By Matt Taibbi, Substack, 2/16/24

Three years ago, on February 25th, 2021, Aaron Maté at RealClearInvestigations ran “In Final Days, Trump Gave Up on Forcing Release of Russiagate Files, Nunes Prober Says.” Extensively quoting former Principal Deputy to the Acting Director of National Intelligence Kash Patel, Aaron wrote a section on “Assessing the ‘Intelligence Community Assessment,’” detailing a lot of the same story Michael Shellenberger, Alexandra Gutentag and I ran in Public and Racket Thursday. Describing a 2018 House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) report on the subject, Aaron wrote:

The March 2018 House report found that the production of the ICA “deviated from established CIA practice.” And the core judgment that Putin sought to help Trump, the House report found, resulted from “significant intelligence tradecraft failings that undermine confidence in the ICA judgments.”

Many of us who followed this story — a number of reporters on both sides of the aisle did so obsessively — have long had a good idea about the general direction of that House investigation. The tale of improper CIA and FBI surveillance mixed with manufactured intelligence has been in the ether since late 2017 and early 2018.

I’ll list just a few of the names who reported stories in this direction over the years, in some cases day after day on broadcast shows. An attentive reader will notice nearly everyone on the list has been denounced at some point by the mainstream commentators who got this story horribly wrong. Aaron, considered a traitor by former mainstream colleagues, faced pressure from staff at The Nation, was denounced by The Guardian as part of a “network of conspiracy theorists,” and failed to gain support from any major media outlet or press advocacy organization when the FBI passed on an outrageous request from Ukrainian secret services to remove him from Twitter.

Others who got this story right but were singled out for dismissal or ridicule include:

• former CIA officer Ray McGovern, who was called “fringe” and “conspiracy-mongering” by Max Boot, a member of the illustrious club of pundits who botched both the Steele dossier and Iraqi WMD stories;
• former NYPD officer and Secret Service agent Dan Bongino, who has been on this subject for years and was called a “misinformation superspreader” by the New York Times after the 2020 election;
• Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald, denounced as a pathological bigot for dissenting on Trump-Russia themes, and ultimately forced out of his own publication for writing critically of Hunter Biden and Burisma without adequately addressing the question of “Russia’s hand”;
• former CIA operative Larry Johnson, who said years ago that the surveillance campaign began with the GCHQ, Britain’s version of the NSA, in 2015 and was among the first to say publicly what our source just told us, that there is intelligence suggesting Maltese professor and supposed Russian asset Joseph Mifsud was British intelligence. He’s naturally been denounced as a “conspiracy theorist”;
• Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, declared “bonkers” by the Daily Beast, perhaps the most aggressive promoter of the “collusion” theory and one of the most dependable producers of factually dubious stories on this subject in the mainstream press landscape;
• author Lee Smith, the major chronicler of the HPSCI work (more to come on this), who naturally was ripped for “conspiracy theory” for publishing a book on the subject;
• Pulitzer-winner Jeff Gerth, who wrote a 24,000-word deconstruction of Trump-Russia coverage in the Columbia Journalism Review that included a quote from Bob Woodward saying the media needed to “walk down the painful road of introspection.” He was called a “Trump-Russia denialist” who “can’t handle the truth,” by David Corn of Mother Jones, one of the first people to publish the phony Steele-blackmail story;
• another RealClear writer, Paul Sperry, who wrote about CIA chief John Brennan overruling dissent to create the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment. Sperry popped up in the Twitter Files when the office of California congressman Adam Schiff, who infamously said he had “more than circumstantial” evidence of collusion, asked to have Sperry banned;
• Professor Margot Cleveland of The Federalist and Chuck Ross of the Daily Signal, who both got this right and were both marked “unreliable” by Pentagon-funded NewsGuard;
• former The Hill and current JustTheNews writer John Solomon, who published a significant amount of the key documents in this matter, and was the subject of a poisonous media campaign that crested particularly during the period of the first Trump impeachment;
• citizen investigators like the Racket-profiled “Sleuth’s Corner” of @Walkafyre, @TECHNO_FOG, @RyanM58699717, @climateaudit, @FOOL_NELSON, and @Hmmm57474203. This group who uncovered the name of the “primary sub-source” of famed British ex-spy Christopher Steele, Igor Danchenko, not only went roundly uncredited, but was immediately accused in the New York Times of putting Danchenko “in Russia’s sights” by Virginia Senator Mark Warner.

There are countless others. Even I took more than one whack at this material in the past, among other things listing episodes involving illegal classified leaks as a way of focusing attention on intelligence abuses surrounding the Trump-Russia scandal. I heard the gist of this week’s story six years ago, but didn’t have the details and the multiple people willing to be sources I needed to put something in print. That changed when Michael, Alexandra, and Public got their scoop a few weeks ago.

Anyone can go back and read the reports of the figures listed above and piece together pretty much the whole story we ran this week, minus a few conspicuous details. We learned there were 26 surveillance targets among Trump’s aides and associates in the 2016 campaign year, and we were able to use a number of key quotes, including the internal intelligence community analysis that Russia wasn’t desperate to avoid a Hillary Clinton presidency at all, but saw her as “manageable and reflecting continuity” and a “relationship they were comfortable with.”

