenko’s ‘persecution.’”

*****

Yes, after the 2010 election, everything was going perfectly in regards to Ukraine for Putin, Yanukovych, Manafort, Gates, Firtash, Mogilevich, and their teams, but, as in 2004, there was one thing that they did not plan well for, and it was the same thing that confounded Soviet leaders for decades and led to the downfall of the USSR: the people had other ideas. 

Many Ukrainians—especially younger ones—realized what was happening to their country, and were hopeful of better opportunities and a better future by having Ukraine orient itself more to the West, towards Europe and the U.S. and less corruption. Yanukovych sought to placate these desires by courting a major trade deal with the EU.

But in November 2013, protests erupted over Yanukovych’s about-face backing out of this long-desired EU trade deal in the face of a Russian counteroffer. In particular, protests erupted in a main square (the Maidan Square) in Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, protests that did not go away and came to be known as the Euromaidan protests. After months of a tense situation, security forces shot and killed dozens of protesters on February 20th, 2014; in response to the government’s use of violence, the protests swelled exponentially, fueled by mass public outrage at the bloodshed, and by the end of February 22nd, the Ukrainian parliament had voted Yanukovych out of office, security forces had melted away in Kiev, protesters had taken over the capital, Tymoshenko was freed from prison (in a wheelchair, recovering from what she said was physical abuse and ill-treatment at the hands of her guards and authorities), and Yanukovych has fled the city; soon, he would flee the country to Russia with the help of none other than Putin; today, he is still wanted by Ukrainian authorities for the deaths of the protesters, but he hopes to one day return to Ukraine again as president, which he still contends he is legally. 

Putin had overplayed his hand: his royal straight flush of an ace of natural gas, a king in Yanukovych, a queen in Firtash, a jack in Mogilevich, and a 10 in Manafort did not anticipate a wild-card joker in the form of Yanukovych’s allies fleeing him; that joker lined up with four 2s consisting of many of the Ukrainian people to make five of a kind, the people beating Putin’s flush. But Putin had invested a lot into Ukraine over many years, into controlling its politics and energy sector through gas, Yanukovych, Mogilevich, Firtash, and Manafort: faced with his whole house of cards collapsing in on itself in the face of popular resistance, and with a government hostile to him and his intentions once again in place after a decade of effort designed to restore and maintain Russian hegemony over Ukraine, Putin went to Plan B: the dismemberment of Ukraine and war.

Which is exactly where the situation is today (and, of course, gas is in the middle of the conflict).

Firtash has fled Ukraine as well, and is also wanted by U.S. authorities for a separate racketeering and bribery scheme; he was living in a sort of exile in Austria, but just late last month, a U.S. extradition request based on bribery and corruption charges in a Chicago-based case was approved in Austrian court (the ruling is almost unappealable), though in a bizarre twist he was arrested mere minutes after the ruling by Austrian authorities on a Spanish warrant related to charges of money laundering and organized crime.

In light of ties to Manafort and the related implications for Trump’s presidency, as well as the scandals and ensuing war in Ukraine, his relationship with the Russian mafia, and importance to Putin, this could be one of the most sensational and important internationally focused trials in many years. And, not to be macabre, but it is highly doubtful that either Putin or the Russian mafia will give Firtash the chance to prove his loyalty or show his disloyalty, as powerful men willing to orchestrate murder for far less have little reason to allow him to be tried and risk so much, especially as they have demonstrated a willingness to act through any means necessary to silence individuals who put them at risk.

In the end, Manafort made millions and Gates profited too to the tune of who knows how much off the activities mentioned here (e.g., hand-written records from the office of Yanukovych’s Party of Regions show the Party had set aside payments totaling $12.7 million specifically for Manafort from 2007-2012 alone; Gates was also involved with Manafort in the $19 million Cayman Islands fiasco with Deripaska, who accused both of the other two of illegally bailing out on him the fate of that $19 million is still unknown; all this is totally apart from the newly-revealed annual $10 million Manafort got from his Deripaska-brokered deal), profiting to an obscene degree all while helping to weaken and corrupt Ukraine’s democracy, assisting massively crooked international energy deals, undermining U.S. interests, helping Putin and his allies profit enormously, and helping Russia dominate Ukraine. The culmination of their work for over a decade can be seen in the first war on European soil in two decades. And it was this resume which earned them spots on Trump’s campaign as he sought to become the leader of the free world and succeeded. For some time it even seemed Manafort had more influence on Trump than anyone whose last name was not Trump.

Manafort and Gates have plenty of other questionable dealings, including one particularly scandalous piece of drama with a Russian oligarch featured in the Panama papers revelations and close to Putin. There are at least two U.S. government inquiries into Manafort and one into Page, and Trump associate and Republican political operative Roger Stone is being investigated by the FBI for his ties to WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange, who have questionable ties to Russia and who the whole world knows is receiving information stolen by Russian government hacks related to Clinton, Podesta, and the Democratic party. There are also other Trump campaign staff and/or associates with questionable ties to Russia: Michael Caputo and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, and one American ex-spy alleges a plot by the Kremlin to co-opt Trump against the backdrop of all this.

Less is known about Gates and his role, but after he was brought onto the Trump Campaign by Manafort), he was important enough to be trusted with the vetting of Melania Trump’s Republican National Convention speech—Donald Trump’s wife’s introduction to the nation as a whole—a task at which he famously failed, and failed miserably. It was not clear what the status of Gates was once Manafort resigned, but recent reporting has shown that kept a low profile after and acted a link between the campaign and the RNC; once Trump won, he was apparently planned Trump’s inauguration, and since then he was shipped off to a pro-Trump and strangely quiet-ish nonprofit called America First Priorities (which also landed Trump All Star Katrina Pierson), where he has stayed until this the new reporting on Manafort, after which it seems he was deemed too much of a liability and was nudged out just days ago.

As for Page, it still isn’t even clear who brought him into the Trump Campaign (Julia Ioffe’s account of Page, the most exhaustive yet, illustrates how multiple answers have been given and none have been confirmed, but people sure seem angry about being asked about him); what is known (and it isn’t much) is that he was one of only five foreign policy advisors Trump could actually name in a Washington Post interview from a year ago, suggesting his influence on Trump could be far from insignificant. As his relationships with important Russians are being looked into by the U.S. government, to simply dismiss him as being a charade would be premature, indeed—especially in light of information on Page apparently meeting with Russian officials coming out of the as of yet only partly-substantiated dossier from an ex-MI6 intelligence officer—despite questions of how serious his role was at Merrill and how deep his ties to Gazprom and RAO UES actually were. What is certain is that questions about his role remain, questions which need to be answered, especially in light of his incredibly anti-American, pro-Russian views that could just as easily be coming from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov or a “pundit” on RT and his continued investment in Gazprom. 

Direct Trump Involvement

Trump might have enough to worry about were it just for what has been described above; still, while both of the previous schemes are relevant to Trump insofar as three future Trump Campaign staff—Page, Gates, one of the most important and powerful people in his entire presidential run: Manafort—were involved in various ways in the just-outlined past criminal schemes and/or in the future acted to further the interests of Putin and his Russian government, now we get into territory where Trump himself was directly involved, and in not just one, but roughly a half-dozen situations linked to Russian organized crime.

A piece of context that is important to note for all of the following cases is that the setting for the following suspicious deals was a Donald Trump and a Trump Organization that was reeling financially.

By the mid-2000s Trump was having a hard time finding investors: he had just declared bankruptcy in 2004 for one of his major casino businesses to the tune of $1.8 billion in debt (and would declare another business bankruptcy in 2009, his fifth and sixth overall business bankruptcies, respectively) and all major Wall Street lenders—whose relationships with Trump had been souring for years—stopped offering Trump loans, in part because of his frustrating and suspicious business practices.

That is, all but one: Deutsche Bank, yet even that relationship “frayed” starting in 2008 because of Trump’s untrustworthiness as a business partner (Deutsche itself would later become involved in major money laundering scandals involving Russia, but more on that later).

So Trump was clearly hurting for investment after that 2004 bankruptcy, and yet, somehow, by 2008, Donald Trump Jr. was able to publicly remark that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets” and that “we [i.e., the Trump Organization] see a lot of money pouring in from Russia;” yes, this was a time when Trump was aggressively courting Russian business (it should now be obvious why Trump has not released his taxes and why that information could, and likely will be, so crucial to the investigations into his Russia ties and to the public’s evaluation of Trump).

In fact, a report from Reuters from less than two weeks ago noted how in just seven Trump luxury towers in southern Florida, 63 Russian passport/address-holders have bought $98.4 million in property; they include “politically connected businessmen and other elites,” though “none of the buyers appear to be from Putin’s inner circle;” one buyer, Alexander Yuzvik, was senior at Spetstroi, a Russian state-owned company that has done construction for Russian military and intelligence, including the G.R.U. and the F.S.B. intelligence agencies that were heavily involved the 2016 American election hackings, with Yuzvik only stepping down in March 2016, after the hacking operations had begun, though as of now, no evidence has surfaced linking him to these operations.

The above figures may even be a conservative estimate: at least 703 out of 2,044 of the units in the seven towers were owned by limited liability corporations (LLCs), often designed to mask their owners’ identities; many owners’ nationalities could not be identified; and Russian-Americans without a Russian passport/address were not included.

*****

At the same time the aforementioned Eurasian gas and Manafort-led New York real estate dual schemes were taking place, and while Donald Trump was losing investors in the U.S., Trump was cultivating Russian/former-Soviet business relationships. One of his point men in these efforts was Felix Sater, the son of an alleged mob captain of Mogilevich’s Russian mafia operation; the offices of Bayrock, Sater’s real estate company where he was Chief Operating Officer and eventually the dominant force within, were even in Trump Tower itself.

Sater, a man with a violent, criminal, mafia-rife past of his own, had himself previously been caught up in an elaborate 1990s $41 million stock fraud scheme on Wall Street that had used the Russian mob to launder money at a time, it should be noted, when Mogilevich was active in large-scale stock fraud and laundering in North America. Sater ended up assisting U.S. authorities for years, even, apparently, on CIA-related national security issues involving missile terrorism-related purchases in either Afghanistan or Russia, and the details on all this remain something of mystery: his operations with the government remain secret and the juiciest details of the Wall Street case were sealed and remain so despite repeated efforts to unseal them (they were sealed at the time, interestingly enough, by then-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, Loretta Lynch, who just stepped down as U.S. Attorney General the day Trump was inaugurated president). 

As a result, there is also virtually no information on the specifics of the Russian mafia’s activities in Sater’s Wall Street scam, but there is a reasonably good chance or even higher that Mogilevich was running the Russian mob’s involvement in it, or was at least involved, since he was actively pursuing similar schemes in the U.S. at the time, possibly had a connection to his alleged old capo in Sater, and since Mogilevich was already such a major figure in the Russian mob at this point, keeping in mind that hierarchy matters quite a bit in organized crime; in fact, it is far less likely that the Russian mafia would be involved without Mogilevich when considering the points just mentioned. 

Now, that last point should not be taken lightly, considering that, just a few years later, Mogilevich was a primary actor in laundering billions of dollars on behalf of Firtash, Manafort, Yanukovych, and Putin; is it more or less likely that he would turn to an old connection—one with experience laundering money who had come to have the favor of the U.S. government, no less—to help with the laundering? Even without the Wall Street capers, Sater would have been an attractive candidate based on (possible) family ties alone, as would his nominal entry into real estate, as the real estate market in the U.S.has been an ideal avenue for money laundering for some time and is a top concern of U.S. officials, in part due to lax state, local, and federal laws.

Sater began working with Trump in in the early 2000s, trying to help him land real estate deals in Moscow, even showing Ivanka and Donald Jr. around the city in 2006 and introducing the Trumps to influential Russians. None of these potential Moscow deals ever went through…

Criminal Scheme #3: The Trump/Sater/Bayrock Deals

But a number of deals in the United States between Trump and Bayrock produced a far more interesting—and incriminating—history. 

Perhap’s Sater’s most famous partnership with Trump was an infamous deal to develop a SoHo property in Manhattan. The deal was concocted in 2006 by Trump, Sater, and two other partners from former Soviet states: one was Bayrock chairman Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan who’s rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable; the other was Tamir Sapir from Georgia, who had decades ago established ties to numerous important Soviet officials after immigrating to the U.S., who may have very well been (once) part of—or even come to the U.S. secretly working for—the Soviet Ministry of Internal Affairs (at whose academy he had apparently studied), whose source of his wealth had long been subject to rumor-fueled suspicion, who introduced Trump to Bayrock, and whose former business partner had pled guilty to racketeering conspiracy charges spanning 13 years with the Gambino crime family (incidentally or not, at the time of the SoHo deal, it seems Sapir was not exactly mentally fit).

It turns out that the SoHo deal had a significant portion of its Sater-and-Arif facilitated financing—some $50 million specifically approved by Trump for it and three other projects—flow from a firm in Iceland, FL Group, linked to the Panama Papers revelations and one apparently known as a hub for the money of Russians “in favor with Putin.” Financing for these projects was also secured from Alexander Mashkevich (or Machkevich), a Kazakhstani billionaire with a history of money laundering.

Considering Sater had helped pave the way for this investment and recalling his possible Mogilevich connections, it is hardly unreasonable to assume that there is a high probability that some of the money coming in from Russians was in one way or another tied directly or indirectly to the giant Eurasian gas scheme worth billions, as this period was especially a time when Russians tied to Putin and operating through Manafort, Firtash, and Mogilevich were aggressively trying to funnel money away from prying eyes of the likes of Tymoshenko. Besides the Russian financing, some of the transactions involving the property were clearly carried out by shell corporations for the purpose of laundering money, transactions from which Trump profited. Furthermore, the SoHo deal was structured to cheat the U.S. government out of tens of millions in taxes, as the investments were illegally restructured as loans (not incidentally tax-free) to avoid paying hefty taxes on them, loans that would also give FL Group a big chunk of theoretical future profits over time. 

In the end, the deal went terribly for Trump, who was sued for fraud—his children Eric and Ivanka had inflated the level of interest in order to attract buyers—and in a 2011 settlement, he refunded 90% of the deposits on the building’s condos. 

One must wonder why likely Russian investors were so eager to invest $50 million in this deal, and if it was an excuse to launder money, rather than an actual investment, as was the case with the Park Avenue deal involving Manafort & Co, and that model would seem to be repeated by Bayrock again and again, Repeated in deals with Trump and with Sater serving again as a point-man.

Even as construction on Trump SoHo began in 2007, another of the Trump/Bayrock projects was rising in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; this one, the Trump International Hotel & Tower, would also result in disaster and led to over a dozen lawsuits, with over 100 condo buyers suing for $7.8 million. The project was supposed to have been completed by the end of 2007 but fell way behind schedule; Sater and his Bayrock partners secretly and seemingly cashed out their stakes in this project and several others—including the SoHo deal—in a deal with the aforementioned Icelandic firm, FL Group. Trump eventually pulled his name from the project, and when its buyers learned this in May, 2009, this only increased their outrage and added to lawsuits already in motion accusing Trump and Bayrock of fraud. As in the SoHo deal, confidential settlements, this time with dozens of buyers, ensued, and Trump refused to accept any responsibility, blaming the problems on the economic crises. Florida courts declined to rule that Trump or his partners had committed fraud, including a state appeals court just last year. The project finished years late, cost some $200 million, and was eventually sold for merely $115 million at a foreclosure auction. And while the evidence of money laundering in this case is not as explicit or solid as the information publicly reported on in the SoHo deal, it is still a similarly structured deal with the same partners that led to a similarly dubious result, making it more likely, not less, that similar laundering was taking place.

