By Jeremy Kuzmarov, Covert Action Magazine, 3/5/24

Jeremy Kuzmarov is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023).

On January 31, New York City councilman Robert Holden wrote a letter to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg calling for reopening of the investigation into the death of Dorothy Kilgallen.

Described by Ernest Hemingway as “one of the greatest women writers in the world,” Kilgallen was a regular on the CBS game show What’s My Line who wrote a column for the New York Journal-American during the early 1960s that was syndicated to 200 newspapers.^[1]

After John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, Kilgallen was one of the few journalists to question the findings of the Warren Commission report that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin.

Kilgallen interviewed Jack Ruby at his trial and exposed his Warren Commission testimony before its release date, causing FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to become a mortal enemy.^[2]

If she had lived past the age of 52, Kilgallen’s goal was to expose evidence pointing to the truth about the JFK assassination and corruption at the Warren Commission passed on to her by Commission member Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky in a “tell-all” book she was writing for Random House.

Kilgallen’s body was found in her Manhattan townhouse on the morning of November 8, 1965, sitting upright in a bed in the master bedroom.

Kilgallen’s death was officially determined to have been caused by a combination of alcohol and barbiturates, with the police stating that there was no indication of violence or suicide. New York City Medical Examiner James Luke said that the circumstances of her death were undetermined, though “the overdose could well have been accidental.”

However, numerous people close to Kilgallen recognized at the time that the overdose was not accidental. The chief counsel of 1979 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), G. Robert Blakey, said that though the HSCA’s look into Kilgallen’s death was not substantial, “we thought it was fishy.”^[3]

Kilgallen’s hairdresser Marc Sinclaire, the first to report Kilgallen’s death at 9:30 a.m. on November 8 after passing by her home, was suspicious because a) Kilgallen was found in a room where she did not normally sleep wearing fancy clothes she would not have gone to sleep in; b) was found sitting up with a book turned upside down (The Honey Badger by Robert Ruark) she had finished weeks before; c) had poor eyesight and required glasses to read but no glasses were found in the room where she died; and d) because a police car was parked outside the townhouse when Sinclaire got there, though Kilgallen’s death had not yet been reported.

Sinclaire ruled out suicide further because Dorothy was a) religiously Catholic; b) cheerful about life; c) at the peak of her fame, earning an income of $200,000 per year (equivalent to $1.5 million today); and d) intent on completing her tell-all book on the JFK assassination.

Sinclaire also knew that Kilgallen would not overdose because she did not have a drug problem or drink heavily. In the days before her death, additionally, she had confided in him her belief that someone close to her was a “snitch” who was watching her closely and feeding information to people who wished to do her harm.^[4]

Johnnie Ray, Kilgallen’s lover whom Tony Bennett called “the father of rock ’n’ roll,” told a friend that he did not believe Dorothy had died of natural causes. Dorothy had told him that she had been investigating the JFK assassination and was “close to breaking the whole case open” and had “been threatened as a result of her work.”^[5]

Other people who expressed suspicion about Kilgallen’s death included:

1. Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s lawyer, who said: “They killed Dorothy; now they’ll go after Ruby.”
2. Gossip columnist Liz Smith, who wrote in her column: “Dorothy knew too much. Her murder was very mysterious.”
3. Bob Schulenberg, a good friend of Dorothy’s daughter Jill, who told him: “My mother was murdered [because of her work on the JFK assassination].”
4. Eileen Broich, the wife of toxicologist John Broich, who said that her husband told her that “Dorothy was bumped off.”^[6]
5. Dr. Charles Umberger, Director of Toxicology in the Department of Pathology at the New York City Medical Examiner’s office.
6. Watergate Burglar and undercover CIA operative Frank Sturgis, who told Marita Lorenz, Fidel Castro’s lover and a fellow CIA agent, that “Kilgallen got whacked” because of her intention to publish a book which included information from her exclusive interviews with Jack Ruby.^[7]

Mark Shaw is a former criminal defense attorney and TV legal analyst who researched the Kilgallen case for a long period and appears to have solved it.

Shaw first learned about the Kilgallen case while practicing law with Melvin Belli, Jack Ruby’s attorney in the 1980s, and developed great admiration for Kilgallen.

In three books—The Reporter Who Knew Too Much (2016); Collateral Damage (2021); and Fighting For Justice (2022)—he lays out the evidence about Kilgallen’s murder and shows who was behind it.

One of the oddities that Shaw found was that Kilgallen’s death certificate—which pointed to her death being accidental—was signed by Dr. Dominick DiMaio, the deputy chief of the Office of the Medical Examiner (ME) in Brooklyn, even though Kilgallen was found dead in Manhattan.

Shaw was told by one of his sources, Stephen Goldner, a forensic toxicologist at the Manhattan ME’s office, that it was “known or rumored that DiMaio was known to take care of things for the mafia.”^[8]

Goldner had told Eileen Broich, the wife of his colleague John Broich, that he was writing a book about how the Mafia “controlled the New York City ME’s office in the mid 1960s.” He also told Broich’s son Chris that his dad had been “one of the heroes because he wouldn’t alter toxicology reports like others did in the MEs office.”^[9]

Kilgallen was found with two barbiturates in her bloodstream that she had never before consumed—Nembutal and Tuinal—which indicated foul play.

There were two glasses present at her bedside table, which meant that someone was in the bedroom with her when she died. Kilgallen’s butler James Clement, told Kilgallen’s daughter that he remembered that Dorothy was accompanied by a man when she arrived home during the early morning hours before she died.

Evidence that her drink had been spiked was reflected in the fact that powdered traces of the barbiturates were found on one of the glasses at her bedside. If by some chance she had committed suicide, Kilgallen would have taken it in capsule form, which would have left no residue. Shaw writes that the “powdered barbiturates undercut the accidental death conclusion of ME Dr. Luke.”^[10]

The accidental death conclusion is further undercut by the fact that Kilgallen was found wearing false eyelashes, a hairpiece and makeup that she never wore to bed, which indicated that she was dressed up after she had been killed.

The air conditioner was turned on in her apartment even though it was fifty-five degrees outside, which offered a clue that Kilgallen was murdered because, according to Dr. Charles A. Mathis, a fellow at the prestigious American College of Cardiology,, “in a cold environment, alcohol and barbiturates are all respiratory suppressants.”^[11]

The million-dollar question that Shaw had to try to answer was who Kilgallen’s guest was who was drinking from the second glass that was found at her bedside.

His answer is a fellow journalist named Ronald Pataky, a film and drama critic for The Columbus Citizen-Journal, who had met Kilgallen in June 1964 on the set of The Sound of Music in Austria during a press junket. Friends called Pataky, to whom Dorothy gave an apartment and Thunderbird automobile, Dorothy’s “boy toy.” [Pataky was 23 years younger than Kilgallen]^[12]

A good-looking man who had an affair with Frank Sinatra’s wife Mia Farrow, Pataky had a violent past: He was arrested after getting drunk and throwing a glass across the room at Cinderfella (1960) actress Anna Maria Alberghetti who was then his fiancee, and for firing four shots with a .38 caliber pistol at former NFL player Jim Otis and threatening him with a blackjack.

After he dropped out of Stanford University in the mid 1950s, Pataky allegedly enrolled in the School of the Americas in Panama, the infamous CIA training ground for Latin American security forces.