These details, along with things like the assertion that the surveillance had “nothing to do with our relationship with Russia” and was “just leveraging capabilities to undermine a rookie unprepared Trump campaign,” are important and move the story forward. The quotes about Russia’s attitude toward Hillary in particular could be impactful in helping undo one of the last surviving Russiagate myths.

Still, it’s important to make clear that the substance of these pieces was already out thanks to the people listed above, along with others (Joseph Wulfsohn? Rich Lowry? Caitlin Johnstone?) I may have neglected to mention. The novelty with our series is that headline-ready specifics from still-classified reports do not often get out in a way that’s reportable. And far from searching for credit, the goal in jumping on TV shows and podcasts and trying to make noise with these stories is to inspire or shame (either will do) other reporters to build on these articles, as we built on eight years of past reports.

A last note on the media angle. Amid the initial rush of Trump-Russia mania, a series of reports came out that featured tantalizing details. One was Jane Mayer’s March 2018 “Christopher Steele, The Man Behind the Dossier,” which told us about a “stream of illicit communications between Trump’s team and Moscow that had been intercepted” by the GCHQ. The New Yorker piece asserted GCHQ chief Robert Hannigan flew to Washington to brief John Brennan about these details. Brennan already co-signed that story in May of 2017, when he testified in Congress, saying he had been “aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns” that those people “were cooperating with the Russians,” and that this “served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion… occurred.” The Guardian’s “British Spies Were First to Spot Trump Team’s Links With Russia” also told this same basic story.

There’s considerable overlap between those accounts, the ones we just published, and the reports of the people listed above. In each place you find the elements of very early intercepts of Trump team conversations captured abroad. I think I speak for everyone on the above list when I say I’d be thrilled if Brennan or Hannigan or whoever would come forward and show us what those “illicit communications” were, or what that “intelligence… that raised concerns” was. If there’s proof all of this was legitimate, we all need to see it.

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 3/6/24

Israel’s Permanent Representative to the UN announced late last month that his country is “working to provide Ukraine with early warning systems”, which was followed by a hardline lawmaker promising that “Israel will take a more aggressive stance against Russia.” This came after the new Israeli Ambassador to Russia caused a scandal in early February by misportraying Russia’s regional policy, which readers can learn more about in this analysis here that hyperlinks to nearly two dozen relevant pieces about it.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova reacted to this development by lamenting “The fact that people in the region, especially Israeli politicians, perceive and follow the path imposed on them by the ‘exceptionalists’ – the US”, which has “exacerbated and brought closer this catastrophic situation in the region, given it an eerie momentum, provoked it.” Although Israel is still legally considered a “friendly” country by Russia, that could soon change depending on what it does.

So long as it refrains from sending offensive arms, however, then it might not make that list. Even if it does, then Russia might still keep it off of there for now in order to explore whether diplomacy can result in reaching a “new normal” between them before tensions spiral out of control, similar in spirit to why Russia didn’t designate Turkiye despite it sending Ukraine attack drones. Relations with Ankara remained manageable and mutually beneficial for the most part so ties with Tel Aviv might end up the same way.

Nevertheless, this shift in Israel’s approach towards NATO’s proxy war on Russia through Ukraine – which is already an undeclared but limited hot war after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz inadvertently revealed that Western troops are secretly on the ground there – isn’t being done out of solidarity with Kiev. Rather, it superficially appears to due to Israel’s displeasure with Russia’s balancing act between it and Hamas but is really an attempt by Tel Aviv to curry favor with Washington as its war with Hamas reaches the endgame.

Two detailed reports from American media in late November can be interpreted as an evolution of the Biden Administration’s pressure campaign against Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. The Washington Post informed their audience how he let Qatar fund Hamas, while the New York Times claimed that Israel was allegedly aware of Hamas’ sneak attack plans more than a year before its early October sneak attack. Both are damning and could fuel more protests against him once the conflict ends.

About those, the Biden Administration was already implicated in the unprecedented nationwide ones that rocked Israel last spring, which were analyzed here as being motivated by its ruling liberal-globalists’ ideological opposition to the self-professed Jewish State’s conservative-nationalist government. Anticipating a repeat of those events upon the conclusion of another ceasefire ahead of Ramadan, it’s very possible that Bibi sought to preempt more meddling by agreeing to send those systems to Ukraine.

In his mind, this desperate move could potentially alleviate some of the expected grassroots pressure upon him in that scenario by influencing the US to exercise a greater degree of self-restraint by not involving itself as much in any forthcoming round of Color Revolution unrest. The public pretext upon which these early warning systems are being sent is Israel’s displeasure with Russia’s balancing act between it and Hamas in order to deflect scrutiny from his real motives.

After all, there’s no credence to the claim that Russia supported Hamas’ sneak attack, whether militarily or politically. The Kremlin has repeatedly condemned it as an act of terrorism but also condemned Israel’s collective punishment of the Palestinians in response. Moscow’s hosting of Hamas’ political wing is solely intended to revive peace talks and secure the release of the hostages, the latter task of which “is under the personal control of the president of the Russian Federation” according to a senior diplomat.