Another Bayrock partnership with Trump in Fort Lauderdale (not part of the FL Group ventures) was originally conceived of as the Trump International Beach Club; an initial $2 million in capital was provided by Arif in 2003, and from that point, Sater and Arif conned a friend of Arif’s who was also Sater’s landlord, Elizabeth Thieriot, lying about the value of the club, hiding their own investment in the project, and convincing her to provide a $1 million investment for a mere 4% of the Club, 12 times what they had paid for that percentage and allowing them to make a 1,125% profit on her investment; as in the SoHo deal, they illegally labeled the investment a loan to avoid paying taxes on it and were using their fraud to hide skimming $1 million off the top; on top of that, when there was income finally generated in 2005, they defrauded their partner Thieriot of her rightful share; eventually Theiriot figured out some of what was going on and sued her scammers in court in 2006, and they pulled similar scams on other investors/members in the Club. The project was apparently eventually reconceived of as the Trump Las Olas Beach Resort, but was suspended in a declining market by Trump himself in October 2007.

Another deal among the four which received FL Group financing was a failed project that never even got off the ground in Phoenix, Arizona. Trump began eyeing the Camelback area of Phoenix, Arizona, for a luxury residential tower back in late in 2003, a project similar to the others; Trump’s team, and then Trump himself, met with the mayor, who wasn’t impressed with Trump, and at a meeting in January, 2005, when plans were unveiled, local residents showed up to argue against the development, yet by September, the appropriate city bodies had approved the plans. It seems Sater’s people organized intimidation, bribery, and deception as tactics to deter residents from gathering enough signatures to force a public referendum that could have overridden the city bodies’ approval; under this pressure, the city council voted to reverse its decision and pressed the developers and the neighborhood association to reach a compromise, at which point Trump himself abandoned the project, not wanting to be part of anything that would be scaled down any further in scope and ambition. Ernie Mennes, the owner of the Camelback property who had gone into a partnership with the Bayrock/Trump developers, sued Bayrock in 2007 in federal court, accusing Sater of both threatening to “cut off his legs and leave him ‘dead in the trunk of his car’” and of stealing money from the project for himself. The judge oversaw a settlement and the case was sealed, likely because of Sater’s special relationship with the government. This property was part of the $50 million pseudo-offloading to FL group, and by June of 2009, Bayrock was relieved of the property, which it had left $36 million in debt, when it was “sold out from under” the company at a trustee auction for a mere $10 million.

The final in the group of four projects of Bayrock tied to FL’s “investment” involved a Waterpointe property in Queens (apart from approving FL’s money, Trump was otherwise not involved as far as we know). Bayrock bought the property in 2008 for $25 million, but the soil was contaminated and had to be replaced, which Bayrock did with other soil that was even more contaminated and was fined $150,000 for doing so; when Bayrock defaulted on a loan in 2011, the lender took over Waterpointe and sold it for roughly $11 million, less than half what Bayrock had paid.

As for FL Group, it failed in spectacularly 2008, along with Iceland’s other major banks/funds and many others in the world during the great global financial meltdown.

In a 2013 NY State Supreme Court lawsuit rising from a process that began in 2008, former and then-business partners of Sater’s at Bayrock—Jody Kriss and Michal Ejekam—sued Sater and his accomplices for damages and nonpayment related to Sater’s hiding of his past and his use of Bayrock primarily as a vehicle for criminal activities; in it, Donald and Ivanka Trump and the Trump Organization are named as defendants and the federal government is accused of illegally concealing Sater’s past and crimes in a way that defrauded previous victims from 1998 scam—including Holocaust Survivors—and subsequent victims of the other above schemes of many millions in restitution. The NY State Supreme Court removed the Trumps and their Organization from the suit; the plaintiffs had only sought declaratory relief in regards to the Trumps, i.e., they asked the court to determine what liability the Trumps had in regards to the case, and they were removed “without prejudice,” meaning the removal was no comment on their guilt/responsibility/innocence and that they could be sued again on the same grounds later. 

*****

Taken together, these examples amount to catastrophic losses and colossal mismanagement on the part of Sater and Bayrock and, at the very least, gross negligence and incompetence on the part of Trump; at most, he might have been aware of some of what was going on and turned a willful blind eye, or, even worse, he might have been in on it, though no evidence exists that proves this).

Actually, the performance of Bayrock was so bad, one would not be faulted for concluding they did not care at all about performance. And that seems to be right on the mark: it seems, if anything, these schemes were designed to move large amounts of money, often Russian-tied, into temporary projects that never came to fruition, but that would benefit Sater, Trump, and others high-up in the deals, but rarely if ever the investing partners outside this upper echelon; it seems these other duped partners and especially Trump would lend an air of respectability to clearly criminal schemes that were so poorly managed that the only logical conclusion is that Sater and his friends at Bayrock did not care about the future success of the projects nearly as much as they cared about laundering money and skimming from the top. Furthermore, since FL Group was a stupendously bad performer even by the standards of the 2008 financial crisis, and given its close ties to Kremlin-connected Russian money, one could also be forgiven for thinking there was something more going on there than met the eye. We may never know all the details or whose money was laundered and for what reasons—and if I had a magic wand I’d love to see if any the Manafort/Yanukovych/Firtash/Mogilevich Eurasian gas scheme money made its way into any of these Trump ventures—but it seems clear a lot of dirty Russian money was involved.

When considering Sater, it is important to remember that he has been busted multiple times by law enforcement and yet has not served jail time in America (with the exception of one year for stabbing a man in the face with a margarita glass and severing a nerve in the man’s face, or, as Trump put it under oath, Sater “got into a barroom fight, which a lot of people do.”) and enjoys the favor of the U.S. government, suggesting he is anything but a generally and especially stupid person; also remember that Sater has a long history of money laundering. 

So, in fact, once you look at the Bayrock deals and Sater assuming Bayrock’s primary reason to exist is for RICO money laundering, these deals that were once seemingly mind-bogglingly stupid all of a sudden make a lot of sense, and, in series of lawsuits beginning primarily on behalf of two of Sater’s Bayrock partners—Jody Kriss and Michael Ejekam, who weren’t in on the fun—for money they say is owed to them, Bayrock is precisely described as a RICO criminal organization, of which money laundering is one of its primary activities (in the main complaint, the word “launder” or one of its derivatives appears 39 times in the document).

Sater Saga

After Sater left Bayrock in 2008, none of this stopped him from being brought into the Trump Organization in 2010 as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump” even after Trump was made aware of Sater’s criminal past, and circumstantial evidence points to Sater still being connected to the Russian mafia. For his part, Trump has issued his typically contradictory and slippery statements—more aptly called lies—in regards to these dealings and, in particular, his relationship to Sater, with Trump lying repeatedly about his relationship with Sater and Bayrock in an attempt to falsely minimize them. And there is no distancing Trump from Bayrock: one of Bayrock’s flagship presentations from as late as 2008 list its three Trump-named projects discussed above before all others and lists The Trump Organization as its first “strategic partner” (followed by FL Group), Donald Trump as its first “reference,” and “Trump Tower” in New York as its address.

The Huffington Post also recently discovered just a few days ago that Sater owns three shell companies—Global Habitat Solutions (GHS), United Biofuels Company LLC, and Sands Point Partners GP LLC—that are apparent fakes that “sell no products and have no customers,” ideal for being used to launder money; GHS had collaborated with another company named Titan Atlas in promoting itself, a company co-founded by Donald Trump Jr. and in which Trump Jr. also invested; Sater used promotional images from Titan Atlas’ website for GHS’s own after Trump Jr. introduced him to Titan Atlas’ other co-founder, Jeremy Blackburn (with an unsurprisingly troubled corporate past), and Tital is now owned by another company controlled by the Trump Organization, run by Trump Jr. since his father became president. .

Sater even donated the maximum amount allowed to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, and the White House is even using Sater as a back-channel diplomatic go-between for Trump’s person lawyer, Michael Cohen, and a heavily-pro-Russian/pro-Putin Ukrainian legislator, Andrii Artemenko, who are discussing a Ukraine “peace plan” being pushed by close Putin aides; Artemenko also claims he has information damaging to Petro Poroshenko, Ukraine’s anti-Russian president facing off against Putin and his proxies in the Ukrainian Civil War. In an only partially-verified-by-U.S.-officials 35-page dossier on Trump and his people compiled by a respected ex-MI6 British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, Cohen is said to have secretly met with Russian government officials during the late stages of the presidential campaign, though it is not clear if this—or what—specific information has been corroborated by U.S. officials, with journalists having been unable to thus far verify the information on Cohen, who denies playing this role.

The reason a lot of what is known about Sater and his past misdealings is publicly available, besides a then-revelatory late-2007 New York Times article, is because of the intrepid efforts of two of the lawyers who often represented plaintiffs against Sater in court: Richard Lerner and Frederick Oberlander.

Going back to that 2013 lawsuit, because Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Kaminsky was included in these accusations for allegedly illegally aiding and covering up for Sater, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) Preet Bharara (more on him on in a bit) ended up being involved tangentially in defending him in his capacity as a U.S. Attorney, playing a role in trying to moving the suit from the state court system to SDNY jurisdiction, but it was ultimately moved because of Sater and his ties to the government, not Kaminsky. Once in the hands of the federal court, Kaminsky was removed without prejudice from the proceedings.

Which brings us to one of the untold stories of this election, and one which may never be told in full: how Sater’s cooperation with the government gave him government protection from being held liable in many cases for his misdeeds while also helping to suppress information about him and these misdeeds, and how, had his past and crimes been front and center over the past decade, this knowledge could have done much to derail and discredit Donald Trump, his brand and family at a time when he was building a national following with his hit show The Apprentice, which he even used to promote his fraudulent, money-laundered SoHo deal. 

That the public, including Trump’s and Bayrock’s clients and customers, were kept in the dark about Sater—a fact which undoubtedly helped all of these related deals and others advance, which was not lost on partners of Sater’s, and which is at the heart of much of the legal action against Sater—and were kept in dark because Sater cooperated with the U.S. government, adds quite a what-if twist to the tale of Trump and his dramatic rise over the last decade to become the most powerful man in the world: what if the government hadn’t protected Sater, and all that evidence was out in the open while Trump and Bayrock were courting buyers and were fighting court battles? What would that have done to Trump’s reputation if he became most known for defrauding customers and money laundering with a Russian mafia-deluged violent felon, to his hit show The Apprentice (one can just imagine NBC saying “You’re fired!” to Trump), and to his political aspirations? 

In a much less chaotic, less exciting world than the insanity that confronts us today, one can be sure such a salacious story involving a playboy New York tycoon would have been front, center, and dominant in national and international media coverage; lawsuits, trials, and investments may also have gone differently for Trump if such information was common knowledge, too; he may have just faded away in disgrace, or least into a sideshow, if not landing in jail.

Yes, if not for the favors the U.S. government did in protecting and, thus, abetting, Sater, it is far more likely that Trump would have collapsed in scandal than risen to be our current president. This abetting may very well be unwitting, but the two aforementioned lawyers—Lerner and Oberlander—believe differently, that the government cooperation with Sater yielded disappointing results, that Sater fooled and tricked the government into helping him in exchange for dubious assistance of questionable value and that this arrangement may have been such an embarrassment for the government that they covered up this and his past to save face and protect the careers of those involved. No court rulings have affirmed these assertions, yet it is notable that in the U.S. Supreme Court proceedings involved in arguing over Sater’s information being withheld from the public, the Court tacitly admitted that at least some of the points made by Lerner and Oberlander were valid when they ordered many of the documents surrounding Sater be made public, the only reason that much of information about him is now publicly available.

Epilogue of Intrigue

As for Arif and Mashkevich, two other major players in the whole Trump/Bayrock/FL Group saga, Arif was arrested in Turkey in September 2010 when he was at a sex party with apparently underage girls on board a Yacht (which had been once belonged to none other than Atatürk) under suspicion of running a complex prostitution and human trafficking ring in a scheme of which it seems Mashkevich was also a part, though Arif was later acquitted under mysterious circumstances and Mashkevich was not charged.

Going back to Trump’s sole major Wall Street lender, Deutsche Bank, since 2012, it has loaned trump over $300 million, a sum that is still owed. This amount presented a major conflict of interest for the newly inaugurated President Trump in late January 2017, because Deutsche was under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) for orchestrating $10 billion in illegal fake trades from 2011-2015 that might have been part of a massive Russian money laundering scheme; U.S. and UK officials levied $630 million in massive fines against Deutsche at the end of January 2017, but DoJ was not part of this and is still investigating, raising the question of the independence and impartiality of Trump’s own new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, himself under fire for possible improper interactions with Russian officials and forced to pledge to recuse himself from any investigations of into the 2016 election and Russian interference in it. Deutsche itself is under pressure to allow an independent investigation into Trump’s accounts with the Bank (his family also has accounts with Deutsche), even after its own investigation apparently found no link to Trump’s accounts and Russia. 

It was just revealed that Deutsche was also involved in another major laundering scam of Russian money to the tune of $24 million, including the specific division that Trump owes $300 million, with the overall laundering scheme—known as the Global/(Great) Russian Laundromat—involving dozens of Western banks and a sum ranging from $20-$80 billion through the years 2010-2014; the hundreds involved in the scheme include Russia’s notorious oligarchs and Russia’s F.S.B., the main successor to the famed Soviet K.G.B. intelligence agency, with Putin having longstanding intimate ties to both and with some of the money in the scheme apparently being used to further Putin’s and Russia’s interests.

As if there weren’t enough bad connections to Trump Tower, Mogilevich-associated Russian mafia boss and apparent all-around celebrity Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov was overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring for wealthy clientele that in part operated out of Trump Tower in New York. Among other prolific activities, Tokhtakhounov had gained notoriety for apparently fixing 2002 Olympic ice skating matches to help get a gold medal for a fellow Russian, as well as one for a pair of French skaters in exchange for a French visa, but was soon after in Russia and safe from prosecution. The gambling ring connected to Trump Tower, run by two of his capos, Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik, was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine, and besides the gambling ring, they also engaged in some $100 million in money laundering. Trincher himself in 2009 bought an apartment in Trump Tower just below an apartment owned by Trump himself, in which he nearly held a fundraiser for Newt Gingrich two years later, but had to cancel because of a mold problem and a water leak; it was from this apartment that Trincher ran a branch of said gambling ring. Another linked gambling/laundering ring was run by one of Trincher’s sons, who owned an entire floor in Trump tower, and another son of Trincher’s ran multiple illegal poker rooms throughout New York City. 

An indictment naming Tokhtakhounov and his people was filed by U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, mentioned earlier, and the same Preet Bharara fired controversially by Trump just last month after Trump had promised Bharara he would not fire him, and it should be noted that several of the past and ongoing cases involving Trump and/or his associates occurred in the jurisdiction of SDNY and that a number of potential future cases would also occur there if they moved forward and would have been handled by Bharara if he had not been fired. It was Bharara’s indictment that led to a 2013 raid on Vadim Trincher’s Trump Tower apartment, and arrests made there and elsewhere nabbed 29 suspects. A mere seven months after he was indicted, a nonchalant Tokhtakhounov was a red-carpet VIP guest at Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow, a city where, to this day, he is regularly seen at trendy public places.