In late 2019, Shaw was told by a credible confidential source, the Las Vegas Sands Hotel and Casino pit boss during the 1960s who had experience working for the FBI and CIA, that Pataky had landed in some kind of trouble prior to Kilgallen’s death. He was saved by agreeing to become a mole and do dirty work for CIA and FBI agents and underworld figures who were closely monitoring Kilgallen’s JFK investigation and intentions to publish a Random House book.^[13]

Pataky’s key task was to provide his handlers with the secret information that Kilgallen had uncovered in the course of her investigation—information that was lethal in nature.

According to Shaw, Kilgallen and Pataky, on the night of her death, had drinks at the Regency Hotel bar in a back booth where Pataky likely slipped the barbiturates into Dorothy’s drink.

Afterwards, Pataky drove Dorothy back to her townhouse and gave her a glass of water and transferred the remnants of the Nembutal (barbiturate) onto the rim of the glass.

Pataky then assisted Dorothy in getting to her bedroom, and as she passed out, began to search for her JFK assassination research file, including in her closet where Dorothy’s clothes were found strewn about the next morning.

As Pataky searched Dorothy’s house, Shaw believes that he found her dead on the bathroom floor after she had ingested some Pepto Bismol because of her stomach pain. In the minutes before, Dorothy likely experienced bradycardia, a condition marked by a slow heart rate accompanied by dizziness and fainting.

When the body was discovered in the bathroom, Pataky and, possibly, the butler Clement, and Dorothy’s estranged husband, Richard Kollmar, who stayed on a lower floor and discovered Kilgallen’s body, undressed her, replacing her soiled dress with the clothes she was wearing when she was discovered by Marc Sinclaire.^[14]

According to Shaw, Pataky panicked when he could not find her JFK assassination file and phoned his contacts. They called FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who sent his operatives to Kilgallen’s townhouse in search of the file. These were the FBI agents (or rogue agents posing as FBI agents) that James Clement saw taking boxes of Kilgallen’s documents and papers away despite his protest.

Taking cues from Hoover, the police only came into Dorothy’s townhouse at 3:00 p.m., hours after Marc Sinclaire had discovered Dorothy’s body and reported her death.

The police investigation afterwards was completely shoddy, with police never searching for fingerprints or combing Dorothy’s townhouse for clues. Additionally, they failed to interview key witnesses, including Marc Sinclaire and Pataky and patrons at the Regency Hotel.^[15]

Pataky basically confessed to his own guilt in two poems that he posted on his website in 2016. The poems were uncovered by Shaw and then taken down from the website soon after Shaw viewed them.

The first poem titled “Never Trust a Stiff at a Typewriter,” read:

There’s a way to quench a gossip’s stench
That never fails
One cannot write if zippered tight
Somebody who’s dead could tell no tales.”^[16]

Kilgallen was a gossip columnist so obviously Pataky was talking about her.

A second poem by Pataky read:

“While I’m spilling my guts
She’s driving me nuts
Please fetch us two drinks
On the run

Just skip all the nois’n
Make one of ’em poison
And don’t even tell me
Which one!^[17]

This poem is equally incriminating because it references the putting of poison into one of the drinks—the method by which Kilgallen was murdered that only the killer would know.^[18]

According to Shaw, Pataky’s cousin, Belva Elliot, said years after Kilgallen’s death that “there’s no reason to dig up the past. Don’t want to hurt Ronnie, but he admitted the poems he wrote about the poisoning, about the zippered tight, were about Dorothy.”^[19]

Elliot added that “Ronnie told me Kilgallen was poisoned because she was too close to the truth about the JFK assassination. Ron wouldn’t say by whom and yes Kilgallen bought an apartment for Ron and a Thunderbird and Ron said he talked to Dorothy just before she died.”^[20]

Shaw makes a case that Kilgallen should be remembered as one of the great journalists of the 20^th century.

Her father, Jim, had been a star reporter for the Hearst organization who said that Dorothy “had an unerring instinct for news…a brilliant style of writing. She was accurate and had a flair for the apt phrase. She had an uncanny ability to produce scoops and an inordinate speed in turning out copy.”^[21]

Paul Schoenstein, an editor at the New York Journal-American where Dorothy had started her career in 1931 and wrote, said that “Dorothy was far and away the greatest reporter there was.”^[22]

At the time of her death, Kilgallen was in the process of writing a true-crime book, Murder One (1967), which included the case of an Ohio doctor whose conviction Kilgallen’s reporting had helped to overturn.

Though leaning to the right politically, Kilgallen had been one of the first reporters to allege that the CIA and organized crime were teaming up to eliminate Fidel Castro.^[23] She had also raised suspicions of foul play in the death of Marilyn Monroe.^[24]

Kilgallen became invested in the Kennedy assassination case in part because of a friendship that she had struck with him; he once met with her and her son in the White House.

In one column, Kilgallen pointed out that, after JFK was shot, Dallas Police Chief Jesse Curry, who was in the first limo of the presidential motorcade, issued orders to “get a man on top of the overpass and see what happened there [atop the grassy knoll].” The next day, Curry lied when he told reporters he thought the shots came from the Texas School Book Depository.^[25]

Kilgallen’s column on November 14, 1965, “Why Did Oswald Risk All by Shooting Cop,” questioned whether Oswald was the one who shot police officer J.D. Tippit after killing Kennedy, as was alleged.

Kilgallen wrote that “a man who knows he is wanted by the authorities after a spectacular crime does not seek out a policeman usually unless he decided to give himself up, and certainly Oswald was not doing that.”^[26]

Kilgallen had been tipped off by a witness, Acquila Clemons, who, contrary to the Warren Report, said that she saw two men involved in the murder of Officer J.D. Tippit, not one, and that neither of the men resembled Oswald.^[27]

Kilgallen also reported that Tippit had met with Jack Ruby in Ruby’s Carousel club eight days before the assassination, indicating he may have been part of the conspiracy to assassinate JFK.^[28]

Later investigators determined that Oswald could not have been in the location that Tippit was shot at the time Tippit was killed.^[29]

Because of the wide reach of her columns, Kilgallen served as a conduit for information supplied to her on the JFK assassination by Mark Lane, a lawyer who wrote the 1966 best-selling book Rush to Judgment, the first book to critique the Warren Commission.^[30]

Lane said that Kilgallen was “a very, very serious journalist. You might say that she was the only serious journalist in America who was concerned with who killed John Kennedy and getting all of the facts about the assassination.”^[31]

Dorothy had told Lane that their investigations into the Kennedy assassination were dangerous and that the “intelligence agencies will be watching us. We’ll have to be very careful.”^[32]

Kilgallen was indeed subjected to FBI surveillance, with the FBI tapping her home phone line. The CIA also had 53 field offices around the world watching her on her foreign travels.^[33]

At one point, two FBI agents visited Kilgallen to find out how she got Ruby’s testimony before the Warren Commission. She made the agents tea but told them that she could never reveal how she got that exhibit or who gave it to her.^[34] 

J. Edgar Hoover, in one of the reports that he received, scribbled “Wrong” next to a copy of Kilgallen’s November 29, 1963, column, “Oswald File Must Not Close.”

The column questioned how “Ruby—the owner of a strip-tease honky tonk—could have strolled in and out of police headquarters in Dallas as if it were a health club at a time when a small army of law enforcers were keeping a ‘tight security guard’ on Oswald.”

