(Russian/Русский перевод coming soon; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook, Substack with exclusive informal content) August 11, 2024; see my related August 15 Twitter thread on the Kursk operation, what led to it, & its importance; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—I know it has been some time since I have written about Ukraine, with personal reasons having played a role in this, including losing a Democratic U.S. Senate primary campaign in Maryland (but hey,  I came in 5^th out of 10 candidates in my first race ever against some opponents with a lot more staff, much more money, and far deeper roots in the state, but now make sure you support winner Angela Alsobrooks in the fall!).  But aside from my own personal hectic situation, the fact is that compared to the previous massive Ukrainian counterattacks, previous smaller Ukrainian-supported Russian rebel incursions into Russia, spectacular victories of Ukraine against the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Yevgeniy Prigozhin’s ill-fated rebellion against the Kremlin, and Russia’s suicidal Pyrrhic “victories,” very little exciting large-scale developments have happened until this thus-far successful operation in Russia being conducted by Ukraine.  Of course, there have been the standard war-criminal barbarity of the Russians in targeting and massacring Ukrainian civilians throughout this period in addition to the standard smaller-scale Russian offenses by a Russian military incapable of sustaining large-scale offensives, offensives that made mild-to-no progress while Ukraine was running out of ammunition and Republicans under Trump’s sway were holding up Ukrainian aid—a telling fact that displays Russia’s impotence as it was unable to do more when Ukraine was at its weakest.

Setting Up This New Counteroffensive

But now that that massive aid package finally passed in late April some three-and-a-half months ago, many including myself were wondering how soon how much of that $61 billion in U.S. aid would be disbursed and how soon that could allow Ukraine to be in a position to launch a major successful counteroffensive.

Having received billions of dollars in aid from the U.S. and other allies, we have now seen the beginning of what can hardly be called a minor incursion into Russia, not of Ukrainian-allied-and-supported Russian rebel units—the Russian Volunteer Corps (R.D.K.) and the Free Russia Legion (also translated as the Freedom of Russia Legion or Liberty of Russia Legion) that raided Russia earlier—but of actual Ukrainian forces themselves.  For ground combat, this is the most Ukraine has taken the actual fight to the Russians’ actual home territory and it is unprecedented and an utter humiliation for Russia and Putin (Putin’s face in this clip speaks volumes).  Even earlier, the fact that this was being undertaken by Ukrainian, and not Russian rebel units, suggested that this is was likely going to be much more than a raid, could even be a major operation.  Now, it is obvious that this is a major operation involving many Ukrainian troops.  And the beauty of all this is that this could very much be the beginning of a dramatically different phase of the war that could very well transform it.

How so?  I wrote well over a year ago, after a series of dramatic raids by the aforementioned Russian rebels into Russia and Ukrainian drone strikes deep into Russia hitting Russian bases and even Moscow itself, that such operations had the potential to cause Russia to dramatically drain its combat power and strength from the front lines in Ukraine and that this, in turn, would leave Russia very vulnerable to massive Ukrainian counterattacks.

Well, we can think of what we saw before with the Russian rebel forces as mini-preview versions of what we are seeing now, providing a lot of intelligence on the borderlands on the Russian side.  And, as I have noted before, Ukraine—unlike Russia—values the lives of its troops and does not try to rush its operations but puts a lot of effort into planning, exercising prudence.  So it prepared on its own timetable, meticulously, and patiently, and we can be certain that Ukraine has put a tremendous amount of time and effort into planning what is now unfolding.

And that is why it is unfolding so well for Ukraine right now.

Kursk Crumbling!

For what is unfolding is the most spectacular, impressive development in a long time, with Ukraine taking more Russian territory in days than Russia has taken as far as Ukrainian territory in months.  Or, Russia has lost far more of its own territory in just a few days than Ukraine has lost in terms of its own territory in months, if you prefer.  To quantify this, we’re talking roughly between 500-850 km², and that is almost certainly outdated and smaller than where things are currently as Ukraine and those posting publicly about this siding with Ukraine are exceptionally careful about operations security, or OPSEC (in contrast to Russian OPSEC, which is abysmal in general and specifically so in Kursk at the moment).

What we are seeing now in Ukraine is not raid, then, but a major effort to take and intend to hold and be able to hold Russian territory.  If the raids from before showed Russia was not able to effectively defend its own territory from potential attack and, that like its positions in Ukraine, it had no layered defense in depth in its own territory, the current operation is the realization of that potential, with disastrous consequences for Russia.  Indeed, Ukraine has taken a significant amount of territory in Russia’s Kursk Oblast—well-known in the hearts of Russians as the site of the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany during World War II from July-August 1943 in the largest tank battle in the history of the world and including today—and has also begun to advance into Russia’s Belgorod Oblast, long staging areas for Russian attacks on Ukaine.  But now the tables have turned, and turned dramatically and suddenly as Ukraine outmaneuvers Russia inside Russia again and again in recent days.

And let’s be clear, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and his regime have been absolutely embarrassed, it being clear that Russia’s military was incapable both of anticipating the Ukrainian invasion and of putting together a competent defense for its early phase: even Russian military bloggers (“milbloggers”) are openly acknowledging this.  There is even a hilarious “Belgorod People’s Republic” Twitter account that is trolling Russia on a next level.  Things are unfolding as rapidly as the great Ukrainian counteroffensives earlier in the war, except this one is inside Russian territory.

Why should this operation be transformational for this war?  Because Ukraine is attacking in force inside Russia with high quality troops and high-quality, NATO-level equipment, and Russian security forces and military left behind in Russia are generally not of high-quality (often very poorly-trained green conscripts), nor well equipped: the most seasoned troops with the “better” Russian equipment (“best” is really too strong) are spread throughout the frontline in Ukraine and there are not even that many: most troops in Ukraine at this point in the war, after so many Russian casualties and so much Russian equipment destroyed, are poorly-trained and with outdated equipment (Russia is literally throwing T-62M tanks at the Ukrainians in Kursk Oblast, tanks that are 1983 upgrades of a 1961 tank that was itself an upgrade of a 1958 model, all while Ukraine takes far better care of its equipment than Russia).  This means that Putin is going to have to remove large numbers of better troops and better equipment from the front lines in Ukraine, and this means there will almost certainly be collapses of the Russian lines in Ukraine.  Already, the number of Russian attacks in Ukraine are declining dramatically because of Ukraine’s Kursk invasion as Russia withdraws troops from Ukraine to face the threat in Kursk.  It’s basic math, as I have noted before.

And the choice for Putin is clear: cannibalize key parts of the Russian lines in Ukraine, almost certainly leading to major Ukrainian breakthroughs there, or allow Ukraine to occupy, control, and demilitarize large swathes of Russia on Ukraine’s border.  Because as it stands now, Ukraine has smashed through the rear support lines of the Russian right flank of the entire war effort and will be able to threaten and roll up a large chunk of the Russian line in the north of Ukraine unless a dramatic redeployment of Russian troops from those Ukrainian lines occurs.  Again, simple math.  And Russia will have to keep a closer eye on other border areas, too, further diverting resources from the front lines in Ukraine.  So make no doubt about it, this is the weakest Putin has been since Prigozhin was approaching the gates of Moscow, but unlike with the late Prigozhin, Putin has no way to manipulate the Ukrainians into to giving up their march into Russia without major concessions Putin would be unwilling to entertain and the Ukrainians are in a prime position to do massive damage to both the whole Russian military position in Ukraine as well as the ability of Russia to even use these border regions to stage any further military operations against Ukrainian territory.

Ukraine Railroading Russia

If you think I am exaggerating, I am not.  And for this next section, I would like to thank Trent Telenko and Intelschizo from Twitter for much of what I will explain here (not that I always accept everything from any particular account, but really appreciated what I cite here).  Russia’s land forces—“more so than any other military”—are highly dependent on its rail network to supply their troops and move them and their equipment.  And one of the main Russia rail lines supporting the war for a large part of the front line—the Lgov-Belgorod Line—has now been severed during this operations and is partly under Ukrainian control along with the Lgov-Vorozbha line, to the point that they have taken over and will be able to use Russia’s own rail lines to rapidly move in its own heavy equipment into the area.  Ukraine is already in a strong position and will be dug in with excellent fields of fire, controlling the heights in the area and using those heights to dominate the roads that operate in between and around this high ground, creating ideal kills zones and already making it hard for Russia to reinforce or counterattack.  This means Ukraine is establishing a solid bridgehead into Kursk Oblast around the key crossroads town of Sudzha, which contains one of Russia’s major operational natural gas line Gazprom metering stations for Europe, with nearly half of Russia’s gas exports to Europe passing by pipeline through Sudzha in 2023.  Protecting this bridgehead, among other defenses, is a solid buffer zone where Ukraine’s drones can easily monitor and hit enemy targets.

As a result, we even have multiple examples of cheap Ukrainian drones taking out Russian military helicopters midflight and Ukraine has already inflicted heavy casualties on the disorganized Russian defenders, even taking many Russian personnel as prisoners.  Also, a major Ukrainian drone attack pretty much destroyed a nearby Russian military airbase in Lipetsk, making lack of air support a real issue for the Russians, and Ukraine is also already hitting neighboring Voronezh Oblast with drone strikes.

The other main rail line Russia might have used nearby, the Oryol Line, has already been well-targeted by Ukraine and is unusable, so, essentially, what has happened is that Ukraine has or is just on the cusp of making it impossible for Russia to send supplies, troops, or equipment by rail from Moscow and the rest of the north to the frontline without going far, far out of its way by using other circuitous rail lines that will severely delay any attempt to move anything from there to the front.  Resupplying and reinforcing using rail lines from the east, Russia is facing dramatically less effective, far longer logistical routes that will make the Russian army’s already miserable logistics situation far more miserable.  And a lot of these rail lines will be susceptible to further sabotage and attacks and will also likely suffer from overuse and maintenance issues as Russia panics in response to Ukrainian offensive operations going deeper into Russia. And those troops will be exhausted when they finally arrive and subject to Ukrainian attacks while en route.

What all this means is Russia is in a lot of trouble not just in Ukraine but also in Russia.  And I don’t just mean militarily: as I have noted in the past before Prigozhin’s rebellion, which I essentially predicted, and as I noted with Prigozhin’s rebellion how that would plant mental seeds of further rebellion, such failures in the past in Russian history have provoked rebellion and revolution inside Russian history, including defections of whole military units.  If things collapse rapidly for Russia inside Russia and Ukraine in the coming weeks and months, I would not be surprised if sizable Russian military formations defect in whole and rapidly march on Moscow to overthrow Putin.  Again, I am not saying this will definitely happen specifically because of this operation or soon, but I would not be surprised and have noted this possibility for some time (and do see Putin’s downfall coming at some point as a consequence of this disastrously and pathetically mismanaged war of colonialist imperialism).  Russians’ confidence in Putin has already been shattered time and time again as the reality of this war consistently keeps piercing Putin’s propaganda bubble, from Russia’s insanely high casualties to the sinking of the Black Sea flagship the Moskva, but significant amounts of actual Russian territory being taken and occupied by Ukraine and used to stage further attacks deeper inside Russia is a whole other level of undeniable failure, failure that falls squarely on Putin and the people he has personally chosen to run this failing war.

Russia, Still Screwed and Now More Screwed

Even if there aren’t internal revolts against the Kremlin in the coming weeks and months, Russia’s military situation is just terrible now to an even higher degree with these most recent developments.  For, as I noted before, if Russia could barely advance against Ukraine when it was running out of ammunition while Republicans pushed by Trump shamefully blocked Biden Administration aid to Ukraine, it was only going to get worse for Russia once that aid started flowing from the U.S. again, and now, three-and-a-half months later, it’s certainly getting worse for Russia and is only now going to get dramatically worse for Russia after the events of the past few days.

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others.

See all Brian’s Ukraine coverage here

© 2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s 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).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Twitter. 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!

(Russian/Русский перевод; Если вы состоите в российской армии и хотите сдаться Украине, звоните по этим номерам: +38 066 580 34 98 или +38 093 119 29 84; инструкции по сдаче здесь)

By Brian E. Frydenborg (Twitter @bfry1981, LinkedIn, Facebook) May 31, 2023; see related June 28 follow up after Prigozhin’s Wagner revolt Putin’s (and Russia’s) Naked Weakness; also see related June 13 article The Coming Siege of Crimea?; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023, but I still need your help, please keep sharing my work and consider also donating! Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

SILVER SPRING—“As Russia fought a war that was unpopular, disastrous, and self-destructive—all increasingly so—to the point of unraveling its social contract between ruler and ruled, Russians began to desert the military and revolt, even fighting against the Russian government to overthrow it and raiding and taking territory from the jurisdiction of Russian authorities.  It was not long before Russia’s ruling elites were deposed and replaced by new blood.”

That could be a near-future account of the end of the Putin regime (the positive effects of which I have mused on before), but incredibly that would also be a fitting description of the Russian Empire in 1917, a time I am thinking a lot about while reading Antony Beevor’s excellent account of the period in Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921, but sadly, I am speaking of Russia now in 2023.

Well over a year into Russia’s massive escalation of this war, Russia finds its own capital under attack and its border regions threatened by Ukraine and Russian rebels, clearly things Putin did not anticipate.  The longer this war goes on, the worse it is for Russia, and if Putin cannot defend Russia itself, how can he defend Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine?  The answer is that, over time, he cannot, and that will be his undoing.

Setting the Stage for the Meaning of Russia’s Latest Shocking Setbacks

For many months, it has been clear that Russia’s failure of an army is incapable of mounting competent offensives (see its ten-month Pyrrhic Bakhmut campaign as a prime example).  Rather, for the most part, Ukraine has been setting the tones, times, and places of fighting (e.g., it was Ukraine’s deliberate strategy to maintain resistance in Bakhmut in the face of a massive Russian onslaught so as to bog down Russian forces there and allow it to keep wasting lives, equipment, and supplies trying to take Ukraine’s fifty-eighth largest city by a 2021 official estimate while neglecting, basically, everywhere else).  Ukraine chose to take a more patient and prudent approach to preserve far more of its own men overall while allowing the Russians’ stupidity and limitations to destroy themselves as Ukraine itself used its advanced, precise Western weapons and munitions and its clever ingenuity to strike hard at Russian targets of opportunity, all while allowing the harsh months of “General Winter” to further whittle down Russian forces equipped, led, and supplied far more poorly than Ukraine’s.

While exhausting itself in the east, and losing a huge net amount of territory over an entire yearlong period, Russia had already shown it was vulnerable on its own soil to Ukrainian drone strikes against bases deep inside Russia months earlier.  And there was that very minor drone strike from early May against a Kremlin dome in Moscow that is still murky as to its origins and perpetrators.  But the most recent attacks—with 1.) Russian rebel ground forces penetrating into Russia and holding Russian territory for days before withdrawing and with 2.) airborne drones hitting the city of Moscow itself—mean that Russia’s position is even more helpless and pathetic than it was before.

Five weeks ago, when Ukraine finally successfully crossed and established a presence across the Dnipro River from Kherson city, it was a momentous moment which, as I noted at the time, meant that the whole of the south of Ukraine that was occupied by Russia was now vulnerable to being retaken by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.  Back in April 2022 I noted that Crimea would eventually be quite vulnerable (a “perfect understanding” according to Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky) and built upon that understanding in August and again in October to note that, after Ukraine would retake Kherson city (which happened over a month later) and the eventual crossing of the Dnipro River there (which, as noted, happened late last month), the rest of the south would be open to Ukraine.  As part of that analysis, I noted, too, that this would essentially be the beginning of the end of the war—not in terms of a quick resolution but in terms of setting the stage for shaping the final main campaigns of the war.  As I have argued, it comes down to a mathematical equation and Russia is going to lose out badly no matter how it tries to arrange its numbers and factors on its side of the equation, which cannot handle what Ukraine with the help of its allies is going to throw at it.  In other words, more major collapses of Russian positions are inevitable.  As I noted in July, the defeat of Russia may very well take time, but it is coming.

Part of the reason is that Russia’s shambolic eastern campaign in particular has left it spread perilously thin throughout Ukraine and suffering from severe and chronic manpower, equipment, and ammunition shortages (perhaps most famously broadcast in the screaming tirades directed at Kremlin higher-ups from Wagner mercenary group warlord Yevgeniy Prigozhin), with those issues already huge problems for Russia even long before it began this battle for Bakhmut at the beginning of August.  As has been well documented, for many months, Russia has been throwing untrained conscripts into battle in Ukraine with decades-old, obsolete equipment (even just before Russia’s February 24, 2022 escalatory invasion, Russian soldiers who would lead that invasion were being given expired rations!).  And the key point is this: when Ukraine crossed the Dnipro River in late April and was finally in a position to seriously threaten the south and even Crimea, this meant that Russia’s already poorly supplied and overstretched military forces had to now consider adjusting in major ways its deployment of forces, which in the position it is in now is a lot like playing a game of Jenga but with thousands of soldiers’ lives instead of blocks.  

Now, keep in mind that this was clearly the situation a month ago with Ukraine’s crossing of the Dnipro and establishing a presence on its south/east bank, before the recent ground raids into Russia and yesterday’s Moscow drone attacks.  Also keep in mind that not long after that Dnipro crossing, Russia had just started trying to grapple with new British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles with twice the range of the already devastating HIMARS ammunition, meaning their contingency plans for dealing with HIMARS strikes as far as they had and implemented them at all became somewhat obsolete, the Storm Shadows being used to devastating effect.

Why the Borderland Ground Raids and Moscow Strikes Are Amplifying Problems for Russia

But with those twin developments of the ground raids of last week and yesterday’s drone strikes, the effects along the nature of what I italicized above are only going to be significantly worse and will lead to even more catastrophic losses for a Russia that cannot handle much more severe misfortune for its war and regime to continue.  Before, Russia had to worry about cannibalizing already weak positions to meet threats to its occupied territory in Ukraine’s south, one of Russia’s most undermanned sectors in Ukraine.  But now, Russia has to worry about shoring up ground defenses throughout the regions on much of its border with Ukraine and has to worry about air defenses all the way to Moscow.  In short, these developments make already critical and debilitating problems for Russia far worse, adding more pressure on the already weak infrastructure of its entire war effort.

And that is a total disaster for Russia.

In its hubris, Russia likely thought Ukraine would not dare think of attacking Russia itself, let alone be capable of such.  But significant parts of Russia’s border regions with Ukraine are remote from major cities and do not have major highways near them, making it hard for Russia to reinforce and repel even small unanticipated attacks across such a large area.  It is entirely possible for Ukraine or the Russian rebels Ukraine is supporting to actually take Russian territory from Russian government control and hold it for some time, forcing Russia to panic and divert large amounts of troops and equipment to retake its territory and perhaps giving Ukraine more leverage with which to bargain after it pushes Russia out of all its territory and meaningful negotiations can begin (if it comes to that).

Russia also needs as many air defenses near the front as possible, as Ukraine has been adept with its precise artillery, munitions, reconnaissance, and intelligence at destroying enough Russian air defenses to actually give Ukraine air superiority during some key moments when coupled with its own advanced Western air defenses that severely limit Russia’s ability to use its own air force, even fifth-generation aircraft like the Su-57.  With yesterday’s mysterious drone attacks on Moscow, Russia and its people are flat-out freaking out and the Kremlin will be forced to place substantial air-defense resources throughout the hundreds of miles between Moscow and the Ukrainian border.

At an absolutely critical moment in the war shortly before a big Ukrainian counteroffensive that will see even newer advanced Western weapons come to bear against their outmatched Russian counterparts and that was already going to be a disaster for Russia even without those new weapons systems in the hands of Ukraine, needing to divert troops and air defenses to cover large sections of European Russia is just about the last realistic development that Russia can handle.

So when two groups of Russian rebels fighting inside Ukraine against Russia government forces—the Russian Volunteer Corps (R.D.K.) and the Free Russia Legion (also translated as the Freedom of Russia Legion or Liberty of Russia Legion)—conducted ground raids last week into the two Russian oblasts (provinces) of Belgorod and Kursk (the former lasting several days), the aforementioned results are precisely what happened: mass panic and a mad rush by Russia to throw whatever it could into the areas to appear to be fulfilling its responsibility of defending its own territory, including taking troops from front lines in Ukraine where they were badly needed.  Earlier tiny raids by R.D.K. in March and April of this year were rather insignificant, but the newer raids signify what is essentially a new front for Russia to defend inside Russia at a time when it will barely be able to defend what it is desperately hoping to hold onto in Ukraine.

Likewise, the drone attacks yesterday in the Moscow region—which Ukraine is coyly denying—are another area where Russia did not imagine it would have to play defense well over a year into what Putin assumed would be a very short and easy operation.

And if Putin does not weaken fronts in Ukraine to boost Russia’s border regions’ defense or divert more air defense systems to protect the hundreds of miles of Russian territory from Moscow south to the border with Ukraine, then Putin faces an even more fraught domestic situation and will be blamed for not doing more to protect Russians in Russia.  And keep in mind this is lose-lose: this is not a situation where Russia’s prospects look good in one area by denying resources going somewhere else, but a choice of degree and speed of losing in one place versus another.

Either way, when the raids and drone strikes come so soon one after the other, the psychological blows are pretty bad for Russians, including the Muscovites Putin has sought to shelter from the effects of the war in order to stave off unrest and threats to his rule in the capital, with Putin himself barely mentioning the war publicly.  But after these drone strikes in Moscow, it is hard to see how anyone can think that the war is going well for Russia now, and criticism of Russia’s leadership and the conduct of the war will only grow.  And this will only accelerate even more than the coming counteroffensive was already going to accelerate the process of Russians collectively turning on Putin and deciding he is a loser who needs to go so Russia can ends its pointless losing war effort that brings Russia nothing but loss and suffering.

The frustration and rage will not only be with Russian citizens and the bureaucrats of the Kremlin, but the military itself.  With the Russian military about to suffer one or more major defeats from Ukraine’s looming counteroffensive, there is a real possibility for morale in Russian formations to collapse yet again, causing whole fronts to collapse yet again, as Russian soldiers see Putin being unable to protect Russians near the border and even Moscow itself from attack.  Russians that surrender or desert may increasingly defect and be willing to fight against the Russian military (whole units turning on the Russian government of first the tsar and then later factions, from the Bolsheviks to the Whites, became a common feature in 1917 and years following once things went past certain points of awfulness, as Beevor’s book catalogues).  One thing that is certain is that with each major setback for Russia, morale gets lower and lower and there is a floor for that, as in all wars, beyond which soldiers will no longer fight: any group of men in any army have their breaking point, and Russia’s army is obviously nowhere even close to being one of the best or most resilient.

Yes, things were bad enough over a week ago for Russia.  And even as I finish writing this, reports tell us (very likely) Ukraine with another drone attack has successfully hit the Afipsky oil refinery close to Krasnodar, Russia, and not far from one of Russia’s major oil exporting seaports, Novorossiysk on the eastern Black Sea (an attack that comes four days after another drone attack targeted a station of the major Druzhba oil pipeline northwest of Moscow in the Tver region).  But the two very recent developments I have highlighted—the drone attacks in Moscow and the border raids in Belgorod and Kursk oblasts—have especially ensured a cocktail of a negative feedback loop that is going to speed up:

1. the fracturing and overstretching of Russian military resources
2. the cratering of Russian military morale
3. the weakening of support of Russians for Putin and the war
4. the actual losing of the war
5. the process of a Russian revolution of sorts that must occur for Russia to stop losing this war so badly with no serious gains being made but with plenty to lose, more and more so, over time.

I cannot tell you when these breaking points will be reached, but they will come significantly sooner with the Rubicons of drone strikes Moscow and more-than-cosmetic raids into Russia now crossed, with more of those actions to come and at greater and greater psychological and material cost to Russia.

Russia’s Border Areas with Ukraine as the Battlefields to Come

Raids and strikes against targets deeper inside Russia are very much in the future of this war: as Ukraine pushes more and more Russian forces back, it will eventually drive them back to the Russian side of the border, as Russian forces are unable to consistently defend against Western-supplied Ukrainian precision distance weapons like the HIMARS, M777s, and Caesars.  Once Ukraine reaches the border in force, the range of those weapons range will be able to create a logistical dead zone and no man’s zone on the Russian side of the border inside which it will be hazardous for the health of Russian soldiers and be very difficult for Russia to supply them.  Ground raids on the border regions of Russia will be an important part of establishing such buffer zones, and drone strikes or Storm Shadow strikes will wreak havoc on Russian logistics hubs farther back trying to support any Russian troops attempting to push back through the buffer and into Ukraine again.  That is, if Russians do not get rid of Putin before he forces things into such an embarrassing point for Russia…

The consequences of Putin’s disastrous mismanagement are piling up and cascading one into the other, and the avalanche will bury him and his failing war one way or another, when enough Russians—including soldiers and government officials—tire of losing and realize this insanity must be stopped.  Losing has consequences—ask the ghosts of Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Qaddafi, or the Emperor and Autocrat of All the Russias, Tsar Nicholas II—and those consequences are coming for Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin.  And much like I argued that both Kherson and Bakhmut have set up this coming Ukrainian counteroffensive as bookends, so similarly will both the drone strikes deep inside Russia and the raids on the ground help to unravel both Russia’s war effort and the social contract between Russians and Putin that enable him to prosecute it.  Until that happens, it will only be more misery, death, and losing for Russia.

Also see related June 13 article The Coming Siege of Crimea?

Brian’s Ukraine analysis has been praised by: Mykhailo Podolyak, a top advisor to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the Ukraine Territorial Defense Forces; Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, U.S. Army (Ret.), former commanding general, U.S. Army Europe; Scott Shane, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist formerly of The New York Times & Baltimore Sun (and featured in HBO’s The Wire, playing himself); Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), one of the only Republicans to stand up to Trump and member of the January 6th Committee; and Orwell Prize-winning journalist Jenni Russell, among others. See all of Brian’s coverage of Russia’s war in Ukraine here.

© 2023 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see Brian’s 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).

If you appreciate Brian’s unique content, you can support him and his work by donating here; because of YOU, Real Context News surpassed one million content views on January 1, 2023. Real Context News produces commissioned content for clients upon request at its discretion.

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) Novermber 15, 2021

SILVER SPRING—He was mocked, again and again, for believing bipartisanship was possible, on the campaign trail and since becoming president.  Even more so for believing he could achieve this as a supposedly out-of-touch old white male.  Many pundits on CNN joined the young, woke reporters and columnists on the political beat for the New York Times and Washington Post throughout the primaries, general election, and into the Biden presidency, much in line with their editorial boards and the same folks at many other mainstream publications.  For the far-left media and writers, Joe Biden was like a Republican and a relic from a bygone area that “just didn’t get it;” for the far-right, Biden has been some sort of combination of senile and socialist.

And yet, here he is despite the media thinking he was old news in early 2020: his infrastructure bill—formally titled the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA)—passed the U.S. Senate with nineteen Republicans votes (and all fifty Democrats) and, more recently, the U.S. House with thirteen Republican votes and is moments away from being signed by now-President Biden into law.