We also have the curious case of the Trump’s fabulously ostentatious mansion—the “Maison de l’Amitie”—in Palm Beach, Florida, that he bought back in 2004 for $41 million. A representative of Trump claimed Trump put $25 million of his own money into renovating the house, but this is doubtful; plans obtained who improvements were relatively minor, and, Typical of Trump, he seemed to be lying through his teeth: when taking a local reporter on a tour, he claimed he installed gold fixtures in bathroom, but when the report scratched a faucet, gold paint came off to reveal not-gold underneath. Trump set his asking price at $125 million when he listed early in 2006, but had trouble finding a buyer; then, in March 2008, he brought his price down to $100 million, but it still wasn’t until that July that he got Russian oligarch billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev to buy the mansion for $95 million after some haggling in a deal said to be the largest U.S. residential real estate deal ever. If you’re thinking that Trump might have swindled Rybolovlev, that’s very possible: he has a habit of falling for tricksters, especially when it comes to art deals; the house was appraised at less than only $59.8 million in 2013, and though it rose to $81.8 million in the summer of 2016, that was still about 15% less than what he had paid. Just months after he bought the house, he ended up in a messy divorce drama with his wife, who was after the house; there are plans to demolish the house, and Rybolovlev has not even physically entered the house, which may be demolished.

But unlike other major Russian oligarchs doing business with Trump or his allies, either directly or indirectly, Rybolovlev is no apparent friend or ally of Putin or the Russian mafia, which seems to put this story in the category of mere trivial.

But then, multiple reports that Rybolovlev’s private jet had repeatedly been tracked to cities where and when candidate and later president Trump was: Las Vegas in October, just five days before Election Day in North Carolina, and in Miami in February, creating a sense of intrigue. One might be tempted to say this is meaningless, yet on top of this, his accounts of the mansion deal have changed, making people wonder if he has something to hide.

At the very least, this Palm Beach mansion saga is a good reminder that Trump is a swindler and a liar, and if you’re still not convinced, google Trump University, Trump Steaks…

And oh, we just found out that during the campaign, Republicans paid a private intelligence firm that works closely with an ex-K.G.B. officer to dig up dirt in Clinton.

Putting the Pieces Together: Not a Pretty Picture

Sorry, Trump fans, but it’s time a reality check: it’s more likely that you will soon be struck by lighting than that all of these threads together and tied together by a Russian mafia godfather end up as innocent, harmless coincidences when it comes possible connections between Team Trump and Team Putin.

It is also crucial to note that the whole Russian operation in Ukraine—using Russia’s natural resources, deals related to them, and the profits from selling them to dominate and corrupt political elites of neighboring and other countries along with hacking and (mis/dis)information operations—is hardly unique to Ukraine; Putin is trying to do much the same thing throughout Europe, and it was clear he successfully threw his weight around last year during our election to help Trump win in what I called the (First) Russo-American Cyberwar, part of his overall war on Western Democracy and promotion of what I call democratic fascism.

The question is now about whether or not there was treason going on during that (First) Russo-American Cyberwar. If (and we don’t know yet) Putin was able co-opt agents people Manafort, Gates, Page, and/or others, this would simply be current Russian standard operating procedure for how it spreads its power throughout the world in the era of Putin; such hybrid warfare and “Cold War”-type or non-hot warfare being directed at America should not only not surprise Americans, it should be expected. And it seems that, along with Manafort and Page, the record-fast-recently-resigned-due-to-Russian-related-stuff Trump National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn and longtime Manafort and Trump confidante Roger Stone are all under an official FBI “counterintelligence”—to use FBI Director James Comey’s exact word—investigation, and Manafort, Page, and Stone all just volunteered to testify before Congress.

Should those hearings be public, that would be epic.

Conclusion originally a Part II published here

Donald Trump, Paul Manafort, and Ivanka Trump on stage for a rehearsal at the Republican National Convention- NBC

Conclusion: Trump Has Terrible Judgment or Is a (Treasonous) Criminal or Both

I will never forgive the news media or the American people for not caring enough about the aforementioned information when it mattered most and had the chance to change the outcome of this election, since any one of these main three threads alone carried more weight than Clinton’s and yet got only a fraction of the coverage that red-herring of a “scandal” got. Nor will I forgive Comey for his political tone-deafness, the politically-suicidal liberals who empowered Trump by myopically and narcissistically not voting for Clinton, or the Republican Party for so willingly spreading its buttocks for Putin; anyone who doubts me on that last point can watch the disgraceful behavior of Republicans on the supposedly relatively non-partisan House Intelligence Committee, especially its Chairman Devin Nunes and shallow grandstander Trey Gowdy, the latter of whom led the partisan witch-hunt that was the last “Benghazi”—really Clinton e-mail—investigation. Yes, I have no faith in Trump—Team Trump has lied at least 20 times about its ties to Russia as of early March and only continues to do so in the most outlandish and unprecedented and Orwellian of ways, making the possible reality of a serious cover-up more and more likely—but seeing Nunes as the Intelligence Committee Chairman act in such an unprecedented way—blatantly covering for the president—made me tear up and almost cry because his behavior is such a dramatic sign of how our government is failing us and how the last bastion protecting this country from what I call democratic fascism—that bastion now being that the party in power won’t twist every organ of government it can to benefit itself politically no matter the cost—may be crumbling. As historian Douglas Brinkley (who implored the public after Trump won to “give…[Trump]…a chance”) said of all of this: “There’s a smell of treason in the air.”

Trump repeatedly claimed during his campaign he would surround himself with “the best people;” I’m sure he believed himself, and that is the problem. What has been outlined here is probably one of the strongest cases (if not the strongest) against Trump’s judgment as leader, whether in business or in politics; if you surround yourself on a regular basis with mobsters and criminals and those who favor the worldview (or purse) of America’s greatest enemy over America itself, there is no more discussion to be had: Donald Trump is too stupid and too incompetent a leader to be president as he simply cannot be trusted to make decisions about whom to give power to (for every supposed hit there are far more misses and we can’t delegate the fate of our nation a game of chance; sorry, but I’m nearly convinced that Trump picked Gen. Mattis to run the Pentagon simply because he like Mattis’ nickname of “Mad Dog”); Trump’s selection of Paul Manafort alone would be disqualifying enough, and that’s just the beginning.

And that is the best case scenario that he was too stupid to see that his people were playing him for a fool or were abusing their power in a way that could destroy his potential presidency and do the nation irreparable harm. But if Trump himself in any way knew about any possible collusion with Russia, that takes us from disqualifying incompetence into the realm of treason. Even if that is not the case, the newest revelations are making it more and more likely that some sort of treason from within his camp will be uncovered—Comey recently noted that this counterintelligence investigation began in July, some ten months ago, and if it was clear there was no collusion it would probably have ended long ago—and it is increasingly likely that this issue will cripple Trump’s presidency in ways not seen since the later nineteenth-century, when Reconstruction’s war between President Andrew Johnson and Congressional Republicans, as well as the scandals of the Gilded Age, dramatically weakened the presidency.

Russia is as defiant as ever, just in recent months and weeks assassinating—or trying to assassinate-—opponents, arresting hundreds of peaceful protesters and Russian’s main opposition leader (Alexey Navalny, again) during Russia’s largest protests in five years, trying to overthrow democratically elected foreign governments (Montenegro), hacking foreign politicians in ways designed to sway elections (from Hillary Clinton to France’s Emmanuel Macron and beyond), fanning the flames of war in Ukraine, slaughtering civilians in Aleppo, and assaulting the world of norms the West has known since the end of WWII.

And Donald Trump is in the White House and wants to be Putin’s friend.

*****

Sometimes, if there’s enough smoke, it’s undeniable that there is a fire even if the flames are obscured or not visible from afar. Back in July, when I began my in-depth exploration around the same time the FBI did, I wrote that

… it’s possible there is  some sort of coordinated effort going on between Trump or people in his campaign and Putin or people associated with him. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we also have two groups of actors here  acting mostly independently yet with common purpose. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of Trump’s associates, especially Manafort, are part of some sort of deal (tacit or otherwise) to promote Putin’s agenda within Trump’s campaign between several staffers or just himself on one side and Putin’s agents on the other, given Manafort’s and several staffers’ histories. And it’s certainly believable—in fact,  almost certain—that Putin would like to see Clinton defeated and Trump in the White House, since it would be  hard to envision a leader that would or could play more into Putin’s hands than Trump. 

This may yet backfire on and Trump and Putin, since the  Russian interference is so obvious…

Sometimes I hate being right.

© 2017 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related articles:

The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Trump, Putin, Russia, DNC/Clinton Hack, & WikiLeaks: “There’s Something Going on” with Election 2016 & It’s Cyberwarfare & Maybe Worse

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here. 

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow him there at @bfry1981). If you think your site or another would be a good place for this or would like to have Brian generate content for you, your site, or your organization, please do not hesitate to reach out to him!

*****

A close look at the tangled web of relationships involving Trump, his Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort, his campaign in general, Putin, Russia, and WikiLeaks in light of the DNC and Clinton-aimed related hacking is not reassuring. Trump is fond of using the phrase: “There’s something going on!” when he wants to imply a scandal without going into detail. Well, “There’s something going on” here and we will go into detail in this in-depth special report, more than any single article you will find anywhere, period. Here is the one article to read on Trump, Putin, the Russian hacks, and political cyberwarfare in election 2016.

January 19th, 2019. Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 30/31, 2016, with major updates August 8 and 15, 2016

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981 July 30th/31st

See major follow-up pieces: November 4, 2016 EXCLUSIVE: Top Trump Aides’ Deeper & Linked Roles in Putin Agenda Revealed; Russian Mafia Nexus With Trump & Aides Goes Back Years

March 28, 2017: Trump’s Russia & Mafia Dealings Expose Him As Fool or Criminal (Traitor?) or Both: Biggest Scandal in U.S. History, Too Many Ties to Be Nothing

July 27, 2017: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

Also, see his related piece from December 7, 2016: The (First) Russo-American Cyberwar: How Obama Lost & Putin Won, Ensuring a Trump Victory

Andrew Harnik/AP; Reuters; The Washington Post

AMMAN — When it comes to President Obama, Donald Trump is very fond of saying “There’s something going on!”, often in relation to the president’s views on, responses to, and efforts to fight Islamic terrorism, and most recently, regarding his body language…

Well, we can return Donald the courtesy: there’s something going on with Trump, Putin, Russia, WikLeaks, the DNC/Clinton hack/reveal, and the 2016 election, up to an including the possibility of some kind of secret deal between Putin and Trump or between some of their people, though Putin acting without coordination with Trump’s campaign—trying to undermine America and weaken America’s global standing and its position with its allies, most notably NATO allies—is also very much a possibility; so is some sort of combination of these.

Maybe this sounds ridiculous, and it should. But the facts of Trump and his associates’ ties to Putin and Russia are what are most disturbing of all.

As with any complicated situation, the best place to begin is the beginning…

Trump’s Business History with Russia & Russians:There’s Something Going On!

Starting in the 1980s, Trump began both seeking business opportunities in Russia, including a 1987 trip to Moscow and Leningrad, and began taking money from Russian investors, to the degree that, by 2008 his, one of his sons, Donald Jr., was able to remark to a business conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our [the Trump Organization’s] assets,” and that “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.” Trump made numerous other trips to Russia since his first in 1987, as did Donald Jr., to pursue business interests there, exploring a variety of ventures. Trump’s business partners in one deal went to Moscow to sell Russian investors condos in 2006, and in 2008 Trump sold Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev a Palm Beach mansion for $95 million. Donald Jr. alone made over a half-dozen trips during the financial and sub-prime mortgage crises that began in 2008, when Russia was on the Trump Organization’s “A-list” for potential real estate deals.

Around this time, Trump also went into a deal structured to deprive the U.S. government of tens of millions of dollars in legitimate tax revenue that involved the construction and financing of Trump’s marquee SoHo property in New York City. The main partner driving this project was Bayrock, a company run by Tevfik Arif, a man who in the Soviet-era was an economic official for the USSR. His point man for the deal, Felix Sater, was a convicted Russian mobster; financing involved money from an Iceland firm known for drawing money from Putin-linked Russians (FL Group), as well as from a financier hailing from the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan named Alexander Mashkevich, who had been charged in a corruption case but settled in exchange for not having to admit any wrongdoing. Trump recalled only light, possible interaction with Sater, but evidence shows that Sater worked closely with Trump on the deal, as did Arif, who personally set trump up with Russian investors. The other major partner in the deal was from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, one Tamir Sapir. 

The deal did not go well. Trump was sued for defrauding buyers of condo units in the SoHo because he and his children Ivanka and Eric had falsely inflated the level of buyer interest, and settled late in 2011, refunding 90% of $3.16 million in deposits on condos, though not admitting that he or the Trump Organization had done anything wrong. Arif was later arrested in Turkey, charged with running a prostitution ring from a yacht in a situation that involved Mashkevich, but was later acquitted, though the details of the case remain murky. As for Sater, he was later brought into the Trump Organization, being given a business card that named him a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump,” years after Trump is publicly said to have been aware of his earlier criminal record.

Perhaps most famously, in 2013, Trump even brought his Miss Universe beauty pageant to Moscow, invited Russian President Vladimir to the pageant, and publicly speculated on a new friendship between himself and the Russian president should Putin attend; a meeting was set up for the two men, and though Putin canceled just before the meeting, he sent a Trump a traditional Russian gift with a “warm” written message. In attendance of both the pageant an afterparty at a Moscow nightclub were many of Russia’s notorious business oligarchs, mingling with Trump, discussing potential future deals.

He Said, He Said: There’s Something Going On!

Fast forward two years later, to when Trump announced his candidacy for the U.S. presidency, and Putin and Trump have had something of a lovefest: neither has opted to criticize the other, instead choosing to hurl compliments at each other from opposite sides of the world:

Trump on Putin:

Trump remarked last September that: “I will tell you that, in terms of leadership, he’s getting an “A” and our president is not doing so well.”

Trump also said: “I think that I would probably get along with him [Putin] very well. And I don’t think you’d be having the kind of problems that you’re having right now.”

Trump also released a statement praising Putin as “a man so highly respected within his own country and beyond” and that “I have always felt that Russia and the United States should be able to work well with each other towards defeating terrorism and restoring world peace, not to mention trade and all of the other benefits derived from mutual respect.”

When Putin said nice things about Trump, Trump said those compliments were an “honor.”

Trump also said he would not denounce Putin: “A guy calls me a genius, and I’m going to renounce?” and that “I’m not going to renounce him.”

Putin on Trump:

Putin recently said of Trump that “He is a bright and talented person without any doubt” and “an outstanding and talented personality.”

In response to Trump’s stated desire to improve U.S.-Russian relations, Putin remarked “What else can we do but to welcome it? Certainly, we welcome it.”

Putin also referred to Trump as “the absolute leader of the presidential race.”