Kilgallen further wrote that “so many people were saying there was something queer about the killing of Oswald, something strange about the way his case was handled, a great deal missing in the official account of his crime. The American people have just lost a beloved president. It was a dark chapter in our history, but we have the right to read every word of it [the Oswald file]. It cannot be kept locked in a file in Dallas.”^[35]

In another column, Kilgallen called the Warren Commission report “laughable” and wrote of Jack Ruby’s statement to her that “the world will never know the true facts of what occurred. My motives, the people who had, that had so much to gain and had such a material motive to put me in the position I’m in would never let the true facts come above board to the world.”^[36]

Kilgallen interviewed Ruby twice, including a private 30 minute interview in the chambers of Judge Joe Brown absent his bodyguards, and came to believe that Ruby was a patsy who had been used and then discarded by the coordinators of the Kennedy assassination.^[37]

She never published any information she obtained from her private talks with Ruby because she was “saving it for the book,” according to Pataky. But Kilgallen did suggest in one of her columns that there were witnesses who saw Oswald inside Ruby’s Carousel Club.

Prior to her death, Kilgallen had been planning to travel a second time to New Orleans for a “cloak-and-daggerish” type trip in which she aimed to further trace Ruby’s past, his mob ties and Oswald’s background, which were also all going to be discussed in her book.^[39]

All the material she compiled on the case was placed in her assassination file—which more than one person saw since, at times, she would carry it around with her.^[40]

Kilgallen’s views on the JFK assassination were summarized when she said that “the whole thing smells a bit fishy. It’s a mite too simple that a chap kills the President of the United States, escapes from that bother, kills a policeman, eventually is apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every law of police procedure, and subsequently is murdered under extraordinary circumstances.”^[41]

On September 3, 1965, three months before her death, Kilgallen published her last column on the JFK assassination in which she wrote “Those close to the scene realize that if the widow of Lee Harvey Oswald (now married to another chap) ever gave out the ‘whole story’ of her life with President Kennedy’s alleged assassin, it would split open the front pages of newspapers all over the world.” Kilgallen further wrote that “this story is not going to die as long as there’s a real reporter alive—and there are a lot of them.”^[42]

Unfortunately, for history’s sake, there really was only one real reporter and, when she died, so too did the story. The blackout was evident just before Kilgallen’s death in June 1965 when she planned to speak about the Warren Report on ABC’s Nightlife, having brought parts of her JFK assassination research file, but was told by the show’s producer that the network did not want her to address the subject because it was “too controversial.”^[43]

Hugh Aynesworth, the only reporter present in Dealey Plaza when Kennedy was fatally shot, in the Texas Theater when police arrested Lee Harvey Oswald, and in the Dallas Police Department when Jack Ruby shot Oswald, wrote to Life Magazine editor Holland McComb in November 1966 that the press had failed to cover the JFK assassination story, stating “few people did much. Fewer newspapers or TV stations took the time to cover the situation adequately.”^[44]

In 1967, the CIA issued a memo to its media assets imploring them to label as “conspiracy theorists” and far-left extremists any investigator who dared challenge the veracity of the Warren report. When New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began probing deeply into the case and prosecuted CIA agent Clay Shaw, he was accused not only of being a conspiracy theorist but also of bribing witnesses and to be suffering from psychoneurosis.^[45]

In hindsight, it seems clear that Kilgallen’s murder was intended not only to ensure the theft of her file on the assassination but also to intimidate and silence other reporters who might have been intent on probing into the case.

The historical implications were huge, contributing no less to the destruction of the free press in the U.S. which no longer exists.

1. The column was called “The Voice of Broadway.” ↑
2. Kilgallen had received an advance copy of the Warren Commission Report whose gaps, contradictions and lies she helped to expose. ↑
3. Mark Shaw, Fighting For Justice: The Improbable Journey For Exposing Coverups About the JFK Assassination and Deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen (Post Hill Press, 2022), 65. The HSCA primarily investigated the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations. ↑
4. Mark Shaw, Collateral Damage: The Mysterious Deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Dorothy Kilgallen, and the Ties That Bind Them to Robert Kennedy and the JFK Assassination (Franklin, TN: Post Hill Press, 2021), 286; Sara Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen,” Midwest Today, 2007, https://www.midtod.com/dorothys.pdf. ↑
5. Mark Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much: The Mysterious Death of What’s My Line TV Star and Media Icon Dorothy Kilgallen (Franklin, TN: Post Hill Press, 2016), 207. ↑
6. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 511. ↑
7. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 460. Sturgis bragged that “we can kill anybody we want. Just blame it on national security.” ↑
8. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 284. ↑
9. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 281. John Broich had to leave the ME’s office. He said that the Mafia was intimidating him and that he was terrified. According to Goldner, Broich was strong-willed and would not be bought or pressured to fudge results like others. Also according to Goldner, two-thirds of the staff at the ME’s office were Sicilian and some were listed with phony credentials and were not actually chemists. ↑
10. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 279; Shaw, Collateral Damage, 516. ↑
11. Shaw, Fighting For Justice, 132. ↑
12. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 460; Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” 19. Recipient of a journalism degree from Ohio State in the 1950s, Pataky years later earned a master’s degree in Christian Counseling from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, and a Ph.D. in Christian Counseling from Trinity Theological Seminary in Newburgh, Indiana. Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” 23. ↑
13. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 460. Shaw emphasizes that the authenticity of his source was confirmed by Gianni Russo on his podcast “The Hollywood Godfather” in March 2020. According to the source who knew Frank Sinatra, Pataky was sent by Mafia associates to Las Vegas to check on a blackjack dealer who was supposedly cheating. Pataky allegedly confirmed the dishonesty of the dealer, whom the Mafia killed. ↑
14. The fact that the air conditioner was on was very odd since it was cold outside. ↑
15. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 271, 274. Oddly, a movie magazine editor named Mary Branum received a phone call the morning after Kilgallen was killed. The voice said “Dorothy Kilgallen has been murdered” before hanging up. ↑
16. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 257. ↑
17. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 258. ↑
18. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 467. Pataky died on May 16, 2022. ↑
19. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 467. ↑
20. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 467. ↑
21. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 127. Jim covered the 1919 Black Sox scandal, Alger Hiss case, and surrender of Nazi Germany in World War II among other important stories in his journalism career. ↑
22. Shaw, Collateral Damage, 28. ↑
23. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 34. ↑
24. Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” ↑
25. Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” 19. Kilgallen also reported on the intimidation of witnesses in the case by the Dallas police and FBI. ↑
26. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 78. ↑
27. Lee Israel, Kilgallen: A Biography of Dorothy Kilgallen (New York: Delacorte Press, 1979), 395. ↑
28. Israel, Kilgallen, 373. Some researchers believe that Tippit was one of the assassins of JFK. Kilgallen’s reporting on Tippit’s ties to Ruby came from the reporting by Thayer Waldo of the Fort Worth Star Telegram, which Waldo supplied to Mark Lane though was too afraid to himself publish, telling Lane that “if he published what he knew “there would be real danger to him.” ↑
29. See Joseph McBride, Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit (Berkeley, CA: Hightower Press, 2013). ↑
30. Israel, Kilgallen, 373. ↑
31. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 78; Shaw, Fighting For Justice, 94. ↑
32. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 82. ↑
33. Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” 23. ↑
34. Israel, Kilgallen, 395. ↑
35. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 175. ↑
36. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 88. ↑
37. Penn Jones Jr. Forgive My Grief II: A Further Critical Review of the Warren Commission Report on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy (Midlothian Texas: The Midlothian Mirror Inc., 1967), 12, 13. ↑
38. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 66, 67. ↑
39. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 188; Jordan, “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” 20. Melvin Belli called Kilgallen’s scoop on Ruby the “ruin of the Warren Commission.” Kilgallen’s trip to New Orleans was a year before New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison began his famed investigation into the JFK assassination and charged Clay Shaw as a conspirator. ↑
40. Israel, Kilgallen, 401. ↑
41. Israel, Kilgallen, 396. ↑
42. Shaw, The Reporter Who Knew Too Much, 91. ↑
43. Israel, Kilgallen, 401. ↑
44. Hugh Aynesworth to Holland McCombs, Dallas, Texas, November 29, 1966. From the file of Robert Morrow. For other suspicious deaths of journalists investigating the JFK assassination, see Jones Jr. Forgive My Grief II, 13.. Jones Jr. discusses the case of Jim Koethe, a journalist working for the Dallas Times Herald writing a book on the Kennedy assassination who was killed after a man broke into his home in late November 1964 and karate chopped his throat. Jones Jr. also discusses the mysterious death of Kilgallen’s close friend Ms. Earl E.T Smith (Florence Pritchett), wife of the former U.S. ambassador to Cuba at age 45 two days after Kilgallen’s death, stating that the cause of death was listed in the autopsy as unknown. Jones Jr. suggests that it was possible that Smith was given Kilgallen’s notes for her book on the JFK assassination. ↑
45. See, for example, Hugh Aynesworth, “’Big Jim’s Three-Ring Shaw Trial a One-Man Show,” The Pittsburgh Press, February 2, 1969. Kilgallen’s colleague Bob Considine was characteristic in branding critics of the Warren report as “opportunists,” “crackpots,” and “graverobbers” in his introduction to a 1967 book written by Ricardo Warren Lewis, The Scavengers and Critics of the Warren Report: The Endless Paradox (New York: Dell, 1967). Israel, Kilgallen, 401. ↑