To quote the current president when he was vice president to Barack Obama from the signing of Obamacare/ACA (Affordable Care Act) into law: “This is a big fucking deal!” (BFD)

Some of the Republican House votes were necessary because the six most far-left members of the House, together known as the “The Squad,” just had to stand out and not be team players even on such a historic bill: the original four of Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ilhan Omar (MN), Rashida Tlaib (MI), and Ayanna Pressley (MA), with the two newcomers Jamaal Bowman (NY) and Cori Bush (MO), some of the loudest, harshest, and most consistent critics of Biden from the left.  Having fought in good faith to get more in the bill after a months-long campaign and/or get a vote on Biden’s social spending Build Back Better bill first, in the end, they preferred signaling the lack of dissatisfaction with the scale of the historic $1.2-trillion bill and/or the process than being part of a massive leap forward for their party, the Biden Administration, and all Americans regardless of their party affiliation or ideology (as a result, they are hearing complaints from plenty of their constituents).  They voted contrary to 89 of 95 members in their own House Progressive Caucus, including their leader, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (WA).

As much as we should be dissatisfied with those six renegade Democrats, we should be far more upset that most Republicans in the Senate and the vast majority of House Republicans voted against it.  Along with the six House Democrats, they were, in the end, spectators to History with a capital “H,” and the overall differences between the two parties could not be clearer when looking at the details of what is the bill, what the vast majority of Republicans in Congress opposed and the vast majority of Democrats supported…

And that is the biggest investment in national infrastructure in more than a generation.

Out of $1.2 trillion in the bill, almost half—$550 billion—is new spending over the next five years that would be above what we would be spending on infrastructure in an “all things being equal,” or what policy wonks would call a “baseline,” sense (the spending under the currently enacted budget and laws, essentially what we would spend if the exact same budget and spending levels were authorized again but adjusted for inflation, an estimate provided by the non-partisan Legislative Branch agency called the Congressional Budget Office, your fine government professional bureaucrats at work and I mean that in a non-facetious way!).  Of course, that is never guaranteed—cuts can always be made, so not only does Biden’s infrastructure bill keep the current baseline, it nearly doubles it, adding an average of $110 billion more in spending each year for the next five years.  But the Democrats’ agenda will almost certainly do even more than that: the House reconciliation budget bill, a big part of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, is going to include a lot more infrastructure spending, too, and those parts are not likely the parts that conservative Democratic Senators Joe Manchin (WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (AZ) might force out or pare down, meaning there could (and likely will be) be an additional $500 billion in new non-baseline infrastructure spending over ten years, or an average of an additional $50 billion a year; that would mean that, for the next five years, we would be seeing an average of $160 billion above baseline per year.

Ok, so there are some relative numbers for you, but what does that mean?  Well, to answer that, we need history.

In a historical sense, this truly is a once-in-a-generation investment in America’s future.  You have to go back more than four decades, to the 1970s, when anything like this kind of infrastructure spending was happening at the same or higher a percentage of our GDP (adjusted for inflation), and it would exceed the levels of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal-era infrastructure spending from 1933-1937.  In the past century, only during World War II and the 1970s have we spent more on infrastructure over a period of several years, then, than we would be going forward under president Joe Biden (and we really don’t have the same quality of analysis for earlier investments, such as the effort begun under Abraham Lincoln—even in the midst of the Civil War—to forge a transcontinental railroad, so this really could be among the biggest relative investments in infrastructure in American history; even without the extra $50 billion a year from the reconciliation Build Back Better bill, it would still be by far the largest infrastructure spending over several years in roughly the last half-century, even if it would be at lower GDP levels than the New Deal).

We know what a huge impact these spending sprees had: under FDR, we brought America into the modern world, and in the Nixon/Carter era, well, there’s a good chance that road or bridge you are driving on today was shored up to much of its present state or built in that era, or that rehabilitating your water utilities and making polluted water safe for use again also happened then.  Those eras cover most of the highways we use and much of the electric grid we have, especially if you live in rural America (Tennessee Valley Authority, anyone?).  

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been abroad repeatedly in the past two decades, and I can tell you our infrastructure is mostly either creaking and/or outdated compared to much of the rest of the world.  The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) even rated our overall infrastructure as a C- in its latest report.

Some facts to consider: about one-fifth of students did not have high-speed internet for their classes during last year’s COVID-19 lockdowns; we lose six billion gallons of treated water every day from water main ruptures; some 42% of our bridges are at least 50 years old; some 43% of our roads are in a middling or bad state.  This bill’s investments are not only necessary, but long overdue.  And, after roughly a half-century of nothing comparable, help is finally coming.

Specifically, there is:

We are still living in an America creaking forward some forty-to-ninety-years after these massive investments of the past; just imagine what people will be saying decades in the future because of the legacy these Biden bills will have left for a generation not even yet born.  This is one of the only non-defense long-term investments I’ve seen our government make in my lifetime.  And these are not esoteric, special-interest investments that will not reach most Americans or sit unused because of confusion or bureaucracy: every single person in the country that will be alive in a few years and every single person that will be born for decades to come will literally live, breathe, drink, web-browse, and/or traverse the effects of this bill.  Even if you, say, already have broadband internet or clean drinking water, you will still see the improvements in roads and airports.  Not a driver?  Public transportation and pollution alleviation will hit you instead.  Even the more “specialized” projects, like Western state water infrastructure development and Amtrak—will still affect tens of millions of Americans.  And all of these benefits will greatly enhance our economy and quality of life: faster transit of people, goods, and services; less loss of work and life due to preventable diseases caused by pollution and improvement in transportation safety; students in rural America learning better with better internet connections and becoming more productive members of society; enormous savings in not having to maintain dilapidated power grids and bridges that will free up funds for all manner of programs benefitting millions in ways not yet considered.  

And yet, even as I write this, CNN led with the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and spent more or as much time talking about supposed friction between Biden’s and Harris’s staff (staff, not the President and VP themselves) and Adele’s interview with Oprah.  In the hours after the bill finally passed the House last week, the trampling tragedy at a Houston concert was the lead story for days.  The New York Times, Washington Post, and L.A. Times this morning lacked any large-font, prominently-placed stories on their homepages on this bill.

As I have lamented repeatedly, the mainstream media has been myopic when it comes to prioritizing and weighting some of the biggest stories (and non-stories) of the past half-decade, from Hillary’s much-ado-about-little e-mails and then-FBI Director James Comey’s ill-timed “reopening” of that to the massive Trump-Russia saga as well as coverage of hunter Biden and Trump-Ukraine (really, as I noted in depth, another phase of Trump-Russia). 

Now, in 20201, this lack of extended, deep, and lasting coverage of this infrastructure bill—the bill itself, not the he-said, she-said negotiations of the abysmal horse-race process coverage—and the lack of attention and weight given to it once its form was final, makes this bill the most miscovered, underreported story of 2021.  The media has done an admirable job of covering the momentousness and weight of the Trump Capitol insurrection, of keeping attention focused on it when it should be.  But to the degree it has done an excellent job of that, it has done a terrible job of covering and weighting Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.  I get that there is a tendency to focus on the negative and personalities, but here is something grand, substantive, and institutional, and all the media can do it whiff.  So if the major media outlets think it is too boring to focus on the details of this once-in-generation investment in infrastructure and the impact it will have on all of us and our nation for decades to come, I am happy to do so in their stead.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

See related article The Kabul Airlift in Light of the Berlin Airlift: Surprising Parallels and Important Lessons

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

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 31, 2021; see related June 7, 2021, article: Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare, cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence; condensed rewrite for Small Wars Journal September 24 also cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence and featured by Real Clear Defense.

SILVER SPRING/WASHINGTON—New York Times cybersecurity reporter Nicole Perlroth’s groundbreaking This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends is one of the most important books I have ever read.  Truck bombs and missiles and massacres are hard to shut out and miss (though Americans were famously and shamefully able to shrug off and ignore death and destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan even while American troops were fighting and dying there), but Perlroth’s book tries to shock Americans into caring deeply about an invisible war in an invisible battlespace that American citizens and policymakers have been all too content to ignore, but one which Perlroth makes clear is more of a clear and present danger to us than conventional or even nuclear weapons.  Such an undertaking is undeniably a tall order, but she is more than up to the challenge.

Invisible Weapons, Invisible Threats, Invisible Vulnerabilities

The main focus of this book is the black market for cyberweapons: how that fits into the history of cyberwarfare, the U.S. government’s role in fostering that black market, and how the proverbial cat is very much out of the bag as far as our rivals, adversaries, and a host of other bad actors are concerned.  Perlroth did not have a background in cybersecurity before joining The New York Times (she did have some Silicon Valley beat reporting) but quickly teamed up with the recently-retired-from-the-Times Scott Shane—then still with the Times and one of the top national security reporters in the country—and, among covering other major national cybersecurity stories, they were the Times’s pointwoman and pointman on the Snowden/NSA saga.

Rather counterintuitively, this makes her ideal for this book, as the relevant topics are very poorly understood by the public and politicians alike and she is better able to communicate as something of a non-expert recently turned expert to other non-experts—you and me, the lay-folk—which is exactly what this pressing topic requires.

Her descriptions are methodical and in direct but riveting and colorful language (she compares bar crowds at hacker conventions to the patrons of the Star Wars Mos Eisley cantina), painstakingly going step-by-step in explaining everything from the concept of “zero-days” to the Stuxnet attack, often using colloquial analogies and the occasional well-placed expletive.

From the start, it is clear this book consumed years of her life and not always in healthy ways, that researching this topic was a massive undertaking because it has essentially not been covered before, certainly not like this or in this depth.  In fact, the zero-day/exploit market was still essentially secret when Perlroth began trying to uncover it, and it took her two years of poking, prodding, snooping, and being rebuffed at every turn before she really got anywhere in terms of solid information from an insider on the nature of the secret government market for zero-day bugs and their exploits, bugs that were defined by their being wholly unknown both by the companies that made the affected software and the customers who used and relied on it, bugs that allowed hackers to take total, undetected control of the entire software package and often many others tied to it (and, yes, if you want to know, the latest mass ransomware cyberattack from Russia’s at-the-very-least-tacit ally REvil utilized a zero-day).

That initial breakthrough source for Perlroth only involved a player long-retired from the scene, and it would take her another five years of intrepid research to answer many of the main questions she set out to answer when she first started covering the Snowden revelations fallout, when she saw sign after sign of some massive secret government market for hacking vulnerabilities but no details beyond these hints of its existence.

As you read her book, you get the sense that she is overwhelmed and not really sure how to feel about what she has been discovering, let alone know precisely how to solve these daunting problems.

But this is itself wisdom: Perlroth is trying to raise awareness about just how crazy and complicated all this is, to make the public and leaders unnerved, upset, prepared to engage far more on these issues, to demand answers to weighty questions.  And for anyone rational and reasonable reading this book, in this she succeeds wildly.

Even if Perlroth is one of the only people attempting to put all this together—her book is essentially a first draft of history—if the best companies in Silicon Valley, the best minds at the NSA, CIA, DoD, and White House (let’s not even include Congress) and those of our foreign allies and adversaries have no seriously good, deep answers for these issues, how can we expect Perlroth?  Of all the experts on this topic, she is probably the only person right now who could write a coherent narrative accessible to a wider audience and actually be allowed to publish it (the vast majority of the folks involved are off-radar or offer no comment, often tied by government non-disclosure agreements or in fear of worse, as Perlroth makes clear).

Her book is messy, all over the place, and overwhelming: which is precisely what it needs to be, precisely how to characterize these problems, and precisely the way in which they must be presented.  Anything less would sell these terrors short, giving the false impression that these threats can somehow be compartmentalized or isolated; the reality is that this really is a giant, all-encompassing asteroid hurtling at us incredibly fast, and trying to pretend it is not a mess will do a disservice to any serious attempt to defend against it.

For these reasons and Perlroth’s skill at storytelling, Perlroth’s messy narrative more than works and engages and accurately—more than anything else I have seen penetrate major news coverage—alerts us to the scope of the messy threat we face.  She chronicles how, for so long, we have been flying blind, willfully ignoring or downplaying these threats, whether in government or in business, and, even today, critical infrastructure like our power grid, dams, and nuclear reactors are running insanely outdated, highly vulnerable software.  As she puts it:

We were plugging anything we could into the internet, at a rate of 127 devices a second. We had bought into Silicon Valley’s promise of a frictionless society.  There wasn’t a single area of our lives that wasn’t touched by the web.  We could now control our entire lives, economy, and grid via a remote web control.  And we had never paused to think that, along the way, we were creating the world’s largest attack surface.

At the NSA—whose dual mission is gathering intelligence around the world and defending U.S. secrets—offense had eclipsed defense long ago. For every hundred cyberwarriors working on offense, there was only one lonely analyst playing defense…

The biggest secret in cyberwar—the one our adversaries now know all too well—is that the same nation that maintains the greatest offensive cyber advantage on earth is also among its most vulnerable.

As just one example, she notes how a bipartisan group of top former energy, intelligence, and national security officials were secretly warning Congress all the way back in 2010 that a major, successful attack on just the U.S. power grid “would result in widespread outages for at least months to two years or more, depending on the nature of the attack” (yes, that is years, plural).  Penning much of her book during the heights of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, Perlroth notes COVID-19 pushing us even more online as a society means that, now, “our attack surface, and the potential for sabotage, has never been greater.”

At no time does her narrative feel hyperbolic (if anything, the threat could be said to be so dire as to have language fail to do it justice, but Perlroth succeeds quite well in creating appropriate levels of tension of dread even in a non-fiction book; perhaps her deal with the FX television network to produce a TV series based on her book may succeed at further penetration through a different media platform that can reach an even wider audience).  Her readers will come away with the sense that there is a near-certainty that something terrible will happen soon enough—either intentionally or unintentionally—unless a drastic global effort is undertaken and a paradigm-shift occurs.

And similarly as I have noted when discussing a 2020 UK parliamentary report on Russian designs against the UK, with Russian (and other) cyberwarfare, so, too, both must American society within itself unite on these issues and America unite with its allies (through NATO, as I have argued).  Much like the COVID-19 pandemic response in the era of Trump, everyone and everything are pretty much on their own in fighting cyberwarfare; this cannot be the approach of free nations any longer.  Furthermore, these cyberweapons’ development and their sale and spread happen almost entirely in the shadows, those making the decisions facing little accountability, let alone any public scrutiny; while the cloak-and-dagger realm of spycraft, secret weapons, and cyberwarfare can hardly simply be made anywhere near fully transparent, this modus operandi, too, cannot continue as is.

No Easy Answers

Yet there are no easy solutions to these problems, and you would be right to distrust Perlroth if she claimed to have them (she wisely does not).  But her recommendations that we start coordinating among the different parts of our society—utilities, government, private sector, communities—start having serious public conversations, feel out some baseline international consensus, and that individuals in their personal and professional lives take basic cybersecurity steps (like two-step authentication) are as decent places to start as any.

So do not expect Perlroth to give detailed solutions; that is not her role.  But in raising crucial questions that are simply not properly being addressed in the public or private sectors, by leaders or by citizens, she may yet play the role of a Cassandra who, rather than be doomed to have her warnings ignored, instead helps frame a crucial long-overdue discussion at a time when there is little time to spare.

The questions are not just weighty and challenging policy-wise, but also philosophically.  How do we balance security and freedom, openness and security in the internet age?  How do we balance offensive and defensive cyber-capabilities?  To what degree and when can governments justify capabilities based on keeping vulnerabilities in widely-used, critical software secret from the software vendors and clients (including many major companies and institutions)?  How on earth can a measure of transparency, security, and trust be injected into the lucrative zero-day black market?  How can we punish cyber-transgressions even as we maintain the same or similar capabilities?  How can we deal with hackers operating in a grey zone of principles of freedom utilizing illegal intrusions?  How can we make sure cutting-edge cyberweapons we develop, use, and share with allies will not be used to oppress or even come to be used against us? 

No easy solutions, indeed.  But Perlroth repeatedly asks and muses on these questions and wants us all to do the same.

As you read the book, you will also appreciate how much Perlroth’s narrative is very much present with us day after day, week after week, month after month as the topics, events, and figures she covers demonstrate how their effects still reverberate today and keep popping up in unfolding events.  This has the effect of making her book concerned with and relevant to the past, present, and future, and her work and insight will stay with you long after you finish her book and keep forcing their ways back into the front-and-center of your brain (and should do the same for leaders and policymakers around the world).

Since her book’s publication, we have already seen the Colonial Pipeline, JBS, and Kaseya ransomware cyberattacks from Russian-based (and Russian-tolerated) hacking groups along with rampant coronavirus disinformation magnifying an already terrible pandemic and “killing people” (to quote President Biden); all these topics have been covered for the Times by Perlroth.  And Perlroth was all over the Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware being used for nefarious purposes long before the recent stories and a report from Amnesty International from just these past few weeks that have garnered a lot of attention with what are less-novel revelations and more confirmations of Perlroth’s fine investigative work on that topic for her book, with any reader of it hardly being surprised by any of the latest NSO information now being discussed.  And these bigger stories do not even touch upon many, many lesser-reported cyberattacks.

All in all, this is a groundbreaking book that not only towers above other cybersecurity works as the only current somewhat-full history of cyberwarfare and the cyberweapons black market mixed in with appropriate security policy concerns, it is a clarion call for the world that business as usual is taking us down something of a cyber-Guns of August path.  Whether nations and the world and, ultimately, the general public are up to the challenge in demanding a far less risky and far less dangerous cyber-domain, it will be to the degree that they understand the issues so excellently presented by Perlroth and prioritize them as she tells us we must.

Issues? (Or Why This Book Could Not Have Been Written by a Techie)

Some tech experts have brought attention to what they claim are technical inaccuracies with particular details in the book.  I am not qualified to weigh in on those, but of the few criticisms I have examined, with some, Perlroth has responded convincingly and seems to have successful challenged her critics’ framing of the issues or even their reading comprehension of her work (indeed, some seem to have easily fallen into their own errors of mansplaining—in spite of the general overuse of that term—which is not surprising given the notoriously male-dominated and toxic nature towards women of the tech, Silicon Valley, and cybersecurity worlds, as well as of social media.  While correcting reviewers’ misunderstandings in some cases, in others, Perlroth has taken some constructive criticism and worked to include corrections and even to give frustrated credit to some less-constructive criticism.

I even found one example of an individual—cybersecurity researcher Kevin Finisterre—who was mad that he was not included or credited in her narrative when he feels he should be, but no narrative ever includes everyone and in this case Perlroth retorted that one of her sources apparently left out Finisterre for, perhaps, self-serving purposes, and in a secretive, reclusive world with all kinds of bruised egos like the one Perlroth is covering, some omissions are going to be inevitable (in this case she has apologized and pledged to include the Finisterre in the next edition).  The fact of the matter is that no history book ever includes all relevant names and when sifting through research, data, and information, there must always be material, people, and events that are sifted out of inclusion to make books manageable.  Especially with first drafts of history, completeness is hard to come by, but a work can still be definitive if it is practically the only game in town and still makes a solid effort to be thorough, well-researched, and coherent, and, even allowing for some errors, Perlroth excels in all three areas.

In such narratives of living history, the individuals presented often do not like how they are portrayed or lower- and mid-tier folks balk at not being included or included more, many in these categories often choking on their egos and unable to see their blind spots, but that is why a journalist and storyteller is there: not to portray the individual as he wants to be portrayed but to put him in the wider context and show how his self-perception lines up with the bigger picture.  That hardly means Perlroth’s choices are above criticism or that Finisterre specifically is unreasonable at feeling left out (I am unable to conclusively judge either way), but to characterize her errors as particularly egregious or the book in total as sloppy just seems unfair and inaccurate.  Given the high quality of her overall narrative and the dizzying array of events, characters, and locations involved, I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt in most of these contested cases as a rule of thumb.

Not so others: things got so toxic for Perlroth on social media that she felt compelled to quit Twitter not long after her book came out, but thankfully she eventually returned.  Her book’s harshest non-social-media reviews seem to come from obscure techie blogs almost no one outside of the tech field would know (and many within would not) and Perlroth seems to have credibly pushed back against a good number of these worst detractors.  Adding credence to her defense is that most major new outlets that have reviewed her or mentioned her book have done so quite favorably, even if a few of these had their qualms and quibbles, which begs the question: if the obscure techies are right, why aren’t some of the biggest outlets in the news business echoing these framings and criticisms when they clearly have access to experts with similar pedigrees?  Never known collectively for their wonderful people skills or temperaments, the angry hardcore techies and their takes on Perlroth’s book serves as a reminder as to why it took a non-techie like Perlroth to produce this narrative that her antagonists never were able to before her book was published (skills like gaining access to important and secretive folk and making them like and trust you are crucial).

Regardless, neither individually nor collectively do any of these alleged and/or admitted errors take away from the most important thrusts, revelations, themes, or messages of the book and none reduce its singularity, urgency, or overall considerable strength.  Most readers will not know or understand these technical aspects (and most of the time Perlroth is dumbing down extremely complex phenomena with fun analogies because that is the only way the vast majority of us could even approach a worthwhile understanding), but they will still get the same overall big-picture sense of how government, business, society collectively, and individuals individually are all caught up in this and how urgent these problems are with or without adjustments related to these possible or actual technical errors.

Conclusion: Putting the Must in “Must-Read”

These seemingly minor admitted and potential technical issues, some distracting typos, and a perplexing decision (and confounding for policy wonks and researchers like myself) to have a sources/notes section at the end presented in narrative form—as opposed to footnotes where it is easy to tie a factoid to a source or note—aside, this book is a monumental achievement, one that both should change, further spark, and guide a debate that should be front and center in our present national agendas.

Perlroth has indeed presented a remarkable first draft of a living and unfolding history, the questions now are “Do we learn from it and heed its warnings?” and “What do we do armed with this indispensable knowledge?”  Trying to figure out the answers to those questions makes the technical spats discussed above seem like schoolyard squabbles, and how we rise—or fall—to the key challenges posed by Perlroth are likely to define much of our world for the rest of this century and beyond.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my related article on the UK Parliament’s singularly excellent Russia report, my proposal to reform NATO’s Article 5 to explicitly include cyberwarfare, and my discussion as a member of a panel with author and Senior International Correspondent for The Guardian, Luke Harding, on Russia’s bad behavior

Also see see related June 7, 2021, article: Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare, cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence; condensed rewrite for Small Wars Journal September 24 also cited by NATO LibGuide on Cyber Defence and featured by Real Clear Defense and 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

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) June 27, 2021; Also see my subsequent article “Why is Putin pulling all this crap now?“, published February 21, 2022, and excerpted from my Small Wars Journal article from the same day, “The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine“

SILVER SPRING—As the West increasingly faces a Russia dealing out far more damage to the West than it suffers in response, the United States has a unique capacity to weaponize its oil and natural gas and oil sectors to alter the dynamics of the corresponding European markets in ways that can seriously weaken Russian power and influence in Europe, damage the Kremlin’s economic strength that has been itself weaponized against the West, and increase Western unity and economic ties.

A New Cold War

There was optimism as Putin stabilized a chaotic post-Soviet Russia, but towards the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, that optimism quickly gave way to dread as he plunged Russia into cyberwarfare against NATO-member Estonia in 2007 and, even worse, invaded and annexed parts of Georgia in the middle of the 2008 Summer Olympics.  Cyberwarfare against the West (as I chronicled recently), military adventurism, brazen political interference, bad-faith behavior, and gaslighting have been Russia’s norms ever since, from invading and annexing parts of Ukraine to helping to install Trump in the White House and from routine bombing of hospitals and other civilian infrastructure in Syria to pushing coronavirus disinformation.

The U.S. has staked much of its blood and treasure over decades to ensure military security, political stability, and economic prosperity throughout the continent.  Conversely, Russian President Vladimir Putin has increasingly staked many of his efforts as the twenty-first century has unfolded to undermine all of this.  Simply put, Russia usually does not treat diplomacy or international law with respect and has not shown itself amenable to changing course through good-faith engagement; rather, it continues to behave as a hostile, bad-faith actor vis-à-vis the U.S., Europe, NATO, and the West.  The impunity that Russia has enjoyed under Putin is enabled by a lack of consequences and punishment for Russia’s bad behavior that itself enables further destructive behavior in a geopolitical negative feedback loop.  Thus, relatively consistently weak responses from the West have succeeded not in deterring Putin, but in emboldening him.

Clearly, a much tougher approach is warranted, as I have argued for some time.

While imposing sanctions—in particular through Magnitsky legislation and going after Putin regime finances—derailing the nefarious Nord Stream 2 pipeline, and expanding Western military alliances and deployments are obviously crucial ways Russia can be punished and countered, good-old-fashioned economic competition can be as effective as more traditional political and military statecraft, perhaps even more so.

And on this front, America and Europe can work together to hit Russia where it is particularly vulnerable.

An Economic Geopolitical Arms Race with Europe As the Proving Ground

Perhaps most surprising among all of Putin’s achievements in recent years has been the extent to which Russia has infiltrated Europe.  Using Europe’s openness against it, Putin and his allies have used a “firehose” of disinformation to affect public opinion throughout Europe to its advantage (part of why I recently proposed major reform to NATO’s founding charter when it comes to cyberwarfare and disinformation) while also finding allies among major European political figures through financial corruption, appealing to far-right nativism, or a combination of the two.

Indeed, for years Putin has funded far-right (and sometimes far-left) extremist parties and figures in his constant quest to weaken the European center and destabilize the continent, sometimes even forming formal alliances through his own thoroughly banal political party, United Russia, with other similarly inclined revanchist chauvinistic right-wing parties in Europe, including in NATO heavyweights Italy, Germany, and France.

The issue of financial and economic infiltration in Europe was an especially sensitive and worrisome one as presented by a report on Russia authored last year by the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) of the UK Parliament, which noted systemic infiltration of Britain’s economy and society by Russia through Russian businesses, noting “it is widely recognized” that Russian businesses are “completely intertwined” with “Russian intelligence” (in fact, as I have noted repeatedly, it is often difficult to distinguish between the Kremlin, Russia’s infamous oligarchs, and the Russian mafia, which often act together as one towards the same purposes, a Holy Trinity in Putin’s religion of realpolitik raw power).  The infiltration is at such deep levels that the report (which I discussed in detail) states “this cannot be untangled and the priority now must be to mitigate,” a disheartening official admission that Russian malign influence is currently too big to be defeated outright, with the report also noting similar mechanisms of influence spreading throughout Europe. 

Simply put, one of the main weapons in this overarching campaign against Europe is Russia’s economic might.  Particularly weaponized by the Kremlin for geopolitical aims are Russian oil and natural gas, with taxes on the oil and gas sectors in Russia accounting for 39.25% of the Russian federal government’s revenue in 2019 (leaving the aberrant 2020 pandemic year aside) and the two industries accounting for a huge part of the oil-and-gas-dependent Russian economy.

Logically, the U.S. targeting Russia’s share of those commodities’ markets in Europe can advance collective Western interests and unity while weakening and punishing Putin in ways long overdue.  It would only be fitting since Russia has long used its oil and gas exports and other economic ties to Europe as a geopolitical club, bribing and bludgeoning nations and politicians throughout Europe to bend them to its will or otherwise expanding its influence.  The most dramatic example of this is clearly Ukraine, which I have chronicled in detail for years.  But apart from Ukraine, most of Europe is heavily dependent on Russian oil and natural gas, while Russia itself is dependent economically on its exports to Europe, as the below tables I created demonstrate along with America’s ability to push its way into Russia’s European market share (click on each chart to see the full-size version; also available all together as a single image or in one Excel file):

In fact, it is the U.S. that has become the world’s top oil and natural gas producer ever since the Obama Administration, and in the decade before 2019, the U.S. increased its oil production at almost six-and-a-half times the pace per year on average as Russia and increased natural gas production at almost five times the rate per year on average compared with Russia.