When pushed on his compliments on Trump, Putin slyly doubled down and reiterated them.

The Russian Press on Trump

But it’s not just Putin saying nice things about Trump: Putin’s massive media propaganda machine now seems to have swung solidly behind Trump and his candidacy as well, lavishing praise on him across the boardwhile it clearly does not favor Clinton and demonizes her.

Putin’s choice in 2016 is clear: he dislikes Clinton and prefers Trump.

Trump’s Positions More Favorable to Russia than Any Other Candidate: There’s Something Going On!

In addition, Trump has put forward policies closer to the Kremlin’s policies than any other major candidate for the presidency. Notably:

Trump wants the U.S. to defer to Russia in Syria and let it “fight ISIS” there, and agreed with Putin’s backing of Syrian’s murderous President Bashar al-Assad.

Trump is against the U.S. taking a large role in helping Ukraine defend itself against Russian aggression, and his campaign people also aggressively saw to it that language calling for the U.S. government to supply arms to the Ukrainian government to help it defend itself against “Russia’s ongoing military aggression in Ukraine” and expressing American “admiration and support” for Ukraine in this struggle was removed from the 2016 Republican Party platform, shortly before the Republican National Convention, removing stances that virtually all Republican national security and foreign policy leaders shared; factoring in that the Trump campaign was pretty agnostic when it came to the platform in general, this is indeed curious (Trump’s people have distinctly avoided going into detailed or adequate explanations for this decision). Trump also just recently said at a press conference that he is considering lifting sanctions on Russia and recognizing its annexation of Crimea.

Trump also doesn’t think that there is enough evidence to blame Russia for the downing of MH17.

Trump defended Putin against accusations that he was behind the murders of numerous Russian journalists critical of Putin.

Most recently, Trump signaled less-than-enthusiastic, vague, and conditional support for NATO and has calling it “obsolete,” while the weakening of NATO is a chief aim of Putin.

*****

But ties to Russia in the Trump campaign don’t end with Trump and his family.

How Paul Manafort, Agent of Despots, Gave Ukraine to Putin, & Manafort’s Other Russian Ties: There’s Something Going On!

The Daily Beast

Trump’s Campaign Chairman, Paul Manafort, is a notorious spin doctor for Third World dictators, a leader of the “torturer’s lobby” who represented and lobbied for a true rogue’s gallery, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (then Zaire’s) Mobutu Sese Seko, the Philippines’ Ferdinand Marcos, Somalia’s Siad Barre, Sani Abacha of Nigeria, and Kenya’s Daniel arap Moi; other clients include Jonas Savimbi, the leader of the Angolan human-rights-abusing rebel guerilla group UNITA, and the Kashmiri American Council: a front for the terrorist-dealing Pakistani government intelligence service ISI that had helped create the Taliban, among other nefarious dealings.

Manafort has also had dealings with Russian business oligarch and Putin ally Oleg Deripaska going back to 2005 on a project to help Montenegro secure independence from Serbia, a move that would help Deripaska economically but also advance Russian interests in extending Russian influence into Montenegro, which has coastline on the Mediterranean Sea. UPDATE 8/15: Another deal was later put together by Manafort and Deripaska using offshore accounts for almost $19 million, set up to launder money personally to Yanukovych’s and his closest associates to enable them to live like ostentatious royalty. This was the only deal the shell company they set up for it ever orchestrated.  Later, Deripaska claimed in 2014 in a Cayman Islands court that Manafort, along with Manafort partner Richard (“Rick”) Gates, took that almost $19 million that was supposed to be invested jointly with Deripaska, but which disappeared without a trace, much like Manafort did at the time; Deripaska, even with the aid of private investigators, was unable to track down Manafort in the years before today, when Manafort emerged to work for Donald Trump. Deripaska is still seeking the money, which he has asked to be returned for eight years running now. Gates also works for Trump’s presidential campaign, and, incidentally, it was Gates whose ultimate responsibility it was to vet and approve Melania Trump’s now infamously plagiarized speech. UPDATE 8/15: Deripaska has also been denied a U.S. entry visa by the State Department on suspicion of being linked to the Russian mob.

Perhaps the most intense story of Manafort’s saga are his business dealings in Ukraine. Manfort’s Ukrainian career officially began over a decade ago when Manafort arrived to serve the interests of Ukrainian billionaire Rinat Akhmetov, then Ukraine’s richest businessman. Akhmetov was a close ally of Viktor Yanukovych, then the country’s prime minister, who was a close ally of Vladimir Putin in a Ukraine whose political fault lines very much ran (and still run) along the ethnic Ukrainian and ethnic Russian divide within Ukraine, with Yanukovych allying with the ethnic Russian camp that feels strongly tied to Russia. Russian President Vladimir Putin in particular has a history of trying to manipulate, strong-arm, and dominate Ukrainian politics, with Yanukovych acting as key agent for advancing Russian interests in Ukraine.

Behind the scenes and unofficially, Manafort worked as a campaign consultant for Yanukovych, already surrounded by a cloud of corruption at this time, who was running for Ukraine’s presidency against Viktor Yushchenko in 2004; Yanukovych was running in part on a campaign to stay close with Russia, while Yushchenko was running in part on bringing Ukraine closer to the West. During the campaign, Yushchenko was even poisoned with dioxin and was incredibly lucky to live; the sitting president and Yanukovych colluded to falsify the election’s results, which in reality were a victory for Yushchenko, to hand the win to Yanukovych, who was quickly congratulated by Putin. 

But the people roared to the street and independent observers cried fraud, and the Orange Revolution began, in which the Ukrainian Supreme Court sided with Yushchenko, a redo of the election was ordered, and Yushchenko rode a people-powered revolution over the course of about a month to victory (much to Putin’s chagrin). Paul Manafort had worked on behalf of Yanukovych, against democracy, against the overall will of the Ukrainian people. 

But Manafort stuck around, helping to resurrect Yanukovych’s career over the course of the following years, sometimes working in direct opposition to express American interests and engineering Yanukovych’s 2010 comeback victory in Ukraine’s presidential election. Manafort even brought in Tad Devine, who would be one of the top senior staffers on Bernie Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign, to aid with Yanukovych’s 2010 election campaign, among other people. Manafort also helped to shape the strategy of Yanukovych’s political party, the pro-Russian Party of Regions. UPDATE 8/15: Evidence from Ukraine has emerged that the Party of Regions set aside unreported payments for Manafort for $12.7 million from 2007-2012. The evidence comes from a series of secret handwritten accounting ledgers (the “black ledger”) detailing illegal dealings with political overtones and include Ukrainian political officials. Just for one six-month period in 2012, the payments to all parties reached $66 million. Said one former leader in the Party: “This was our cash…They had it on the table, stacks of money, and they had lists of who to pay.” Overall, Manafort seems to have been one of the main driving forces behind the overall political reversal in Ukraine and return of Yanukovych to power.

Concurrent with much of his work for Yanukovych, Manafort also linked up closely with Ukranian power-broker Dmitry Firtash, who worked closely with Semion (or Seymon) Mogilevich, a godfather of the Russian mafia. But, even more importantly, Firtash was one of Putin’s top agents in Ukraine: Russia’s state-owned gas giant, Gazprom, would sell Firtash huge amounts of gas at a discounted rate, who would then sell that gas to Ukraine for a sizable profit, profit that Firtash funneled to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, including—yes—Yanukovych. 

On top of this, Firtash used millions out of the billions he made from this scam to partner with Manafort and “a longtime Trump family aide” to hatch an elaborate business venture on prime real estate on New York’s Park Avenue, investing $25 million into the project in 2008; he also set up a $100 million investment fund, which Manafort and his associates were paid $1.5 million to run (that same year, Manafort was considered for the role of McCain’s campaign convention chair, but was not chosen because of these very relationships). This was at a time when Yulia Tymoshenko, who was a partner of Yushchenko during the Orange Revolution and was appointed as the Prime Minister under President Yushchenko, had herself recently returned to power again as Prime Minister, before Yanukovych’s 2010 comeback; Tymoshenko, who had first risen to prominence as a gas tycoon herself, moved to seize Firtash’s gas business assets and cut him out of the gas loop and thus cut off a source of Russian influence in Ukrainian politics. It should, thus, be no surprise that Firtash was suc enthusiastic a supporter of Yanukovych. Once Yanukovych came to power on the back of Manafort’s years of consulting and rehabilitating him, Tymoshenko was imprisoned as a result of a controversial, politically motivated trial (UPDATE 8/15: a trial and imprisonment that Manafort helped Yanukovych’s team publicly defend amid the controversy) while Firtash was awarded back $3 billion in gas assets, also reopening the Kremlin’s gas-scheme line to dominating Ukrainian politics at the expense of Ukrainian interests and sovereignty. In many ways, this set the stage for the 2014 Maidan protests that erupted into the current Ukrainian mess.

Tymoshenko could sense a money laundering scheme in that Park Avenue New York real estate deal, the end state of which never came to be and with much of the money going back to Ukraine, exactly what her government’s actions were trying to prevent; after she was imprisoned, she sued Firtash, Manafort, Mogilevich, and others in New York for racketeering whose proceeds had been used to persecute her, but the suit was dismissed on questions of procedure and jurisdiction; still, the U.S. District Court ruling acknowledged that foul play was indeed going on, that “the Court accepts as true the allegation that some of the money that passed through the U.S. Enterprise was ‘funneled back to Ukraine’ — albeit by unidentified actors — and somehow used as ‘financing’ for Tymoshenko’s ‘persecution.’” Manafort also helped Yanukovych’s team publicly defend its controversial prosecuction and imprisonment of Tymoshenko. (As for Firtash, there is currently a U.S. arrest warrant out for him on bribery charges, and as a result he is living in Austria in exile from Ukraine). 

As Yanukovych became ever closer to Putin and tried to steer Ukraine closer to Russia, Manafort’s role was kept quiet and confidentiality agreements were signed, and he profited handsomely from this work (UPDATE 8/15), further made clear by this new New York Times story showing at least $12.7 million in authorized payments. His role in Ukrainian politics over the last few years is even cloudier. UPDATE 8/15: Some of Manafort’s subordinates were still operating in Ukraine even in 2016, and no evidence has come to light that Manafort has formally closed up shop there. But what is clear is that, fed up with the stagnation, corruption, and cronyism of President Yanukovych’s government, hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets early in 2014 after he went back on pledges to increase ties to the EU, culminating with Yanukovych fleeing the country with Russian help and a new, more pro-Western government being formed. In response, Yanukovych, in exile in Russia and facing charges in Ukraine, requested Putin intervene militarily in Ukraine. Russia soon invaded, annexed Ukraine’s Crimea region and directly and indirectly assisting separatist rebels in eastern parts of Ukraine, where a state of civil war still exists today.

None of the above lines up with Manafort’s terse explanations and contentions that he was working to push Ukraine to orient itself more democratically and more with Western interests.

Both before and after the seismic recent events in Ukraine, Manafort maintained minimal contacts with his American friends and colleagues and avoided responding to media inquiries; for years his location and activities were not known with specificity. One of these colleagues, Roger Stone, a former Nixon advisor and close confidante of Donald Trump, sent an email to other mutual colleagues in the midst Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea early in March 2014 titled “Where is Paul Manafort?” The e-mail then included some options for answers to this question: A.) “Was seen chauffeuring Yanukovych around Moscow,” B.) “Was seen loading gold bullion on an Army Transport plane from a remote airstrip outside Kiev and taking off seconds before a mob arrived at the site,” and C.) “Is playing Golf in Palm Beach.”

*****

If that was exhausting to go through, remember: that was just one person.

The Trump Campaign’s Additional Russian Relationships: There’s Something Going On!

Yes, there are others around Trump with ties to Russia.

Michael Caputo, a leader of Trump’s New York Republican primary campaign, lived in Russia and worked as political consultant there in 1990s, where he at least once butted heads with the U.S. State Department for working against U.S. interests there. When he came back to the U.S. at the end of the decade, he founded a PR firm and, through that firm, helped to lead an effort to improve the then-recently-newly-elected Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public image in the U.S. at a time when he was coming under criticism from the U.S. government for attacking free press in Russia. He has expressed regret for that work for Putin.

Then there is retired General and former Defense Intelligence Agency head Michael Flynn, a foreign policy advisor to Trump who gave an intense pep-rally-style speech at the recent Republican National Convention.  In December 2015, he sat near Putin at a Moscow dinner celebrating Russia Today (RT), the international Russian TV network and website funded by the Russian government that is a notorious anti-U.S. propaganda machineadvancing Putin’s agenda. His appearance raised eyebrows, and he was invited to address the dinner, and both RT and Flynn at first declined to answer if he was paid for his speech, though Flynn later deflectively and evasively confirmed that he was. Gen. Flynn has also been a repeat guest on RT’s programming. He is a true hawk when it comes to ISIS and Islamic extremist terrorism, and has issued blistering criticism of the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism strategy for not emphasizing the Islamic nature of the threat (to do so would actually be a very counterproductive move), among other reasons. His strong stance against Islamic terrorism may be a posture that he feels he shares with Putin, and Gen. Flynn is on record advocating closer U.S. ties with Russia, in particular on the issues of Syria and terrorism. August 8th update: interestingly, the Green Party’s candidate for president for 2016, Dr. Jill Stein, also attended the RT gala dinner and proudly advertised this fact on her campaign website, addressed an RT-organized panel before the dinner (begging the question if she was paid by RT for this), and sat at Putin’s table along with Gen. Flynn. She recently suggested Clinton could be worse than Trump and has also been featured heavily on RT, and while in Moscow she very pointedlyand extensively criticized U.S. foreign policy, “American exceptionalism” (similar to Putin’s views on this subject), and U.S. human rights abuses while only offer relatively very muted criticism on the same issues of Russia, if at all.

On to Carter Page, who is another Trump foreign policy advisor. Page used to be the head of Merrill Lynch’s Moscow branch for three years, beginning in 2004, helping to advise the Russian state-run gas behemoth Gazprom. Gazprom was active at this time in Firtash’s political laundering scheme, funneling money to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine, and throughout this period Firtash was working with Paul Manafort, raising the possibility that Manafort and Page might have connected during this period, even worked together on the Gazprom scheme (such a possibility surely deserves investigative scrutiny). 

Today, Page is still an investor in Gazprom and attends its annual investor meeting, and seems to lament the effects of U.S. sanctions on Russia enacted in response to Putin’s invasive military moves in Ukraine. And just this month in Moscow, Page gave a speech heavily criticizing U.S. policy towards Russia that would have been completely in line with the editorial slant of RT, excoriating American “hypocrisy,” actions directed at regime change, and criticism of Russia for corruption, a corruption level that he opined was not any worse than corruption in the U.S. When asked by a Russian student if he really believed that America was a liberal democracy, Page noted with a smile that “I surround the word ‘liberal’ with quotes,” and that ”I tend to agree with you that it’s not always as liberal as it may seem,” concluding with an “I’m with you.”

Shortage of Big U.S. Investors for Trump = Opening for Russian Investment? There’s Something Going On!

Then there is the issue of Trump’s relationships with the banking industry.