By Jamie Dettmer, Politico, 4/3/24

KYIV — Wayward entrepreneur Elon Musk’s latest pronouncements regarding the war in Ukraine set teeth on edge, as he warned that even though Moscow has “no chance” of conquering all of Ukraine, “the longer the war goes on, the more territory Russia will gain until they hit the Dnipro, which is tough to overcome.”

“However, if the war lasts long enough, Odesa will fall too,” he cautioned.

With a history of urging Ukraine to agree to territorial concessions — and his opposition to the $60 billion U.S. military aid package snarled on Capitol Hill amid partisan wrangling — Musk isn’t Ukraine’s favorite commentator, to say the least. And his remarks received predictable pushback.

But the billionaire entrepreneur’s forecast isn’t actually all that different from the dire warnings Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made in the last few days. According to Zelenskyy, unless the stalled multibillion-dollar package is approved soon, his forces will have to “go back, retreat, step by step, in small steps.” He also warned that some major cities could be at risk of falling.

Obviously, Zelenskyy’s warnings are part of a broad diplomatic effort to free up the military aid his forces so desperately need and have been short of for months — everything from 155-millimeter artillery shells to Patriot air-defense systems and drones. But the sad truth is that even if the package is approved by the U.S. Congress, a massive resupply may not be enough to prevent a major battlefield upset.

And such a setback, especially in the middle of election campaigns in America and Europe, could very well revive Western pressure for negotiations that would obviously favor Russia, leaving the Kremlin free to revive the conflict at a future time of its choosing.

Essentially, everything now depends on where Russia will decide to target its strength in an offensive that’s expected to launch this summer. In a pre-offensive pummeling — stretching from Kharkiv and Sumy in the north to Odesa in the south — Russia’s missile and drone strikes have widely surged in recent weeks, targeting infrastructure and making it hard to guess where it will mount its major push.

And according to high-ranking Ukrainian military officers who served under General Valery Zaluzhny — the commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces until he was replaced in February — the military picture is grim.

The officers said there’s a great risk of the front lines collapsing wherever Russian generals decide to focus their offensive. Moreover, thanks to a much greater weight in numbers and the guided aerial bombs that have been smashing Ukrainian positions for weeks now, Russia will likely be able to “penetrate the front line and to crash it in some parts,” they said.

They spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely.

“There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now because there are no serious technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of troops Russia is likely to hurl at us. We don’t have those technologies, and the West doesn’t have them as well in sufficient numbers,” one of the top-ranking military sources told POLITICO.

According to him, it is only Ukrainian grit and resilience as well as errors by Russian commanders that may now alter the grim dynamics. Mistakes like the one made on Saturday, when Russia launched one of the largest tank assaults on Ukrainian positions since its full-scale invasion began, only to have the column smashed by Ukraine’s 25th Brigade, which took out a dozen tanks and 8 infantry fighting vehicles — a third of the column’s strength.

Everything now depends on where Russia will decide to target its strength in an offensive that’s expected to launch this summer | Genya Savilov/AFP via Getty Images

However, the high-ranking Ukrainian officers reminded that relying on Russian errors is not a strategy, and they were bitter about the missteps they say hamstrung Ukraine’s resistance from the start — missteps made by both the West and Ukraine. They were also scathing about Western foot-dragging, saying supplies and weapons systems came too late and in insufficient numbers to make the difference they otherwise could have.

“Zaluzhny used to call it ‘the War of One Chance,’” one of the officers said. “By that, he meant weapons systems become redundant very quickly because they’re quickly countered by the Russians. For example, we used Storm Shadow and SCALP cruise missiles [supplied by Britain and France] successfully — but just for a short time. The Russians are always studying. They don’t give us a second chance. And they’re successful in this.”

“Don’t believe the hype about them just throwing troops into the meat grinder to be slaughtered,” he added. “They do that too, of course — maximizing even more the impact of their superior numbers — but they also learn and refine.”

The officers said the shoulder-fired anti-tank missiles supplied by the U.K. and U.S. in the first weeks of the invasion came in time, helping them save Kyiv — and so, too, did the HIMARS, the light multiple-launch rocket systems, which were used to great effect, enabling them to push Russia out of Kherson in November 2022.

“But often, we just don’t get the weapons systems at the time we need them — they come when they’re no longer relevant,” another senior officer said, citing the F-16 fighter jets as an example. A dozen or so F-16s are expected to be operational this summer, after basic pilot training has been completed. “Every weapon has its own right time. F-16s were needed in 2023; they won’t be right for 2024,” he said.

And that’s because, according to this officer, Russia is ready to counter them: “In the last few months, we started to notice missiles being fired by the Russians from Dzhankoy in northern Crimea, but without the explosive warheads. We couldn’t understand what they were doing, and then we figured it out: They’re range-finding,” he said. The officer explained that Russia’s been calculating where best to deploy its S-400 missile and radar systems in order to maximize the area they can cover to target the F-16s, keeping them away from the front lines and Russia’s logistical hubs.

The officers also said they now need more basic traditional weapons as well as drones. “We need Howitzers and shells, hundreds of thousands of shells, and rockets,” one of them told POLITICO, estimating that Ukraine needed 4 million shells and 2 million drones. “We told the Western partners all the time that we have the combat experience, we have the battlefield understanding of this war. [They] have the resources, and they need to give us what we need,” he added.

Europe, for its part, is trying to help Ukraine make up for its colossal disadvantage in artillery shells. And in this regard, a proposed Czech-led bulk artillery ammunition purchase could bring Ukraine’s total from both within and outside the EU to around 1.5 million rounds at a cost of $3.3 billion — but that’s still short of what it needs.

The officers emphasized that they need many, many more men too. The country currently doesn’t have enough men on the front lines, and this is compounding the problem of underwhelming Western support.