Until recently, the United States was not even a player in the European gas market, dominated by neighboring Russia.  But the last decade has seen an explosion of both U.S. and Russian exports of liquified natural gas (LNG), which can be transported without pipelines, with the U.S. increasing its LNG exports by nearly 370 percent to Russia’s roughly 200 percent in 2019.  U.S. entry through LNG has meant a dramatic increase in its overall gas presence in Europe in recent years while Russia’s gas exports to Europe only increased 3.9 percent in 2019, the lion’s share of that through its vast pipeline network. 

So while Russian gas exports to Europe dwarf those of the U.S. (well over 1,000 percent more), the U.S. has demonstrated far more ability to grow its European market share in recent years and will be able to keep doing so in the years soon to come, its European gas exports only amounting to about 15 percent of all its gas exports while Russia’s gas exports to Europe are over 81 percent of its total gas exports.  Similar dynamics are at play when it comes it comes to oil, with the U.S. sending a bit under 18 percent of all its oil exports to Europe while Russia sends 57.5 of all its oil exports to Europe.   

And though U.S. oil and gas exports are well under 7 percent of all its exports and are not even 1 percent of its GDP, for Russia, oil and gas exports account for over 56 percent of all exports and 13.5 percent of its GDP.  Taken together, it is clear that oil and gas trade with Europe is huge portion of Russia’s economic trade and a significant portion of its GDP and that it would be fairly easy for the U.S. to weaken Russia’s economy profoundly by simply displacing big portions of Russia’s vital European oil and gas trade with oil and gas from the U.S., a prospect that Europe seems eager to make a reality.

While Russian exports are utterly dominated by massive state-owned companies (like Gazprom and Rosneft, among others) following Putin’s will, the U.S. has its own long tradition of subsidizing its oil and gas industries, so subsidies to make U.S. oil and gas exports to Europe more profitable and desirable would hardly be anything dramatic.  Costs of taxes, tariffs, and transportation could all be mitigated through various government initiatives and, indeed, the U.S. has a number of provisions currently in place, though those subsidies may not be required since U.S. market share in Europe has been booming.  Still, even as new U.S. President Joe Biden seems keen (for good reason) on eliminating such subsidies for oil and gas, giving the U.S. oil and gas sector incentives to focus much more of their business on Europe could further justice in punishing Putin and it would be a good idea here to view the economic and foreign policy goals as going hand in hand.  Pursuing each without view of the other may weaken the payoff of each policy, but combining them would align with a host of Biden Administration and traditional U.S. priorities, such as promoting human rights and transparency, strengthening transatlantic relations and traditional alliances, invigorating the rules-based international order, holding bad actors accountable, promoting European unity, and furthering U.S. economic interests.

Of particular note from recent history is that the U.S. under Obama may have coordinated with Saudi Arabia to work to manipulate oil markets to drive down prices and hurt Russia economically for its dismembering of Ukraine and supporting the murderous regime of dictator Bashar al-Assad in Syria, giving potential inspiration for the U.S. to get creative and ambitious concurrently when it comes to Russia and energy geopolitics today.

A Relatively Easy, Risk-Averse Way to Strike a Blow for the West Against Russia

In concert with Europe, the U.S. has the ability to deal a well-deserved punishing blow to Putin and his rogue government by exporting significantly more oil and natural gas into Europe, weakening the Kremlin economically and reducing its growing stormcloud of influence in Europe in a manner that strengthens transatlantic relationships at the heart of the Western-led global international order and promotes the interests of the U.S. and Europe alike.  While President Biden has clearly shored up the West’s diplomatic front against Russia at the recent G7 and NATO summits in Europe, the economic front discussed herein is another timely opportunity for robust, efficient, and lucrative action.

© 2021 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Also see my subsequent article “Why is putting pulling all this crap now?“, published February 21, 2022, and excerpted from my Small Wars Journal article from the same day, “The Utter Banality of Putin’s Kabuki Campaign in Ukraine“; see my other related article on the UK Parliament’s singularly excellent Russia report, and my discussion as a member of a panel with author and Senior International Correspondent for The Guardian, Luke Harding, on Russia’s bad behavior

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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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  September 27, 2020

In response to the bombshell report on Trump’s taxes that was released today, I am releasing a chapter on the scandals, bankruptcies, and financial problems of Trump from my eBook published on November 23, 2019.  These controversies surrounding the financial and business history of the Trump Organization (which even Steve Bannon has apparently described as a “criminal enterprise”) are of greater interest in light of this new New York Times report, but they should have been of far greater, sustained interest from 2015, when Trump began his candidacy for the presidency and when most of this information was already publicly available.  This research of mine was mainly conducted and published in different forms in 2016 and 2017, though some important segments came later., and the resulting material is best understood by reading my full eBook, 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), a detailed look at Trump-Russia and how its Ukraine machinations led to Trump’s impeachment, including Trump’s deeply relevant and deeply shady business history.  For helpful and important background on some of the figures mentioned, but not fully introduced, below—including Russian President Vladimir Putin’s top Russian mafia “godfather,” Semion Mogilevich, and his intricate work in Ukraine with Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash (and his front-company Highrock) and now convicted-by-Mueller’s-team-felon Paul Manafort for Putin stooge Viktor Yanukovych in Ukraine, his Party of Regions and benefactor Rinat Akhmetov, and their schemes to bend Ukraine to Moscow’s will and fight pro-Western Ukrainian leader Yulia Tymoshenko; including Manafort’s work with Russian oligarch and top Putin operative Oleg Deripaska to advance Russian interests; including background on another of Putin’s top men in Ukraine, Viktor Medvedchuk; including how Rudy Giuliani’s longstanding ties with Mogilevich-connected Sam Kislin are also of interest, as is the history of Kislin’s old partner Tamir Sapir in Trumpworld; including interesting background on Felix Sater; including Alexander Shnaider’s ties to Russia and Ukraine, as well as those of his father-in-law, Boris Birshtein and his company Seabeco, as well as oligarch Alexander Mashkevich’s ties to all that—see my articles How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe and Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind, which link to some more detailed work of mine on some of these individual subjects.  You can see all my Trump-Russia coverage here.

UPDATE: Sept 29: The new New York Times second bombshell report on Trump’s finances, this one about The Apprentice TV show being a screen onto which to project Trump’s “success” amidst a reality of failure behind it, discusses a dynamic that I already noted here close to a year ago and beginning in 2016. In other words, Trump’s “success” amounted to his obtaining shady Russian-/former Soviet-linked financing, letting others take the fall in disastrous deal after disastrous deal, outlitigating anyone trying to hold him accountable, and self-promotion on The Apprentice that helped to obscure his many scandals.

Now, let’s jump into my eBook chapter and Trumpworld in the mid-2000s…

VIII. Russian and Former Soviet Money Rife with Putin Ties Came to America and Trumpworld when Trump was Hurting for Cash

Around this time, key figures in these operations in Ukraine began reaching out to U.S. lobbyists and political consultants for assistance (noted in a 2007 Wall Street Journal article by none other than Glenn Simpson, who, as mentioned earlier, testified to congressional committee staff years later on Trump’s ties to Russia). Among the interactions he and a colleague catalogued:

• Semion Mogilevich himself enlisted the services of William Sessions, a Republican who was the only FBI director to be fired… at least until Trump fired James Comey for investigating Trump and his people’s ties to Russia.  Mogilevich retained Sessions’s services at least during 2007 in an unsuccessful effort to get his criminal charges cleared with the U.S. Government and his name removed from the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list.  The middleman for that particular effort was consultant Neil Livingstone, whose firm GlobalOptions employed many Russians and people from former Soviet republics (Livingstone eventually ran unsuccessfully in 2012 for the Republican nomination for the Montana governor’s race with Ryan Zinke—the Trump Administration’s disgraced and former Secretary of the Interior who resigned mired in scandal in December, 2018—as his running mate).  
• Furthermore, two-time Mississippi governor and major Republican operative Haley Barbour founded a consulting firm that in 2004 introduced Livingstone’s GlobalOptions to Firtash’s 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 here how Mogilevich and Firtash are working hand-in-hand, just a bit removed from each other: their modus operandi. 
• Beginning in 2003, Deripaska engaged 1996 Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole to lobby for the visa to the U.S. he was being denied because of his organized crime ties.  Manafort worked on Dole’s presidential campaign and was working with Deripaska on Putin’s agenda when Dole’s efforts were successful, briefly getting Deripaska a visa before the FBI had it revoked shortly after.

Beyond these acts, there were plenty of interesting moves made by Russians and Russian-linked characters in the 2000s that directly involved Trump and his family.

In understanding why and how the moves below were made, it is crucial to understand that by the mid-2000s, Donald Trump had been abandoned by every major Wall Street bank as an unreliable and difficult partner.  The one exception to the Wall Street bank Trump boycott was Deutsche Bank, which has loaned Trump some $2 billion and in recent years has been caught in massive scandals, including two major Russian money laundering scandals.  One such scam involved Deutsche orchestrating some $10 billion in illegal fake trades from 2011-2015 that seem to have been part of an enormous Russian money laundering scheme.  New York State and UK officials levied $630 million in massive fines (the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority portion of the fine is the largest that body has ever assessed) against Deutsche at the end of January, 2017, separate from a Department of Justice investigation that has stalled under Trump but is still ongoing.  It was also revealed back in March, 2017, that Deutsche was 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 “Laundromat” laundering scheme with many banks involving $20-$80 billion from 2010-2014, the very years of Yanukovych’s presidency in Ukraine.  Among those involved in the scheme include Russian oligarchs and the F.S.B., with some of the money in the scheme apparently being used to further Putin’s and Russia’s interests.

So, back to Trump, who was hurting for money, especially after he had to declare a bankruptcy for one of his businesses in 2004, his fifth such bankruptcy up to that point (with another still to come) and with Deutsche as one of his only sources of money.  But another other major source?  Russian and former-Soviet-republic-connected money.

Just a mere four years after the 2004 bankruptcy, Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., publicly remarked 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.”

In other words, the 2000s were years when Donald Trump Sr. was aggressively and desperately courting Russian business and investment with few other significant options.

And that “business” and “investment” that would be done would be quite astounding: a series of spectacularly scandalous, high-profile development deals detailed below that would roughly total $1.5 billion and that would involve people, structures, and results ripe for, and attractively (perhaps best), explained by money laundering.

They would end in failure, scandal, and lawsuits.

Nearly all of these deals exploited lax regulations in the U.S., Canada, or other real estate markets.  And there are so many other crooked deals and Russians involved—over the years and continuing into his presidency, at least 3,500 lawsuits have been filed against Trump and/or his companies, by far unprecedented for any U.S. presidential nominee of a major party—that it can be overwhelming.  Just one report from Reuters noted nearly $100 million was invested by Russians (including some “politically connected” elites but not including Russian-Americans who did not purchase units using a Russian address or passport) in seven Trump properties in South Florida, and that over a third all of the units in the seven properties were owned by shell company LLCs often designed to mask their owners’ identities.  But here, we will stay focused on those players who have or will play prominent roles in our Ukraine-focused saga.

In Manhattan, Ukrainian Vasily Salygin—who would later become an official in Ukraine’s Party of Regions at the same time Manafort was advising it—would buy an apartment in Trump World Tower, among the first to do so after the skyscraper opened in 2001. This purchase would be brokered by fellow-Ukrainian Sam Kislin, who, as mentioned before, had done business with Trump decades earlier, had become particularly close to Rudy Giuliani, and was considered part of a Mogilevich Russian mafia organization by the U.S. law enforcement officials.

The Bayrock/Sater Deals: Russian-Linked, Shady Money and Colossal Failure Become Trump’s Style

Meanwhile, Kislin’s old business partner selling Trump televisions, Tamir Sapir, can be seen as a major catalyst for some of the wildest, most scandalous series of Trumpdeals covered in this entire exploration. Living in Trump Tower, Sapir had easy access to Trump and the families of the two men became friends.  In the early 2000s, Sapir would introduce Trump to Bayrock, ostensibly a real-estate firm led by Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan whose rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable.  None other than our Felix Sater was then Chief Operating Officer (and eventually the dominant force) within Bayrock, the office of which was even in Trump Tower itself.  Saterdirectly partnered with Trump repeatedly throughout this period, trying to help him land real estate deals in Moscow, even showing Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. around the Russian capital in 2006 (in which capacity, he let Ivanka spin around in Putin’s chair in the Russian president’s Kremlin office) and introducing the Trumps to influential Russians.  None of these potential Moscow deals ever went through, but other massively scandalous deals with Bayrock did go further in America.

One of Bayrock’s partnerships with Trump in the U.S. in Fort Lauderdale was originally conceived of as the Trump International Beach Club.  According to a lawsuit—spearheaded by a pair of former Bayrock employees, Jody Kriss and Michael Ejekam, who were seeking damages against Bayrock, Arif, and Sater, and assisted by the aforementioned attorneys Oberlander and later Lerner—Arif put up an initial $2 million in capital.  Then, the lawsuit alleges, Arif and Sater conned Elizabeth Thieriot—a friend of Arif’s who was also Sater’s landlord—by 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.  That lawsuit claims her investment was 12 times the value of that percentage, allowing Sater and Arif to make a 1,125% profit on her investment, and that the pair committed tax and financial fraud and defrauded Thieriot of her rightful share.  Others may have been victims, too, but after she took the pair to court in 2006, it is unclear how or if the case was resolved.  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 prolific partnership with Trump, however, was an infamous deal to develop a SoHo property in Manhattan.  The deal was concocted in 2006 by Trump, Sater, Arif, and Sapir.  In an arrangement specifically approved by Trump, the SoHo deal had a significant portion of its Sater/Arif facilitated financing—some $50 million for it and three additional projects—flow from Icelandic firm FL Group. 

FL Group was later linked to the Panama Papers revelations and was widely known as a hub for the money of wealthy Russians, apparently those “in favor with Putin,” according to the Kriss v. Bayrock lawsuit.  In addition, cumulonimbus-size clouds of well-founded suspicion of involvement with big-time Russian money-laundering then surrounded the incredibly deeply interconnected Icelandic financial system of which FL Group was a key part.  Financing for these four projects was also secured from Mashkevich, formerly of Mogilevich-summit host Birshtein’s Seabeco and a major business partner with Deripaska concurrent with Deripaska’s work with Manafort on behalf of Putin.  This FL Group financing happened to come at a time both when Mogilevich and his network (including Manafort) were laundering money for the massive Ukraine scheme and Deripaska seems to have been engaged in money laundering with Manafort and Gates.

The Trump SoHo deal itself was deliberately structured to cheat authorities out of tens of millions in revenue, as the investments were illegally restructured 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.  Furthermore, some of the transactions involving the Trump SoHo were clearly carried out by shell corporations for the virtually certain purpose of laundering money, transactions from which Trump profited.  Specifically, there was investment for the purpose of alleged money laundering linked to Mashkevich—who, as noted, has his own separate history of alleged money laundering—involving the family of prominent Kazakh politician Viktor Khrapunov, once the mayor of Almaty. Sater has been helping federal authorities investigate Khrapunov’s alleged money laundering for years, but Sater himself was recently sued by a Kazakh Bank and the city of Almaty, Kazakhstan, alleging he worked with Khrapunov’s son, Ilyas Khraphunov, to launder millions in part to help build a potential (an infamous) Trump Tower Moscow (to be discussed later).  A similar U.S. suit from the same parties targeting Viktor Khrapunov that had added information about Sater to its filings just recently had all its claims against Viktor dismissed because of the terms of a previous legal settlement. 

The bottom line is that, given all the general shadiness surrounding Trump, the Khrapunovs, Sater, Sapir, Arif, Mashkevich, and FL Group, there are plenty of reasons to be extremely suspicious of Trump SoHo’s various funding streams.     

In the end, the Trump SoHo project went terribly awry for Trump, who was sued for fraud along with his children Ivanka and Eric Trump, both of whom had inflated the level of interest in order to attract buyers.  In a 2011 settlement, Trump refunded 90% of the deposits for the building’s condos and the property went into foreclosure in 2014.  The Manhattan District Attorney’s office had even been building a serious criminal case against Ivanka and Eric for some two years, but, mere months after longtime-Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz discussed the matter with the Manhattan District Attorney—one of whose top donors before and after was Kasowitz himself—the D.A., Cyrus Vance, rather incriminatingly dropped the case in 2012, overruling his own prosecutors in the process and saving the Trump kids from serious legal trouble (Vance would also give Harvey Weinstein a free pass with a sexual groping allegation in 2015). As a denouement, in November, 2017, the Trump Organization was paid by the SoHo’s corporate owner—weary of the scandals and the negative attention brought on by Trump’s political career—to terminate their contract early, with the Trump Organization ending its management role and fully disassociating itself from the building by the end of the month.

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 second Trump/Bayrock project there, the 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, and Sater and his Bayrock partners may have secretly cashed out their stakes in this project and the three FL Group–linked other projects in an arrangement made with FL Group equal to the initial $50 million “investment” loan.  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 both Trump and Bayrock of fraud.

As in the SoHo deal, confidential settlements, this time with dozens of buyers, ensued, with Trump refusing to accept any responsibility and blaming the problems on the housing bubble bursting and the Great Recession.  Florida courts declined to rule that Trump or his partners had committed fraud, including a state appeals court in 2016, but most of the lawsuits against Trump and his partners resulted in undisclosed settlements.  The project finished years late, cost some $200 million, and was eventually sold for a relatively mere $115 million at a foreclosure auction.

A third deal among the four which received FL Group financing was a failure that never even got a concrete start. When Trump began eyeing the Phoenix, Arizona, area’s Camelback location for a luxury residential tower back in late 2003, Trump’s team, and later Trump himself, met with the mayor, who was not impressed with Trump nor the proposal.  At a January 2005 meeting, when plans were unveiled, local residents even showed up to argue against the development. Still, 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 petition signatures to force a public referendum that could have overridden the city bodies’ approvals, but under this public pressure, the city council voted to reverse its decision anyway and pressed the developers and the neighborhood association to reach a compromise.  At that point, Trump himself abandoned the project for at leas the stated reason of 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’” as well as 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 federal government.  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 faux $50 million “investment” by FL Group was Queens, New York, property called Waterpointe.  Bayrock bought the property in 2008 for $25 million, but its soil was contaminated and had to be replaced, which Bayrock did with other soil that was even more contaminated and, thus, Bayrock was fined $150,000; when Bayrock defaulted on a loan in 2011, the lender took over Waterpointe, then sold it for roughly $11 million, less than half the amount Bayrock had paid for it.

Unsurprisingly, Bayrock would later find itself facing heavy legal problems.  Emerging out of a process that began in 2008 in Delaware was a lawsuit filed with the New York State Supreme Court in May of 2013 by aforementioned former business partners of Sater’s at Bayrock—Kriss and Ejekam—against Bayrock, Sater, Arif, and their associates.  The plaintiffs sued for damages and nonpayment related to Sater’s hiding of his criminal past and what their lawsuit, moved to federal court, says was his use of Bayrock primarily as a criminal organization for criminal activities, especially alleged money laundering and fraud.  In this suit, Donald Trump, Ivanka Trump, and the Trump Organization are named as defendants.

The state court process removed the Trumps and their Organization from the suit in a way that left unresolved their guilt, responsibility, or innocence.  The case dragged on and on, over years, but was finally settled in February, 2018, after a number of the accusations against Sater were withdrawn, but the details of the settlement have not been revealed.

Confusing?  Of course.  That likely by design.  What we do know overall is that these deals were going down at a time when Mogilevich, Manafort, Firtash, and others were involved in the Ukraine gas plot and were eager to move and allegedly launder billions of dollars out of Ukraine as part of that scheme.  Starting in late 2007, they were facing increased scrutiny from the new Ukrainian Prime Minister, Yulia Tymoshenko—Yushchenko’s right-hand woman during the Orange Revolution—and her allies in the Ukrainian government.  If Sater’s father really was part of Mogilevich’s crew, as the U.S. Supreme Court writ of certiorari asserts without evidence, or if Sater was himself connected to Mogilevich, as Simpson with his legal counsel present asserted to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee staffers and after being reminded that lying to Congress is a prosecutable federal offense that can land someone up to five years in prison, then it seems highly likely that Mogilevich would have been running Ukraine gas scam money through these Bayrock deals.  If these claims of ties between Mogilevich and Sater are unfounded, Mogilevich still has some entry points—most likely Mashkevich and FL Group, but also others—into these deals besides Trump himself that could have been on his radar, too, that should also be looked into for possible money laundering related to the giant Ukraine gas scam.

It was also clear from these deals and others 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 tied to organized crime or to hostile foreign governments and even those governments’ intelligence agencies.  Thus, selecting Trump as either an unwitting or willing conduit for money that needed to be moved stealthily, even laundered, was pretty much a no-brainer, especially since his playboy celebrity status made it much easier to attract additional “partners” to further distract and normalize, lending an air of respectability to these murky deals.  And in all of these details, it is those additional folks who paid the biggest prices by far.

When Sater left Bayrock in 2008, none of those disastrous deals 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.  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 with Sater, as Trump lied repeatedly in sworn testimony 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 “Trump Tower” in New York as its address.

On top of all that, it was revealed in March of 2017 that Sater owned several shell corporations tied to Don Jr., the Trump Organization, and/or another executive with shady ties, shell companies that had sold no products, had no customers, and were ideal for money laundering.  More on Sater later… 

As for Arif, Sater’s main partner at Bayrock, he was arrested in Turkey in September 2010 when he was at a sex party with, of all people, Mashkevich and apparently underage girls on board a yacht (which had been once belonged to none other than Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey) under suspicion of running a complex prostitution and human trafficking ring of which it seems Mashkevich was also a part.  Arif was later acquitted under mysterious circumstances and Mashkevich was never charged.

Trump Tower Toronto: Connecting Putin, Mogilevich, and Ukraine Even More with Donald Trump

Another scandal-ridden Trump deal would involve a major property development in Toronto. 

To understand this deal, we must go back again to Ukraine, where we left the Zaporizhstal steel mill—Ukraine’s fourth largest—in the possession of Alexander Shnaider, former Seabeco employee and son-in-law of Boris Birshtein, Seabeco’s owner and the Mogilevich-summit-host from back in 1995.  By 2006, Shnaider was turning down a $1.2 billion offer for the mill.

But in 2007, Shnaider and Trump began building the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Toronto.  It was partly funded by Raiffeisen Zentralbank (RZB) of Austria, which, according to Glenn Simpson, is “the go-to bank for top-level Russian dirty stuff.”  And in 2008, FL Group conspicuously loaned Shnaider €45.8 million ostensibly for a yacht at the same time Shnaider’s former Seabeco colleague Mashkevich was also working closely with FL Group and Trump on the Bayrock projects.  After investors were slammed during the ensuing global financial crises that exploded that same year, 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 passed through five shell companies.  The Zaporizhstal buyer was an unknown Russian acting on behalf of the Russian government and who, in turn, was funded by the Russian state-run bank VEB (Vnesheconombank), which had as the chairman of its board at that time none other than Vladimir Putin himself and which has been sanctioned because of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine.  Then-Ukrainian President Yushchenko saw much of VEB’s activity in Ukraine at the time as infringing on his nation’s sovereignty and said that he tried looking into the transactions for Zaporizhstal and other privatizations of national assets, but was blocked by pro-Russian lawmakers.

Furthermore, selling Zaporizhstal to a Russian fit well into Putin’s scheme of trying to extend Russian influence over Ukraine’s industry and natural resources using Russia state-owned assets, such as Kremlin-run banks and energy companies, in tandem with the likes of oligarchs such as Dmitry Firtash and Rinat Akhmetov.  Shnaider had carried out a similar operation in Armenia with a company that ran the electrical grid there in 2002, handing it off to a Kremlin-run company and giving Russia further leverage in another former Soviet Republic.  2003 saw him pick up a steel mill in Russia, then sell it to a Russian state military subsidiary company, but was given a quarter-stake in return, making him a business partner with Putin’s government.  The pattern is clear: Shnaider was expanding Putin’s power.

It was reported by the Financial Times in mid-2018 that Shnaider was able to attract the VEB-funded Russian buyer because he had secretly agreed he would pay $100 million “commission” to “introducers” speaking for the Kremlin.  Legal filings in a dispute between Shnaider and his then-main business partner, Shifrin with whom he had bought up Zaporizhstal to begin with, suggest that some of that $100 million ended in the hands of officials in the Russian government.  The $100 million seems to have been a bribe and would make the whole Trump Tower project one huge money laundering machine.  Shifrin claims Russian officials made clear threats that his Russian holdings would be in trouble if he did not sell Zaporizhstal to them.  After the sale, VEB seems to have operated in such a way as to ensure Kremlin control over the steel mill, too.

Akhmetov had seemingly narrowly missed out on acquiring Zaporizhstal from Shnaiderback in 2010, and the $850 million price was $160 million more than Akhmetov had offered.  But in a stellar example of the amount of cross-collusion going on, of that difference, $50 million went to Akhmetov (all while Akhmetov was backing the parties to the gas scheme), $10 million to Shnaider and Shifrin’s company, and $100 million, as noted, to the “introducers.”  This deal was set up by the Ukrainian Igor Bakai, who had served in Kuchma’s government and in Naftogaz before fleeing Ukraine to Russia during the Orange Revolution.  Though the succeeding Yushchenko government wanted him for financial crimes, Moscow declined to hand him over and clearly found him useful in 2010.  A lawyer of Birshtein’s indicated in 2017 that $15 million from the Zaporizhstal sale went into the Trump Tower Toronto project, but the newer Financial Times report suggests this figure was $40 million.  After that further investment from Shnaider, Trump would earn millions through the deal. In July, 2011, just a year after Shnaider and Shifrin sold Zaporizhstal, Akhmetov was able to gain majority ownership of it, when he was a sitting member of Ukraine’s parliament with the Party of Regions.  Incidentally (or not), with just days until Trump’s 2016 electoral win, Shifrin was granted Russian citizenship.

Like the other deals discussed above, the Toronto deal fell into the same pattern of coming apart amid scandal and lawsuits from dozens of investors saying they were lied to and who are apparently still suing both Trump and Shnaider. Late in 2016, the property was placed into bankruptcy receivership, and in the summer of 2017 Trump’s stake in the project was completely bought out, his name removed from the building that July.

Rinse, Repeat for Panama

Still another massive scandal-ridden deal from this period was just exposed by an NBC News/Reuters/Global Witness joint series of exposés on the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama City, Panama.  Ivanka Trump was particularly involved in this project, and Eric Trump was also involved substantively, though there is, as of yet, no evidence that shows any of the Trumps were aware of the criminality swarming their project; as usual, their best defense is that they are just incredibly stupid.  This project, which began in 2005 and opened in 2011, became a massive hub for organized crime—including the Russian mafia—to use for money laundering, as demonstrated by the overwhelming evidence presented in the reports. 

Notably, in 2007, Bear Stearns “underwrote a $220 million bond issue” that would help finance the project’s construction, less than a year before Bear Stearns’s meltdown initiated the Great Recession.