Many major U.S. bank won’t lend to Trump anymore; after doing business with him throughout the 1980s and 1990s, today Wall St. banks have “pulled back in part due to frustration with his business practices but also because he moved away from real-estate projects that required financing, according to bank officials,” to quote The Wall Street Journal; these banks include Citigroup, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley. Additionally, one Goldman Sachs executive noted that its people “know better than to pitch” any deals with the Trump name on them.

One of the banks with which Trump has one of his largest relationships is the German giant Deutsche Bank, which has loaned Trump billions ($2.5 billion in loans and $1 billion in loan guarantees to Trump/Trump-affiliated companies), but executives there, too, have found him difficult to deal with and the relationship has been rockier of late. Deutsche Bank, is, in fact, the only Wall Street bank of a larger scale that still loans to Trump, and overall, he owes “at least” $250 million to banks, mostly small banks.

But it should be noted that Deutsche Bank seems to have had a huge problem when it came to dealing with Russian transactions of an illegal or suspect nature: between 2012 and 2014, some $10 billion was found to have passed through Deutsche Bank from Russia fitting a “suspected money-laundering pattern” due to “systemic” failures of internal safeguards, and it was revealed that bank officials “ignored” or “dismissed” warning signs for a whole year. Included among the people whose money is being scrutinized are several close associates of Vladimir Putin, who, as the Panama Papers recently made abundantly clear (among other investigations), is hardly new to money laundering. The bank is currently under U.S. investigation. And, without access in recent years to major U.S. banks, the move by Trump to seek shadier investment from shadier sources, as with the SoHo deal, is not surprising, given Trump’s long history of flirting with and courting business with and in Russia and with Russians.

*****

Individually, these aspects might raise an eyebrow but not more. But all of this taken together? Is it possible “there’s something going on,” as Trump is fond of saying? It seem reasonable to believe that, yes, “there’s something going on.”

But wait, this is even without going into the hacking…

The Other Democratic E-mail Scandal: There’s Something Going On!

This mid-June, the Democratic National Committee (DNC)—the national leadership and braintrust of the Democratic Party—and the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike announced that two different groups of Russian hackers working for two different Russian government intelligence agencies had been successfully hacking the DNC’s servers. A week later, it was announced that the same Russians seemed to have penetrated the Clinton Foundation’s network. 

The first group planted spying software on DNC servers last summer in June, giving it full access to DNC communication passing through DNC servers for almost a whole year. The DNC eventually suspected it had been hacked and called in CrowdStrike early in May of this year to assess the situation. Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, NY, also seemed to have been attacked but without a clear picture as to if data was stolen. Crowdstrike was able to drive out the hackers from the DNC servers earlier that June. The DNC only seems to have had “standard cyberprotections” wholly incapable of protecting against focused and persistent hackers acting with the support of foreign governments and intelligence agencies. This first hacking group has been nicknamed Cozy Bear by CrowdStrike and is also known as APT 29, and seems to be the one that had previously hacked into unclassified e-mail systems of the White House and State Department; the cleansing process for the State Department infection resulted in a few shutdowns throughout 2014 and 2015, at the height of negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program and international sanctions. This group is tied to the F.S.B., the modern version of the K.G.B., from which Putin emerged years ago,and is thought to be the better of the two hacking groups. The other group, labeled Fancy Bear and also known as APT 28, apparently hacked the DNC this April; it is thought to be run by Russia’s military intelligence service, the G.R.U., and has hacked aerospace and military installations in the West (including in the U.S.), Japan, and South Korea. The two hacking groups do not appear to have coordinated their efforts. Among the many pieces of information stolen by the hackers was the DNC’s opposition research on Trump, stole in the second April hack.

The story basically faded from the public consciousness until a few days before the Democratic National Convention began and one day after the Republican National Convention ended; on that Friday, the quixotic activist organization known as WikiLeaks posted nearly 20,000 e-mails taken from the DNC servers. As is normal with WikiLeaks, the organization and its controversial founder and leader, Julian Assange, decline to offer any details on how they obtained the information, but experts suspect the Russian hackers were the ones who handed them over to WikiLeaks. The e-mails contained information that showed controversial hostility to Bernie Sanders and discussions as to how to put Sanders on the defensive on the part of seven DNC staffers, including some senior ones (one staffer whose comments were felt to be the most offensive offered an apology). While no evidence was found on the e-mails that demonstrated a concerted DNC policy of working actively against Sanders in a material way (as one old college friend summed up the incident on social media: “so, lemme get this straight: some staffers from a national political committee expressed personal political opinions on their work email? ok, gotcha.”), the revelations nevertheless led to a massive outrage, especially with Bernie Sanders’ supporters, a group already prone to conspiracy theories and victimized thinking and that often feeds off of outrage.

Almost lost in the scandal about the DNC’s impartiality coming into question was the issue of the timing of the leaks and who orchestrated then. Obviously, releasing this information the day after Trump’s Republican National Convention ended and just at the beginning of the weekend before Clinton’s Democratic National Convention is designed to provide maximum benefit to Donald Trump and the Republican Party while inflicting massive harm and embarrassment upon Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. Especially after the embarrassment and disorganization of the divided and divisive Republican National Convention, Clinton and the Democrats were poised to begin their convention in a particularly strong position; with the e-mail leak dominating the headlines all weekend and even Monday as the Democrats’ convention began, focus was driven away from Clinton’s announcement of Virginia Senator Tim Kaine and Bernie Sanders supporters began to stew in a rage that fomented and grew and boiled over the weekend and on Monday before the evening’s Convention proceedings. 

Because of the leak, the Democratic Party’s raw wound was reopened and was in danger of becoming seriously infected at the very moment when it was the most important time to project Party unity. The scandal threatened to blow up and ruin the Democratic National Convention, and possibly Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning the presidency, and only some furious and frantic last-minute scrambling on the part of both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, as well as their campaigns and the staff of the DNC, including the new interim DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile who had taken over only on Monday, averted what could have been a historic disaster for Clinton.

The first and only tangible casualty thus far was DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz, a congresswoman from Florida, who tenure of late was marred by difficulty; this DNC e-mail leak was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back, and Sunday, not even 48 hours after the WikiLeaks release and on the day before the Convention, it was announced that she would be stepping down from her position at the DNC, but only after the Convention. This did little to assuage the concerns of Democrats, the Clinton campaign, and especially Bernie Sanders supporters, especially as Wasserman Schultz made clear she still planned to gavel-in and gavel-out the Convention and publicly address it while in session. 

Reality seemed to set in Monday, when both Rep. Wasserman Schultz and Sen. Bernie Sanders were booed loudly and continuously during dayime meetings, making clear the reality that more had to be done. Within a few hours, all talk of Rep. Wasserman Schultz gaveling and appearing at the convention disappeared and she agreed to stay away from the Convention; as a face-saving gesture for her long years of hard work on behalf of the Democratic Party, the Clinton campaign named her an honorary chair of the campaign’s “50-state program,” a move that failed to placate some and was seen by many in and of itself as a controversial mistake. Only deft political maneuvering, both behind the scenes and on the convention floor during the actual convention throughout the convention, up to and including Clinton’s culminating acceptance speech on Thursday, prevented far worse damage that might have resulted in a spectacle of sustained chaos and potentially ruined the Convention and Clinton’s candidacy, as the capacity of Bernie Sanders supporters for disruption had been well demonstrated several months earlier at Nevada’s Democratic Convention, which was closed out amid security forcing an end to the events as concerns for safety passed a red line. 

Also on Monday as the Democratic National Convention’s first day unfolded, it was learned that government investigators had tried to warn the DNC of a possible intrusion months before the DNC took substantive action to address it, raising questions as to how competently the hacking problem was handled, and that the FBI was now investigating the hack.

In just a short period of time, WikiLeaks was able to do real damage to the Democratic Party, and nearly succeeded in doing far more damage. Was this all in the name transparency and fairness?

Questioning WikiLeaks’ Motives: There’s Something Going On!

As for WikiLeaks, its leader Julian Assange has made it abundantly clear that he harbors a great animus, both personal and professional, for Clinton, describing her and her policies in strident language—saying that a vote for Clinton is “a vote for endless, stupid war”—and making it clear that he deliberately timed the release of the DNC e-mails just before the Democratic National Convention to harm Clinton and her candidacy. 

But beyond that, there are serious questions as to if WikiLeaks has a relationship with the Russian government. For starters, after Assange took up residence in the Ecuadorian Embassy to the UK in London to avoid arrest, the state-funded Russia Today (RT) network gave Assange a TV show for a time, which was extremely critical of the U.S. even as it praised the founder of Hezbollah. In one of this show’s episodes, Assange quite hypocritically supported the crackdown on Ecuador’s free media by the Ecuadorian president, who is increasing his ties to Russia. There was also an incident that saw documents in the possession of WikiLeaks given by a WikiLeaks staffer to the government of the pro-Putin dictator of Belarus, which it used to arrest and suppress Belarusian pro-democracy activists. Since Assange was close to that staffer, that staffer apparently was not criticized or reprimanded for this act. 

It may very be that WikiLeaks is unwittingly playing into serving Russia’s interests, rather than in a spirit of collusion, but the picture is murky and either way, it does not look good; either way, it seems Russia has “weaponized” WikiLeaks for its own anti-American purposes. But this also fits what seems to be Assange’s agenda, which is more anti-American and anti-Western than anything else; Assange even criticized the Panama Papers leaks, which detailed a lot of embarrassing information about Putin’s private fortune and those of Russian elites, as serving American interests. Assange had promised to reveal information embarrassing for and damaging to Russia in 2010, but never did (perhaps because of thinly veiled F.S.B. threats from Russia? Perhaps he’s been intimidated and/or co-opted into serving Russian interests? We may never know for sure. Notably, he threatened to release that info before he was given his Russian TV show). Oh, and contrary to the many other sources agreeing that Russia is behind the DNC hacking, Assange claims there is “no proof” of that…

On a disturbing side note, the WikiLeaks DNC release was not very discriminating, including Social Security and credit card numbers of DNC donors, certainly violating their right to privacy, with even Edward Snowden (who has been helped greatly by WikiLeaks, especially in his getting asylum in Russia) criticizing this aspect of the leak.

The DNC Hacks: Putin Penetration? There’s Something Going On!

As the political drama around the hacks faded away with the fading away of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, more oxygen was given to the other aspects of the hack, which pundits seemed to miss the significance of at first, but slowly (at least in terms of a 2016 24-hour news cycle) it began to dawn on them: an outside force was trying to alter the outcome of a U.S. election, tipping the scales in favor of Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton, in a clear, substantive, and indisputable way.

So people started caring again about who had hacked the DNC servers.

Wait, didn’t people say that it was the Russian government? Does that mean Russia and Putin are messing with an American election? Is this cyberwarfare??

At first, that suggestion seemed conspiratorial and the media and public seemed reluctant to embrace it, as if that narrative was perhaps mostly a plot by Democrats to divert attention away from their internal scandal, another “he said/she said” in a long war of words between Trump and Clinton. Maybe the delay was in part because the story broke over the weekend, maybe it just seemed too fantastical for people to take seriously. But as expert opinion began weighing in, and it seemed to be consistently unanimous when it came to those with direct knowledge of the hack, it became clear that it is very likely that Russia and Putin aremessing with the current U.S. election, with American intelligence reaching a consensus with “high confidence” that Russia was the culprit of the crime. 

It could be that they are out “to stir the pot” and destabilize the U.S. political landscape; it could also be that they are trying to get Donald Trump elected (many would argue that that itself is tantamount to destabilization).

How are we almost certain it’s Russia?

The details pointing to Russia are numerous and clear. The initial findings by CrowdStrike, citing the Russian government-backed hacking groups APT 28 and APT 29, were later confirmed by two other private-sector cybersecurity firms. Relative to other similar cases, the evidence linking the hacking to these two groups was significantly more compelling. Apt 28 often uses a tactic of setting up a domain spelled very similarly to the actual domain in a bid to get users to unknowingly disclose their usernames and passwords. For the DNC hack, APT created misdepatrement.com (as opposed to misdepartment.com), to confuse staff at MIS Department, which managed the DNC’s network. And previous hacks by the group has used the same IP address and malware software, a discovery that helped to point to patterns. This process “sometimes included unique security or encryption keys, a kind of digital fingerprint,” a fingerprint found in other significant attacks, which both government intelligence and private sector experts believe are also tied to APT 28. 

Both hacking groups use also approaches and technology “consistent with nation-state level capabilities” and choose foreign military entities and military contractors in a way that “closely mirrors the strategic interests of the Russian government,” according to a CrowdStrike report and echoed by other reports. Another firm noted that the hackers seemed to operate during the Moscow and St. Petersburg time zone business hours and to take holidays during official Russian holidays.

Within on day of the DNC disclosing to The Washington Post in mid-June, a person styling himself Guccifer 2.0 began a WordPress blog and claimed that he, and only he, was behind the hack, and to back up his claim, he posted DNC documents on the blog and leaked others to the press and to WikiLeaks. He chose the name Guccifer to honor an imprisoned Romanian hacker of that same name, who earned; the original Guccifer claims to have hacked Clinton’s private e-mail server that has consumed American politics for the last year, but this claim has not been verified. However, we know Guccifer did hacked Clinton friend and confidante Sidney Blumenthal’s e-mail, which, in turn, revealed the existence of Clinton’s oft-criticized private e-mail server to congressional investigators in the first place.

Kind of crazy how all this ties together, right?

While Guccifer 2.0 claimed Russia had nothing to do with the hackings, his very actions provided investigators with evidence backing up the initial claims that Russia was behind the hackings: metadata from the information he posted had Russian digital signatures and showed that systems running on Russian language setups had accessed the files; one document had been modified by a user named Felix Edmundovich, the letters spelled out in Cyrillic and an obvious homage to Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the Soviet Union’s secret police. This information was exposed by a researcher on security issues operating under the Twitter handle @pwnallthethings, who also exposed the fact that error messages in the documents were in Russian; all these imprints were made before WikiLeaks obtained the files. The aforementioned points were echoed by another analyst writing for Ars Technica soon after. 

Other telling evidence indicated that Guccifer 2.0 might be little more than a Russian public relations smoke-and-mirrors operation: Guccifer 2.0 made himself accessible to the media for interviews, a rarity for criminal hackers who tend to be paranoid of being caught and therefore reclusive; he strongly asserted that Russia had never penetrated the DNC, but that is something that he would be incapable of knowing as an independent hacker, as he claimed to be; he claimed to be Romanian, but then seemed unable to converse in Romanian without using only short statements and making repeated grammatical mistakes as noted by native Romanian speakers; metadata in his e-mails indicated he sent them from Russian networks, and some evidence even pointed to the use of the same or similar networks used by APT 28. It seems Guccifer 2.0 was concocted by Russian intelligence right after The Washington Post reported that DNC officials and investigators suspected Russia, a tactic of “deception and disinformation” or “denial and deception” that is standard operating procedure for Russia and codified officially in Russian military doctrine. A few such examples were noted in a just-released RAND report:

“Russian propagandists have been caught hiring actors to portray victims of manufactured atrocities or crimes for news reports (as was the case when Viktoria Schmidt pretended to have been attacked by Syrian refugees in Germany for Russia’s Zvezda TV network), or faking on-scene news reporting (as shown in a leaked video in which “reporter” Maria Katasonova is revealed to be in a darkened room with explosion sounds playing in the background rather than on a battlefield in Donetsk when a light is switched on during the recording).”