However, Ukraine has yet to pull the trigger on recruitment ahead of the expected Russian push, as authorities are worried about the political fallout mobilization measures might bring amid draft-dodging and avoidance of conscription papers. Zaluzhny had already publicly called for the mobilization of more troops back in December, estimating Ukraine needed at least an additional 500,000 men. The draft issue has gone back and forth ever since.

Then, last week, General Oleksandr Syrsky — Zaluzhny’s replacement — abruptly announced that Ukraine might not need quite so many fresh troops. After a review of resources, the figure has been “significantly reduced,” and “we expect that we will have enough people capable of defending their motherland,” he told the Ukrinform news agency. “I am talking not only about the mobilized but also about volunteer fighters,” he said.

The plan is to move as many desk-bound uniformed personnel and those in noncombat roles to the front lines as possible, after an intensive three- to four-month training. But the senior officers POLITICO spoke to said that Syrsky was wrong and “playing along with narratives from politicians.” Then, on Tuesday, Zelenskyy signed some additional parts to an old mobilization law tightening the legal requirements for draft-age Ukrainian men to register their details, and lowering the minimum age for call-up from 27 to 25. But in Ukraine, this is just seen as tinkering.

 “We don’t only have a military crisis — we have a political one,” one of the officers said. While Ukraine shies away from a big draft, “Russia is now gathering resources and will be ready to launch a big attack around August, and maybe sooner.”

So, Musk may not be too wide of the mark after all.

By Scott Ritter, RT, 3/9/24

Tucker Carlson’s confused exasperation over Russian President Vladmir Putin’s extemporaneous history lesson at the start of their landmark February interview (which has been watched more than a billion times), underscored one realty. For a Western audience, the question of the historical bona fides of Russia’s claim of sovereign interest in territories located on the left (eastern) bank of the Dnieper River, currently claimed by Ukraine, is confusing to the point of incomprehension.

Vladimir Putin, however, did not manufacture his history lesson from thin air. Anyone who has followed the speeches and writings of the Russian president over the years would have found his comments to Carlson quite familiar, echoing both in tone and content previous statements made concerning both the viability of the Ukrainian state from an historic perspective, and the historical ties between what Putin has called Novorossiya (New Russia) and the Russian nation.

For example, on March 18, 2014, during his announcement regarding the annexation of Crimea, the president observed that “after the [Russian] Revolution [of 1917], for a number of reasons the Bolsheviks – let God judge them – added historical sections of the south of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic composition of the population, and these regions today form the south-east of Ukraine.”

Later during a televised question-and-answer session, Putin declared that “what was called Novorossiya back in tsarist days – Kharkov, Lugansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Nikolayev and Odessa – were not part of Ukraine then. These territories were given to Ukraine in the 1920s by the Soviet Government. Why? Who knows? They were won by Potemkin and Catherine the Great in a series of well-known wars. The center of that territory was Novorossiysk, so the region is called Novorossiya. Russia lost these territories for various reasons, but the people remained.”

Novorossiya isn’t just a construct of Vladimir Putin’s imagination, but rather a notion drawn from historic fact that resonated with the people who populated the territories it encompassed. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was an abortive effort by pro-Russia citizens of the new Ukrainian state to restore Novorossiya as an independent region.

While this effort failed, the concept of a greater Novorossiya confederation was revived in May 2014 by the newly proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics. But this effort, too, was short-lived, being put on ice in 2015. This, however, did not mean the death of the idea of Novorossiya. On February 21, 2022, Putin delivered a lengthy address to the Russian nation on the eve of his decision to send Russian troops into Ukraine as part of what he termed a Special Military Operation. Those who watched Tucker Carlson’s February 9, 2024, interview with Putin would have been struck by the similarity between the two presentations.

While he did not make a direct reference to Novorossiya, the president did outline fundamental historic and cultural linkages which serve as the foundation for any discussion about the viability and legitimacy of Novorossiya in the context of Russian-Ukrainian relations.

“I would like to emphasize,” Putin said, “once again that Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an integral part of our own history, culture, and spiritual space. It is our friends, our relatives, not only colleagues, friends, and former work colleagues, but also our relatives and close family members. Since the oldest times,” Putin continued, “the inhabitants of the south-western historical territories of ancient Russia have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians. It was the same in the 17th century, when a part of these territories [i.e., Novorossiya] was reunited with the Russian state, and even after that.”

The Russian president set forth his contention that the modern state of Ukraine was an invention of Vladimir Lenin, the founding father of the Soviet Union. “Soviet Ukraine is the result of the Bolsheviks’ policy,” Putin stated, “and can be rightfully called ‘Vladimir Lenin’s Ukraine’. He was its creator and architect. This is fully and comprehensively corroborated by archival documents.”

Putin went on to issue a threat which, when seen in the context of the present, proved ominously prescient. “And today the ’grateful progeny’ has overturned monuments to Lenin in Ukraine. They call it decommunization. You want decommunization? Very well, this suits us just fine. But why stop halfway? We are ready to show what real decommunizations would mean for Ukraine.”

In September 2022 Putin followed through on this, ordering referendums in four territories (Kherson and Zaporozhye, and the newly independent Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics) to determine whether the populations residing there wished to join the Russian Federation. All four did so. Putin has since then referred to these new Russian territories as Novorossiya, perhaps nowhere more poignantly that in June 2023, when he praised the Russian soldiers “who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya and for the unity of the Russian world.”

The story of those who fought and gave their lives to Novorossiya is one that I have wanted to tell for some time now. I have borne witness here in the United States to the extremely one-sided coverage of the military aspects of Russia’s military operation. Like many of my fellow analysts, I had to undertake the extremely difficult task of trying to parse out fact from an overwhelmingly fictional narrative. Nor was I helped in any way in this regard by the Russian side, which was parsimonious in the release of information that reflected its side of reality.

In preparing for my December 2023 visit to Russia, I had hoped to be able to visit the four new Russian territories to see for myself what the truth was when it came to the fighting between Russia and Ukraine. I also wanted to interview the Russian military and civilian leadership to get a broader perspective of the conflict. I had reached out to the Russian Foreign and Defense ministries through the Russian Embassy in the US, bending the ear of both the Ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, and the Defense Attache, Major-General Evgeny Bobkin, about my plans.

While both men supported my project and wrote recommendations back to their respective ministries in this regard, the Russian Defense Ministry, which had the final say over what happened in the four new territories, vetoed the idea. This veto was not because they didn’t like the idea of me writing an in-depth analysis of the conflict from the Russian perspective, but rather that the project as I outlined it, which would have required sustained access to frontline units and personnel, was deemed too dangerous. In short, the Russian Defense Ministry did not relish the idea of me being killed on its watch.

Under normal circumstances, I would have backed off. I had no desire to create any difficulty with the Russian government, and I was always cognizant of the reality that I was a guest in the country.

The last thing I wanted to be was a “war tourist,” where I put myself and others at risk for purely personal reasons. But I also felt strongly that if I were going to continue to provide so-called “expert analysis” about the military operation and the geopolitical realities of Novorossiya and Crimea, then I needed to see these places firsthand. I strongly believed that I had a professional obligation to see the new territories. Fortunately for me, Aleksandr Zyryanov, a Crimea native and director general of the Novosibirsk Region Development Corporation, agreed.

It wasn’t going to be easy.