In 2011, the Trump Ocean Club’s Board of Directors voted to end Trump’s management of the building, claiming TRUMP was engaged in financial wrongdoings.  His response was to sue them and a bitter fight ensued, ending in a confidential settlement that still left Trump managing the building.  By 2013, the company Trump had partnered with to make the whole Trump Ocean Club happen was filing for bankruptcy.  The Club’s majority owners kept trying to remove Trump’s name and end his involvement entirely, which they were finally able to do in 2018—including taking physical control of the property away from Trump’s security staff with actions of a Panamanian judge and the assistance of armed police on the site—and court rulings soon after this in New York and Panama affirmed that result, paving the way for Marriott to take over management of the property later that year.  Legal filings made in June, 2019, by the majority owners who pushed out Trump even argue the Trump Organization evaded paying Panamanian taxes while running the property and claim both to have the financial records to prove evasion and that auditing by Panamanian authorities has demonstrated such tax evasion.

But the shady Trump Panama deal also has a link to our Ukraine drama.  A Ukrainian businessman named Igor Anopolskiy was involved in several companies dealing with Trump Ocean Club units and in marketing the Club’s units to Ukraine.  In 2014, he was convicted in Ukraine for forging travel documents, but had his three-year prison sentence strangely first suspended and then, in 2017, purged from his record.  Even more suspiciously, he has since 2005 been a shareholder in a Ukrainian travel agency that once had among its other shareholders one Oxana Marchenko, who, according to Global Witness, “is believed to be the wife” of Viktor Medvedchuk.

While Oxana (or Oksana) is a major Ukrainian TV personality who dabbles in Russian oil drilling through a Cyprus-based company, Medvedchuk is an even more connected individual.  He was one of Ukraine’s first post-Soviet oligarchs and in none other than the natural gas business, and by 1999 he was a close ally of then-Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma, supporting him in tandem with Oleksandr Volkov, who at the time was funneling money from Birshtein to Kuchma and was the latter’s campaign manager, as discussed previously.  Medvedchuk later became Kuchma’s chief of staff from 2002-2005, yet also became very close with Putin’s number-two, then-Russian Prime Minister and later-President Dmitry Medvedev.  But Medvedchuk is even closer with Putin himself, who is the godfather to Medvedchuk’s and Marchenko’s daughter (Medvedev’s wife is the godmother) and has pushed for, and seen, Medvedchuk take leading roles in Ukraine’s politics.  In such roles Medvedchuk backed Yanukovych, has worked to steer Ukraine away from the West and closer to Russia, and has played a major role as a negotiating representative “for” Ukraine in major disputes with Russia on everything from gas deals to the current war. 

Clearly, there is a distinct possibility of some sort of cash flow from Ukraine into the Trump Ocean Club in Panama, and this possibility should be of keen interest to American, Ukrainian, and Panamanian officials, among others.

The Manafort, Firtash, and Mogilevich Manhattan Money Laundering Moves

As Tymoshenko moved to fight the overall Kremlin-serving gas scheme, laundering the gas-generated proceeds became even more important to the people involved.

To this end, Manafort may have engaged in money laundering, possibly including his 2006 cash purchase of a $3.675 million Manhattan Trump Tower apartment using one of the shell companies cited in Special Counsel Mueller’s October, 2017, indictment.  If that property was involved, it means a direct link between alleged money laundering that was part of Putin’s Ukraine gas plot and Trump himself. In 2008, Manafort and Gates were personally involved in moving money—alleged laundering—to the U.S. through multiple deals involving Manhattan properties, according to court documents.  Those documents detail how Manafort ran a shell corporation that was part of the machinery that pushed money into real estate deals on behalf of Firtash and their mutual allies, with Firtash in one case allegedly laundering some $25 million in an $895 million deal involving the Drake Hotel.  But that deal never came fruition, resulting a number of parties that felt cheated and defrauded.

Another major money laundering case involved the arrest of Mogilevich-linked Russian mobsters in Trump Tower itself.  A Mogilevich-outfit Russian mafia boss, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov (somewhat famous for allegedly rigging figure skating in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah to get Russians gold medals), and his lieutenants Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik were allegedly overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring.  The scheme drew rich participants and was, in part, operated out of the Trump Tower. The whole caper ended up being the subject of the recent Jessica Chastain movie Molly’s Game.  Important for our story, the gambling ring was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine and its ringleaders engaged in some $100 million in money laundering.  In 2009, Trincher purchased a Trump Tower unit just below one owned by Donald Trump himself. In his own apartment, Trincher almost held a fundraiser two years later for future-Trump-ally and bigwig Republican Newt Gingrich.  A mold problem ended up derailing the plans for the fundraiser, with a water leak being detected. Other mobsters in this overall Mogilevich cell also owned Trump properties.  Many of these folks did not escape justice in 2013 raids orchestrated by U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) Preet Bharara, a noted foiler of Kremlin plots but who was later fired by Trump soon after Trump became president.  Tokhtakhounov did manage to get away, though, and was soon after a red-carpet VIP guest at Trump’s very own 2013 Miss Universe Pageant in Moscow. The two men arrived within minutes of each other, and it is certainly possible they interacted there.  Tokhtakhounov is regularly spotted at trendy public places in the Russian capital, easily still evading justice.

How does one make sense of so much scandal?  Just the Trump deals involving Bayrock, Toronto, and Panama alone amounted to some $1.5 billion, and there was a clear pattern with each: money connected one way or another to the Kremlin or the Russian mafia, failure, scandal, lawsuits, an overwhelming stench of money laundering, and the Trump name being removed by Trump backing out or Trump being forced out.  Taken together, it is pretty improbable that so much disaster could surround one person without a greater, deliberate purpose behind such losses, that people would risk so much money without money laundering being the real reason behind these deals.  And those deals certainly match the model of the Manafort, Gates, Firtash, and Mogilevich Manhattan money moves for Yanukovych, the Party of Regions, and Putin that were clearly money laundering, even if a court case has not yet produced a guilty verdict regarding those deals.  These were the big deals he was doing while he was rebuilding himself and using his TV show The Apprentice to build a huge national fanbase

Let us also pause here to note Trump’s direct involvement with two major financial firms—Bear Stearns and FL Group—just before they failed and were the two major catalysts for the worst global economic crises since the Great Depression.  FL Group failed spectacularly in 2008, along with Iceland’s other major banks and funds.  The firm’s failure was a major factor in the collapse of Iceland’s financial sector, a collapse that served as a catalyst for the 2008 global financial crisis and America’s Great Recession.  Furthermore, since FL Group was a stupendously bad performer even by the standards of the 2008 financial crisis, and given its close (direct and/or indirect) 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.  In the case of Bear Stearns, its collapse would be the first big domino on the U.S. side of the global financial crises and the catalyst for the U.S. Great Recession.  The Trump deals were not insignificant and were important factors in both firms’ collapses, so, it would not be without accuracy to say that Donald Trump played an important role in causing the economic crises that erupted in 2008.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article is an excerpt from Brian’s 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 Kindleand Barnes & Noble Nook (preview here). Also be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2019-2020 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Twitter @bfry1981, YouTube, Facebook)  September 26, 2020; UPATE September 21, 2024: BE SURE to check the Rachel Maddow-produced, Bill Corden-of-Cocaine Cowboy-directed From Russia With Lev (trailer here), the MSNBC documentary focusing mainly the exact same events and people I chronicled five years ago, excerpted below!

This is the Epilogue from my eBook published on November 23, 2019.  For the full context in one place, check out that 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), a detailed look at Trump-Russia and how its Ukraine machinations led to Trump’s impeachment (Sept. 27 update: this eBook also goes into detail on Trump’s long history of scandalous, criminal business dealings, bankruptcies, and financial problems that are of increasing interest since the bombshell report on Trump’s taxes was released on 9/27, and this article of mine offers a less complete version of those misdealings). As far as articles, for more info on Trump’s nefarious, criminal business dealings in Panama and how they connect to pro-Russian Ukrainian political force Viktor Medvedchuk; for specific context on now convicted-by-Mueller’s-team felon Paul Manafort’s work on Ukraine on behalf of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s stooge Viktor Yanukovych alongside Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, one of the top partners in Ukraine for years of Russian mafia “godfather” Semion Mogilevich, himself a right-hand of Putin; for how Konstantin Kilimnik was a link between Manafort and the Kremlin; for how Andrii Artemenko fits into all this; and how Rudy Giuliani’s longstanding ties with Mogilevich-connected Sam Kislin are also of interest, as is the history of Kislin’s old partner Tamir Sapir in Trumpworld, especially the infamous Felix Sater-brokered Bayrock deals, see my articles How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe and Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind, which link to some more detailed work of mine on some of these individual subjects (the second article contains information on Trump’s banruptcies and business fiascos relevant to the 9/27 major report on Trump’s taxes).  For more on the inner workings of the Burisma issues in Ukraine involving various Ukrainian prosecutors, including Viktor Shokin and Vitaliy Kasko, and how they do—and do not—relate to the Bidens, see my other piece The Untold Story of the Bidens and Burisma.  You can see all my Trump-Russia coverage here.

The Circus Comes to Ukraine and Blows Everything Up

The Government Accountability Institute should be famous, but it is not.  Founded by none-other than Steve Bannon—former maestro of right-wing-propagandistic site Breitbart, former CEO of Trump’s presidential campaign (something of a replacement for Manafort), former top advisor to President Trump, and current orchestrator of a European pan-national right-wing movement—the Florida group was critical in advancing debunked disinformation on the Clintons during the 2016 election cycle.  Its then-and-current president, Peter Schweizer (also an editor at Breitbart), wrote the notoriously error-riddled Clinton Cash.  One thing he was good at, though, was getting mainstream media—including The New York Times—to feature his work prominently and help to get these false stories mass traction: myth would become reality and some of the main talking points used against Hillary Clinton during the election were first given prominence through Schweizer and his manipulations and continued to be amplified by him and his allies all throughout the election.  It was a concerted, deceitful, coordinated effort from right-wing media using dubious financing that depended on co-opting mainstream media outlets for legitimacy, and it succeeded wildly in its aims of damaging Clinton.  Such tactics actually even mirror Kremlin disinformation campaigns.

Defying belief, Schweizer and his Institute are doing the same thing again—and succeeding—with a newer book, Secret Empires, to target the Bidens with debunked disinformation and even eventually succeeded in 2019 in once again co-opting The New York Times for the same thematic purpose as before, among other outlets. 

Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor now acting as Trump’s personal lawyer, picked up on the new Schweizer false narratives late in 2018 and began engaging relevant Ukrainians in person in New York and Ukraine, including ousted former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, to advance them.  He also enlisted one of Shokin’s successors, Yuriy Lutsenko, in January, when Lutsenko made unsubstantiated incriminating claims about Hunter Biden (it was, interestingly, under Lutsenko’s watch that the aforementioned criminal record of Igor Anopolskiy, involved in the Trump Panama fiasco and apparently financially connected to Medvedchuk’s wife, was purged). 

Lustenko has a reputation for using his power as a personal political weapon and for being an amateur, and proved it for Giuliani, agreeing to work to reopen inquiries into Burisma and to focus on Hunter Biden, which he did in March even though he had earlier cleared the Bidens.  He was already clashing on corruption issues with then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch—who had pushed him to act more against corruption—and sought ways to discredit her with Giuliani, hoping his actions against the Bidens would earn him favor from Giuliani and Trump when he was not getting along with Yovanovitch.  Lutsenko accused her of giving him a list of certain untouchables, implying the Bidens, but later admitted he lied about this.

Yet the “political hit job” on Yovanovitch was successful: she was recalled from her post in May, in part because of the disinformation fed to Trump by Giuliani, right-wing media, and others as well as the complicity of her boss, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (it was this silence and inaction on his part that led to the abrupt resignation of Michael McKinley, one of Pompeo’s senior advisors, who has since testified in detail to investigators).  Also, in what could be an example of an earlier inappropriate quid pro quo with the Trump Administration, Lutsenko in early 2018 froze Ukraine’s investigations into Manafort and others related to the Mueller probe right when Trump Administration was deciding whether to provide Ukraine with advanced anti-tank Javelin missiles that could help check Russian armor (Lutsenko was also responsible for allowing Manafort’s colleague Kilimnik to escape to Russia without being asked questions that would have aided Mueller’s investigation).  Lutsenko would later even talk with Giuliani about the unsubstantiated wild conspiracy theory that Manafort was set up by Clinton supporters.  Lutsenko was fired for his misconduct in September, after which he admitted there was no evidence on which to base investigations against the Bidens and is now facing his own criminal investigation for abusing his power.

Another key Ukrainian Giuliani enlisted in this effort, Kostiantyn Kulyk, was Lutsenko’s deputy.  An opportunistic current prosecutor, he is known for corruption, for targeting his political opponents with investigations, and for ties to a Russian intelligence agent who set up a paramilitary unit of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine’s east to fight the Ukrainian government.  With Lutsenko’s blessing, Kulyuk went all in on Giuliani’s Biden scheme in March, joining in the smearing of U.S. diplomats (including Yovanovitch) and even Democrats by accusing them of covering up for the Bidens, accusations he has not substantiated.  Also unsubstantiated was an apparently fabricated dossier authored by Kulyuk about the Bidens, purporting to describe the corruption of both Joe and Hunter Biden.  Fittingly, Kulyuk will soon be fired, much in the manner of his old boss.

Giuliani even began trying to coordinate strategy with Pompeo, who would be one of the most senior Trump Administration officials to parrot Biden disinformation and conspiracy theories, in essence encouraging a witch hunt.  Fox News began getting in on the action, too, and a prominent figure at The Hill, John Solomon, began intensely advancing debunked false narratives through a series of columns in the spring of 2019, even coordinating with Giuliani and interviewing Lutsenko.  They were not only attacking the Bidens though: they, too, began attacking Amb. Yovanovitch, spreading unsubstantiated claims that Ukraine had tried to help Clinton win in 2016 (sure to grab Trump’s attention) and repeated unsubstantiated, self-serving claims from Shokin about Biden.  On April 25^th, 2019, the very same day Biden officially began his presidential campaign, Trump himself called into the Fox News show of Sean Hannity—who has been predictably trafficking the Biden smears—and told Hannity he wanted to have his Attorney General, Bill Barr, to look into the Bidens.  The following month, The New York Times would have a major story on the “controversy” involving the Bidens.

As to this problematic May, 2019, New York Times piece: it was co-authored by Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel; in 2015, Vogel, writing for Politico, seems to have known how to properly characterize information coming from Schweizer, so it is not sure what changed in 2019.  His co-author Mendel was a Ukrainian freelancer at the time and was controversially hired the month after this article was published as the press secretary for freshly-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky himself, raising serious questions about her background, motives, and conflicts of interest.  The article was a major boost, perhaps even a turning point, in the attention given to the Bidens’ activity in Ukraine.  Earlier, just before Trump’s inauguration and during his Politico days, Vogel was also instrumental in advancing the false Kremlin propaganda that Kilimnik had fed Manafort who, in turn, fed it to Trump that Ukraine interfered in the 2016 election and did so to help Clinton and hurt Trump.

A follow-up piece a week later in May by Vogel for the Times even portrayed Giuliani’s trip to Ukraine as a legitimate fact-finding mission and failed, again, to note the problematic, baseless origins of the claims even though Vogel was familiar with Schweizer.  Just to name one example of the mirror effect, even the BBC had a piece on the Bidens and Ukraine a week-and-a-half after.

It was 2016 all over again, just this time Biden was the target of the coordinated assault, not Hillary Clinton.

A conspiracy of lies had been birthed, raised in an accelerated program, and was now of fighting age, much like a clone trooper from Star Wars.  This clone trooper, like in Star Wars, was not produced randomly but was part of an organized plot pushed by people with nefarious, deceptive interests and operating and funded from the shadows.  And that false narrative of the Bidens is what is existing as reality in the eyes of many millions duped by this concerted right-wing disinformation campaign.  For those who can remember Kerry vs. Bush, this takes what happened with GOP attacks in 2004 on John Kerry—referred to as “swiftboating”—and injects that with steroids, especially in utilizing the official powers of the presidency and Executive Branch in doing so.

Within the context of this fabricated reality, Giuliani engaged in gross antics in Ukraine, to be detailed below in a bit.  Trump himself engaged in pushing this nonsense onto Ukrainian President Zelensky during a July 25^th phone call between the two, freezing aid authorized by Congress to Ukraine before the call and verbally pressuring him during it, both as part of a bid to try to force the new Ukrainian president to play along with the alternate-reality Biden fantasy world (and the “Ukraine was behind U.S. election interference” fiction) just to be able to receive aid for his country as it fought Russian aggression.

Trump’s goofy power play almost worked with the desperate Ukrainian president, but pressure from Congress on Trump to release the aid just two days before Zelensky was about to cave in to Trump’s demands in September salvaged propriety.  Even so, Ukraine’s new president still finds himself in an extremely uncomfortable situation with America even as he tries to defuse tensions in his own country.

For many, this moment was a Rubicon that had been crossed.  The actual U.S. government professionals who had spent years running Ukraine policy or enforcing ethical norms—from the State Department to the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, from the National Security Council to the Office of the Intelligence Community Inspector General—were aghast at what was happening.  And, throughout Trump’s own Executive Branch, they revolted (including Yovanovitch and William Taylor, whom Firtash tried to sweet talk all those years ago), many coming out already to testify to Congress about Giuliani’s misdeeds and other details, with Trump and his minions attacking them in response in ways that amount to clear witness tampering.  And it is that revolt that has been dominating headlines lately, fueling the impeachment inquiry, and increasing support for impeachment like never before in Trump’s presidency.

Some of what has been happening on the ground in Ukraine involves some important details that may have been reported but have not received nearly as much attention as they deserve, nor been made top stories from top outlets, as they should be.  But these details are explosive in the context of everything outlined in this book and bring disparate elements of this narrative together, so are therefore discussed below.

Rather incredibly, Dmitry Firtash is trying to align his defense with claims made by Trump and Giuliani.  Yet, when one realizes that Firtash switched up his defense team in July to include Victoria Toensing and Joseph diGenova—a conservative married couple who are prominent media defenders of Trump (often passionately so on Fox News) and who work closely with Giuliani as business partners—this is hardly surprising.  The duo met with Trump’s Attorney General, William Barr, also in July, to ask him to end the U.S. effort to extradite Firtash and present a case against the charges levied against their client, but Barr chose not to become involved.  It is worth nothing here that Brady Toensing, the son of Victoria Toensing and stepson of diGenova, began working for Barr’s Department Justice as a senior counsel for the Office of Legal Policy the month before his parents started working for Firtash.  Indications are he will recuse himself from at least some areas from which he should recuse himself, but the potential for conflict of interest here should not be forgotten.

Strangely, none other than the Ukrainian prosecutor ousted by pressure from Joe Biden and others pushing Ukraine on corruption, Viktor Shokin, submitted an affidavit on Firtash’s behalf to his legal team, claiming that Biden had had him fired to protect Hunter Biden and had pressured Ukraine’s government not to allow Firtash back into Ukraine in order to limit Firtash’s political influence (this second point is quite believable since Biden was working against corruption in Ukraine).  The idea was to discredit Biden, and Giuliani has made this affidavit a major pillar of his Biden attacks.

Here is where Soviet-born Americans Lev Parnas (from Ukraine) and Igor Fruman (from Belarus), two partners of Giuliani’s working for him to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine, enter quite interestingly into our story.

After their dramatic arrest early last month at Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, DC, trying to use one-way tickets to get out of the U.S. and travel to Vienna, Austria, they were front-page and round-the-clock TV material for a while.  They were charged by federal prosecutors from SDNY for breaking campaign finance law to feed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Republican groups and candidates including a pro-Trump super PAC.  Their indictment mentions that they were funneling money into these campaigns from an unspecified Russian to help gain leverage with certain state and national politicians regarding a recreational marijuana “future business venture” in Nevada and other states.  The indictment also notes that Parnas met with a congressman (former Republican Congressman Pete Sessions of Texas, who had lost to a Democrat in 2018 and is hoping to mount a comeback) to whom money from the scheme had been donated to try to get him to work towards the removal of then-Amb. Yovanovitch from her post, and that this was done at the request of at least one Ukrainian government official.  Sessions would join this effort, and now he has had to respond to federal grand jury subpoenas.

The whole investigation into Parnas and Fruman is part of an ongoing investigation, as Parnas and Fruman were arrested as a matter of necessity because they were leaving the country, not because prosecutors preferred that time for the arrest.  That piece of information and the keeping of several individuals’ identities in the indictment secret indicates that the SDNY prosecutors are holding their cards close to their chest and that more charges can be expected.  And it would hardly be surprising if the unnamed Ukrainian government official(s) were Lutsenko and/or Kulyuk and that this investigation into Parnas and Fruman were actually part the SDNY investigation into Giuliani’s finances and activities in Ukraine and his overall activities involving Parnas and Fruman (incredibly ironic since Giuliani made a name for himself as the SDNY U.S. Attorney), given what will be outlined below.

As part of their efforts in Ukraine as directed by Giuliani (who, it seems more and more, was in turn directed by Trump), Parnas and Fruman connected Giuliani with Shokin late in 2018.  We also just learned that, according to Parnas’ current lawyer (who claims his client has text messages and other documentation backing this up), at or near the same time, Shokin met in Vienna with, of all people, egregious Trump apologist and disinformation-and-conspiracy-theory all-star Devin Nunes, the disgraced leader of the Republican side on the House Intelligence Committee, which has been the recent front line in the impeachment fight (some of his most controversial efforts involved baselessly attacking the legitimate FISA surveillance of Carter Page).  Nunes was seeking to combine his efforts to dig up “information” on the Bidens with Giuliani’s intrigues, along with efforts to boost a discredited, baseless conspiracy theory pushed by the Kremlin that Ukraine, not Russia, was behind the 2016 U.S. election meddling.   Nunes also met with Parnas around this time and directed his staffer, Derek Harvey, to coordinate efforts with Parnas, and they met repeatedly after.  Such meetings were confirmed by Solomon, whose “reporting” was a basis for some of Nunes’s lines of inquiry.  Nunes engaged and directed this activity after the 2018 midterm elections—in which Democrats took the House back from Republicans—but before the new Congress was seated specifically in order to avoid having to reveal details about his trips and meetings to the incoming Democratic leadership.   It is obviously extremely problematic that, in the public impeachment hearings exploring all of this, the highest-ranking Republican present during and helping to lead these public hearings has not disclosed that he was involved in the very efforts that are currently under the impeachment microscope.  It should be noted that, concurrent with Nunes in recent days spewing these lies about Ukraine on the record at these hearings, Putin himself exclaimed “Thank God, no one is accusing us of interfering in the US elections anymore; now they’re accusing Ukraine.”

We also know that in January of 2019, Giuliani asked the State Department to grant Shokin a U.S. visa: State said no, so then Giuliani asked the White House, and an official there also said no after discussing with State.  Giuliani also met Lutsenko with both Parnas and Fruman that same January in a meeting arranged by the pair, who engaged frequently with the then-prosecutor.  In February, the pair tried pressuring Poroshenko in person along with Lutsenko to announce an investigation into the Bidens, just months before Poroshenko lost to Zelensky.  They offered a formal state visit to Washington for Poroshenko in return—something he was actively seeking—and present at this meeting was Lutsenko.  Such a state visit in Washington could have bolstered Poroshenko’s support at home just before an election, but it never came and Poroshenko was crushed by Zelensky just two months later in April (voters had tired of Poroshenko, hamstrung as he was by competing interests and falling short of what he had promised).  In March, Parnas was the guy who orchestrated Lutsenko’s interview with The Hill conducted by Solomon in which Lutsenko disseminated lies he later retracted.  Parnas’s intro to Solomon, in turn, was facilitated by Rep. Pete Sessions, and Parnas and Solomon continued to coordinate after the Lutsenko interview.  Adding to the idea of a coordinated campaign, Solomon is represented legally by Toensing and diGenova; clearly, Solomon’s role is far beyond that of a just a writer.

Just days before Zelensky’s inauguration in May, Parnas and Fruman had a meeting with Serhiy Shefir, a member of Zelensky’s “inner circle;” according to Parnas’s lawyer, in that meeting Parnas laid out a list of demands: the Zelensky Administration must announce an investigation into the Bidens or both Vice President Mike Pence would not attend Zelensky’s inauguration and the U.S. would freeze aid for Ukraine, and these demands were made by Parnas on orders from Giuliani. 

In the end, Trump ordered Pence not to attend Zelensky’s inauguration, a clear a sign of retaliation for non-compliance with these demands.

Fruman and Giuliani deny the above account, at least so far; Fruman is represented by one of Trump’s former White House lawyers, John Dowd, who represented Trump as his top lawyer during the Mueller probe but ultimately resigned over Trump ignoring his advice and what he viewed as Trump’s risky approach to the whole situation.  With this current situation, Dowd tried to get Parnas to claim executive privilege to not have to answer questions, but that clearly did not happen.  Fruman’s other main lawyer is Todd Blanche, who also represents Manafort.

Sherfir, now President Zelensky’s top advisor, confirmed the May meeting but rather coyly said military aid, specifically, was not discussed (giving him a lot of wiggle room), but this statement, like Zelensky’s affirmation that no one pressured him, must be seen in the context of the extraordinary situation in which the Zelensky Administration finds itself.  Obviously, Zelensky is trying as hard as he can to appease and not to alienate Trump and must walk a delicate line with all his public statements relating to America since the brand new politician has been sucked into impeachment proceedings in an election year, so you can expect him to try not to say things to make either Trump and Republicans on the one hand or Democrats on the other hand think he is helping the other side, at least up to the point Trump looks as if he really will withhold aid or do something worse, as has kind of been happening already.  And all this happens while the young Ukrainian leader faces immense overall challenges in Ukraine.

Parnas and Fruman specifically clearly helped facilitate meetings designed to pressure, and to get Giuliani access to, Zelensky and others close to him (and Poroshenko before him) and were therefore very much a part of setting in motion the July phone call between Trump and Zelensky, with the May disputed meeting only the most emphatic example of the duo’s pressure.

And yet, ties get even more incestuous as far as our threads are concerned.  What received less attention was that one of the two associates of Giuliani, Lev Parnas, was working as a translator for Firtash’s legal team, but both Parnas and Fruman had worked for Firtash before “in an unspecified capacity.”  Toensing, diGenova, and Parnas were trying together to dig up dirt on Democrats with ties to Ukraine, involved Solomon in these coordinated efforts, and Parnas has even tried to portray Firtash as a victim.  Federal prosecutors working on Firtash’s case on Chicago for which the U.S. is supposed to extradite him reached out to their counterparts in New York about the relationship of Firtash with Parnas and Fruman.  The Chicago prosecutors had been investigating their ties to Firtash for some time and when the pair was arrested, they were heading to Vienna; Giuliani was supposed to fly there the following day, but canceled after the arrest.  The trips were to coordinate a meeting with Shokin to prep him for an interview he would do with Sean Hannity from Vienna.  But they could also easily have been trying to engage Firtash.  Either way, it is clear that the two camps of Firtash/pro-Russian Ukrainians and Team Giuliani/Trump were now coordinating, uniting on messaging and strategy.  Giuliani has even admitted to personally looking into Firtash as a resource, and clearly, Russian media along with America’s right-wing media are all too happy to further these narratives and provide assists. 