The Rand Report notes how incredibly common and prolific these propaganda efforts have become since at least Russia’s 2008 war with Georgia and how current, traditional counterpropaganda efforts are falling short in correcting this “firehose of falsehood.” All this just points even more strongly to the Russians being behind the DNC hack.

Hacking and Political Warfare: Russia’s Newest Weapons System, Eagerly Deployed: There’s Something Going On!

Hacking and cyberwarfare are also certainly part of the new Russian way of foreign policy and hybrid warfare, including (mis/dis)information and propaganda operations like those noted above. But another major aspect of Russian policy involves trying to meddle with foreign elections and politics, and the hackings of the DNC can be seen to be part of just such a larger effort. In fact, Paul Manafort can even be thought of as a (indirect?) mercenary general in this exact type of political warfare, where he was on the front lines of Putin’s operations in Ukraine from the Orange Revolution until (and possibly even after) Yanukovych’s 2014 overthrow. 

But such operations were hardly limited to Ukraine, as there are other examples in Eastern Europe; lately, Putin has actually been funding right-wing, pro-Russian parties and demagogues all over Europe, helping to fuel an ongoing continental right-ward drift. Perhaps most notably, this Russian support has been a factor in France, which is lurching even more rightward in the wake of recent terrorist attacks like the one in Nice and where Putin’s chosen candidate, Marine Le Pen, may very well win France’s 2017 presidential election, but Putin has also been trying to destabilize German politics using the issue of refugees to weaken Chancellor Angela Merkel and empower German extremists. 

Another factor that must be acknowledged is that Putin is still simmering over Western expansion of NATO, over two Western military interventions against Russian ally Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia in 1990s, against support for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia. Putin also seen the U.S. as having orchestrated the “color revolutions” of the last decade rather than viewing them a natural expression of post-Soviet peoples’ desires to be free from Russian domination and to not be ruled by Putin’s corrupt puppets; Putin similarly blames the U.S. for the 2014 overthrow of Yanukovych. The Russian president also in particular blames the U.S. for massive demonstrations in Russia in 2011 that erupted after fraudulent parliamentary elections. In fact, at the time, he specifically blamed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Seen in this context, the hacking of the DNC, the DCCC, and the voter database used by Clinton’s presidential campaign serve multiple purposes: in the eyes of Putin and many Russians, this is revenge for U.S. support for democracy in former Soviet republics and the continued post-Cold War expansion of NATO, for perceived U.S. aggressive roles in countering Russian interests, and against Hillary Clinton specifically, who enraged Putin when she called him out on Russian election fraud in 2011.

Conclusion: There’s Something Going On!

Arnau Busquets Guàrdia/POLITICO (Source images KLIMENTYEV/AFP/Getty Images)

Interference in U.S. elections and politics would not be unprecedented: the UK intelligence at Churchill’s direction interfered to try to empower Roosevelt against Republican isolationists; South Vietnam played with peace talks to give Nixon an edge in 1968 after it negotiated secretly with Nixon’s campaign; Iran’s ayatollahs may have conspired with Reagan in 1980; and Israel worked to undercut the Obama Administration’s standing in the U.S in 2012 and 2015 over the Iran issue. Russia even seems to be supporting a secessionist movement in Texas that is still sizable while also only being a fringe minority.

Of course, Russia has categorically denied any involvement in the recent hacks.

As for Trump, he has a lot of questions to answer about Russia, both in terms of him and his family but also about his associates. Trump’s taxes may or may not yield information about his business ties to Russia, and for now, the Trump team denies it has any ties to Russia, but provides no evidence to support this, only repeated assertions. 

Even now as I write some of this, Trump is baselessly speculating at a press conference that the entity behind the hacking is “probably not Russia, nobody knows if it’s Russia,” contrary to all the expert analysis given. At this same press conference, he seemed to actually invite Russia to hack Hillary Clinton, even tweeting that call in writing on his Twitter account soon after (and later unconvincingly claiming he was being “sarcastic” after massive shock and outrage ensued). 

Since then, just yesterday, one week after the WikiLeaks DNC release, we learned that there were new hacks, likely by Fancy Bear/APT 28, of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, a congressional fundraising group for Democrats, and of a voter information database used by the Clinton campaign and other Democratic organizations. The U.S. is trying to determine how to respond to these cyberattacks as the FBI and Department of Justice investigate. And there are likely to be more hacks, with WikiLeaks’ Assange promising are more “a lot more” information on American politics coming from files he already has.  

To be sure, hacking a U.S. political party’s central leadership organization at the height a presidential election cycle is dangerous, unsettling new territory for an already fraught American-Russian relationship. If Congress is to even retain an ounce of non-partisan credibility, a major investigation must be undertaken as soon as possible, and Republicans must put as much zeal into it as they put into their Benghazi “investigations.”

What we do know is that Trump and his family tried to do business for many years in Russia; that he sought to have a relationship with Putin; that both men have been publicly supporting each other as Trump seeks the American presidency; that Trump is by far the most pro-Russian, pro-Putin of the major presidential candidates of this entire election cycle; that he did business with Russian nationals (some of ill repute) and took massive amounts of money coming from Russia; that his Campaign Chairman has a sordid history of helping Putin allies of ill repute to the detriment both of Western interests and, more specifically, of democracy in Ukraine, help that helped precipitate bloodshed and war; that other Trump campaign staff and advisors have questionable links to Russia; that Russia has a pattern of hacking America and others for political purposes; that Russia has a pattern of interfering in elections; that Putin clearly prefers Trump over Clinton; that all the evidence points towards the hacks being committed by the Russian government; that the Russian government, along with WikiLeaks, had the means and motive to harm Clinton and the U.S. and have thus far acted to do so; and that Russia and WikiLeaks have a suspect relationship.

Thus, taken together, there does seem to be some sort of relationship between Trump, his confidantes, and his presidential campaign on one side, and Putin, Putin-linked Russian operatives, and key Putin-and/or-Russian-oriented business and political operatives on another. It remains to be seen how direct, conscious, and centralized these relationship are, and while the sheer number of connections all but rules out sheer coincidence, the likely relationship can range from direct coordination between Putin and Trump themselves at the top, to between low-level staffers working directly or indirectly for both parties with no knowledge of or approval on the part of higher ups; the intent, also, can range from conspiring to tilt an election and to work in the interests of Russia to simple personal enrichment on the part individuals. 

More likely than not, none of these extremes are probably the case, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Given everything I’ve discussed here, it’s possible there is some sort of coordinated effort going on between Trump or people in his campaign and Putin or people associated with him. But I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if we also have two groups of actors here acting mostly independently yet with common purpose. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some of Trump’s associates, especially Manafort, are part of some sort of deal (tacit or otherwise) to promote Putin’s agenda within Trump’s campaign between several staffers or just himself on one side and Putin’s agents on the other, given Manafort’s and several staffers’ histories. And it’s certainly believable—in fact, almost certain—that Putin would like to see Clinton defeated and Trump in the White House, since it would be hard to envision a leader that would or could play more into Putin’s hands than Trump. 

This may yet backfire on and Trump and Putin, since the Russian interference is so obvious that it might cause more Americans to rally against Trump and for Clinton, riled up by an American presidential candidate being the target of Russian intelligence operations. But that remains to be seen, and for now, America is under attack from Russia in a way never seen before, something that is an objective, bi-partisan, national security issue that should concern all Americans. We may never know all the details, but one thing is for sure: this is one of the most disturbing, worrisome, and troubling developments in a year brimming with disturbing, worrisome, and troubling developments, and there must be both fierce consequences and fierce investigations because, clearly, there’s something going on, to quote Donald. Trump.

And one final thing: we haven’t even gotten into the possibility of voting machines being hacked by the Russians on Election Day…

© 2016 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome 

Also see my eBook, A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia, or, Ukrainegate: A “New” Phase in the Trump-Russia Saga Made from Recycled Materials, available for Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here), and be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

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As the situation in Ukraine continues to deteriorate, extremist views of both Russia and the United States are given far too much credence and media space. An examination of history and context, sorely needed in this situation, will reveal that, while certainly Russo-American relations are taking a big hit, and while this is certainly the worst Russo-American crisis since the Cold War, things are not as bad as many would claim. That is not to suggest that this is some even-handed, neutral situation, but only with a clear view and understanding of what is really going on, minus the noise, hysteria, and falsehoods perpetuating discussion of this issue, can a better path forward come to light. Rather than be so at odds, the U.S. and Russia can and should become allies.

 Republished on LinkedIn Pulse March 3, 2015 

This was originally posted by the Russian International Affairs Council, and was “Post of the Month” for February/March 2015.

By Brian E. Frydenborg- LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter (you can follow me there at @bfry1981) February 26th, 2015 (updated February 27th-28th)

One of the sad things about looking at current commentary about Russia, America, and the state of their relationship is the lack of measured and reasoned commentary. Make no mistake, though, the problems between Russia and America are serious and affect a whole host of major issues around the world from wars in Syria and Ukraine to global energy distribution, access, and prices, to space exploration and militarization, just to name a few.

Perhaps this is understandable, given the nature of the history of the most serious, dangerous rivalry the world has ever seen. Sparta and Athens, Greece and Persia, Rome and Carthage, England and Spain, England/Britain and France, Britain and France vs. Germany, Japan and China/Korea all pale in comparison in terms of the threat presented to world with the technology that enabled both the U.S. and Russia to be able to project nuclear destruction anywhere on earth and to the entire earth, especially when that technology was matched with red-hot ideological incompatibility and serious conflicts of interest all around the globe that often made the so-called Cold War burst into quite hot conventional proxy wars (and not always proxy even if this was unknown publicly at the time). The world came far too close to nuclear war and possibly the destruction of humanity because of this rivalry.

Thus, there is an understandable natural tendency for each to view the other as larger-than-life, inflated, and in hyperbolic and exaggerated terms. It has been remarked by more than a few that truth is among a conflict’s first casualties, but among rivals, you could add objectivity and a sense of proportion to that initial casualty list.

Among certain not uncommon elements in the U.S. and the West, especially among American Republicans, there is a tendency to speak of Russia and Putin today hyperbolically in the same breath as interwar Germany and Hitler, that somehow, Putin is a monster of a potential Hitleresque quality, if not in genocidal intent then in a global ambition to dominate. The word “appeasement” is thrown about as something to avoid when it comes to Russia. Putin is the greatest threat to the world order in decades, and, in this view, must be stopped.

Meanwhile, an incredibly common view in Russia and certainly among Putin’s ruling elite is that the U.S. is a global menace that is responsible for the rise of global terrorism and seeks to encircle and weaken Russia through imperialism while empowering Russia’s longtime enemies on Russia’s own borders. Everything can be explained by a U.S. government and (anti-Russian) mainstream media global conspiracy to bring about corporate imperialism not just to Russia, but the whole planet. It’s about global domination, and Russia is under siege!

In truth, neither view captures the real policy aims and legitimate concerns and interests of either party.

The View from Russia

Russia’s actions, through a casual glance, may seem like those of a power hell-bent on wrecking the world system and bent on global domination. But this ignores much history, both from long ago and in recent decades. Russia, for one thing, has a deep insecurity and paranoia in its culture that goes deep into its history, beginning from when what is now Russia was devastated by Mongol invasions and domination. Russian history for the next 800 years is not a happy tale, with both some of the worst invasions suffered in the history of the world (Napoleon in 1812, German assaults in WWI and WWII) and some of the worst and most brutal rulers of any major state, from Ivan “the Terrible” to Stalin. Fear, then, is something that must be given its due in trying to understand the Russian psyche. While I would not say that Russians are truly afraid of the U.S., they do fear being weak and fear what that could mean, given their history. And the late 1980s and 1990s were a time when Russia was very weak, taken advantage of by Western missionaries of capitalism and fighting losing wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya. This was combined with Russia seeing its Soviet Empire collapse abroad while suffering crushing poverty and instability at home. A lack of security both at home and abroad, then, permeated the Russian mind in this period, and the Soviet system gave way to the Russian mafia, oligarchs, and anarchy.

It was into this chaos Vladimir Putin waded, got his hands dirty, and stabilized Russia at home, though at the cost of moving firmly away from democratic norms. But for Russians, the rest of the world was another matter, and still a scary place and source of great anxiety. The worst terrorist attacks in the Western world (if you include Russia) over the last 15 years, excepting 9/11, all took place in Russia in spectacular fashion, from several 1999 bombings of apartment complexes (where there are actually some serious questions as to whether the Russian government staged them, and the war launched in response to them set the stage for Putin’s rise), to assaulting an opera house during a performance in 2002, to attacking a grade school full of children in 2004, in addition to other smaller attacks. Islamists from the Caucasus were the perpetrators of many of these attacks, and al-Qaeda had (and now even ISIS has) some connections to these people. Putin himself very much rose to power on prosecuting a war the Second Chechen War (1999-2009) there in response to terrorism, and brutally so. It should be no surprise, then, that Russia also sought to flex its muscle further south into the Caucasus in Georgia in 2008.

But, even with aggression in Ukraine, rather than see this as a nation hell-bent on world domination, we should see a wounded animal, carving out the territory covering the approaches to its cave, with the memory of much pain coming from the places against which it lashes out. Apart from Islamic terrorism coming up from the Caucuses, there are still some alive who remember the Nazi assault that very much came through the plains of Ukraine. It is not a mistake that Putin chose to highlight a real but tiny fringe neo-Nazi movement that forms a significant part of Svoboda, one small, far-right Ukrainian political party, when he was framing Russian involvement there. These are very real fears among Russians even if the threat—a Nazi Ukraine engaging in mass killing of its ethnic Russians or invading Russia—is not something that Russians should be concerned about as anything likely to happen anytime in the foreseeable future. The idea that a neo-Nazi fraction of a minor party or two in Ukraine (the larger of which only won its first seats in 2012 and lost almost all of those in October 2014 parliamentary elections) is somehow a justification for Russian support for rebels in an internal Ukrainian civil war or for annexing or invading sovereign Ukrainian territory is, simply put, flat-out ludicrous no matter how often and how strongly Putin and his machine of Russian-government-controlled/funded media outlets (most notably the very slick RT.com) choose to hype up their threat-level and make false claims that the West is ignoring these extremist elements. Still, it is important to note the emotional, very powerful themes going back to WWII—what Russians refer to as “The Great Patriotic War” and a war filled with nationalist, Soviet communist, and Nazi fascist overtones—that are still major motivators and influencers for Russian action today.

But there is a sizable minority of ethnic Russians in Ukraine in which the Kremlin has a legitimate interest, and we must also remember that the border is a very modern thing: it only dates to around end of WWI, a time when Russia was very weak, having suffered greatly during WWI and then in the middle of a revolution and a civil war (in which American Western forces intervened against the communist Bolsheviks). And when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, a Russian Bolshevik who had spent much of his early life in Ukraine and had risen through the ranks of Ukraine’s Communist Party apparatus, symbolically “gifted” the Crimea to Ukraine in 1954, this was at a time when Russia and Ukraine were inseparable and when this was going to be the situation as far forward as anyone could see at the time. This “gifting” of Crimea to Ukraine was done to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the joining of Ukraine and Russia, and a poster created for the occasion shows a Russian and a Ukrainian holding a single shield with the caption “Eternally Together” (see below). The gifting also symbolically fit into Khrushchev’s general “de-Stalinization” program. Historically, Russia had put a ton of resources and effort into developing the Crimea over the past few centuries, and the idea that this would be or today is part of an independent Ukraine is not only not something that did and does not sit well with Russians, but is something that did not have much historical weigh to back it up. The last time a Ukrainian state had control/influence over Crimea was about 800 years ago, but the Kievan Rus’ state lost control to Mongol invaders before it was itself destroyed by the same attackers. It is also important to note that there are well over twice as many ethnic Russians in Crimea as there are ethnic Ukrainians.