We first tried to enter the new territories via Donetsk, driving west out of Rostov-on-Don. However, when we arrived at the checkpoint, we were told that the Ministry of Defense had not cleared us for entry. Not willing to take no for an answer, Aleksandr drove south, towards Krasnodar, and then – after making some phone calls – across the Crimean Bridge into Crimea. Once it became clear that we were planning on entering the new territories from Crimea, the Ministry of Defense yielded, granting permission for me to visit the four new Russian territories under one non-negotiable condition – I was not to go anywhere near the frontlines.

We left Feodosia early on the morning of January 15, 2024. At Dzhankoy, in northern Crimea, we took highway 18 north toward the Tup-Dzhankoy Peninsula and the Chongar Strait, which separates the Sivash lagoon system that forms the border between Crimea and the mainland into eastern and western portions. It was here that Red Army forces, on the night of November 12, 1920, broke through the defenses of the White Army of General Wrangel, leading to the capture of the Crimean Peninsula by Soviet forces. And it was also here that the Russian Army, on February 24, 2022, crossed into the Kherson Region from Crimea.

The Chongar Bridge is one of three highway crossings that connect Crimea with Kherson. It has been struck twice by Ukrainian forces seeking to disrupt Russian supply lines, once, in June 2023, when it was hit by British-made Storm Shadow missiles, and once again that August when it was hit by French-made SCALP missiles (a variant of the Storm Shadow.) In both instances, the bridge was temporarily shut down for repairs, evidence of which was clearly visible as we made our way across, and on to the Chongar checkpoint, where we were cleared by Russian soldiers for entry into the Kherson Region.

At the checkpoint we picked up a vehicle carrying a bodyguard detachment from the reconnaissance company of the Sparta Battalion, a veteran military formation whose roots date back to the very beginning of the Donbass revolt against the Ukrainian nationalists who seized power in Kiev during the February 2014 Maidan coup. They would be our escort through the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions – even though we were going to give the frontlines a wide berth, Ukrainian “deep reconnaissance groups”, or DRGs, were known to target traffic along the M18 highway. Aleksandr was driving an armored Chevrolet Suburban, and the Sparta detachment had their own armored SUV. If we were to come under attack, our response would be to try and drive through the ambush. If that failed, then the Sparta boys would have to go to work.

Our first destination was the city of Genichesk, a port city along the Sea of Azov. Genichesk is the capital of the Genichesk District of the Kherson Region and, since November 9, 2022, when Russian forces withdrew from the city of Kherson, it has served as the temporary capital of the region. Aleksandr had been on his phone since morning, and his efforts had paid off – I was scheduled to meet with Vladimir Saldo, the local Governor.

Genichesk is – literally – off the beaten path. When we reached the town of Novoalekseyevka, we got off the M18 highway and headed east along a two-lane road that took us toward the Sea of Azov. There were armed checkpoints all along the route, but the Sparta bodyguards were able to get us waved through without any issues. But the effect of these checkpoints was chilling – there was no doubt that one was in a region at war.

To call Genichesk a ghost town would be misleading – it is populated, and the evidence of civilian life is everywhere you look. The problem was, there didn’t seem to be enough people present. The city, like the region, is in a general state of decay, a holdover from the neglect it had suffered at the hands of a Ukrainian government that largely ignored territories that had, since 2004, voted in favor of the Party of Regions, the party of former President Viktor Yanukovich, who was ousted in the February 2014 Maidan coup. Nearly two years of war had likewise contributed to the atmosphere of societal neglect, an impression which was magnified by the weather – overcast, cold, with a light sleet blowing in off the water.

As we made our way into the building where the government of the Kherson Region had established its temporary offices, I couldn’t help but notice a statue of Lenin in the courtyard. Ukrainian nationalists had taken it down in July 2015, but the citizens of Genichesk had reinstalled it in April 2022, once the Russians had taken control of the city. Given Putin’s feeling about the role Lenin played in creating Ukraine, I found both the presence of this monument, and the role of the Russian citizens of Genichesk in restoring it, curiously ironic.

Vladimir Saldo is a man imbued with enthusiasm for his work. A civil engineer by profession, with a PhD in economics, Saldo had served in senior management positions in the “Khersonbud” Project and Construction Company before moving on into politics, serving on the Kherson City Council, the Kherson Regional Administration, and two terms as the mayor of the city of Kherson. Saldo, as a member of the Party of Regions, moved to the opposition and was effectively subjected to political ostracism in 2014, when the Ukrainian nationalists who had seized power all but forced it out of politics.

Aleksandr and I had the pleasure of meeting with Saldo in his office in the government building in downtown Genichesk. We talked about a wide range of issues, including his own path from a Ukrainian construction specialist to his current position as the governor of Kherson Oblast.

We talked about the war.

But Saldo’s passion was the economy, and how he could help revive the civilian economy of Kherson in a manner that best served the interests of its diminished population. On the eve of the military operation, back in early 2022, the population of the Kherson Region stood at just over a million, of which some 280,000 were residing in the city of Kherson. By November 2022, following the withdrawal of Russian forces from the right bank of the Dnieper River – including the city of Kherson – the population of the region had fallen below 400,000 and, with dismal economic prospects, the numbers kept falling. Many of those who left were Ukrainians who did not want to live under Russian rule. But others were Russians and Ukrainians who felt that they had no future in the war-torn region, and as such sought their fortunes elsewhere in Russia.

“My job is to give the people of Kherson hope for a better future,” Saldo told me. “And the time for this to happen is now, not when the war ends.”

Restoration of Kherson’s once vibrant agricultural sector is a top priority, and Saldo has personally taken the lead in signing agreements for the provision of Kherson produce to Moscow supermarkets. Saldo has also turned the region into a special economic zone, where potential investors and entrepreneurs can receive preferential loans and financial support, as well as organizational and legal assistance for businesses willing to open shop there.

The man responsible for making this vision a reality is Mikhail Panchenko, the Director of the Kherson Region Industry Development Fund. I met Mikhail in a restaurant located across the street from the governmental building which Saldo called home. Mikhail had come to Kherson in the summer of 2022, leaving a prominent position in Moscow in the process. “The Russian government was interested in rebuilding Kherson,” Mikhail told me, “and established the Industry Development Fund as a way of attracting businesses to the region.” Mikhail, who was born in 1968, was too old to enlist in the military. “When the opportunity came to direct the Industry Development Fund, I jumped at it as a way to do my patriotic duty.”

The first year of the fund’s operation saw Mikhail hand out 300 million rubles (almost $3.3 million at the current rate) in loans and grants (some of which was used to open the very restaurant where we were meeting.) The second year saw the allotment grow to some 700 million rubles. One of the biggest projects was the opening of a concrete production line capable of producing 60 cubic meters of concrete per hour. Mikhail took Alexander and me on a tour of the plant, which had grown to three production lines generating some 180 cubic meters of concrete an hour. Mikhail had just approved funding for an additional four production lines, for a total concrete production rate of 420 cubic meters per hour.

“That’s a lot of concrete,” I remarked to Mikhail.

“We are making good use of it,” he replied. “We are rebuilding schools, hospitals, and government buildings that had been neglected over the years. Revitalizing the basic infrastructure a society needs if it is to nurture a growing population.”

The problem Mikhail faces, however, is that most of the population growth being experienced in Kherson today comes from the military. The war can’t last forever, Mikhail noted. “Someday the army will leave, and we will need civilians. Right now, the people who left are not returning, and we’re having a hard time attracting newcomers. But we will keep building in anticipation of a time when the population of the Kherson region will grow from an impetus other than war. And for that,” he said, a twinkle in his eye, “we need concrete!”