Firtash’s right-wing lawyers see any way to discredit Biden as corrupt and as going after both Shokin and Firtash for personal political reasons as the best way to help their client other than getting charges dropped.  Firtash even paid diGenova and Toensing $1 million to find incriminating information on Biden.  In this context, if Shokin (rewriting history, Trump is now saying that Shokin was “very good” and that it was “unfair” to fire him) and Firtash are remade into the good guys, then Biden must the bad guy and Trump benefits.

Reforms Biden pushed for intensely on corruption and for the gas sector may have cost Firtash up to $400 million a year, and he feels a rage towards Biden, calling him an “overlord” who wielded inappropriate and “enormous” influence on the Ukrainian government after Yanukovych’s ouster.  Lacking self-awareness, Firtash and his team seem not to have considered that such assertions, if anything, are a vindication of Biden’s efforts to fight corruption in Ukraine.  But maybe they are instead playing to an audience of one, hoping like so many others that winning over Trump is enough and will result in interference on his part that might save Firtash from extradition.  It seems Biden is to Firtash what Hillary Clinton was to Putin: his main American enemy, at least in his mind. 

Parnas and Fruman were also concurrently trying to pursue a change at the top of Naftogaz along with replacing Yovanovitch, with both moves designed to help them personally sell gas to Naftogaz and to benefit Firtash.  They worked with and received funding from Firtash towards this effort, advocating for the wiping out of the exiled gas tycoon’s debts with Naftogaz.  The current CEO of Naftogaz, Andriy Kobolev, is seen by Ukrainians and Westerners as a star of Ukraine’s anti-corruption efforts and had been tough on Firtash, accusing Firtash of illegally keeping some $2 billion since 2017 by not making required payments to Ukrainian state-owned companies.  Since Yovanovitch was supporting Kobolev, Parnas and Fruman thought getting rid of her would help them deal with Kobolev more easily.

Despite Parnas and Fruman being photographed repeatedly with Trump and working closely with Giuliani on behalf of Trump, Trump denies knowing either of them.  This has apparently hurt the feelings of Parnas, who now seems to be cooperating with investigators.

A third associate of Giuliani’s we should well remember: Ukrainian-born Sam Kislin, whom U.S. authorities believe is an important figure in the Mogilevich Russian mafia outfit and who did business with Trump both with Tamir Sapir—strongly linked to Sater’s Bayrock—and by selling a Trump condo to a future member of Ukraine’s Party of Regions.  Kislin also supported Giuliani politically by raising several million in fundraising for him and served on important New York City bodies at the behest of Giuliani while he was mayor.  Giuliani had denied in 1999 knowing that the U.S. government considered Kislin a serious Russian mafia member or associate, but that claim is impossible for him to maintain in recent years, when he engaged Kislin to help in these Ukraine shenanigans. 

See, Kislin, too, is neck-deep in the current Ukraine drama.  In January 2018, Kislin tried to push then Amb. Yovanovitch to assist in helping to release millions in funds in a Cyprus shell company of which he was the current owner.  That company held part of some $1.5 billion Yanukovych had criminally looted from Ukraine.  His effort to unfreeze the funds had, strangely, earlier been blocked by Lutsenko, of whom Kislin alleged improper conduct.  This mirrors a similar effort from another Ukrainian oligarch with another Cyprus-based shell company holding some of Yanukovych’s ill-gotten fortune, an oligarch named Pavel Fuks (or Fuchs) who was also tied to Giuliani and one of several attempts to make a Trump Tower happen in Moscow.  Fuks, who was introduced to Trump by Tamir Sapir, was also more recently involved in helping Giuliani go after the Bidens.  The shell companies owned by Kislin and Fuks held $20 million and $160 million, respectively, primarily in government bonds Ukrainian authorities now say were issued illegally by Yanukovych’s government.  Kislin had purchased his company, Opalcore Limited, in November, 2016, the very month Donald Trump was elected president.  In what seems to be a shady scheme to take money that belongs to the Ukrainian people, Kislin claims he did not know that the assets were frozen when he bought Opalcoare and alleged procedural malpractice by Ukrainian government officials during the freezing process, hoping that claim would lead to them being unfrozen and requesting Yovanovitch get involved to this end.

But Kislin is also currently advising Giuliani on Ukraine, is meeting with Ukrainian government officials, and seems to even have been an informal emissary for Trump there on the Biden smear campaign while also agitating against Poroshenko as the former president, too, is under investigation there.  Kislin is now apparently also “good friends” with Andrii Artemenko (to quote Artemekno himself), with the two coordinating and exchanging information on some of these efforts.  Somehow, Artemenko is now living in Washington, DC, and is a regular guest on Kremlin-run television, offering negative takes on Ukraine’s current leaders and now also pushing for a probe into Hunter Biden.  It was reported in October that Kislin was in communication with the House investigators, who are interested in his Ukraine activity in relation to Giuliani’s efforts.

Amid all of this context of clear, overt political pressure on Ukraine from the Trump Administration, in the middle of October, Ukraine’s new prosecutor general announced that he was auditing one previous case concerning Burisma’s owner, Zlochevsky, and that Hunter Biden could be fair game even though neither Burisma nor Hunter were specific points of focus, noting that this audit was a part of a general audit of fifteen high-profile cases handled by the previous administration.  The shady General Prosecutor’s Office is in the midst of a massive overhaul the Zelensky Administration hopes will fix the corruption that made it untrustworthy in the eyes of Ukrainians and Westerners alike, taking away its investigative powers and shifting them to other departments.  Kasko has been restored and promoted to the number-two spot in the office, and the new top prosecutor, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, has a history of working for transparency.  Different departments are expected to take up several cases involving Manafort, but there is worry that much of the information on them and other cases will be lost in the transition.  Perhaps this is in part a shrewd move to stall any findings during a turbulent time in American politics that Ukraine’s new president fears could provoke serious retaliation from Trump should either bad things come out about Manafort or the Burisma probe yields no dirt, likely outcomes given what is known that could leave the country exposed to the rage of President Trump.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article is an excerpt from Brian’s 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). Also be sure to check out Brian’s new podcast!

© 2019-2024 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

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By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) January 5, 2020

Here is the unedited version of an article published today by Al Bawaba where major edits drastically changing the focus of the piece were made without consultation or my approval. The editorial line felt discussing Trump’s unfitness for office and the Cuban Missile Crisis were “asides” that were “highly subjective” (Game of Thrones? Maybe, but the points are well-accented by that reference, too), but since such considerations are objectively important and specifically central to this article I felt the need to publish in full here.

“The truest cause (alêthestatê prophasis) I consider to be the one that was least evident in public discussion (logos). I believe that the Athenians, because they had grown in power and terrified the Spartans, made war inevitable (anankasai).” Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.23

WASHINGTON—The past week has been a week of incredibly dramatic and historic escalations between Iran and the U.S. in the Middle East—specifically in Iraq—that have put both countries dramatically closer to war than at any time in years, possibly decades.

Climate of Escalation in an Increasingly Unstable Arena

After some relatively banal but escalating tit-for-tat, first came what were dramatic attacks against the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq, involving pro-Iranian militias and almost certainly orchestrated by Iran.  This was a very bold move on the part of Iran, to say the least.  They may or may not have been inspired in part by Trump being under siege from the U.S. House of Representatives and its impeachment of him, and with Trump, we know domestic concerns are rarely far from his foreign policy moves (hell, that’s exactly why Trump has been impeached).

Just as dramatic an escalation, perhaps even more so, was American President Donald Trump’s ordering a strike to kill one of Iran’s top generals and almost certainly a man involved in orchestrating the attacks against the U.S. Embassy: Major-General Qassem Soleimani, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’s Quds Force and the mastermind behind Iran’s military adventures abroad, especially in Iraq and Syria.  Over many years, he at times targeted American military personnel (killing hundreds and injuring thousands), other times he targeted ISIS.

Make no mistake about it: not only is the entire region from Yemen and Saudi Arabia through Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, Iran, and Afghanistan all ripe like tinder before a conflagration, that conflagration may have already started and there may be little to no chance of putting it out before it spreads and consumes much.  In fact, it is hard to see how things do not erupt.

Before these latest developments, things were already terrible in the region:

• Yemen was a horror-show of a mess.
• Israel’s political leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is facing an existential domestic politics crisis even as escalation between Israeli forces on one side and Iran and its proxies on the other had been occurring all throughout 2019; throughout the same period, Palestinian areas simmered with opposition to the status quo of Israel’s illegal occupation and settlement expansion in the West Bank along with the siege of Gaza.
• Lebanon is facing historic protests and frustration with its typically paralyzed government, of which Hezbollah—Iran’s primary proxy militia—is a part.
• Syria is still dealing with its long, brutal civil war, now seeming to wind down even as new intrigue has developed with a massive Turkish incursion and a dramatic, sudden, irresponsible partial U.S. withdrawal that betrayed key Kurdish allies who had been fighting ISIS, a withdrawal that may now allow a resurgence of ISIS.
• Iraq is reeling from major unrest and frustration from its own people directed at the government, forcing the recent resignation of its prime minister; key issues were corruption and many Iraqis feeling like their leaders were selling them out to Iran, and it seems Iranian-backed forces were behind much of the killing of hundreds of protesters.
• Iran has itself been in the midst of its largest violent protests since the Islamic Revolution of 1979; the current round has seen some 1,500 people killed.  Iran is also enriching Uranium at high levels again since the collapse of the Obama Administration’s nuclear deal, a collapse irrationally instigated by the Trump Administration.
• In Afghanistan, the Taliban is resurgent and Trump has signaled he wants out of Afghanistan as major reporting from The Washington Post suggests U.S. officials for years may have been less than forthcoming about the level of progress being made there.

A Horrible Game of Chicken

In the context of the above Iraq situation, Iran was clearly hoping to drum up anti-American sentiment to counter anti-Iranian sentiment that had been boiling over.  Whatever Iranian leaders thought America might do in response, they probably figured that a senior government official like Soleimani was off limits; they are probably as surprised as anyone else.

Soleimani has been pretty much the only Iranian military official you would see with any regularity in news reports: in other words, Iran has no replacement of his stature, ability, and experience, and his death is a devastating blow to Iran’s senior leadership and its political, intelligence, and military objectives as Soleimani was perhaps the most effective operator in the Middle East.

We are in that Great Events of History realm where things tend to take on momentum and will of their own, where managing what happens becomes more difficult and far messier.  During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, we had serious minds with U.S. President John F. Kennedy and Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev exercising leadership and guiding events, each acting against pressure for further escalation from their own hardliners, a situation that still nearly plunged the world into nuclear war.  Before the dust on this current crisis settles, we must be prepared to be forced to watch as helpless bystanders watching powerful people make bad decision after bad decision (even a good decision taken in a vacuum often becomes a bad one).

The current U.S. Commander in Chief is facing his greatest test by far right now, and there is little in his acts as president prior to now that should reassure anyone in this moment: his public statements and the corroborated reporting that comes from sources within his own Administration (many of whom have parted ways with that Administration) speak for themselves and demolish the idea that the perception of the President of the United States as unfit for office has anything to do with partisanship.  The man whom his own top chosen advisors have repeatedly called him unfit for office is now in charge of managing a dangerous crisis he knows little about that may already be a war.

At the same time, the Iranian leadership has shown its willingness to gamble irresponsibly and increasingly so, behavior the nuclear deal Trump had abandoned was designed to mitigate.  After scrapping the deal, Trump and his Administration only offered threats to Iran, and Iran responded with its own increasing hostility, increasing its aggressiveness in Yemen and against U.S. allies Israel and Saudi Arabia (who knows where we would be if there had been sustained, robust engagement after that deal had been implemented, not to say necessarily crises would have been avoided, but better to try to avoid them than instigate them).

Thus, both American and Iranian leadership have shown predilections that shun de-escalation and opt for escalation and surprise.  But in the geopolitical situation just described, surprise is the last thing those hoping for peace and stability should want, and such sudden, dramatic escalations ring of the series of unfortunate events that escalated into World War I.  A year ago, I wrote for West Point’s Modern War Institute of the urgent lessons of WWI precisely with scenarios like our current one in mind, and I fear that the lessons I noted as urgent are going unheeded by leadership on both sides of this unfolding struggle.

Clear Acts, Unclear Consequences

The collateral damage will be severe and not geographically contained.

Like never before, Iraq is about to become (even more so) a battlefield between the U.S. and Iran, threatening to undermine everything that the U.S. has tried to build there since 2003.  There are places in Iraq where U.S. troops are vulnerable, and this is also true in the few places where U.S. troops remain in Syria.

Let us also not forget that Russia and Iran are allies, even if uneasy ones: Soleimani had briefed Russia’s leadership in Moscow before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to militarily intervene in Syria, the Iranian becoming an important factor in convincing the Russians to intervene and in planning their military support of the Assad regime, a close ally of both Iran and Russia; Soleimani even met personally with Putin and continued to coordinate with Russian military leaders after Russian forces began fighting in Syria.  Those Russian military forces are deployed throughout Syria, sometimes between spots where Iranian and Iranian-supported forces may try to take on U.S. forces and their remaining allies.  Russia—which is itself engaged in clearly hostile actions against the United States—could accidentally and/or deliberately be drawn into this fight explicitly and/or covertly, adding yet another perilous dimension to all this.

If this is good news for anyone, it’s ISIS.  The main fighters against ISIS were the U.S., the Kurds, and Iran.  The U.S. and Iran will now focus their attention on each other, and Trump’s sad withdrawal from northern Syria means the Kurds are reeling and trying to defend themselves from the Turks now more than ISIS.  The terrorist group will most certainly exploit this situation to further its comeback, a dimension that only makes this mess even messier.

Consider, too, that U.S., Israeli, Lebanese, Iraqi, and Iranian leaders are all facing domestic political crises even (mostly) without war within their borders, and that, especially in the cases of President Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a conflict with Iran would be desirable politically as each are facing concerted threats to remove them from office through extraelectoral means and they would be eager to rally their publics to focus on external threats, diverting attention from their own misconduct.

Iran, likewise, would love to quell its domestic unrest by focusing on a conflict with the U.S.

Conversely, the hapless leaders of Lebanon and Iraq are at this moment terrified of their countries being torn asunder as proxy battlegrounds and will very much be at the mercy of the decisions of Washington and Tehran.  Conflicts in Yemen and Afghanistan (the latter on Iran’s border and with plenty of vulnerable U.S. troops) would also see further escalation and intervention as Iran and the U.S. will seek to harm each other wherever they can, and we have not even gotten to the global reach of Hezbollah.

After such a move as the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, it would be politically impossible for Iran not to respond massively.  And it will be politically impossible for the U.S. to not respond to that.  I have written of the general pressures of the anarchic interstate system before, and we have here a moment where pressure classically reduces the options of the belligerents.  We really may be in a Thucydides trap, where war is almost inevitable and takes on a mind and momentum of its own, a reference to the ancient Greek historian Thucydides’s opinion that the fear of one power (Sparta) concerning the rise in power of another (Athens) made war inevitable (1.23).

Another piece I wrote for the Modern War Institute at West Point looked at the chaos of the final season of Game of Thrones as instructive for reality, and we are certainly staring at chaos now even as we help to unleash it.  The question is, will leaders look at chaos as a “ladder,” as Lord “Littlefinger” Petyr Baelish did, or as something to be avoided, “a gaping pit,” as Lord Varys did?  The Varyses seem few and far between when it comes to those leaders driving current events.

A Gaping Pit

One would hope leaders on both sides are considering all these things, and have plans for how to deal with these multiple varied flashpoints.  History has shown that such hope is often misplaced, that the cooler heads of the Cuban Missile Crisis are more the exception than the norm.  The above axes I have mentioned are by no means all the fronts on which a regional conflict could quickly become a more widespread war and even a global one, one which may even involve Russia, Israel, Turkey, multiple terrorist groups, and crucial oil shipping routes, with leaders mixing domestic politics and foreign policy in ways not for the better of either.  From the 2020 election to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to the security of Jordan and a further inflaming of the Sunni-Shiite conflict, there are a number of fronts beyond the direct confrontation between the U.S. and Iran that could be consumed by the chaos unfolding before our very eyes, “swallowed” by its “gaping pit.”

Actions in the next days, weeks, and months could set the board for the next century, much in the way World War I did and, in many ways, set the map for many of the preexisting conflicts into which this American-Iranian conflict will play and which will play into it.  Every step, every act, every missile right now carries a weight that, if not properly respected (and it seems clear it will not be) risks throwing not just the Middle East, but the world into chaos, bloodshed, displacement, and recession that will make most recent conflicts seem quaint by comparison.

For all the talk of how the U.S. might fall into a Thucydides trap with  China, here it is in one now, with Iran.  Nothing was inevitable about coming to this point, but now that we are here, some disturbing events are now inevitable.  This is, of course, the most likely outcome from the beginning since the Trump Administration abandoned the nuclear deal that was stemming most if not all (but perhaps even all) of the current dynamics leading to this juncture.  One would hope a “lesson” to not casually abandon logical diplomacy would emerge, but then perhaps the bar is so low as to be meaningless?

In Trump, we have a brutal reminder about how history can be dangerously ignored at will to the peril of all.  He will not read this article, nor any of the countless others calling for reflection on the sheer weightiness of this moment.  Will we read thoughtful pieces?  Will our voting public?  Iran will now inevitably be front-and-center in the 2020 election, forcing voters to at least partly realize they are not just voting on Trump, but on the kind of U.S. foreign policy they want, the kind of world they want to help create.  How any of this turns out remains to be seen, but simply hoping for cooler heads to prevail, as was the case with the brink of nuclear war in 1962, seems today naïve at best and irresponsible at worst, with our current cast of characters misstepping from Mar-a-Lago to Persia and altogether too many other locations in a conflict that will refuse to be contained.

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

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981 and on his news website, Real Context News.  He also just recently authored A Song of Gas and Politics: How Ukraine Is at the Center of Trump-Russia.

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. 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) December 18, 2019; also see Brian’s related article on the diabolical efforts by right-wing media, Trumpworld, and the Kremlin to distort the truth and spin unfounded speculation as fact in their quest to destroy Hunter and Joe Biden, the latter whom they feared for good reason: The Nexus of American Right-Wing and Kremlin Disinformation Exposes Trump-Russia’s Mechanics, also excerpted and adapted from his eBook A Song of Gas and Politics, about how the Kremlin and right-wing media unite to spread disinformation on the Bidens and Ukraine

This article has been adapted from Brian’s November 23, 2019 eBook, details of which are given at the end of this article.

CAMBRIDGE—Today, as Donald Trump becomes the third president in U.S. history to be impeached by the House of Representatives and only the second in the modern era, Republicans will try hard—very hard—to make proceedings that should be about the conduct of the sitting president of the United States about unfounded, unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the Bidens and Burisma instead via gaslighting, a style of disinformation long-favored by Russia and now, increasingly, Republicans and Trump.

A good starting point to begin this exploration is by demolishing that which should not even discussed by respectable outlets.  Apart from the media not even attempting to convey the larger picture of the whole Trump-Russia saga, of which the Ukrainian issues driving impeachment are just a part, another gross media misfire is the “coverage” of how Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, is “involved” in this new phase of the Trump-Russia überascandal… except there is no evidence he is involved, none at all of this conspiracy theory pushed by President Donald Trump and his political allies, as any of multiple respectable fact-checks will show (no need to repeat their fine work here); Hunter Biden’s “involvement” rests on two paper mâché pillars: Republican bonfires of lies and the media pouring gasoline onto these fires.

To be clear, this is classic Kremlin-style disinformation, especially the propagandistic, perhaps libelous lie that Hunter Biden warrants some sort of criminal probe because of wholly unsubstantiated allegations of “corruption.”  Hunter Biden is no Eric Trump; while he has had some problems and his life has not been as soaring as that of Beau Biden—the close brother of Hunter and beloved son of Joe stolen before his time by cancer in 2015—Hunter did manage to pay his own way through Georgetown—even working odd jobs— and would eventually graduate from Yale Law School.  Hunter’s perch on the board of Burisma—a Ukrainian gas/energy company—reeks of the standard favoritism shown scions of elites, a banal favoritism devoured almost accidentally like a minnow by the speeding great white shark that is the over-the-top corruption of the mafia-like Trump clan, whose members give the impression that they deliberately broadcast their misdeeds, as if to do so is a boast along the lines of a lion roaring that wants everyone to know it can get away with breaking the rules.

Now, for the actual history.

In an election held just months after President Viktor Yanukovych—Russian president Vladimir Putin’s stooge-in-chief in Ukraine—fled in 2014 during the (Euro)Maidan Revolution, the pro-Western chocolate oligarch Petro Poroshenko was elected Ukraine’s president.  Even with an annexation in Crimea and war in the east, corruption was obviously a central issue for the new president, and it would need to be combatted effectively in order for Western companies to feel comfortable being more engaged, and for the EU to integrate more, with Ukraine.

As part of the Western effort to engage and push Ukraine on reform and especially corruption and as the point-person on all things Ukrainian for the Obama Administration, then-U.S. Vice President Joe Biden in December, 2015, made his fourth personal visit to Kiev since the (Euro)Maidan revolution.  Reform on corruption had stalled and Biden called Ukraine’s leaders out on this in an impassioned address (highlights and full speech) to the parliament, telling them they were not doing nearly enough on corruption and that the time to act was now.  Corruption is specifically how Russian President Putin plays his game in Ukraine, while fighting it is what has been advancing U.S. interests there. 

Of particular target for Ukrainians and Westerners desiring reform—including Biden—was the prosecutor general’s office, especially Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.

Shokin was a close, longtime ally of Poroshenko, and Poroshenko needed all the help he could get, having come to power in a deeply divided country torn apart by the Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea region and civil war in the country’s east, forcing him to engage in a delicate balancing act.  The deep divisions in Ukraine were hamstringing reform efforts, and Shokin was seen as a person who could balance different regional interests and avoid inflaming tensions, but the cost was his and his office’s blatant, total inaction on justice for abuses of both the previous and current governments: his energy was simply not there in fighting corruption in general.  The relatives of the protesters killed by the ousted Yanukovych’s security forces were especially vocal in their outrage at the inaction, and while Shokin was not terrible relative to others previously in his position, at that time, with the world watching, it seemed Ukraine really did need a crusader in that post.

But Biden’s message was complicated because, since April 2014, his son Hunter Biden had been on the board of Burisma, Ukraine’s largest private energy company.  There is zero credible evidence produced by anyone that has shown Hunter Biden acted or intended to act in any way that was inappropriate while on Burisma’s board, let alone illegal, nor that he tried to engage his vice-president-father to influence U.S. policy in any way so as to benefit himself or Burisma.  And the Burisma investigations that became dormant under Shokin had only involved activity that had occurred before Biden’s son was ever even on Burisma’s board.  But Burisma was owned by Yanukovych’s former natural resources minister, Mykola Zlochevsky, concurrently while he was in Yanukovych’s government, presenting a clear conflict of interest during his ministry tenure. 

Yet it was not clear to Ukraine’s people as his ownership was a secret kept hidden by secret Cyprus bank accounts.  It was at a conference at the end of April, 2014, focused on efforts to track down money Yanukovych and his circle had fleeced from Ukraine, when the UK’s Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it had obtained a court order to freeze some $23 million in these accounts of Zlochevsky’s.  Ukraine’s Deputy Prosecutor General with an excellent record on fighting corruption, Vitaliy Kasko, pushed hard for his office to respond to British investigators’ requests for information on Zlochevsky, Burisma, and the $23 million, but to no avail: Shokin’s office stonewalled the most important requests and covered up for Zlochevsky, the case falling apart over time, with a British judge ruling in early 2015 that the SFO did not have the evidence it needed and unfreezing Zlochevsky’s assets.  And while these legal proceedings were unfolding, Joe Biden’s son was on Burisma’s board.

Yet Joe Biden’s message about corruption in Ukraine was still heard and he was not speaking alone: Shokin’s holding his position was holding up billions of dollars in EU and IMF aid, and Biden represented the will of the United States Government (including prominent Republican senators), the EU, the IMF, Kiev Mayor and former star boxer Vitali Klitschko, Ukrainian reform activists, and the Ukrainian people (polling had his support at a dismal 3.5%) who were all calling for this Prosecutor General Shokin to be removed from power.  Kasko even resigned in protest at Shokin’s and the office’s overall gross inaction two months later in March, 2016. The following month and three months after Biden’s visit, Shokin was finally removed from power.

Sure, Hunter being on Burisma’s board did not look good, but appearances can be deceiving.  For one thing, under Hunter’s watch, in 2016 and 2017, Burisma made at least two payments totaling at least $7 million in back taxes to address investigations into tax evasion, and all investigations into Burisma were closed, though, admittedly, some of the circumstances seem murky.  Furthermore, once the these investigations were closed, Burisma began formally cooperating with The Atlantic Council, a NATO-affiliated think tank that promotes democratic values and cooperation between democracies. Perhaps (far?) more should have been done (in principle?), but over $7 million in back taxes is a lot more than the zero that had been obtained under Shokin, and that money was obtained after a far more aggressive investigative stance than existed previously, even if such efforts could have been more vigorous.  To Joe Biden’s credit, asking for a prosecutor that would look into corruption, including into Burisma, could actually hurt the company that was paying his son by having a serious prosecutor who would re-open the Burisma cases, which is what happened after Shokin was removed.  Much the opposite of future-U.S. President Donald Trump with himself and his family, then, Joe Biden put his and his son’s interests aside and did his job as vice president by acting in the interests of the United States and its friend Ukraine and countering the interests of a nemesis in Russia that was acting counter to U.S. interests.

In these years, as has been mentioned before, Poroshenko’s government was only able to make progress by balancing Ukraine’s different political factions, with his allies’ positions in the Ukrainian parliament quite precarious, and the key takeaway here is that, both after Vice President Biden’s and Hunter Biden’s involvement, in the case of Burisma, Ukraine’s government and the company still cooperated and made progress on corruption and accountability.  In the end, while we do not know to what degree if any Hunter Biden was specifically involved the Atlantic Council move, as the efforts of Republicans to paint Hunter Biden negatively rely entirely on very weak circumstantial associations, the key here is that the only circumstantial evidence we do have shows that the situation with corruption got better, not worse, after Hunter Biden joined the board of Burisma and after Joe Biden’s request to remove Shokin was honored.

Another obvious reality is that Trump, Republicans, the Russians, their agents, and Shokin himself have lied, engaging in a chaotic assault on reality by subscribing to not the obvious reality but its opposite: not that Biden had put his son’s position at risk to push for a prosecutor general in Ukraine that would actually tackle corruption, but the lie that Shokin was actively looking into Burisma and that Biden had him removed to protect his son and Burisma’s corruption.  That lie—we already established it was completely unsupported by any substantive evidence, and Shokin can certainly not be thought of as credible—has become the mantra in a Kremlin-style disinformation campaign of the Republican party, Trump, his White House, Giuliani and his associates, and Shokin himself, along with the Kremlin and its media arms joined with right-wing American media, much to their discredit and disgrace.  The even bigger disgrace is the impression of false equivalence put out by all too many of the more respectable outlets.