So Russia had, in many ways, legitimate claims, interests, and aspiration in Ukraine. But these do not create a license for doing what Russia has done, and this will be discussed later.

A View from a Divided Ukraine

Russian policies towards Eastern Europeans, including Ukrainians, from Czarist times had been oppressive (as they were for ordinary Russians, too), so that the many peoples who were able to form their own states after WWI were only too happy to do so. Several Ukrainian postwar states emerged after the war, but chaos and conflict prevailed and they survived only briefly as independent states before falling under the control of the new Soviet Russian state; thus, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic became a founding republic of the Russian-dominated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Under Stalin in particular, Ukrainians were treated brutally and even famine was used as a political weapon, killing millions of Ukrainians and possibly fitting the legal definition of genocide (there is even an active Russophile movement that denies these very real horrors that would even put the climate change denial industry to shame). Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that many Ukrainians welcomed the Nazi invasion in 1941 and supported, even fought enthusiastically, for Germany against the forces of the Soviet Union. Even today, the divided loyalties from the World War eras are a highly contentious issue between Ukrainians of various persuasions and especially between the ethnic Ukrainian Ukrainians and Ukraine’s sizable ethnic Russian minority, concentrated in Crimea and Ukraine’s east, as well as between Russian and Ukraine governments. Now, with fighting erupting into civil war between Ukrainians and into fighting between Ukrainians and Russians, echoes of these past conflicts are playing out hauntingly in this new one.

The View from the U.S. and the West, and the Cold War

Americans, especially, love to help people with freedom (our rate of success in these endeavors, though, may not match our enthusiasm). While there are often other reasons America enters into wars, the idea of fighting for freedom is certainly a factor, especially in the mind of the public. Our own Civil War may not have begun as a crusade to exterminate slavery on American soil, but it evolved into that cause with wide public support. People liked the idea of freeing Spain’s colonial subjects from Spanish ruleduring the Spanish-American War. At the end of WWI, Woodrow Wilson tried—and failed—to push for self-determination for many of the dominated and colonized people of the world. FDR tried also, and it is largely because of him that the United Nations exists today, but he died before WWII ended and the Cold War would derail much of what he had hoped the UN would become. Still, for all its shortcomings, it would be hard to argue that any other single entity does more to promote human rights, advocate for peace, and assist the poor and helpless of the world more than the UN.

As for the Cold War, most Americans thought they were fighting to keep the world safe from the threat of Stalinist-style Soviet oppression. There is absolutely no question about whether Soviet and Soviet-backed regimes were repressive or often brutal. The problem, which even as an American I can admit, was that it was easy for American policymakers to mistake less harmful governments and leaders—Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Muhammad Mossadegh in Iran, even, arguably, Fidel Castro in Cuba and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam—for being more dangerous than they were. Or, to put it another way, the U.S. lost sight of defending freedom for people to choose by conceiving of freedom as being free from communism, a narrow and myopic view that led to horrible abuses, tragic and unnecessary wars, tremendous loss of life, and America supporting regimes and leaders that did anything and everything to oppress people and deny them freedom. If they were not communist, that was usually good enough for us. In fact, our policies were so bad in this era, and led to so many of the world’s current problems, that I am convinced that the U.S. did more harm than good in the period after the post-WWII Marshall Plan and the occupation of Japan up until the fall of the USSR.

I would also argue that American concerns about Communism—which were often though hardly always justified—do not justify our Cold War misdeeds. Conversely, that the U.S. often aided the forces of imperialism and dictatorship does not change the abuses and murderous nature of Russia’s Joseph Stalin, China’s Mao Zedong, Cambodia’s Pol-Pot, their regimes, and other communist entities. One side’s misdeeds cannot justify the misdeeds of the others, and ultimately, both the USSR and the USA were responsible for their government’s action and responsible for the support they provided to abusive regimes, whatever the ideology behind them. Still, it must be remembered that, like the Soviet Union, the U.S. felt threatened by its ideological nemesis’ agenda and, also like the Soviet Union, fear and security more often than not motivated its questionable decisions (in fact, even among large and powerful states, fear of being attacked or weakened to a point that invites future attack is often a prime motivator for aggression, even going back to ancient Rome). Both countries had suffered surprise attacks from major enemies in 1941—Japan’s Pearl Harbor attack and Germany’s Operation Barbarossa—that scarred their nations’ psyches, so that both their publics and leaders were determined to project strength rather than be caught unprepared again. Again, this does not justify either America’s or the USSR’s crimes, but it is important to understand and respect these motivators rather than simply ascribe greedy world-domination to either party in a banal and facile manner.

Fall of the USSR, Expansion of NATO: Russia and America Become Lovers but It’s a Messy, Short-Lived Affair

When the Cold War finally ended, it was not only a great moment heralding less conflict (objectively a true statement) for not only the U.S. and Western Europe, but also Russia, Eastern Europe, and the world, despite Putin’s thoughts to the contrary. Celebrations were common all over states that had unwillingly been dominated and controlled by the USSR. Contrary to popular opinion among Republicans, Ronald Reagan did not “win” the Cold War: the Soviet system’s own inadequacies had doomed it to collapse from within decades ago. And yet, the system did not suffer any marked decline in the years preceding the dissolution of the USSR. Rather, people had been wanting change for years and wanted the whole system to be swept away. This was what Russians, Poles, Czechs, and others wanted, and not because of American propaganda. When Gorbachev filled people’s hearts and minds with the idea of reform, it was also an admission that Soviet leaders knew the system had failed, and the people took their newly-granted freedoms and created a revolution, all the way from Vladivostok to Berlin, and they did not hesitate to abandon the Soviet model. Soviet communism had reduced dignity to a slogan and destroyed it as a reality, and only a wholly new system would satisfy their most human of needs. In short, the Cold War ended because the system had failed to provide the people of the Soviet Union satisfaction and hope for decades, and even the leaders did not believe their system was worth fighting for anymore, let alone repressing and killing large numbers of people who had no faith in the system. Russians wanted freedom from their system, and others wanted freedom from Russia.

Between the U.S. and Russia, in the end, there was not so much animosity as relief and a desire to put aside differences and work together. America and the USSR had joined together to defeat Nazi Germany and eradicate smallpox from nature. Now, a weak and failing Eastern Europe and Russia needed help, and Americans and their leaders genuinely wanted to be there for them. Presidents Yeltsin and Clinton developed a genuine friendship filled with affection. Voluntary, grassroots protests demanded revolution not just in Russia, but throughout most of the states that had been under Soviet control or influence; this was no imposition from abroad, no imperialist design. And transitions always have the potential to be messy, anytime and anywhere. In this vein, unfortunately, some of the people—both Russian and non-Russian, including some Americans—leading and aiding in this massive, historic transition to a democratic market system were incompetent and/or not well-intentioned; in other cases, the challenges and power vacuum were too great for there not to be problems. These varied and complicated causes helped to bring about a decade of instability and weakness—especially economic weakness—in Russia, a decade that seriously derailed Russia’s progress towards developing healthy democratic and economic institutions. Volatility, hardship, illegality, massiveand widespread corruption, and the dominance of oligarchs and the Russia mafia was the norm. Some of these trends continue even today. It was out of this terrible decade from which Putin emerged to lead a Russia moving away from democracy, human rights, and democratic norms and awayfrom enthusiasm for democracy. This was largely under Putin’s direction and according to his will, but often with the backing of the Russian public. Over time, these undemocratic trends have only intensified.

Outside of Russia, most of the people that had lived under Soviet control or dominance were eager to put the past behind them and move toward more democratic, market-based societies as well. From Central Asia to the Caucasus, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, from Budapest to Kiev, new democracies emerged that were eager for U.S. patronage and support, military alliances and protection. This desire on the part these people would become one of the biggest issues of contention between Russia and the U.S. Russia, still emerging from a Cold War mentality, was naturally wary of NATO—the U.S./European military alliance—expanding eastwards into formerly Soviet territory. George H.W. Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, did suggest to Gorbachev in 1990 that, allowing a newly unified Germany—including Soviet-controlled East Germany—to remain in NATO could result in NATO deciding to “not shift one inch eastward.” But these were just proposals at the time, and Baker’s proposal could have meant for that year or a few years. But there was certainly no formal agreement. It seems, if anything, a series of honest misunderstandings, during what were mostly informal discussions in 1990, led to Russia’s believing that there would forever be no NATO expansion eastward. In particular, German officials gave stronger private assurances but were not speaking for America or NATO at the time. Perhaps there could have been more clarity, but Russia has stubbornly clung to a myth of Western lying and betrayal on NATO expansion. Even some on the then-Soviet side later disputed that there was an agreement, including Gorbachev himself in an interview late in 2014. Gorbachev, while feeling that years later the U.S. later acted in “violation of spirit of the statements and assurances made…in 1990,” admitted that the U.S. had not broken any promises and that there was no U.S. promise and no deal not to expand NATO. Such a momentous agreement, intended to be permanent, would have had to have been formalized. In any event, there was no NATO expansion eastward for another decade, which is not a bad deal even if there was an informal agreement, which there was not.

The Big Picture and the Way Forward

Considering all of this, it is more than safe to say that Russia and the U.S. have drifted away from their honeymoon of the early 1990s and that that the love is gone. Now, there is only a period of new hostility. If anything, the last twenty-five years were an interregnum between cold wars, but this one should not be nearly as bad, as we will see.

There are few rational reasons why Russia should behave in such a hostile way to the West, define its interests as contrary to the West, and feel the need to oppose to West so often. It almost seems at times as if Russia wants to define its role as simply an anti-American standard bearer. Russia has been on the wrong side of just about everything in recent years. Yes, Russia was right in opposing us on Iraq (2003), and that’s about it. It was wrong to support Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, wrong to oppose NATO intervention designed to stop a civil war in Libya (where Libya could have turned into Syria), wrong to support Assad in Syria (I will say that, while Putin is overall wrong on the Syria issue, he and Russia deserve no small amount of credit for the Syria chemical weapons deal. While it is important to remember that all signs point to Putin and Russia not doing anything on this issue without the threat of American military strikes against Assad’s regime, with Putin’s proposal coming only at the 11th hour, removing large amounts of WMD from Assad’s hand is objectively a good thing, as well as also being the most productive act in the international arena for Putin and Russia in recent memory. But as I have written before, this deal on Syria’s chemical weapons did nothing to stem the drivers of the conflict, bring the war in Syria any closer to ending, and was, if anything, an insurance policy for Russia to keep its client regime in power in Syria. And seriously, can anyone read Putin’s famous op-ed in The New York Times warning against American military intervention in Syria with a straight face? Just thinking of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine today while reading makes it hard to not laugh out loud at the sheer chutzpah and hypocrisy). When you’re on the side of Milosevic, Qaddafi, and Assad while they are all committing mass murder against civilians, you know you’ve got a problem. The U.S. supported some pretty murderous regimes in the past, but not since the end of the cold war with any kind of robust support. Yes, the Saudi Arabian government is terrible, and oppressive, but they’re not killing their own civilians by the thousands.

Russia is also wrong to fear NATO expansion.

If anything, as the West and its new Eastern European allies considered how to proceed after the end of the Cold War, NATO expansion can be said to have moved forward cautiously, happening only in stages five to ten years apart, and one of the few major reasons why this would have proceeded so slowly and cautiously is out of respect for Russia’s concerns. And NATO even put the brakes on both Georgia’s and Ukraine’s earlier attempts to join the alliance, in no small part because of Russia’s concerns (though that does not rule out admission in the future). So the idea that somehow NATO ignored Russia and Russian concerns is groundless.

Still, it not hard to understand why Russia would be uncomfortable, even fearful, of the fact that so much of its former empire has joined and is clamoring to join a U.S. dominated military alliance. Concerned mainly with cementing European unity, NATO countries have repeatedly stated the peaceful intentions behind NATO expansion and backed this up with their behavior, avoiding buildup until recent actions by Russia, especially in Ukraine, have caused them to rethink this approach. But ultimately, these fears of Russia’s are not substantiated and not supported by NATO’s actions and approach. Rather, it is only Russian aggression against its neighbors that has the potential to make NATO and Russia threats to each other. The key for NATO’s major players is to respect Russia’s emotions while not respecting the substance of its arguments.

In some ways, Russia can be fairly accused of being a sore loser. The Soviet Union’s ideology had lost out bigtime to that of the West, and the people subjected to this losing ideology had emphatically rejected it in favor of the West’s, even in Russia. For Russia to act as if the West somehow had no right to spread and intensify political, economic, social, and military ties with so many newly oriented countries very eager to do just that amounts to the loser in a conflict trying to make conditions equal to a stalemate. Such expectations are not realistic in a conflict, whether hot or cold. It would have been like the U.S. seriously expecting North Vietnam not to spread communism to South Vietnam in the 1970s, after we withdrew. And while there are sensible reasons to argue against further NATO expansion at this time, too, I don’t believe they are as strong as the case for expansion, and will explain this later. At the very least the West can be more sensitive to Russia’s concerns about NATO expansion to its borders. It can build on and improve the existing process and institutions in which Russia has been consulted and included in all instances of NATO expansion. Perhaps, when someone like Putin is not the leader of Russia, Russia itself could be induced to join NATO and further reduce tensions, but more on that in a bit.

In the context of this NATO expansion and of Ukraine’s and Georgia’s stated desire to join NATO, Putin felt that necessary response was its military actions in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia, and Crimea and eastern Ukraine in Ukraine, feeling the West’s interventions served as justification for his own. However, there are major problems with this comparison, as if somehow the actions are equal or the one set of actions justifies the other. Such assertions are not in line with reality. While majorities in most and possibly all these areas Russia has invaded and/or annexed want to secede and/or join Russia, all these areas were part of sovereign states, states that Russia recognized. In any democracy, there are going to be minorities that disagree. But secession as a matter of law, whether in the U.S. Civil War, Russia’s first war with Chechnya, or in Georgia or Ukraine, is generally illegal except in extreme circumstances. NATO expansion, on the other hand, was undertaken by elected democratic governments in accordance with the wishes of their people. The case with Yugoslavia is also different because so many minorities in so many parts of the country (which already had a federal constitutional structure that both implicitly and explicitly provided for legal secession) viewed the state structure as illegitimate, and in that ethnic cleansing and genocide were issues in both the earlier war and in the later situation with Kosovo, where minorities were under the threat of very real state-supported mass violence against them. Despite misleading Russian claims made both before and after Russia’s military actions, there is not currently a comparable threat to civilians in either Crimea or Eastern Ukraine, and there is no evidence of mass killing like there was in the Balkans. The Georgia case is less clear-cut, but still did not involve anything near as bad as that which was perpetrated by the Milosevic regime.