I thought long and hard about the words of Vladimir Saldo and Panchenko as Aleksandr drove back onto the M18 highway, heading northeast, toward Donetsk. The reconstruction efforts being undertaken are impressive. But the number that kept coming to mind was the precipitous decline in the population – more than 60% of the pre-war population has left the Kherson region since the Russian military operation began.

According to statistics provided by the Russian Central Election Commission, some 571,000 voters took part in the referendum on joining Russia that was held in late September 2022. A little over 497,000, or some 87%, voted in favor, while slightly more than 68,800, or 12%, voted against. The turnout was almost 77%.

These numbers, if accurate, implied that there was a population of over 740,000 eligible voters at the time of the election. While the loss of the city of Kherson in November 2022 could account for a significant source of the population drop that took place between September 2022 and the time of my visit in January 2024, it could not account for all of it.

The Russian population of Kherson in 2022 stood at approximately 20%, or around 200,000. One can safely say that the number of Russians who fled west to Kiev following the start of the military operation amounts to a negligible figure. If one assumes that the Russian population of the Kherson Region remained relatively stable, then most of the population decline came from the Ukrainian population.

While Saldo did not admit to such, the Governor of the neighboring Zaporozhya Region, Yevgeny Balitsky, has acknowledged that many Ukrainian families deemed by the authorities to be anti-Russian were deported following the initiation of the military operation (Russians accounted for a little more than 25% of the pre-conflict Zaporozhye population.) Many others fled to Russia to escape the deprivations of war.

Evidence of the war was everywhere to be seen. While the conflict in Kherson has stabilized along a line defined by the Dnieper River, Zaporozhye is very much a frontline region. Indeed, the main direction of attack of the summer 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive was from the Zaporozhye region village of Rabotino, toward the town of Tokmak, and on towards the temporary regional capital of Melitopol (the city of Zaporozhye has remained under Ukrainian control throughout the conflict to date.)

I had petitioned to visit the frontlines near Rabotino but had been denied by the Russian Ministry of Defense. So, too, was my request to visit units deployed in the vicinity of Tokmak – too close to the front. The closest I would get would be the city of Melitopol, the ultimate objective of the Ukrainian counterattack. We drove past fields filled with the concrete “dragon’s teeth” and antitank ditches that marked the final layer of defenses that constituted the “Surovikin Line,” named after the Russian General, Sergey Surovikin, who had commanded the forces when the defenses were put in place.

The Ukrainians had hoped to reach the city of Melitopol in a matter of days once their attack began; they never breached the first line of defense situated to the southeast of Rabotino.

Melitopol, however, is not immune to the horrors of war, with Ukrainian artillery and rockets targeting it often to disrupt Russian military logistics. I kept this in mind as we drove through the streets of the city, past military checkpoints, and roving patrols. I was struck by the fact that the civilians I saw were going about their business, seemingly oblivious to the everyday reality of war that existed around them.

As was the case in Kherson, the entirety of the Zaporozhye Region seemed strangely depopulated, as if one were driving through the French capital of Paris in August, when half the city is away on vacation. I had hoped to be able to talk with Balitsky about the reduced population and other questions I had about life in the region during wartime, but this time Aleksandr’s phone could not produce the desired result – Balitsky was away from the region and unavailable.

If he had been available, I would have asked him the same question I had put to Saldo earlier in the day: given that Putin was apparently willing to return the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions to Ukraine as part of the peace deal negotiated in March 2022, how does the population of his region feel about being part of Russia today? Are they convinced that Russia is, in fact, there to stay? Do they feel like they are a genuine part of the Novorossiya that Putin speaks about?

Saldo had talked in depth about the transition from being occupied by Russian forces, which lasted until April-May 2022 (about the time that Ukraine backed out of the ceasefire agreement), to being administered by Moscow. “There never was a doubt in my mind, or anyone else’s, that Kherson was historically a part of Russia,” Saldo said, “or that, once Russian troops arrived, that we would forever be Russian again.”

But the declining population, and the admission of forced deportations on the part of Balitsky, suggests that there was a significant part of the population that had, in fact, taken umbrage at such a future.

I would have liked to hear what Balitsky had to say about this question.

Reality, however, doesn’t deal with hypotheticals, and the present reality is that both Kherson and Zaporozhye are today part of the Russian Federation, and that both regions are populated by people who had made the decision to remain there as citizens of Russia. We will never know what the fate of these two territories would have been had the Ukrainian government honored the ceasefire agreement negotiated in March 2022. What we do know is that today both Kherson and Zaporozhye are part of the “New Territories” – Novorossiya.

Russia will for some time find its acquisition of the “new territories” challenged by nations who question the legitimacy of Russia’s military occupation and subsequent absorption of the Kherson and Zaporozhye regions into the Russian Federation. The reticence of foreigners to recognize these regions as being part of Russia, however, is the least of Russia’s problems. As was the case with Crimea, the Russian government will proceed irrespective of any international opposition.

The real challenge facing Russia is to convince Russians that the new territories are as integral to the Russian motherland as Crimea, a region reabsorbed by Russia in 2014 which has seen its economic fortunes and its population grow over the past decade. The diminished demographics of Kherson and Zaporozhye represent a litmus test of sorts for the Russian government, and for the governments of both Kherson and Zaporozhye. If the populations of these regions cannot regenerate, then these regions will wither on the vine. If, however, these new Russian lands can be transformed into places where Russians can envision themselves raising families in an environment free from want and fear, then Novorossiya will flourish.

Novorossiya is a reality, and the people who live there are citizens by choice more than circumstances. They are well served by men like Saldo and Balitsky, who are dedicated to the giant task of making these regions part of the Russian Motherland in actuality, not just in name.

Behind Saldo and Balitsky are men like Panchenko, people who left an easy life in Moscow or some other Russian city to come to the “New Territories” not for the purpose of seeking their fortunes, but rather to improve the lives of the new Russian citizens of Novorossiya.

For this to happen, Russia must emerge victorious in its struggle against the Ukrainian nationalists ensconced in Kiev, and their Western allies. Thanks to the sacrifices of the Russian military, this victory is in the process of being accomplished.

Then the real test begins – turning Novorossiya into a place Russians will want to call home.

By Tony Kevin, Facebook, 3/31/24

https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1941530/

Key talking points:

• The West tries hard to convince everyone that ISIS is behind [the Crocus City Hall terrorist attack] & there is apparently no point in suspecting anyone else, above all… Ukraine. They mention that country directly & regularly to the point of becoming obsessive.

• We will wait for the investigation to complete before drawing final conclusions. The West is suspiciously assertive as it tries to convince us, not only publicly but also in their contacts with our diplomatic missions, that we should not suspect Ukraine, without explaining why.

• The US sent us these signals [regarding talks on strategic stability]. We explained that it was impossible to talk about strategic stability in a situation when we were declared a strategic enemy that needed to be “strategically defeated.”

• The irreparable confidence of the US in its own righteousness, omnipotence and impunity has led to the fact that the US foreign policy is now led by people who do not know how to do diplomacy.

• You know that European ambassadors have refused to attend a meeting with me. We have notified them that, from now on, we will consider every request for meetings with Russian authorities at all levels, on a case-by-case basis to decide if we want to hold such meetings or not.

• Globalisation, which the Americans forced on everyone based on their own terms, has shown that nobody can set it hopes or rely on the US. It can weaponize the dollar, terminate contracts regardless of the presumption of innocence and the inviolability of property.