The favoritism shown Hunter Biden is far from rare and he is far from the poster-child of nepotism, but there is a place for a conversation about his preferential treatment.  Yet that place is not the 2020 election cycle, since the actions of the father—a different person and regarding whom zero evidence exists he did anything other than put aside thoughts of his son’s job with Burisma when engaging in Ukraine policy as a representative of the United States Government advancing the interests of the United States and its ally Ukraine—are not the actions of the son and since the Trump family, whom Biden hopes to oust from the White House in November 2020, are in a league of their own crassness in American national-level politics.  The counternarrative pushed by Trump, Giuliani, their associates in the U.S. and Ukraine and by extremist Kremlin and American media fly in the face of clear reality, and that their counternarrative at all even has a major place in the public discussion is already a defeat.  And with more and more of an unholy alliance between Kremlin media, American right-wing media, and even media in other countries, this will only get worse.

In the interest of full disclosure, Brian interned for Joe Biden from September-December, 2006.

This article has been adapted from Brian’s new 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

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

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. 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!

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) December 10, 2019; see Brian’s related Dec. 24, 2020 article: The History of Russia’s Cyberwarfare Against NATO Shows It Is Time to Add to NATO’s Article 5 and June 7, 2021 article: Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare

WASHINGTON & ARLINGTON —  U.S. “engagement” with Russia needs to shift dramatically to acknowledge obvious reality: Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin is actively hostile to the United States and constantly seeking to undermine its interests and those of our allies and Western democracy in general.  While open military conflict is obviously the wrong approach, far short of such action, America must meet Russia’s state of hostility with hostility, countering Russian moves to undermine America with our own forceful undermining of Putin’s power and the Kremlin’s reach and credibility.

Russia is not our friend and does not act in good faith.  Pretending otherwise gives the U.S. no advantages.  From Syria to Ukraine, from arms control to our own election security, treating Russia as a serious partner willing to play ball has only led to frustration, destabilization, death, and humiliation.  To make matters worse, the current extraconstitutional U.S. presidency, in particular Donald Trump’s White House, is clearly compromised by the Kremlin to the degree that, unwittingly or not, Donald Trump is acting in the Kremlin’s interests and is undermining American interests, despite the best efforts of his own political appointees, career intelligence officials, diplomats, bureaucrats, and other “adults-in-the-room.”  Furthermore, the Republican Party as a whole has been coopted to a degree by Russia, too, with an unprecedented amount of Russian money going to fund and promote Republicans and Republican-affiliated organizations like the NRA and with Republican leadership and rank-and-file all too happy both to turn a blind eye to election security (since doing so benefits them) and to adopt Kremlin talking points and tactics.

In the entire history of Russo-American relations, never has the U.S. been at such an overall disadvantage, let alone a major disadvantage, as it is now, but with Russia’s own Agent Orange in the Oval Office, it is what it is.  The question, now, from our compromised position, is: what do we do to fix it and deal with Russia effectively?

We can play hardball, with or without President Trump. Simply put, Russia—Putin’s Kremlin specifically—has greatly benefitted from its hostile posture towards the United States with minimal cost in return.  It will continue to do so until it becomes more harmful than beneficial, and for this to be understood, Russia must experience harm in a way that sinks deep and puts fear back into calculus of the Kremlin, as was the case during the Cold War.

We know that Russia has been owning us as far as cyberwarfare.  We, too, can hack secrets of prominent Russian politicians and release them through third-parties like the Russians did with WikiLeaks in 2015-2016.  We can impose severe penalties on platforms like Facebook and Twitter for disseminating what is clear Kremlin propaganda online.  We can also ban RT and Sputnik in the U.S.  The U.S. must also set up its own media arms like RT and Sputnik to be broadcast aggressively and to offer free VPN services for native Russian speakers and readers that will allow them to bypass any censorship the Kremlin can muster against them.

The United States, not Russia, is the world’s largest natural gas producer.  If the Kremlin wants to play hardball with its gas assets, so can the U.S., and more so.  Russia’s state-run Gazprom often sells at a loss to further the Kremlin’s geopolitical aims; the U.S. government, in turn, can buy up stocks of natural gas from its own private sector and then sell at far lower rates than Gazprom to Europe even as it sanctions Gazprom for any of an array of offenses the company has committed over the years.

Russia has supported secessionist movements to harm the West, from Brexit and Scotland to Catalonia and Donetsk.  The Russian Federation is rife with minorities with centuries of grievances against Russia whose pots can also be stirred by propaganda.  And where Russia has aggressively countered Western influence in places like Moldova and the Central African Republic, the U.S. can offer even more economic aid in exchange for alignment with the U.S. and democracy.

We can offer far more military support to Ukraine and engage in deniable special operations missions.  Russia’s one aircraft carrier, the aging Admiral Kuznetsov, might meet with an unfortunate accident next time it ventures far from home…

Perhaps most effectively, we can go after Putin’s and his henchmen’s money.

From the internet to gas, we can outplay Russia with the strengths it has used against us.  Most actions can be undertaken by Congress even without the president.  The time to act is now.

See Brian’s see Brian’s related Dec. 24, 2020 article: The History of Russia’s Cyberwarfare Against NATO Shows It Is Time to Add to NATO’s Article 5, June 7, 2021 article: Already in a Cyberwar with Russia, NATO Must Expand Article 5 to Include Cyberwarfare, and e-Book, 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

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcome

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer, academic, and consultant from the New York City area. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

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. 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 by Hill Reporter August 1, 2018

(Russian/Русский перевод) By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), March 6, 2019

See related article: Cohen’s Shady Family Business Dealings’ Unexplored Links to Key Trump-Russia Figures Demand Scrutiny

AMMAN — To many people following the Trump-Russia investigation for the start, it might be surprising that Michael Cohen, a longtime Trump “lawyer” and soldier, and Paul Manafort, a longtime Republican operative, political wizard for a rogue’s gallery of dictators over decades, and Campaign Chairman for Trump’s campaign during arguably the most crucial stretch of 2016, would become two of the most significant current centers of gravity in the Trump-Russia investigations.

But to those who have been paying close attention, this is not surprising at all (I’ve been writing about Manafort for over two years and Cohen for over a year).  And their specific work that raises significant concerns about Kremlin attempts to co-opt Trump and people close to him over the years overlaps in meaningful ways, an overlap that has generally been overlooked, but that merits a closer inspection.

Currently, Cohen is the subject of “many” inquiries that have been ongoing for months, and it seemed as though he could have been arrested at any moment. Now, Cohen seems both to have turned on Trump and to be cooperating with authorities (rather enthusiastically, it seems, with Team Cohen releasing a profoundly relevant and incriminating conversation of a private conversation with Trump and more potential tapes on the way). Cohen’s apparent change of heart occurred after he started feeling as if Trump betrayed him and left him out to dry, taking his loyalty for granted.

Meanwhile, Manafort is, yet again, being further investigated and is locked up in jail because of his attempts to obstruct justice and tamper with witnesses with the assistance of his old long-time colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik, U.S. officials, including Special Counsel Robert Mueller, assert was (and may still be) a Russian military intelligence operative, and is now starting what looks to be a grueling trial in federal court in Virginia, with another trial set to begin in Washington in September.

But one must go back decades to correctly understand why both Cohen and Manafort are so central to the Trump-Russia probe.  And no, this is not about the surprisingly and impressively graceful and tenacious pornstar Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels), who, if anything, has received a disproportionate amount of coverage that has drowned out some of the deeper, more complex aspects of the Trump-Russia scandal.

*****

In the 1980s, Donald Trump bought some 200 televisions for one of his hotels from an electronics store run by Semyon “Sam” Kislin and Tamir Sapir, immigrants from the then-Soviet Republics of Ukraine and Georgia, respectively.  Their store was a known hot-spot for senior government officials, spies, and politicians all from the Soviet Union.

Sapir may have (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). Rumors swirled around the sources of his extremely unlikely and massive wealth.  One of his primary business partners pled guilty to longtime scams with the Gambino Crime family.

As for Sapir’s partner, as I noted in more detail previously, Kislin was a longtime ally of Rudolph Giuliani: a prolific repeat donor to the future-Trump-ally’s mayoral campaigns, with Giuliani as mayor even appointing Kislin to his economic council where he served until Giuliani’s final year as mayor. Kislin would also later serve on another of the city’s economic advisory groups.  By at least the mid-1990s, U.S. authorities believed Kislin had helped launder millions for the Russian mafia, had helped bring in a suspected hired assassin to America, and specifically had been linked by the FBI to Vyacheslav Ivankov’s Russian mob crew based in Brighton Beach as a “member or associate.”

Ivankov—one of the Russian mafia’s top men in America—lived in 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 Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, NJ.

Ivankov reported to Russian mafia “boss of bosses” Semion Mogilevich, perhaps the most powerful mobster in the world today, a financial mastermind known for long-term schemes, a top concern of the FBI for decades, and a longtime-friend and ally of current Russia President Vladimir Putin, who shields him to this day from U.S. (and other) authorities.

Mogilevich set up a front company in America in 1995 that would perpetrate a massive stock fraud worth $150 million on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Its ostensible “CEO” was Jacob Bogatin, who made repeated donations in this role to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Jacob’s brother, David Bogatin, had served in the Soviet Army in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, targeting U.S. aircraft.  By the mid-1980s, Bogatin had purchased five Trump Tower apartments that Trump had personally sold to him. By 1990s, he was also a key soldier for Mogilevich.

A man that a U.S. Supreme Court petition for a writ of certiorari alleges was another Mogilevich lieutenant, Mikhael Sheferovsky, had a son, Felix Sater, who, even without his father’s possible relationship with Mogilevich (which Felix denies), ended up having his own ties to the Russian mafia.

Sater was involved in a massive stock fraud and money laundering scheme worth tens of millions. Sater ran his illegal operation in the mid-1990s from an office in none-other-than-Trump-owned 40 Wall Street. It’s well-known that Sater’s plan involved the Russian mafia, but it is not publicly known if Mogilevich was involved. If Mogilevich were involved, it would hardly be surprising because of his involvement in similar stock fraud and money laundering in the U.S. and Canada during the same period.

Many details of Sater’s case remain sealed because he later mysteriously cooperated with the U.S. government on national security issues in a deal made on the government’s side by Andrew Weissmann, then a federal prosecutor and now a key member of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team.

Glenn Simpson (a Fusion GPS opposition research lead investigator on numerous Russian cases including Trump’s connections to Russia and the infamous Prevezon/Magnitsky case, discussed later) also testified to U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee staff that Sater has strong ties to the Mogilevich crew. Specifics on which basis Simpson is alleging this are not clear.

Sater also grew up in Brighton Beach—a neighborhood notorious for being a Russian mafia enclave—and had a friend since childhood from that neighborhood whose uncle ran a catering establishment in New York then popular with Russian mafia figures.  That friend was Michael Cohen, the same Michael Cohen close to Trump and at the center of the Stormy Daniels saga.

*****

Mogilevich was hardly only focused on North America.  In 1995, he attended a major summit for Eastern European mafia bosses in Tel Aviv hosted by Boris Birshtein, a Russian émigré living in Canada who ran a number of ostensible businesses under the Seabeco name.  The main agenda was laying out plans for their Ukrainian operations.

Not long after, Mogilevich would be making major moves in Ukraine’s energy sector.

Those moves were all related to corrupt relationships and arrangements with Ukraine’s pro-Russian (then-)President Leonid Kuchma, who was close with Putin and other major Ukrainian politicians. At one point, $5 million was delivered by Birshtein and his Seabeco associates to Kuchma’s campaign manager, Oleksandr Volkov, known for his ties to Russian organized crime. Volkov also just happened to be Seabeco’s representative in Ukraine.

Meeting at Birshtein’s Seabeco and working for it throughout the 1990s were 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 corrupt Kazakh “Trio” of oligarchs, one being Alexander Mashkevich.

At the same time, Russian-born Canadian Alexander Shnaider also began working for Seabeco in 1991 while in law school; he would eventually marry his boss’s daughter, Simona Birshtein, and he rose quickly in Seabeco’s steel sector.  Shnaider and a partner would later found a company that began aggressively buying up the Ukrainian government’s shares in Ukraine’s fourth-largest steel mill, Zaporizhstal.

Also in Ukraine was Ukrainian businessman Viktor Topolov. By the late 1990s, Topolov’s construction company was allegedly employing multiple Russian mobsters, including as a “vice president” Leonid Roytman, whom the FBI has found to be a Mogilevich-associated (confessed) hitman and who said that the company regularly functioned to set up mafia meetings.

It seems Topolov was also involved in a scandal involving alleged money laundering and embezzling with Ukrainian state gas company Naftogaz, the giant Russian state gas company Gazprom, and a Ukrainian football team named CSKA Kiev.  The football team was managed by Topolov until he handed it off to Andrii Artemenko in 1999. Artemenko was himself involved in, and later took much of the fall for, the laundering/embezzling scandal.

*****

In the 2000s, these relationships would explode into billions of dollars in scandal and shake the foundations of a nation.

By at least 2000, Ukraine’s President Kuchma seemed to tacitly approve of, or at least not try to block, whatever designs Mogilevich had for Ukraine and was also aware both of the mafia don’s longstanding relationship with Putin and that the two were already plotting something big for Ukraine.

Kuchma tried to fix the 2004 Ukrainian election to install his chosen successor Viktor Yanukovych, and the well-known 2004-2005 Orange Revolution thwarted this election fraud.  The disgraced Yanukovych needed a political rebirth, and it was none other than Paul Manafort, who was brought in to help him try to beat the Orange Revolution and then to rehabilitate him.  With his deputy Rick Gates, Manafort was effectively the political manager for Yanukovych and his political party, the Party of Regions.

Essentially, Putin would arrange to have Gazprom sell natural gas cheaply to Firtash, who ran the relevant intermediary company called RosukrEnergo (RUE), and Firtash would then generally sell that gas to Ukraine at much higher rates.  The profits would then be laundered by Mogilevich and others and used both to bribe Ukrainian politicians to do Russia’s bidding and to fund Yanukovych and his party.

Manafort and Gates even allegedly worked directly with Firtash to launder some of this money into fraudulent Manhattan real estate deals using shady shell companies.

One of the shell companies mentioned in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s indictments of Manafort (John Hannah LLC) is the same one Manafort used in 2006 for a cash purchase of a $3.675 million Trump Tower apartment, raising a distinct possibility the property was used for Ukraine-related money laundering.

Manafort and Gates also partnered with close Putin ally and Russian aluminum oligarch-billionaire Oleg Deripaska on various projects serving Russia’s and/or Putin’s interests and funneling Yanukovych’s private fortune and those of his inner circle away from prying eyes.

Over the years, Manafort would end up owing Deripaska no less than a staggering $60 million.

Also at this time, from 2004-2007, future-Trump-campaign-advisor and repeated FISA superstar Carter Page advised both Gazprom and another Russian state-owned energy company—RAO UES—all the way on the other end of this massive Ukrainian gas scam, making it highly unlikely he was not at least partly aware of what was going on.

Michael Cohen would also become heavily involved in Ukraine in the 2000s. Cohen started his business career as a personal injury lawyer, then pursued some other business interests that ended in dozens of lawsuits and involved mafia-linked associates.  Both he and his brother, Bryan Cohen, married Ukrainian women, Bryan marrying Oksana Oronov, daughter of Alex Oronov, a “longtime” business partner of Mogilevich-linked Topolov (linked to the earlier alleged money laundering that had involved Gazprom and the Kiev soccer team), who had now become a powerful Ukrainian politician.

Together, the Cohens, Alex Oronov, and Topolov all joined a Ukrainian ethanol business venture.  In 2006, the Cohen brothers personally tried to convince Americans to invest in building a factory for the business and failed to do so, though they did meet Topolov in the process. Others funded the investment to the tune of millions, and no ethanol was produced at the factory.  All this was at the same time that the Ukrainian gas scheme and money laundering of Mogilevich and Manafort were in full effect.

Going back to Sam Kislin, after his work with Giuliani, in the early 2000s, he brokered a deal for a condo in Trump World Tower for Vasily Salygin, who would soon become an official in Ukraine’s Party of Regions at the same time Manafort was running its political affairs and then some.

Around this time, Kislin’s old partner Sapir—who now owned a $5 million apartment in Trump Tower, with Trump calling Sapir and his family “great friends”—introduced Trump to Bayrock, ostensibly a real-estate firm led by Tevfik Arif, an ex-Soviet government official from Kazakhstan whose rise to fortune is at least somewhat questionable.

The earlier-introduced Sater now enters Trump’s orbit as the COO of Bayrock, the office of which was even located in Trump Tower. Sater now famously partnered with Trump (and sometimes his children Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump, Jr.) in a series of potential deals (including the infamous Trump Tower Moscow with his old friend Cohen) and actual deals, most of which ended in disaster, failure, lawsuits, and scandal, with hundreds of millions in losses.

The most famous of the actual deals was the Trump SoHo, and none other than Alexander Mashkevich was one of its chief financiers.  By this time, Mashkevich was also a dominant player in aluminum and orchestrated a huge aluminum deal with Deripaska in 2004 at a time when Deripaska’s relationship with Manafort was taking off, while the other two members of Mashkevich’s Kazakh “Trio” had been dealing with Gazprom.

Four specific deals, SoHo included, of Bayrock’s that had been signed-off on by Trump personally received $50 million in “financing” from an Icelandic firm—FL Group—known as a hub for Russian investors, investors apparently linked to Putin and money laundering. FL Group’s $50 million investment was illegally structured as a “loan” designed to cheat governments of taxes and helped precipitate some of FL Group’s woes that led to its meltdown, which helped spark the 2008 global financial crises.

Sater was the point man for these deals, which were alleged, in a settled-in-late-February long-running lawsuit, of being RICO money-laundering scams.

Meanwhile, back in Ukraine, by 2001, Shnaider and his business partner had acquired a 93 percent stake in Zaporizhstal for some $70 million. They managed the deal at a time when steel was the country’s most significant industry, accounting for about 25% of Ukraine’s GDP.  By 2006, Shnaider was turning down a $1.2 billion offer for the mill.

Then came 2007, when Shnaider partnered with Trump to begin building the Trump International Hotel and Tower, Toronto.  And in 2008, FL Group conspicuously loaned Shnaider €45.8 million ostensibly for a yacht at the same time Shnaider’s former Seabeco partner Mashkevich was also working with FL Group and Trump on the Bayrock projects.

After investors were pounded during the ensuing global financial crises that exploded that same year, 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.  His buyer was an unknown Russian acting on behalf of the Russian government and who, in turn, was funded by the Russian state-run bank VEB (Vnesheconombank), and the chairman of its board at that time was Vladimir Putin himself.  Subsequent chairman Sergei Gorkov, a graduate of the F.S.B.’s academy, would meet Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in December 2016, just after Trump’s victory against Clinton and while the bank was under U.S. sanctions because of the war in Ukraine).

Zaporizhstal fit well into Putin’s and Mogilevich’s scheme of trying to extend Russian influence over Ukraine’s industries and natural resources.  Yanukovych financier Akhmetov had 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.

Like the other deals discussed above, the Toronto deal fell into the same pattern of coming apart amid scandal and lawsuits from dozens of investors saying they were misled and who are still suing both Trump and Shnaider.

Still another massive scandal-ridden deal from this period involves the Trump Ocean Club International Hotel and Tower in Panama City, Panama, which began in 2005, with the Tower opening in 2011.  To get to that point, in 2007, Bear Stearns “underwrote a $220 million bond issue” that would help finance the project’s construction, less than a year before Bear Stearns’s meltdown (along with FL Group’s) initiated the global financial crises of 2008.

(Pause: This means that scandalous Trump projects were major catalysts in the two main corporate collapses that were themselves the catalysts for the global financial crises!)

The Panama project involved Ivanka Trump, Eric Trump, drug cartels, the Russian mafia, and a Ukrainian businessman named Igor Anopolskiy, who has strong financial ties to Oxana Marchenko, apparently the same Marchenko who is the wife of Viktor Medvedchuk…

Medvedchuk was one of Ukraine’s first post-Soviet oligarchs (and in none other than the natural gas business), and by 1999 he was an important ally of then-Ukrainian President Kuchma, supporting him in partnership with Volkov, who at the time was funneling money from Birshtein to Kuchma as previously discussed.  Medvedchuk later became Kuchma’s chief of staff from 2002-2005 and also became very close with Putin’s number-two, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev.  But he is even closer with Putin himself, who is godfather to Medvedchuk’s and Marchenko’s daughter (Medvedev’s wife is the godmother).

Putin has pushed for and seen Medvedchuk take leading roles in Ukraine’s politics.  In such positions, Medvedchuk helped Yanukovych, has worked to steer Ukraine away from the West and closer to Russia, and has played a significant role as a negotiating representative “for” Ukraine in major disputes with Russia on everything from gas deals to the current war.  He was also one of the first officials sanctioned by the U.S. government in 2014 after Russia’s annexation of Crimea for his role in that affair. That same year Medvedchuk met Manafort whom Medvedchuk has praised as “the best, both among foreign and domestic political consultants,” which makes the fact that Medvedchuk was reported to be in contact with the Trump campaign during 2016 concerning “U.S.-Russia cooperation” unsurprising yet still very troubling.

Even now, a prostitute in a Thai Jail has been exposed by suppressed Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny as being connected with Oleg Deripaska. She was with him, and Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko, who is a big-time foreign policy guy in the Kremlin, on a yacht at the height of the 2016 election, shortly before Manafort had offered to brief Deripaska on Trump’s campaign (presumably) on behalf of Putin.  The prostitute, known as “Nastya Rybka,” recorded video of Deripaska and Prikhodko talking about Russian relations with the U.S., and noted more such interactions in writing.

Rybka is threatening to share damning evidence she claims to have—including audio recordings she claims proves collusion between Manafort, Deripaska, and Prikhodko to interfere in the U.S. election. Rybka has asked the U.S. for asylum and protection from Russian authorities in exchange for the information she says she can offer.

If only Deripaska had a fixer like Michael Cohen, who apparently allegedly regularly paid women who had extramarital sexual affairs with Trump (and at least one other significant Republican Party figure, Elliott Broidy) to be quiet and go away.

Outside a courtroom in mid-April of this year in which the business inside centered on criminal inquiries into his own business dealings, Cohen took time to share cigars with Rotem Rosen and other friends.

Rosen married Tamir Sapir’s daughter, Zina Sapir, in 2007 at a ceremony hosted by Donald Trump himself at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, and the next year, Trump and Kushner attended the newlywed couple’s bris for their newborn.

Rosen was the longtime right-hand man of Lev Leviev, a famous Israeli diamond oligarch from the former Soviet republic of Uzbekistan.  Leviev is close and, it seems, a friend to Vladimir Putin, but also is close with the Sapirs, Deripaska, and (another) Russian aluminum oligarch named Roman Abramovich, who is himself close to Putin and was apparently the first to recommend Putin to then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin as a successor.  Abramovich owns the UK club football team Chelsea, and until recently lived in the UK. Following Russia’s shocking recent Skripal chemical nerve agent attack on British soil, the UK declined to renew Abramovich’s visa, and he made aliyahto Israel, instantly becoming that nation’s wealthiest citizen).

When former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko, who had been talking on tape about Putin’s “good relationship” with Mogilevich, among other things, was assassinated with radioactive material in the UK in 2006 on the orders of the Kremlin (not that different from the Skripal poisoning), he was helping both British and Spanish intelligence look into money laundering and organized crime ties surrounding Abramovich.

Ivanka has been very close with Dasha Zhukova, Abramovich’s wife during this period (they separated in mid-2017, and Abramovich has since curiously been spotted with Polina Deripaska, Oleg’s “estranged” wife) for over a decade (introduced, interestingly, by Wendi Deng, then Rupert Murdoch’s wife and more recently a rumored lover/girlfriend of, yes, Vladimir Putin).  Abramovich became acquainted with both Kushner and Ivanka as a result.

His and Putin’s friend Leviev, whose company’s U.S. operations were headquartered at Trump’s 40 Wall St. property (where Sater ran his 1990s’ massive scam), was a business partner of Denis Katsyv, scion of a Putin ally, through Katsyv’s company Prevezon. Their dealings were at the heartof the whole Magnitsky money laundering and Russian sanctions saga that, in turn, led to the infamous June 2016, Trump Tower meeting hosted by Manafort, Kushner, and Donald Jr. with a variety of Russian operatives with deep Kremlin connections.

Leviev later conducted a major business deal with Kushner in 2015 and financing from Deutsche Bank related to that deal is under scrutiny by federal authorities. Deutsche also helped finance Donald Trump for years when few other banks would, and financed the Prevezon deal between Katsyv and Leviev. The Prevezon deal later became the subject of a settled civil case from the local U.S. Attorney’s office and is still the subject of a criminal probe there (a piece I wrote on Prevezon/Magnitsky was even censored in Russia). “Magnitsky” has since become synonymous with a human-rights crusade against Putin, and his Kremlin allies carried out by one Bill Browder, who has been a repeated target of Putin and Russian authorities as a result.

Another money laundering case of note involved the arrest of Mogilevich-linked Russian mobsters in Trump Tower when local boss Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov and his minions Vadim Trincher and Anatoly Golubchik were allegedly overseeing an illegal high-stakes international gambling ring. The ring targeted wealthy clientele and was, in part, operated out of the building (and was the subject of the recent Jessica Chastain movie Molly’s Game).  The gambling ring was popular with Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs in both Russia and Ukraine, and besides the gambling, its ringleaders also engaged in some $100 million in money laundering.

In 2009, Trincher bought an apartment in Trump Tower just below an apartment owned by Donald Trump, in which Trincher nearly held a fundraiser for future-Trump-ally Newt Gingrich two years later. The fundraiser never occurred after a mold problem, and a water leak was detected. Other mobsters in the outfit also owned Trump properties.  The minions did not escape justice in 2013 raids orchestrated by Preet Bharara (later fired by Trump), but Tokhtakhounov did and was soon after a red-carpet VIP guest at Trump’s 2013 Miss Universe Pageant. The two men arrived within minutes of each other, and it is certainly possible they interacted there in Moscow, a city where, to this day, Tokhtakhounov is regularly spotted at trendy public places.

*****

Meanwhile, Manafort’s and Gates’ work led to the triumphant rise of Yanukovych’s Party Of Regions and of Yanukovych’s ascent to Ukraine’s presidency in 2010.  Ultimately, the gas scam that empowered those wins precipitated the 2014 (Euro)Maidan revolution, the ouster of Yanukovych, Russia’s annexation of Crimea, and today’s civil war in Ukraine.  At this time, Manafort and Gates were lobbying the U.S. government to improve the corrupt image of Yanukovych’s government, and it was for lying about this work that Alexander van der Zwaan, son-in-law of major Putin-linked Russian oligarch billionaire German Khan, was sentenced in April, the first defendant in Mueller’s Russia probe sentenced to time in prison.

After Trump’s presidential win and eleven days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2017, Cohen met with a Russian oligarch close to Putin and the Kremlin named Viktor Vekselberg, who has been sanctioned by the U.S. government in response to Putin’s hostile actions. The two men discussed Russian-American relations in Trump Tower in New York; probably not coincidentally, a company of Vekselberg’s ended up sending Cohen substantial sums of money amounting to more than half a million dollars.

A diplomatic episode from the beginning of Trump’s presidency ties all this together.  Early in 2017, Cohen teamed up with his old friend Sater and Topolov’s old associate Artemenko from the alleged Gazprom-related laundering scam in an unofficial diplomatic meeting in Manhattan regarding Ukraine. This meeting was organized by Alex Oronov, whom Artemenko described in March 2017 as a “partner, mentor, teacher and friend.” His statement was made shortly after Oronov had mysteriously died.