Ukraine, though, is a special case from the perspective of Russia. For Russia to see Ukraine join NATO would be a particularly strong blow to the Russian nationalist ethos, seeing that Russia has defined itself as the inheritor of the Kievan Rus’ state and the leader of the Slavs since it emerged from Mongol domination many centuries ago, and a Ukraine firmly allied and joined with the West would destroy what is left of this notion. And yet, Ukrainians have their own say in this matter. Primarily, for most Ukrainians the Maidan protests and several of Ukraine’s most recent elections are part of a war between “old guard” Ukrainians who want to continue a corrupt system of Soviet and now Russian-style patronage dominated by oligarchs on hand, and younger Ukrainians who want transparency, accountability, and a Western system on the other. Will the soul of Ukraine will orbit the older, more authoritarian, more corrupt model of Russia or the newer, more democratic, less corrupt EU model? It is clear that Ukraine’s rising generation wants to change the status quo and to orient itself with the EU, America, and the West. The West will be happy to include and welcome them in time, but it is hardly desperate to do so and does not view Ukraine as central to its interests and future.

Russia, on the other hand, does view Ukraine as central to its future and identity, as mentioned. Thus, it is willing to play at the big-money blackjack table, while the EU and the West are over at a table with chips in much smaller denominations. Russia and the West are playing much different games then, with different rules and different stakes. And this is obvious to anyone even paying slight attention to the conflict. The reality is this: whatever the wishes of the majority of Ukrainians, there is little practicable or realistic that the U.S. can do to prevent one of the world’s most powerful nations (Russia) from doing pretty much whatever it wants to a much smaller neighbor (Ukraine). The world saw this in 2008 when Russia took away two areas—Abkhazia and South Ossetia—from the former Soviet Republic of Georgia, right when the Olympic Games were occurring. Putin and Russians didn’t care then and don’t care now about world opinion on these issues. Russia knew the U.S. and Europe would not go to war against it to preserve Georgian territorial integrity, just as it knows now that the U.S. and Europe will not go to war against it today to preserve Ukrainian territorial integrity. If they wanted to, they could easily start a war with Russia and prevail with conventional arms or, should the need arise, nuclear. U.S. military spending in 2014 (after cutting down from $640 billion the previous year!) was over $580 billion, but Russia spent only $70 billion, more than eight times less. Inside NATO, the UK, France, Germany, and Italy alone spent over $180 billion together, more than two-and-a-half times what Russia spent, and this does not even include the rest of the alliance. Still, even with this imbalance, the consequences of a NATO/Russia war would be catastrophic, with anywhere from thousands to millions, or even billions, of casualties and anywhere from between large sections of Ukraine to large sections of the world in ruin, if not the whole world. No one wants this: not Americans, not Europeans, not Ukrainians, and not Russians.

In the end, Ukraine just means that much more to Russia than it does to the West. Everyone knows this. The U.S. and Europe can provide money, diplomatic support, and equipment—tons of equipment and heavy weapons, if they want—to Ukraine. But, ultimately, that will only prolong fighting and increase the destruction and bloodshed, as a far smaller Ukrainian military, no matter how well equipped, cannot win a war with Russia, especially while it is also fighting a minority of rebel Ukrainian separatists being armed and supported by Russia, too (Russia even obscenely denies that its troops are operating in Ukraine, which they clearly and provably are, though the Kremlin pressures families to keep quiet when their sons are killed in Ukraine). Ukraine will not be able to field enough trained pilots to fly advanced Western aircraft or enough soldiers to use state-of-the-art Western guns. And there is no way American or European troops will come to Ukraine’s aid with their own soldiers manning Western weapons, flying Western planes. Since that will not be done, it is nearly pointless to militarily aid Ukraine. This will simply be a matter of inflicting more pain, blood, and death on a Russia that seem quite willing to absorb pain, blood, and death to protect its interests in Ukraine. What will the U.S. or Europe gain by helping Ukraine to kill more Russian troops and Ukrainians rebels? Such action certainly won’t make Russia nicer, behave more in accordance with Western norms, or cause Russia to be kinder to Ukrainians in any kind of inevitable defeat for Ukraine. If anything, it will encourage the opposite. The only outcome, for now, is whatever outcome Russia decides it wants, which seems likely to be redrawing the map of Ukraine in favor of Russia even more than has already occurred, but will not, likely, see a full takeover of Ukraine.

The only question is, what will the final price tag be?

Let me call here for a price that is low in blood, but still high in cost.

What do I mean by this? Well, as I have stated, short of WWIII, the West cannot stop Russia from accomplishing its military aims in Ukraine. Ukraine, of course, needs to resist, if only just to show that there will be at least some price in blood for such Russian heavy-handedness, but this price does not and should not be exacted by the rest of Europe and the West. And when Ukraine’s defeat comes, terrorism and guerilla fighting against Russia is something that will only bring even greater misery to untold numbers of Ukrainians, as Chechnya (not to mention America’s experience in Iraq and both the American and Soviet occupations of Afghanistan) shows us beyond a shadow of a doubt. Chechnya also shows that, unlike Yeltsin, Putin will not cease until there is “victory” as he has defined it, even if there are thousands and thousands of casualties. Putin sent a clear message with his war in Chechnya: you can resist, you can kill us, but there is only one outcome while I am running things.

And yet, with Ukraine especially, there is much more support in the West for punishing Russia than there was in either the cases of Georgia or Chechnya. With the military option making no sense, the West has made clear their price tag to Russia: “We won’t get our soldiers’ boots dirty, but we are happy turn up the economic pressure on you and to make your regime suffer economically and your people suffer for so blindly supporting a thug like Putin who says one thing and does another, and outright lies about using force in Ukraine. This is not how the big boys choose to resolve disputes anymore and if you behave like this, that is the bill we are sending you,” the West increasingly seems to be saying.

Will this change Russian policy in Ukraine anytime in the near future? Highly unlikely, though it is possible. That does not mean that sanctions are pointless. Quite the contrary, actually. They let Russia know in a humiliating way how much more powerful the EU and America are each in comparison to Russia. They remind Russians that they are vulnerable, and that cooperation is better than conflict. They let the Russian people know that there is a lot more to the world than having a strong military and picking on smaller neighbors. They let them know of the awesome economic might that can be part of their society if they ever want to join us at the table, give them a taste of what they are missing by pursing their present general course. And, in the long-run, they will even make Putin and Russians think twice about engaging in any kind of military adventurism beyond Russia’s immediate neighborhood and beyond Russia’s major interests without international partners and backing. It invites them to think about how Russia might have accomplished the annexation of Crimea peacefully by using far more carrots than sticks, and to consider using twenty-first century approaches instead of nineteenth-century ones.

Is there a bit of hypocrisy in this? Sort of, but not really. Yes, the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 under stupid and (unknowingly?) false-pretenses. Yes, it was reasonable to suspect Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but yes, it was madness to invade a country based on an unproven suspicion. Also, last time I checked, America as a whole did not make any money off of this misadventure and actually lost trillions of dollars, so the idea that we did this just to make money off of oil is absurd. After 9/11, a child-like and naïve George W. Bush wanted to remake the Middle East in America’s image through military force as the solution to 9/11-like terrorism. Admirable in a sense, but mind-numbingly-stupid and hubristic. In any event, the execution of this plan was so miserable that failure was practically a foregone conclusion only a few years into the future. If Maliki had been a saint (or even an Arab Mandela) and the Middle East a place full or forgiving people and neighbors that minded their own business, even as late as 2012 Iraq could have turned out a lot better. This was not the reality, and it did not. Annexing or dismembering another country’s legally recognized territory would not fit the description of either our aims or our action in Iraq. But they do fit into a description of Russia’s recent activities in Georgia and Ukraine. Furthermore, there was a large amount of open discussion and debate in American over the last decade about Iraq throughout most of the Iraq war, but this is not the case in Russia, and Putin, as I have shown, does not allow for much debate. The U.S. also withdrew all of its troops from Iraq by the end of 2011, even though there are some advisors newly on the ground now helping to fight ISIS. In addition, Iraq has demonstrated an ability to act contrary to and independent of U.S. interests, making it clearly sovereign and not just some puppet pulled by U.S. strings. To be fair to Russia, Iraq is not on our border so disengagement from there is far easier for us than for Russia to disengage from places like Georgia or Ukraine. Thus, in many ways, even though America’s invasion of Iraq was wrong and a mistake as well, the U.S. pretty much admitted this by voting Obama into office twice and is trying (though not in stellar fashion by any means) to move past the Iraq debacle. Comparing this U.S. intervention to recent Russian military action is like comparing apples and oranges.

When it comes to any sovereign nation, it should not be for the U.S. or Russia to make decisions for it. This goes for the countries of Eastern Europe, and it goes for Ukraine. If they want to enter into an alliance with America, the EU, or Russia, that should be the choice of those countries. The truth is, NATO expansion is far from being some sort of U.S. imperialist plot; in fact, it is mainly being initiated by the countries asking to join. And, as it is, most of these countries clearly do want to stay in or join NATO, and Russia has no veto over the choices of these sovereign states, not should it. Russia should, instead, ask itself why it is not the more attractive potential partner. Why would so many the countries it used to control now so desperately want to switch allegiance to America and the West? The usual shrieking accusations of a corporate western media conspiracy and foreign NGOs turning people into fifth columnists fall far short of explaining this phenomenon. Russia will need to take a hard look at its own past and present behavior, atone, and change course if it wants other countries to voluntarily engage with it. Because the hard truth, one which Russia does not want to admit, is that it oppressed most of these people, stifled independent thought and dissent, and limited the choices and economic opportunities of millions pf people for decades. Many of these people died, were imprisoned, or were tortured, though later Soviet leaders were obviously far less brutal than Stalin. And under Putin, instead of democratizing and improving its economy in a way that broadens opportunity, Russia has become more authoritarian and now has an economy highly dependent on the natural gas and oil markets, as its recent economic woes have shown. Even as I make my final edits here, we have just learned that Boris Nemtsov, one of Russian’s main opposition leaders and one of the most prominent critics of Putin, has been found murdered near Red Square, within sight of St. Basil’s Cathedral, at the very least raising even more than usual some very uncomfortable questions about the nature of dissent, politics, and freedom in Russia  and increasing a feeling of fear among Russia’s opposition activists. As for Russia’s economy, Russia’s GDP in 2013 was under $2.1 trillion, compared to almost $16.8 trillion for the U.S., while, NATO/EU members Germany ($3.7 trillion), France ($2.8 trillion), the UK, ($2.7 trillion) and Italy ($2.1 trillion) all had higher GDPs than Russia, whose GDP ranked 9th in the world by the World Bank’s estimate. There are clear reasons, then, why the U.S. and EU, with better economies and more political and social freedom, are drawing the attention and affection of Eastern Europe more than Russia is. Putin’s recent actions will only increase this trend.

But it is not just about power and money. The truth of the matter is that Russia and the Soviet Union used to stand for something. After WWII, the European colonial order oppressed millions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, people who rose in rebellions against their colonial masters or the pro-Western, pro-capitalist regimes often installed or supported by the West. These regimes brutalized their own people and served elites and themselves and few others, leaving the masses to toil and suffer. Capitalism as practiced by these countries enriched the few and powerful at the expense of the many and poor. Some of Russia’s leaders were revolutionaries who truly believed in the socialist and communist ideals of helping the common man and empowering him for a better way of life. There was more to the USSR than Stalin oppression and tragedy and the breadlines of its last few decades. Khrushchev and his circle were inspired by Castro, seeing something of the revolutionaries they had once been in the romantic, passionate young Cuban leader, and that was a major reason why the USSR helped Cuba. Both Castro and Khrushchev believed in something greater than themselves, greater than just and a local nationalism.

In contrast, what does Russia stand for today?

That is a difficult question to answer. For the most part, it seems to stand for itself and its own power, for dominating other Slavic peoples who do not want to be dominated by Russia, and for being against America. That is hardly a love song destined to make its former subjects swoon back into its arms. Putin’s Russia “lacks both vision and appeal,” as The Economist notes. It appeals to Russians in Russia and ethnic Russians in nearby states, but any sort of mass appeal stops there. Putin’s more exclusive nationalism lacks the ring of solidarity between peoples that the USSR’s ideology espoused. To put it bluntly, Russia inspires almost no one today who is not of Russian ancestry. The reasons for this have much to with both the past and the direction in which Putin has taken Russia. All I know is, if you stand for nothing beyond yourself and your own narrow interests, if you cannot broaden your interests to encompass much of what other people dream about, your power and money are not going to inspire anyone to come to your side and believe in you when there is a better, more inspirational vision right nearby. It is human nature to often reject the more powerful for the inspirational, but Russia does not even have more power to offer. In short, there’s nothing deeper or lasting that Russia is selling that its neighbors want that the West is not selling on better, friendlier terms. The same reasons why Russia cannot win back Eastern Europe through any method other than force are the same reasons that force could not keep Eastern Europe a few decades ago and the same reasons why the Soviet Union lost the Cold War. Until Russia realizes this, it continue to be a pariah, hated and feared by its neighbors, who will generally do whatever they can to distance themselves from this hollow, unappealing Russia of Putin’s and reach out for the outstretched hands of the America, the EU, and NATO.

Some even suggest the prospect of nuclear war has significantly increased over the Ukraine crisis, that today is more dangerous that the Cold War, which is utter nonsense. Yes, the U.S./West and Russia have a clear conflict of interests in Ukraine, and yes, this conflict has gone from cold to hot.

But none of this has to keep proceeding as it is. As crazy it may seem to some, there is so much more that should unite Russia and the U.S. than should divide them. On combatting terrorism, containing the spread of nuclear weapons and other WMD, fighting poverty and disease, promoting stability around the world, bringing our economies and markets together, mutual investment, cooperation on scientific endeavors, and bringing in more countries to a global system based on the free exchange of goods, services, and ideas, both Russia and the U.S. not only have a tremendous amount in common, they have so much more to gain working together, hand in hand, rather than working against each other. And each would only be stronger from such a relationship. Yes, the prior era of friendship in the 1990s was not without major problems for Russia. But, surely, can we can try again! Imagine a world where the U.S. and Russia are allied together in NATO, working together to promote peace, freedom, health, prosperity, and stability. Imagine how badly China would want to get into the action if the U.S. and Russia had such a relationship. Imagine a UN Security Council that is not divided. Imagine the most powerful countries on earth united in a common purpose that transcends narrow self-interests and helps to peacefully empower the global south against the cancers of poverty and extremism. That is the world I want to live in. That is the world that is possible. And it is not as crazy as it sounds. There were, after all, serious considerations by Russia and NATO of bringing Russia into NATO in the 1990s. NATO expansion can only be good for current and aspiring members, then, but for Russia as well. NATO, America, and Europe, then, can all be Russia’s friends and be good for Russia, if only Russia would let them.

Russia feels the only way it can maintain its influence in Eastern Europe, though, is to oppose us and draw those countries away from us. We say, bring some vodka, come to the table, and join the party. It’s a big table, and we have a big chair for you. If Russia can change its mentality and realize this is the best way forward, and if the West can sell this vision better than it has, it will be a great party, not just for Americans, Europeans, and Russia, but the whole world, which deserves us all respecting our differences but coming together to work together in spite of them.