• If [the West] comes to its senses & sees that it is no longer possible to act as the neo-colonial power, & that there are new centres of power it must respect, it will be able to join these processes [of regionalisation of global development and revival of the global process] on the basis of equality, respect for each other and a balance of interests.

By Prof. Andrei P. Tsygankov, E-International Relations, 3/9/24

Andrei P. Tsygankov is Professor of International Relations at San Francisco State University. His is the author of (among other works) Russia’s Foreign Policy (Rowman and Littlefield 2022, 6th ed.), Russian Realism: Defending ‘Derzhava’ in International Relations (Routledge 2022) and The “Russian Idea” in International Relations Civilization and National Distinctiveness (Routledge 2023). He teaches Russian/post-Soviet relations, comparative foreign policy, and IR theory. He is a graduate of Moscow State University (Candidate of Sciences, 1991) and the University of Southern California (Ph.D., 2000).

Since the 16th century, many Russians associated change with the rising and increasingly global civilization of the West. At the same time, they have sought to build upon Russia’s own identity and power. The common dilemma of how to borrow from the advanced West while remaining ‘Russia’ has been at the center of Russian political debates for centuries. In the 19th century, the dynamic group of Russian thinkers with Western leanings, known as Westernizers, proposed to resolve this dilemma. They aspired to do so with Russia in their heart, yet primarily on Western ideological and value terms. Russian Westernizers then and now include those viewing Russia’s values as inferior to the West and advocating the country’s integration with Western institutions. While differing in definitions of the West, Westernizers invariably support Russia-Western partnership based on shared values. They tend to view history in progressive terms and believe in a linear, rather than pluralistic, interpretation of human development. Because of their association with the mighty Western civilization, Russian Westernizers have a considerable influence at home whenever the Russian state decides to improve relations with the West.

In my forthcoming book on Russian Westernizers, I identify four broad schools of Russian Westernizers with radical and conservative leanings. I also analyze conditions of their relative influence and marginalization. Finally, I discuss contemporary challenges for Westernizers and the prospects of their development.

Russian Westernizers

Intellectually, Westernizers fall into four distinct groups – Christian Westernizers, economic liberals, political liberals or advocates of the Western-style political system of individual rights, and supporters of the social state. To a considerable degree, their differences are defined by varying images of the West. Christian Westernizers stress the unity of Russia and the West’s religious roots and argue for restoring such harmony. From their perspective, the historical split between Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity should not stand in the way of such unity.

The second group of Westernizers includes admirers of the West’s dynamism in economic development, commercial and technological successes, and financial institutions. Russian economic liberals tend to associate the achievements of Western civilization with the institutions of private property and free market competition rather than geography, scientific discoveries, or any other advantages. This group rose to prominence in the second half of the 19th century when Russia embarked on the path of capitalist development. The views of Russian economic liberals reflected the country’s growing trade ties with European nations. Russia successfully exported grains to Britain and France, while the British-French capital was increasingly present on the Russian exchange market.

The third group favored the development of political freedoms and constitutional legitimacy in Russia. The group became active in the first half of the 19th century under the influence of the Western nations’ transition from absolutist rule to popular sovereignty and defense of individual rights.

Finally, in the second half of the 19th century, Russia followed the West in becoming increasingly industrialized. As a result, Russian Westernizers grew critical of the state’s lack of attention to the economic and social rights of the lower classes. Many Russian Westernizers became socialist, rather than liberal, in their orientation. Even those who were not socially radical became sensitive to what the Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyev defined as “the right to a decent human existence” (dostoinoye suchshestvovaniye).

In addition to different definitions of Western values, Russian Westernizers diverge in perceiving Russia’s goals and methods of their achievement. While viewing integration with the West as the ultimate objective, they disagree on how far Russia should go to accomplish the objective. Radical Westernizers assess the country’s rapid integration with the West as the most practical and perhaps the only way to bring Russia in line with the West. In the view of conservative or moderate Westernizers, the transition toward the West must be based on sufficiently broad support inside the country rather than imposed from the above. For these reasons, Russia’s overall objective cannot be a complete integration with the West but rather a strategic partnership with Western nations based on broadly shared values.

The difference between radical and moderate Westernizers was on display during Russia’s late Soviet and post-Soviet transformation. While radicals supported Boris Yeltsin’s policies of rapid Westernization, moderates or conservatives cautioned against doing so at the expense of established social values and national interests. Radical and moderate trends competed within the pro-Yeltsin party, Democratic Russia. Another liberal party, Yabloko, advocated a gradual transition and development of foreign relations with both Western and non-Western countries. Yabloko-affiliated intellectuals supported pro-Western reforms at home while insisting on Russia’s special interests in protecting national security interests in Eurasia, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Conditions of Rise and Fall

Both Russia and the West are responsible for the success and failure of Russia’s Westernization. The first condition is the West’s relative openness to and demonstration of recognition of Russia. Such recognition can come in different forms. It can include rhetorical support for Russian reforms and reformers. It can also include financial assistance and the development of joint projects in political, economic, and cultural areas. Russian Westernizers depend on such recognition by the West in rallying domestic support for reforms. They are not likely to be successful if, instead of recognition, the West criticizes Russia’s actions or policies that aim to isolate Russia from international and Western markets.

The second critical condition of Russia’s Westernization is the relative openness of Russian society and its political leaders. Russia’s cultural differences have often prevented its leaders from implementing pro-Western reforms. However, other leaders have done so, sometimes taking personal risks to introduce reforms and having to resign because of their commitment to Westernizing Russia.

For the success of the Russia-West rapprochement, both sides must be sufficiently open to initiate and sustain it. This is difficult because the two sides are culturally different and have historically disagreed on various issues. At times, their disagreements were even constitutive of their national self-definition: Russia’s values were defined in terms of their difference from and superiority to those of the West, and vice-versa. In addition to cultural differences, the contemporary interests of Russia and Western nations diverge. The two sides cannot forge a partnership because they have different geopolitical priorities and stakes in the international system.

Challenges and Prospects

Therefore, Russian Westernizers could only be successful if they had sufficient support at home and in the West. Both conditions are missing in today’s Russia. Russia’s war in Ukraine and confrontation with Western nations have encouraged the rallying around the flag effect rather than liberal reforms at home. Western leaders did not hide their goals to degrade Russia’s power, rather than merely support Ukraine’s territorial integrity. They did little to facilitate negotiations and cease-fire. Furthermore, plagued by domestic instability and polarization, the West has also relied on presenting others, including Russia, as threatening its values. As a result, Russian Westernizers have remained weakened and marginalized.

Today, when the West’s global standing is declining relative to those of rising non-Western powers, the ability of Russian Westernizers to influence national discussions will still be more limited. The global transition from the West-centered world to a pluralist international system will make the demand for defining and developing national values and interests all the more pressing. In the best scenario, this predicament may prompt Russian Westernizers to move away from their radicalism, becoming more sensitive to national realities and more critical of the West’s international priorities.

In terms of IR theory, this suggests the need for Westernizers to learn from other intellectual traditions in Russia. Today, pro-Western policies and theories are even less able to serve as a guide to Russia than they have in the past. The post-conflict Russia is unlikely to become a pro-Western Russia. Advocating for improving relations with Europe and the United States following the end of the war in Ukraine may have an appeal in Russia if such relations enhance, not undermine, Russia’s national interests. In the post-Western world, the country’s main priorities include the survival and the reframing of historically built national values, political sovereignty, and strengthening relations with the global South.