The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a “peace” plan for Ukraine that had support from senior Putin aides, one that would cede to Russia official control over Crimea, which Russia illegally annexed with 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, who had attended a Russian gala dinner in 2015 while seated at Putin’s table, which was next to Vekselberg’s table. Flynn would later resign from Trump’s team because of his Russian entanglements that would then lead to his indictment by the Special Counsel.

Such excellent Ukraine work assisting Russian interests would have made Manafort proud, and Manafort may even have played a role in it.  Manafort few to Europe in July, 2013, on a private plane owned by a company co-founded by Artemenko’s father, and Manafort made at least 19 trips to Kiev in the 20 months after Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014 to work for the Opposition Bloc, Artemekno’s party and the successor to the Party of Regions, even possibly partnering with Medvedchuk.

Soon after the last trip, he and Gates joined the Trump campaign, just in time for the campaign to defang the Republican Party Platform’s harsh language on Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

Cohen’s work on the 2017 “peace plan” would, had it been adopted, have been the long-worked-for culmination of over a decade of work by Manafort and Gates. This “peace plan” would have basically put an official stamp of approval on the latest in the long series of Putin, Yanukovych, Medvedchuk, and their whole crew’s efforts to enforce Russian domination of Ukraine through corruption, politics, lobbying, laundering, annexation, and war. Russia’s any means necessary approach was often orchestrated in no small part by Manafort.

With Manafort sidelined by the clouds hanging over his head, Cohen, along with his old friend Sater, were virtual representatives of Manafort, both in agenda and in spirit, ready to carry the pro-Russian torch Manafort had so diligently carried steadfastly for so long.

What is clear at a minimum is that an awful lot of people with deep ties to the Russian government, the Russian mafia, especially to Mogilevich, and involvement in (sometimes alleged) money laundering surround both Cohen and Manafort in profound, sustained ways. Those ties also appear to pertain directly to their relations to Trump the businessman, Trump the candidate, and Trump, the president.  At worst, this could go way beyond collusion.

In particular, large-scale involvement by a network of Russian operatives ties dealings in Ukraine to dealings in America, suggesting some sort of coordinated effort by a network spanning continents and oceans.  This network and the way it engaged Trump and his (future) people for years—all out there for those willing to give them the time and scrutiny they deserve—have been woefully undercovered by major American news outlets, with too little coverage and too little depth, often just scratching surface layers and eschewing the core while foregoing any deeper, larger-picture analysis, perhaps mentioning in a major article or two, but failing to connect the dots or revisit when another look is warranted.

If this all looks suspicious to you, we can be sure it all looks suspicious to Mueller, and that he is being more thorough than the news media or most Republicans in Congress.

Manafort and Cohen are at the center of this saga, now more than ever, with law enforcement zooming in on their activities ever more closely with each passing day, getting closer to the truth, far closer than the myopia of the journalistic and editorial class has allowed the news media to reach.

This overlap in pro-Russia work and connections between Manafort and Cohen would be as good a place to start as any if the news media is to unearth the deeper layers of this story and help voters be armed with a far larger sense of the truth than that which has been presented thus far as they consider their votes in the coming midterms and beyond.

Adapted in part from author’s earlier work published on July 31^st, 2016, November 4^th, 2016,March 28^th, 2017, and July 27^th, 2017.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

See related article: Cohen’s Shady Family Business Dealings’ Unexplored Links to Key Trump-Russia Figures Demand Scrutiny

Also see how Manafort and Cohen fit into the larger Trump-Russia saga and an explanation of the below chart in article: Think You Know How Deep Trump-Russia Goes? Think Again: This Chart/Info Will Blow Your Mind

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

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. 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!

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), February 26, 2019

CNN/Lawrence Crook

Also see related article: How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe

AMMAN — Trump has conspicuously Tweeted and talked about the idea that Michael Cohen’s wife and Ukrainian father-in-law have some sort of shady criminal connections and has sent his eager minion and Russia point-person Rudy Giuliani to publicly discuss the same.  Leaving aside that Giuliani has his own huge shady connection to the Russian mafia and Kremlin operative network linked to Trump and his former Campaign Chairman, Paul Manafort, and that Trump’s actions amount to blatant witness tampering in spirit and probably also in a strict legal sense, Trump may actually be doing more damage to himself in his calls to shed light on the Cohen family’s shady dealings.

That is because many of those shady ties and dealings also involve the same Russian mafia and Kremlin agent network from which Trump is trying so hard to distance himself, a network that envelops everyone from his former Campaign Chairman and now convicted felon Paul Manafort and Donald Jr. to his son-in-law Jared Kushner and many of Trump’s top business partners over the past two decades, among others. And while Cohen’s connections have been barely explored in the media and publicly released investigations’ material, Cohen’s upcoming hearings present a unique opportunity to show the public how this all ties together, both demonstrably and possibly.  It is one of the few chances the main public lens might actually zoom out to show the public the bigger picture instead of the non-stop barrage of details that are overwhelming for most people when they try to understand the Mueller probe and the whole Trump-Russia saga.

To start, we must go back to late 1990s Ukraine.

Kiev Connections for Cohen

In post-Soviet Ukraine, a businessman named Viktor Topolov ran a construction company called Kyiv-Donbas, and as the 1990s drew to a close, he was allegedly employing several members of the Russian mafia through his company.  Among these was Leonid Roytman, officially a vice president of Kyiv-Donbas, which Rotyman said regularly served as a conduit and meeting-hub for organized crime in Ukraine.  According to the FBI, in reality, Roytman was a (now confessed) hitman and Russian mafioso linked to Semion Mogilevich. 

Semion Mogilevich is one of the biggest mafia bosses in the world and was long on the FBI’s most-wanted list, the “boss of bosses” of the Russian mafia known mainly for two things: his tight relationship with Putin and his “brainy don” financial schemes of immense complexity that are difficult to expose.  Back in the 1990s, as he was cementing that close relationship with Vladimir Putin, he attended a 1995 mafia summit meeting in Tel Aviv hosted by Boris Birshtein (at some point becoming father-in-law of his one-time employee Alexander Shnaider, later Trump’s primary partner in the scandalous, majorly-Russian-funded Trump Tower Toronto saga), where he and other top Eastern European organized crime figures met to lay out their plans for Ukraine.

At this point, Mogilevich’s tentacles were well into the Ukrainian energy sector, and it would irresponsible not to look at the following in that context and in the above paragraph’s context since money laundering run by Mogilevich and behind most of the nation’s gas deals for the past few decades would dictate the course of politics, war, and peace in Ukraine through the present, all part of a scheme to bend Ukraine to Putin’s and Russia’s will.

Returning to Topolov, he would be a major player in an alleged money laundering and embezzling scandal that involved the Ukrainian state gas company Naftogaz and its Russian counterpart, gas giant Gazprom, in addition to the Ukrainian football team CSKA Kiev.  Topolov ran the team during this scandal until he handed it off in 1999 to Ukrainian Andrii Artemenko.  It would be Artemenko who would take much of the fall for the gas-football scandal.

Topolov seemed to fare better and within a few years had become a powerful Ukrainian politician.  At this stage, he and his “longtime business partner,” Alex Oronov (who was also quite close with Artemenko), entered into a new business arrangement with Oronov’s son-in-law (who had married Oronov’s daughter Oksana) and his son-in-law’s brother.  The husband was one Bryan Cohen, and his brother was also married to a Ukrainian, Laura Shusterman, the daughter of convicted money-launderer and Ukrainian immigrant to the U.S. Fima Shusterman. 

This brother was none other than Michael Cohen, soon to be Donald Trump’s laywer, fixer, and confidante.

Before he got in deep with Topolov and Trump, Michael Cohen was involved in shady business deals with suspicious and “connected” Russian/former Soviet state partners.  But given where he was raised, that is not terribly surprising.  The Cohen brothers grew up in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn, an area notorious for Russian mafia activity, and their uncle even ran a catering business that was for a time a hot-spot for Russian mobsters. 

As a boy, Michael even became friends with a neighborhood boy, Felix Sater, who as an adult would end up having a long history of alleged and proven Russian mafia and money laundering activity, with even one uncorroborated U.S. Supreme Court petition alleging that his father was a captain in the Mogilevich mafia outfit.  Sater was himself convicted of Russian-mafia-involved money laundering run from a Trump property at the same time Mogilevich was running similar schemes in the U.S. and Canada, but much of Sater’s file was sealed when he began cooperating with the U.S. government on numerous issues, including cases that involved stinger missiles and even al-Qaeda.  Mysteriously, Sater ended up working with, and later for, Trump, on a serious huge yet disastrous real-estate deals that all ended in some combination of lawsuits, bankruptcies, scandal, failure, and heavy suspicion of money laundering.  These deals involved major financing from shadowy Russian and former Soviet-state figures linked to the Russian mafia and/or the Russian/Soviet government and were going down around the same time that the Cohens were setting up shop with Topolov and Oronov.  Since Cohen quickly rose to top Trump confidante at the time the Sater-brokered deals were blowing up and falling apart, and given that Cohen was childhood friends with Sater (it was they who coordinated the now infamous Trump Tower Moscow feelers), it is far more likely than not that Cohen was aware of a lot of the drama involving the Sater deals. 

The Cohens-Topolov-Oronov project took the form of a Ukrainian ethanol business venture.  In 2006 (the same year Michael Cohen rose rapidly into Trump’s inner orbit), the brothers Cohen solicited investment from Americans to build a factory for the ethanol project, meeting Topolov in person during in the process; they failed in their pitch, but others funded the investment to the tune of millions.  Considering no ethanol was ever produced by the venture, this entire setup is extremely suspect and the few explanations that have been given fall short and leave unanswered many questions that would be highly relevant to a number of investigations related to Trump-Russia issues, includin Special Counsel Mueller’s probe.

This need for greater scrutiny is only increased when one realizes that this all happened at the same time one of the largest money laundering scams in history was underway in Ukraine.  The previously alluded to gas deals were part of a massive plot designed to hand Ukraine over to Russian President Vladimir Putin, at first indirectly, but later even involving a push to formally hand over Crimea, the Ukrainian region illegally occupied and annexed by Russia in 2014, to Russia. 

While Mogilevich had set up the laundering mechanisms to launder billions behind the scenes, It was none other than later-to-be convicted felon and former Trump Campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates—now at the center the Mueller probe—who were running the political side of the gas scheme for Putin’s chosen candidate in Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, and his pro-Russian party, the Party of Regions.  They also engaged in related work to further Russian interests, sometimes with Oleg Deripaska, who has been in several Trump-Russia related scandals of late.  That work is central to major Mueller lines of inquiry and was often related to shady gas deals for Gazprom gas worth many billions that were being used by Putin allies to siphon money to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine over many years, eventually allowing Yanukovych and his Party to take over the government and precipitating the (Euro)Maidan revolution, the Ukrainian civil war, and Russia’s snatching of Crimea. 

This massive money laundering operation involved a huge chunk of the organized crime activity in Ukraine at the time, and it would be hardly surprising to find Topolov—who was previously tied to money laundering, Gazprom, the Russian mafia, and Mogilevich specifically—may have used his business venture with the Cohens to play a part in this massive laundering scheme consuming Ukraine at the time.  That so little is known or offered about that ethanol business only further demands answers in the context of the overall situation, as Manafort’s and Gate’s work at this time is important to Mueller’s probe and since significant parts of Putin’s machinery that was trying to control Ukraine would also be mobilized to engage Trump and his inner circle.

Considering that Oronov, a “partner, mentor, teacher and friend” to Artemenko, helped organize negotiations shortly after Trump was inaugurated between Cohen and Sater on one hand and Artemenko on the other—negotiations designed to produce U.S. legitimization of the illegal Crimea annexation, legitimization that ran counter to U.S. policy and U.S. interests—and considering Manafort right up until he joined Trump’s campaign was doing political consulting for the pro-Russian successor to the Party of Regions, the Opposition Bloc, of which Artemenko was a member (Manafort even flew at least once while doing this business on a private jet owned by a company co-founded by Artemenko’s father), the focus should be clear: the relationships between Topolov, Oronov, Artemenko, Sater, and Cohen raise many unanswered questions, are at least partly-related to the Manafort-Gates work, and now is the time to have answers.

A Chance for Answers Now

In other words, if Cohen engaged in business that doesn’t add up with a Russian mafia and Mogilevich-linked Ukrainian politician (Topolov), whose old (seemingly criminal) partner (Artemenko) is close with that Ukrainian politician’s-then partner, Cohen’s brother’s father-in-law (Oronov), and that partner ends up sitting opposite Cohen years later discussing a deal on Crimea when Cohen represents the president of the United States (Trump), and if for most of the time in between, Putin’s best friend in the Russian mafia (Mogilevich) had been working on a massive scheme to hand over Ukraine to Putin with the man who would become that U.S. president’s Campaign Chairman (Manafort), and that same man tied to Cohen’s old business partner, brother’s father-in-law, and presidential diplomacy involving Cohen (Artemeko) had been a member of the pro-Russian party employing that future Campaign Chairman until shortly before he became said Campaign Chairman and whose father co-founded a company flying that future Campaign Chairman around to do this business, and that Campaign Chairman runs a campaign for a candidate and president who is the most pro-Kremlin since the American-Soviet alliance of WWII, Congress and the media might want to ask some questions about all this.

While Wednesday’s public House Oversight Committee will be quite restricted to avoid interfering with Mueller’s probe, the closed Senate and House Intelligence Committees’ hearings (today and Thursday, respectively) will be less so.  However possible, the questions raised from the above must be asked.

Despite all his proven past wrongdoing in support of Trump and allegedly in other situations, Cohen should still be applauded for attempting to assist the cause of justice and the law today.  However, it should still be remembered that for years, he was one of Trump’s most loyal soldiers, one with multiple organized crime connections.  Through that lens, the questions of what exactly he was doing in Ukraine in and around 2006—when so many other nefarious things were going on related to the Special Counsel’s investigation and other Trump-centered investigations involving people in the orbits of Cohen’s business partners and in the orbit of Cohen himself—still demand answers, and the upcoming hearings are an excellent chance to demand them.

The story of Cohen’s Ukrainian father-in-law and wife has yet to be really fleshed out, but if they are indeed connected to Russian organized crime, a focus on that may haunt Trump, especially if they are connected to the same Mogilevich network that worked for so long with Manafort and has long sought to engage Trump himself.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg all rights reserved, no republication without permission, attributed quotations welcome

Also see related article: How Cohen’s and Manafort’s Ukraine Ties Tell the Deeper Story of Trump-Russia and the Mueller Probe

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

Feel free to share and repost this article on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. 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!

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981), February 6, 2019

Pool/Getty Images

AMMAN—If you’re looking for a State of the Union summary, or a play-by-play, you can find many of these elsewhere.  What I am going to get into here today is the overall meaning of what happened last night, or, rather, the lack thereof.

Aside from the many (and diverse) Democratic women proudly attired in white to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the national success of the suffragette movement getting women the right to vote in America, what stood out to me as a highlight was not anything President Donald Trump said or did, it was Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s so-called “sarcastic point clapback.”  To appreciate this moment, we must understand that this State of the Union speech transcended “normal” such speeches (which in recent years have already become increasingly pointless, even with a master orator like President Barack Obama at the helm) into the realm of the theater of the absurd.  I say this because Trump made a call for civility and bipartisanship when he has been, more than anyone else in Washington, the destroyer of bipartisanship and civility, even in ways we cannot have conceived of until he went there. 

Trump issuing a call on these issues would be like Russian President Vladimir Putin and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman giving a joint speech on press freedom or Syrian President Bashar al-Assad delivering a formal address on limiting civilian casualties in war. 

Sure, we can all say “I would never be able to sit through such an absurdity,” but what if you had to?  What if a sacred office you held required you to be there? 

We don’t have to think about this in the abstract, but can just consider the case of Speaker Pelosi instead.

Throughout the speech, Pelosi showed a level of respect and decorum Trump has more often than not chosen to not show her or her office—with Trump routinely calling the Speaker of the House just “Nancy” in public, absent her title, while she refers to him more respectfully, generally with the word “president” in the mix—and at the slightest hint members of her caucus might have reacted more vocally than is the norm, she batted her hand at them to simmer down and they did.  One can recall the wholly unjustified example of Rep. Joe Wilson (R), SC, shouting and interrupting President Barack Obama in a 2009 joint-session of Congress with a scream of “You lie!” (Obama did not lie) and consider that, during Trump’s State of the Union last night, Democrats would have been justified on a factual basis of screaming all throughout his speech the very same at him, even if not on a basis of decorum.  I have written before that I am worried the left is allowing itself to be dragged down into the muck of Trumpism and extremism (most notably Bernie Sanders and his Sandernistas), but last night, I can thankfully say that that was not the case with the Democratic Party.  And to this warm feeling, we all owe a debt to Speaker Pelosi, who knew some of the more interesting personalities in her caucus would relish a Joe Wilson-type moment and thusly made decorum a central theme for the event for her Democrats.

And yet, here she was, standing right behind Trump as he called for civility and bipartisanship when he has been the largest obstacle to both.  On the one level, of course we should all embrace such a call. On another, the messenger does actually matter.  So Pelosi clapped in support of the statement, but in such a way that she let it be known that the gross irony of the moment did not escape her.  It was the perfect combination of class of subtle snark, one that allowed Pelosi to not be co-opted into the theatrical absurdity but even allowed her to fight it without disruption.

And yes, that is the highlight for me.  I could write about Donald Trump’s uninspiring, tired words, and uninspiring, tired delivery.  I could write about some of the most obvious lies and deceptions, including the total fantasy about illegal immigration on the southern border, how Trump tried to claim credit for Obama’s energy policy that made the U.S. the world’s number-one producer of both oil and gas before Trump was even elected, or Trump’s ridiculous claim that his election is the only reason we are not at war with North Korea.  Yet these topics are well covered by countless copycat articles published in the past hours.  Perhaps besides these lies, anyone who was there, who saw or heard him barely manage to deliver a laundry list of overall lies, would have been struck most of all by the unmemorable quality of the whole address, save for moments of absurdity that were not intended effects on the part of speaker.  I have expressed privately many a time before the cost of such a lack of great, or even decent, rhetoric coming from Trump as president, an office that more often than not has been essential in transmitting memory and history to new generations of Americans.  Sadly, today we live in an era where people are reading less and less, and especially less actual literature.  Our critical thinking skills are also sorely lacking and declining, and most Americans don’t even know their nation’s history (and truly, what better way for such a huge portion of Americans to show utter contempt for the societal value of language, thinking, reality, and history—together some of the hallmarks of fascism, I might add—than voting for Trump, a man who makes George W. Bush seem eloquent and intellectually curious in relative retrospect?).  Regrettably, for far too many Americans, one of the only times they will hear any of the words or stories of our Founding Fathers, past presidents, and other great American historical figures is when a current presidents quotes them or tells their tales.  Trump did none of this in his State of the Union speech: not once in his entire long speech did he quote one of the great Americans of the past, and apart from brief mentions of WWII, he did not discuss history.

Obviously, Trump’s damage is hardly confined to the rhetorical presidency and historical memory.  I have long been quite upfront about the threat Trump is to Western democracy in general and democracy at home in the U.S., so on the one level, there is nothing surprising in this speech being yet another step on the downward-spiraling staircase that is our current era (even if I can certainly imagine worse States of the Union from him in the future).  But we must not become immune to these moments and acts of decline, and I write that as much for me as for the audience.  But that fact of the matter is that this is no small task, for Trump’s relentless war of attrition on decency and reality wearies the souls of those of us who have souls left and creates a numbing effect that is a common biological survival mechanism for engaging in deadly combat, and make no mistake: we are in deadly combat for the survival of the West, for democracy, for America.  As Freedom House just starkly noted the same day of Trump’s big speech, “the current president’s ongoing attacks on the rule of law, fact-based journalism, and other principles and norms of democracy threaten further decline.” 

In the end, as much as I am a fan of the oft-ill-covered Nancy Pelosi, I cannot claim the night belongs to her.  No, the night was still Trump’s, his meaningless words put together in meaningless sentences in a meaningless speech.  The speech—as bad and badly delivered as it was—did not inherently carry the quality of meaninglessness, no; that quality was entirely a result of the man who gave it and the Administration that helped craft it.  It was not even the lies that defined this speech.  No, more than anything else, the speech carried with it the searing awareness that we are listening to words come from the mouth of a man who keeps few promises or oaths, lies constantly both compulsively and in a deeply premeditated fashion, capriciously changes his mind on any given issue repeatedly in both the short and long-term, reneges on deals even to the point of causing multiple government shutdowns, and that, ultimately, this is all a farce.

As the late and singular Christopher Hitchens noted, “there is some relationship between the hunger for truth and the search for the right words. This struggle may be ultimately indefinable and even undecidable, but one damn well knows it when one sees it.” The problem with Trump is that we can damn well know he is not even engaging in this struggle.

In other words, this speech matters very little because more words from the mouth of that man will come that will surely contradict what was said last night (which contradicted who knows how many previous statements), and still more after that, to a point where we truly get to explore the word meaningless.  When the president’s words and actions change so rapidly that one must truly exert effort to keep track of, or define, a “position,” let alone a policy—on everything from the border “wall” to Syria—we really are in Game of Thrones’s Jon Snow trap, when Jon lamented: “When enough people make false promises, words stop meaning anything. Then there are no more answers, only better and better lies, and lies won’t help us in this fight” (video but big spoilers!).  We should lament, too, and, like Nancy Pelosi, solider on as gracefully as possible in dealing with that man, his words, and his actions, the meaning of which at times it seems no one, not even Trump himself, is capable of understanding.

© 2019 Brian E. Frydenborg, all rights reserved, permission required for republication, attributed quotations welcomeI

Brian E. Frydenborg is an American freelance writer and consultant from the New York City area who has been based in Amman, Jordan, since early 2014. He holds an M.S. in Peace Operations and specializes in a wide range of interrelated topics, including international and U.S. policy/politics, security/conflict/(counter)terrorism, humanitarianism, development, social justice, and history. You can follow and contact him on Twitter: @bfry1981

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 Originally published on LinkedIn Pulse July 3, 2016  

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) July 3rd, 2016, also published by StupidParty Math v Myth here

All photos taken from the Clinton Foundation website

AMMAN — If you listen to many conservatives, the Clinton Foundation is little more than a personal, criminal stash for cash for the Clintons (one big “scam,” to quote Trump).  But like so many other things that conservatives claim, upon closer inspection, efforts to tarnish or call into question the Clinton Foundation fall flat, quite like their efforts to dismiss the good work of the United Nations, even for all the UN’s faults.  In reality, the Clinton Foundation is a massive organization, atypical of most charities but one that does a staggering amount of good all around the world.

Love or hate the Clintons’s politics, it is an objective and indisputable fact that Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Chelsea Clinton have been involved in programs that have bettered and save the lives of millions of people.  Even without Bill’s political career, his work with the Clinton Foundation would be enough to make him one of the great philanthropists of our time, and Hillary Clinton has also been getting increasingly involved, as has Chelsea.

What the Clinton Foundation Is and How It Works

The Clinton Foundation is actually a public charity that mainly does direct charity work, which can be confusing since many foundations primarily funnel money to other charities.  While conservative media and political figures (like serial liar Carly Fiorina) have claimed that only a small portion (Fiorina said 6%, hot-air-dispenser Rush Limbaugh said 15%) of the money going into the Foundation goes to charity, this statistic is in reference to the money that the Foundation gives to other charitable groups; the vast majority its money still goes to charity, its own charitable works, with 87.2% of all funds going directly to either their or others’ program activities/beneficiaries.  Unsurprisingly, conservatives myopically failed to do even this basic level of research before making their wildly off-base claims, which is par for the course in these hyperpartisan times. 

What is now the Clinton Foundation began in 1997 as an organization that began helping then-President Clinton set up his presidential library, but since then it has grown to be a global foundation that encompasses eleven initiatives, has raised over $2 billion for charity and development work, and now raises about a quarter of a billion annually.

Let’s look at these eleven parts, and a twelfth that was recently ended:

Clinton Foundation:

2014 expenses: $249,545,030 (12.3% overhead, including management, administrative, and fundraising expenses; 87.2% directly to program activity/beneficiaries; and 0.5% to make up for shortfalls in donation pledges)

Clinton’s Presidential Center (library) (1997-present)

2014 expenses: $13,501,618 (5.4% of Foundation total)

Presidential libraries serve as something of a combination of a museum and an archive for the particular presidency they showcase.  The Clinton Foundation was formed in 1997 to help raise money for Bill Clinton’s presidential library, which it did to the tune of $165 million over some years plus over $11 million in the form of grant of land from Little Rock, Arkansas, on which the library was built (in comparison, Reagan’s library cost $60 million at the time it was built, and George W. Bush’s presidential library cost about $250 million).  Clinton’s library, which includes the University of Arkansas’ Clinton School of Public Service and provides year-round educational programs and camps for students of all ages, has benefited the city of Little Rock greatly, as well.

Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative (2002-2013)

The Clinton Economic Opportunity Initiative began in 2002 by helping small businesses in Harlem and grew to focus on promoting entrepreneurs and small businesses in cities across America.  Through partnerships with successful entrepreneurs who acted as mentors and major business institutions like Booz Allen Hamilton and UBS, the Initiative specialized in providing consulting and mentoring to small businesses and small business owners.  The 2012 annual report for the Clinton Foundation noted that the Clinton Economic Initiative had provided 75,000 hours of pro bono consulting and mentoring hours, over $15 million in pro bono consulting, that 92% of businesses that received assistance from its Entrepreneur Mentoring Program said that that assistance had helped them deal with the recession, that all these the businesses assisted had an average of a 16% increase in workforce, and over 600 volunteers provided long-term pro bono services for small businesses in nine different U.S. cities.  Another example of the type of work the Initiative engaged in, as highlighted in the 2009 annual report, was helping to provide banking services to struggling populations in America that were underserved by the banking industry. The program was shuttered in 2013 because the Foundation found that the efforts were too labor intensive and dependent on many too outside factors to be replicated on the larger scale the Foundation had hoped for it.

Clinton Health Access Initiative* (2002-present, *now affiliated but separate entity)

2014 expenses: $143,041,357 (57.3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Health Access Initiative began in 2002 as a big push to provide HIV/AIDS patients with low-cost access to life-saving drugs, and since then has expanded to include treatment for malaria and vaccine access, among other programs; nearly 10 million people have received access to lifesaving treatment at low cost through the Initiative since 2002, to name its most significant achievement.  It now operates directly in more than 33 countries benefiting over 70 countries overall.  Its 2014 annual report noted that it was also heavily involved in assisting Liberia with its recent Ebola epidemic.

Clinton Alliance for a Healthier Generation (2005-present, *now affiliated but separate entity)

2014 expenses: $16,436,262 ($2 million from Clinton Foundation, 0.8% of Foundation’s total expenses; rest is (presumably) raised by Alliance on its own, outside of the efforts of the Foundation)

The Alliance for a Healthier generation was founded by the Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association in 2005 to fight America’s childhood obesity epidemic by providing alternatives to soft-drink sodas in schools and other facilities used by children, all through making deals with the soda industry.  It is the nation’s largest effort to fight childhood obesity, and in large part because of the Alliance’s efforts, the calories of drink products sent to school locations fell 90% from 2004-2010.  Through 2015, the program has spread to help affect 18 million students in over 31,000 schools in all 50 states, Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico, as well as over 6,300 locations used by children outside of school grounds.  There is also an effort to help students improve health in other ways, engaging over 56,000 doctors and health professionals.  The Alliance also engages companies like McDonald’s to improve the level of healthier offerings within their product lines, in McDonald’s case covering 85% of its worldwide sales.

Clinton Global Initiative (2005-present)

2014 expenses: $23,544,381 (9.4% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Global Initiative began as way for President Clinton to bring together world leaders and thinkers as only he can together in one place and to get them to make substantive commitments towards tackling major global problems.  Through 2015, it has engaged over “180 heads of state, 20 Nobel Prize laureates, and hundreds of leading CEOs, heads of foundations and NGOs, major philanthropists, and members of the media, which has resulted in $90 billion in commitments representing over 3,100 Commitments to Action, which have improved the lives of over 430 million people in more than 180 countries,” spanning issues as diverse as job creation, training, education, human rights, gender equality, health, medicine, conservation, ecology, endangered species, and international development, among others. 

Clinton Climate Initiative (2006-present)

2014 expenses: $8,293,416 (3.3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Climate Initiative has been working for years to address fundamental drivers behind dangerous man-made climate change using easily replicable and cost-effective methods that the Initiative is spreading throughout the U.S. and the world.  The Initiative’s Forestry Program is helping governments together with other partners to better manage their forests and forested lands and to help plan and enact forest restoration, with major programs in Kenya, Ethiopia, and Indonesia. The Islands Diesel Replacement program helps small island countries transform their energy sectors into ones that involve far more clean energy and far more sustainable practices, and also assists with waste and water management, which all, in turn, spur new jobs and markets for the green energy sector.  An energy-consumption-reduction program and a Home Energy Affordability Loan (HEAL) program that both began in Arkansas have both spread to six other states—California, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, Vermont, and Wisconsin—and allowed both employers and employees to greatly improve energy efficiency and reduce costs, with the HEAL program alone helping over 5,600 people and both programs together reducing U.S. carbon emissions by over 33,500 tons every year.

Clinton Development Initiative (2006-present)

2014 expenses: $4,482,714 (3.3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Development Initiative has been helping small farmers in Tanzania, Malawi, and Rwanda by leveraging knowledge, resources, and partnerships to help over 105,000 small farmers improve their efficiency and access to markets.  In addition, its Trees of Hope program in Malawi has helped over 2,300 farmers plant more than 2.6 million trees to help offset their carbon footprint and create a new opportunity in tree farming, where it is also helping local farmers and their families by establishing local health clinics.  In Rwanda, the Initiative recently helped to create two local businesses based on producing soy in one case and coffee in the other that are combined expected to create hundreds of jobs and help 150,000 farmers with their livelihoods.  With a New Seeds to Sale Project in Myanmar, the Initiative also helps to reach some 15,000 farmers there over the first 3 years of implementation.

Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (2007-present)

2014 expenses: $7,358,967 (3% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership seeks to implement the best of non-profit and for-profit approaches to help emerging-market-nations around the world deal with major gaps in either supply chains or distribution chains in ways that improve both the social and financial situations of poorer, underserved populations by bringing them into one of three-market driven approaches: supply chain enterprises, distribution enterprises, or training center enterprises in the hopes of providing economic opportunities through which people can find social mobility and lift themselves out of poverty.  Distribution enterprises can make a huge difference in rural areas where many small villages and towns and farmers often find it very difficult to obtain basic supplies.  The Partnership in one instance found almost 3,000 women in one of the most remote parts of Peru and trained and equipped them with the help of major corporations to be able to sell many basic, in-demand products to their own communities; these women are expected to double their income within a year of beginning the program.  Supply chain enterprises help small farmers in developing countries obtain ways to get their products to the right markets and improve their business as a result as well as help developing markets fill their shelves with appropriate and better quality products.  A Partnership enterprise in one region of India was able to help small farmers get cashew products to new customers, and another Partnership program set up many small farmers with PepsiCo’s local juice operations; along with efforts to help local farmers become more efficient and produce better crops, the Partnership hopes to see these farmers’ incomes double within 5 years and to spread these models to encompass some 15,000 local farmers in the region in the near future.  Another project is helping over 12,000 peanut farmers in Haiti get their crop to markets.  Finally, training center enterprises help to provide youth in developing countries the skills needed to get decent jobs in places where there is often a skills mismatch.  One such enterprise in Cartagena, Colombia, is training some 20,000 young people to be able to find jobs in the hospitality industry.  The Partnership will be expanding to new regions and countries soon, and thus far has helped to train and empower more than 450,000 people in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asia.

Clinton Health Matters Initiative (2012-present)

2014 expenses: $3,696,323 (1.5% of Foundation total)

The Clinton Health Matters Initiative works in the United States through a wide variety of public and private, local and national entities to reduce the occurrence of preventable health problems, conditions and diseases, while also working to bridge inequality in health and healthcare access and to improve access for all Americans.  Its national-level programs focus on “employee health, military and veteran health, health disparities, access to nutrition, access to sport and physical activity, and prescription drug abuse,” while a variety of local and regional programs (mainly focusing on working through many hundreds of partners to help some 8 million people in specific regions in the U.S.: California’s Coachella Valley, Central Arkansas, Northeast Florida, the Greater Houston Area, and, most recently, Adams County, Mississippi) combine with the national programs to be projected to be able to benefit some 85 million Americans.  The initiative has also created over $200 million in partnerships with various organizations to help improve Americans’ health, is helping to innovate new technology to improve healthcare across the country and access to information about health and healthcare, is improving substance abuse and mental health programs on over 60 college campuses, is pioneering fitness programs, is working with 40 different organizations to improve employee wellness, and is bringing together experts from many different organizations to plan new ways to tackle health problems in America.

The following programs fall under the “other” category as listed in the Foundations’ financial statements/annual reports, as is (presumably) the $2 million grant that goes to the Clinton Alliance for a Healthier Generation; the “other” category comprised $13,789,165, or 5.5% of the Foundation’s 2014 expenses; minus the Alliance grant, these below programs would be part of $11,789,165, or 4.7% of the Foundation’s 2014 expenses.

Clinton Foundation in Haiti (2009-present)

The Clinton Foundation in Haiti began in 2009 as a way to specifically help the beleaguered Caribbean nation, but when a major earthquake devastated the nation in 2010, the program focused for some time on disaster relief, recovery, and rebuilding but is now back to its original intent: helping to empower the people of Haiti through education and economic opportunity by engaging a wide range of actors.  Since its inception, the program has raised some $36 million for Haiti (including $16.4 million in for immediate relief after the earthquake tragedy), and has also been instrumental in bringing about $120 million in direct investment to Haiti, including in Haiti’s agricultural, artisan, and environmental sectors, helping some 117,000 Haitians and creating some 11,200 jobs.

No Ceilings: The Full Participation Project (2013-present)

The No Ceilings: Full Participation Project, led by Hillary and Chelsea Clinton, aims to bring women and girls around the world to points of full participation and equal opportunity in their societies using data-driven methods.  To this end, the Project partnered with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to produce a detailed global report on the status of women and girls worldwide, identifying specific areas of concern that can be targeted by various organizations around the world.  As part of this process, the Project began a global conversation about the status of women involving over 12,000 people, and conducted a survey about the status of women of over 10,000 people in over 150 countries.  The Project also teamed with The Brookings Institution to secure pledges from over 30 partners to provide $600 million to help girls get access to and do well in secondary school, which has since been increased to $800 million through 50 partners with plans to reach 15 million girls.  Another initiative plans to facilitate access to mobile technology for women in Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the Arab Gulf States in order to help empower disempowered women in those locations.

Too Small to Fail (2013-present)

The Too Small to Fail project, also led by Hillary Clinton, seeks to help different parts of society to come together to provide solid heath and growth environments for children from when they are born to age 5, focusing in particular on interactions involving talking, reading, and singing.  Such interactions foster vital early brain and language development among our youngest children, ensuring that they enter school not in a mental state behind that of their follow classmates and in a better position to succeed in life.  This helps to fight the “word gap” in which lower-income kids by age 4 hear an average of 30 million fewer words than their better-situated counterparts, causing their brains and language skills to develop more slowly.  With partners like Sesame Street, the American Academy of Pediatrics, Univision, Text4baby, and Scholastic, Too Small to Fail was a major force in efforts to donate some 500,000 books, reach 700,000 parents regularly with parenting information and tips through text messaging, use television programming to get important information and tips out to parents, get over 20,000 families to take pledges, and distribute 62,000 literacy toolkits to pediatric professionals.

*****

In addition:

In America, the Clinton Foundation has also helped to organize thousands of volunteers for “Days of Action” that have resulted in over 18,000 hours of volunteer service since 2012, at first in response to Hurricane Sandy and later to include other projects.  There is also the Job One initiative, designed to help young Americans find meaningful employment in the wake of the Great Recession; so far, the initiative has secured promises from 13 companies to focus on mentoring and hiring young people, has generated commitments worth $37 million, and expects to be able to help some 150,000 young Americans in the near future.

*****

All in all, The Clinton Foundation is a unique thing in the world, one of the world’s largest charities on its own, but then transcending even that status when the extensive action it has led indirectly through its special partnerships and relationships is taken into account, amplifying its already staggering scale of impact on people all over the world.  It’s time the media and even the Clintons’ critics clearly acknowledged this basic truth.  And for Trump to criticize the Clinton Foundation, when nothing he has done has even come close to a fraction of this level of charity, is shameful.

© 2016 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. 

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 May 26, 2016 

By Brian E. Frydenborg (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter @bfry1981) May 26th, 2016

Stephen Crowley/The New York Times

EILAT and TEL AVIV — In what has become a constant occurrence throughout the 2016 Republican nomination contest, Trump’s own behavior has so lowered the bar as to what is considered “acceptable” that when he behaves in a way that is only mildly offensive as opposed to egregiously offensive, that when he speaks using prepared notes in a normal tone as opposed to yelling and rambling incoherently, people that are held to be respectable mainstream analysts are able to claim Trump is “presidential” and “serious” and is “improving” as a candidate.

Apart from Trump’s AIPAC speech, perhaps no better example of this has happened thus far during his campaign than his recent foreign policy speech.

Trump’s Elementary Mentality

For starters, Trump used the word “great” eighteen times in his address.  While it would be inane to expect the American people to elect someone of the linguistic abilities of Shakespeare, I myself remember how by middle-school, my instructors took great pains to teach us that using the same word over and over again was not to be desired, and that variety was an essential aspect of what is to be considered “good” communication.  Then again, as it has been pointed out, Trump tends to communicate at best at a middle-school level, and often at an elementary-school level; this is not some expression, but the result of sophisticated linguistic analyses.

Pretty early in his speech, Trump made clear that the cornerstone of his foreign policy would be to “put…‘America First.’”  I think it would be hard to accuse even the worst of our presidents of not acting in what they felt were the best interests of the United States, or to find one that acted on behalf of other nations primarily, and not on behalf of America; thus, while this is certainly a crowd-pleaser among some segments of the population, on a substantive level this “cornerstone” can only fairly be regarded as pointless, for while the segments of the population that appreciate such language feel that President Obama and others who don’t think like them are traitors who actively try to sabotage the United States in the interest of helping the Muslim Brotherhood or other apparently nefarious actors, such talk is simply inane and not even worth addressing… unless you are a mainstream Republican candidate for the presidency.

Another thing worth noting is how many times Trump repeats himself throughout.  That means even though Trump spoke at some length, the “content” of the speech was stretched pretty thinly throughout.

Dr. Trump Diagnoses U.S. Foreign Policy Problems

Trump then went on to assert that there are five main weaknesses in today’s American foreign policy, only one of which was accurate, and even that one is not exactly something that can be controlled on America’s end directly.

1.) “First,” he began, “our resources are totally over extended,” and maintained that Obama’s actions that have weakened the economy have thus weakened the military and America’s power in the world. 

What’s ironic about this criticism is that Obama, more than any president since the end of the Cold War, has retrenched, reducing and pulling back American commitments overseas, most notably in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, and cutting what was a historically and unnecessarily high defense budget in ways not seen since the end of the Cold War and more steeply than any time since the end of the Korean War.  If anything, Obama has clearly helped the U.S. to be less overextended. 

POGO.org

As for the economy, since the peak lows during the Great Recession—the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression—Obama has overseen 74 consecutive months of net job creation (a record for any president), the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 stock indexes have more than doubled in value, the export-import trade deficit has fallen by 24%, America has risen to become the world’s number-one producer of both oil and natural gas, and the unemployment rate has been cut in half.  So Obama has clearly “outperform[ed] Reagan on jobs, growth, and investing.”  Now, this does not tell the full story, and there are aspects of the economy which are certainly still troubling, but by any measure these numbers are impressive, even when allowing for very real problems, and one can hardly claim that Obama is “weakening our economy” overall, as Trump claims. 

Trump’s first major point can be dismissed, then.

2.) “Secondly, our allies are not paying their fair share,” and he expects them, especially fellow NATO members, to pay up, and pay up far more than they have been. 

Trump actually has a point here, besides the U.S. only four other NATO members are meeting their NATO defense-spending obligations.  But these decisions are not up to the Obama Administration, and while Obama could try to undiplomatically strong-arm close allies to do even more than the Obama Administration is already urging them to do, at a time when China and Russia are rising, when combating global terrorism requires better, not worse relationships, it is hardly a given that bullying our allies into paying more would be the best method.  And yet, Trump still has a point—EU nations and others that enjoy a high standard of living (including better education and healthcare than America) while America puts more effort into defending these same countries from potential foes like Russia, China, and North Korea than these countries expend themselves is definitely an imbalance that should be adjusted—but this has been the case long before Obama and Obama is not the one to blame for it.

3.) Then, “Thirdly, our friends are beginning to think they can’t depend on us. We’ve had a president who dislikes our friends and bows to our enemies, something that we’ve never seen before in the history of our country.”

Like his first claim, this statement of Trump’s is also very problematic.  As noted above, the Obama Administration does more than its fair share to contribute to European security, and Obama has led a regime of economic sanctions against Russia that have quite likely restrained the scope and intensity of its aggressiveness.  Europe, India, Russia, and China also very much wanted progress in improving the West’s relationship with Iran, and Obama led the way in achieving a historic nuclear agreement between the world’s most powerful nations and Iran’s government on their nuclear program.  But Trump’s criticism focuses on this Iran deal, which he and many Republicans (and Netanyahu and many Israelis) myopically and erroneously label a “disastrous deal.” 

Part of the argument that is made against this Iran deal is the claim that this deal makes Israel less safe, an absurd argument that is related to an absurd general criticism that many Republicans and many Israelis make in which, in Trump’s words, “President Obama has not been a friend to Israel.”  In fact, under Obama, Israel has seen a notable increase American in military aid and has been given more American military aid overall and on average per year than under any previous American president.  This aid includes the highly effective Iron Dome missile/rocket defense system, so effective in neutralizing Hamas’ and other militant groups’ rocket attacks against Israel. Besides this, Obama has not been shy in using the diplomatic might of America to defend Israel, the U.S. both being the sole Security Council veto of a resolution critical of Israeli settlement building in early 2011 and using pressure behind to scenes to push against Palestinian diplomatic efforts.  As is obvious to many, doing right by Israel does not mean supporting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Likud Party’s agenda.  That Obama challenged Israel under Netanyahu to do what’s in its own interests is not “throwing Israel under the bus,” it’s being a true, honest friend.  So while Obama does not hand over to Israel (increasing) billions every year in military aid without letting Israel know that its occupation and expansion of settlements is inflammatory and self-destructive, this does not make him an enemy of Israel. 

As for our other allies, Obama has been increasing America’s military presence in Eastern Europe to reassure allies wary of Russian aggression as well as increasing it in East Asia to reassure our Asian allies wary of aggressive Chinese moves.  So it is hard to find substantive examples of where we have let our allies down, though we may not always agree 100% with each other, as is the case with every American president.

And the whole fuss that people made over Obama “bowing” to foreign leaders was selective outrage at best and misleading at worst.  Another silly non-issue.

Thus, Trump’s narrative here is also false.

4.) After that, we have “Fourth, our rivals no longer respect us.”

“No longer” in this case implies that America’s image in the past was better.  As objectively measured in reliable global public opinion surveys, this can be dismissed at least in comparing America under Obama to America under George W. Bush, where a clear general trend of global opinion has been an improvement in America’s standing under Obama.  The largest downward trend in recent decades was a sharp decline in global opinion from the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency to when George W. Bush was president.  In short, any recent major decline in the respect people have had for America has a strong association with the Republican presidency of George W. Bush, not Democrats Barack Obama or Bill Clinton.  So Trump’s characterization of placing a supposed decline in the respect the world has for America as being associated mainly with Obama simply flies in the face of the facts. 

While it is true that, in contrast to many other nations, China’s opinion of America has dipped slightly and Russia’s has tanked, this is due to the increasing divergence of interests in the South China Sea on one hand, and in Eastern Europe and Syria on the other.  In addition, Putin has based much of his power on using state-owned and social media to whip up propaganda, including anti-American sentiment.  In addition, Russia was happy to invade U.S. ally Georgia even when George W. Bush was president, and China’s recent assertiveness is a reflection of its recent growth in power more than anything else, fueled by its impressive economic growth in recent years.  And in both Russia and China, it could be argued that its people like America less because Obama is standing up to their governments’ aggression.

To be fair, the Obama administration’s single biggest blunder to its credibility—backing away in 2013 from the “red line” it set for Syria’s Assad—did not help with the respect America’s rivals have for America; but to define Obama’s presidency on this single incident, and to blame him for the chaos erupting around the world, from the Arab Spring to the refugee crises in Europe and the Middle East, is myopic and extremely American-centered.  If anything, anti-Americanism is fueled by decades-long American policies, including aggressive military action, support for Israel, and support for oppressive regimes during the Cold War, not specifically because of President Obama.

Under Obama, even after historic cuts, America’s military spending (#1 in the world) still dwarfs China’s (#2) and Russia’s (#4) combined spending, and that is a reality of power that both Russia and China respect whether they admit it or not.  In the end, tying our rivals’ assertiveness to Obama’s policies and personality at the expense of other factors is speculative at best, then.

Thus, we have another dubious assertion on the part of Trump.

5.) And “Finally, America no longer has a clear understanding of our foreign policy goals. Since the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union, we’ve lacked a coherent foreign policy.”  

Perhaps that is because the world is much more complicated now as far as international relations.  Trump early in his speech vowed to create a “new foreign policy direction, one that replaces randomness with purpose.”  For Trump, “after the Cold War…our foreign policy began to make less and less sense.”  This involves the typical assumption that conservatives makes all too often about the American foreign policy and the current world in which that policy needs to be crafted to fit.  For American conservatives, the Cold War is remembered somewhat fondly: the Soviet Union was unquestionable our biggest problem, threat, and adversary, with no other nation even coming close; our foreign policy subordinated all else to the competition between our two nations and their competing ideologies of free-market democracy vs. state-run economic communism/socialism.  Our aims and objectives throughout the Cold War remained consistent and obvious: counter the Soviet Union by any means necessary, preferably but not limiting ourselves to the spread of free-market capitalism and democracy, at least in theory.  Conservatives fail to remember with much clarity that this often meant, in practice, promoting undemocratic and abusively oppressive regimes that opened their markets to us but opened as well as prisons and torture rooms for dissidents within their own borders.  It is in these very trade-offs of convenience that roots of both the 9/11 attacks and many of the problems in the world today lie.

So for Trump and Republicans, they are right on one thing: foreign policy was far more simply conceived and strategized in the Cold War, and was executed without the same amount of hand-wringing and (social) media attention that is the norm in our present world.  If people living in Vietnam could live-tweet and post camera-phone pictures and videos of American carpet-bombing raids and killings like those at My Lai, the Vietnam War would have been a very different experience with potentially very different outcomes.  In other words, simplicity did not necessarily lead to the best long-term results.  Of course, Trump presents a hubristic vision of the Cold War in which the U.S. “won big,” with Reagan the Great getting much of the credit (of course, in this view, the Berlin Wall coming down and the the Soviet system was a consequence of Reagan’s rhetoric, and internal Soviet dynamics and policies, decisions on the part of Gorbachev to reform the USSR and essentially stand his forces down and to respect the will of the people—a hallmark of much of his later period of leadership—are myopically not considered or mentioned as major factors).

The solution to today’s foreign policy problems?  To return to the consistency and simplicity of our foreign policy approach of Reagan and the Cold War.  He engaged in a critique of what he called the “Obama-Clinton” approach to the world, notably repeating a number of repeatedly debunked assertions about Clinton’s response to the Benghazi attacks.

The problem is, the world is a much more complex place than the bipolar world of the Cold War; the current unipolar system, perhaps transitioning to a multipolar one, begs for a different approach, one not rooted in simplicity but in complexity.  A one-size-fits all “consistent” approach would very clearly be a poor fit for today’s more complex world.  This means that consistency is not to necessarily be pursued, as a nuanced and complex world requires different approaches for each new crisis.  Another problem is that while policy during the Cold War was relatively consistent compared with today’s foreign policy, it, too, was subject to nuance and departures and is hardly as simple as some make it out to be.

Trump also made clear that “We’re getting out of the nation-building business and instead focusing on creating stability in the world.”  This statement itself is a slap in the face of logic, as it is weakening, failing, and failed states that are among the greatest contributors to global and regional instability, including the fueling of terrorist movements like ISIS. It’s also a slap in the face to the most successful U.S. foreign policy ever: nation building in Europe with the Marshall Plan and with the American occupation of Japan after WWII are the main reasons why peace has reigned in Europe and East Asia ever since; without nation building, it is very likely that war, extremism, and chaos would have reigned instead.

Still, Trump seemed to articulate that the solutions to today’s crises are rooted in the strategy America had in the Cold War, a conflict that was quite different from the challenges faced by the world today and an ill-fit for as a toolbox for crafting an approach for today’s very different world.

Thus, Trump is wrong to call for a simple, unified approach to foreign policy; if anything, today’s more complex world requires inconsistency as each crisis and region requires solutions that defy them being lumped into a single box.

Dr. Trump’s Prescription to Make America’s Foreign Policy Great Again

Trump then laid out the pillars of his own “foreign policy”:

1.) “First,” he said, “we need a long-term plan to halt the spread and reach of radical Islam. Trump doesn’t really have a plan, as the lack of specifics in this speech demonstrate.  However, Obama has an approach that is set up quite well for longer-terms success, as I have pointed out before.  As part of this, he says “we must as a nation be more unpredictable.”  While there is merit in keeping our enemies guessing, too much unpredictability will unnerve our allies as well.  Either way, Trump has far from demonstrated that he has any competent, detailed ideas for dealing with ISIS, while Obama’s strategy, which Trump criticizes profusely without even understanding it, is very sound.

2.) Then, “Secondly, we have to rebuild our military and our economy.” This has been covered, already, and this statement is simply nonsense.  See above.

A.) After that, either as an aside or as a separate point, Trump says “We must even treat…[our veterans] really, really well and that will happen under the Trump administration.” There’s no denying the Department of Veterans’ Affairs (VA) had and still has serious problems, and there’s no denying that the Obama Administration should have addressed these problems with far more energy than it did.  But the simple fact of the matter is that the lion’s share of the VA’s problems go back many years, and Obama inherited a situation that was a ticking time bomb, most notably from the fact that the Bush Administration fought two significant wars over nearly a decade and did not prepare the VA for what was going to obviously be a serious increase in the number of veterans needing treatment; as soon as the Afghanistan and Iraq invasions began, expansion of funding, staffing, and support for VA services should have been among the first steps undertaken and should have been further expanded as the wars grew longer and more costly.

3.) “Finally,” Trump continues, “we must develop a foreign policy based on American interests.” Again, going back to our earlier commentary, this almost doesn’t even need to be addressed, so silly is this statement. 

Still: Trump engaged in a disorganized and meandering explanation of what this means.  He cites the Clinton years of the 1990s as a time of policy in which we were not acting in our interests based on a few isolated but not insignificant attacks Trump cited as somehow indicative of American policy being totally off -course, even though under Clinton we enjoyed an unprecedented jobs boom and employment growth, helped to bring stability to Europe several times by ending two wars there, and had a better relationship with Russia than any during any other American president’s administration, with the arguable exception of FDR.  Trump then made points he already made about the Middle East.  He then proceeded to spout a series of vague generalities on improving relationships with Russia and China and about the use of military force.  

For Trump, success relies on having a “disciplined, deliberate and consistent foreign policy.”  This coming from a candidate whose entire behavior on the campaign trail has been anything but.  Even within the speech, he seems unaware of the apparent contradictions (e.g., calling for stability while casting aside the role of nation building, calling for closer alliances while also threatening to weaken them).  He then repeated yet again some of his earlier points about the Middle East and the U.S. economy, and took additional jabs at NAFTA, tying all this into putting “America First” again, and vowed to bring in new and different voices into the foreign policy machine in order to do so.  Additionally, he also had this very contradictory statement to make:

“Finally, I will work with our allies to reinvigorate Western values and institutions. Instead of trying to spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants, we should understand that strengthening and promoting Western civilization and its accomplishments will do more to inspire positive reforms around the world than military interventions.” 

In a broad sense, basic Western values—democracy, human rights, equality, transparency—have been spreading, and even where they are not present are generally sought by people in the face of their intransigent governments.  Battles over religion and gender are particularly difficult, but do not negate the fact that many “Western” values since WWII and especially after the Cold War are approaching a universal quality, especially as embodied by the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Trump correctly maintains that these values should not be spread at gunpoint, but then calls for “promoting Western civilization” even as he criticizes the idea that we should “spread universal values that not everybody shares or wants.”  So in the same paragraph, Trump is confusing as to whether or not he thinks the West should promote its values, even as he is clear about not using force to do so, while at the same time asserting he would be firmer than Obama about use-of-force red lines, or “a line in the sand,” as Trump put it.  In fact, this paragraph sums up his speech nicely: full of different ideas and talking points that sound good alone, but that Trump failed to connect coherently in this address and articulated in ways that were often either confusing at best or contradictory at worst.

Trump’s Speech: A Perfect Representation of GOP “Foreign Policy”

Several Republican foreign policy bigwigs, falling pretty easily for Trump’s plummeting expectations game, including the Republican Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Bob Corker and George W. Bush’s Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, praised the speech.  Former Republican Speaker of the House (and possible Trump vice presidential running mate) Newt Gingrich also praised Trump’s speech, calling it “very serious” and “presidential.”

Seth Wenig/AP

But this Republican Party is a party that has been devoid for some time of substantive and serious ideas about foreign policy, which is a reality that was on display beyond any reasonable doubt (and not for the first time) as numerous Republican presidential candidates showed how out of their depth they were back in a December debate focused on foreign policy and security.  A few months before that, we had the Benghazi hearing featuring Clinton, and well before that, another case in point is George W. Bush’s presidency.  Trump’s foreign policy speech—and candidacy—is only the latest sign that the Republican Party and most of its voters are not serious or substantive.

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