However much Israel might dislike this policy due to its desire that all countries take its side over Hamas’ per the zero-sum choice that it’s pressured them to make, this could continue to be conveyed through conventional diplomatic means instead of escalating matters by unilaterally sending such systems to Kiev. The reason why Israel’s export of this early warning equipment is so concerning to Russia is because it could lead to “mission creep” whereby air defense systems and possibly offensive arms soon follow.  

Any significant Israeli-backed improvement of Ukraine’s air defense capabilities could lead to a symmetrical Russian-backed improvement of Syria’s, though this analysis here argues that Moscow won’t risk a wider war to stop Tel Aviv’s increasingly frequent strikes against Damascus. At any rate, these two might slip into a dangerous security dilemma since each might accuse the other of obstructing their strikes against what they consider to be legitimate military targets in those neighboring nations.

The consequences could see Russia and Israel ramping up their respective strikes in Ukraine and Syria so as to more effectively break through these new defenses there. That won’t change the military-strategic dynamics of the Ukrainian Conflict but could risk a worsening of the West Asian Crisis if Iran feels comfortable enough to attack Israel from Syria under its host’s Russian-supplied umbrella. In that event, Israel could either react with a ground operation or might even launch one preemptively.

From Bibi’s self-interested political perspective, widening the war to Syria in any ground or special forces capacity could perpetuate the West Asian Crisis to his domestic and international benefit. On the home front, he’ll likely be able to exploit that move to remain in power and avoid (possibly politically driven) corruption charges, while the foreign one could see the US alleviating potentially impending Color Revolution pressure upon him due to Israel more directly containing Iran in Syria per their joint interests.

It’s unclear whether he’s gamed everything out this far, and even if he did, it can’t be taken for granted that events will evolve in that direction and not be offset by some hitherto unpredictable variables. Regardless of whatever his plans may be and however far he’s looking into the future, the fact of the matter is that Israel’s partial compliance with the US’ anti-Russian demands risks ruining ties with Moscow, and this could quickly reverberate throughout West Asia depending on the scenario trajectory.

By Ray McGovern & Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Consortium News, 2/16/24

As U.S. House members grapple with whether to give $60 billion more to Ukraine, they must also grapple with the checkered nature of the intelligence they’ve been fed.

On July 13, 2023, President Joe Biden announced Russian President Vladimir Putin “has already lost the war.” That was six days after C.I.A. Director William Burns, normally a sane voice, had called the war a “strategic failure” for Russia with its “military weaknesses laid bare.”

Earlier, in December 2022, National Intelligence Director Avril Haines reported that the Russians were experiencing “shortages of ammunition” and were “not capable of indigenously producing what they are expending.”

We advise caution, as these same people now say that Ukraine can prevail if the U.S. provides $60 billion more. Do they think they can change geography, overcome Russian industrial might, and persuade the Russians that Ukraine should not be a core interest of theirs?

Obama’s Reasons

Recall President Barack Obama’s reasons for withholding lethal weapons from Ukraine. In 2015, The New York Times reported on Obama’s reluctance: “In part, he has told aides and visitors that arming the Ukrainians would encourage the notion that they could actually defeat the far more powerful Russians, and so it would potentially draw a more forceful response from Moscow.”

Senior State Department officials spelled out this rationale:

“If you’re playing on the military terrain in Ukraine, you’re playing to Russia’s strength, because Russia is right next door. It has a huge amount of military equipment and military force right on the border. Anything we did as countries in terms of military support for Ukraine is likely to be matched and then doubled and tripled and quadrupled by Russia.”

The above words were spoken by then-Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken on March 5, 2015 to an audience in Berlin. It turns out President Obama was right. It is hard to understand why Blinken (and Biden) chose the way of President Donald Trump, who gave lethal weapons to Ukraine, over the way of Obama.

So much for geography and relative strength. What about core interests? In 2016 President Obama told The Atlantic that Ukraine is a core interest of Russia but not of the U.S. He warned that Russia has escalatory dominance there: “We have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for.”

[See: VIPS MEMO: To President Biden —Avoiding a Third World War]

Earlier, when a saner William Burns was ambassador to Russia, he warned of Moscow’s “emotional and neuralgic reaction” to bringing Ukraine into NATO. Braced on the issue by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in February 2008, Burns reported that Russia’s opposition was based on “strategic concerns about the impact on Russia’s interests in the region” and warned then that “Russia now feels itself able to respond more forcefully”.

Burns added:

“In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene.”

Regime Change in Kiev

Feb. 18, 2014: Protesters throwing pieces of brick pavement at Ukrainian troops obscured by the smoke of burning tires in Kiev. (Mstyslav Chernov, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

The overthrow of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 gave immediacy to Russia’s warnings on Ukraine and its fear that the West would try to effect “regime change” in Russia, as well.

In a major commentary, “Russian Military Power”, published in December 2017, the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency concluded:

“The Kremlin is convinced the U.S. is laying the groundwork for regime change in Russia, a conviction further reinforced by the events in Ukraine. Moscow views the United States as the critical driver behind the crisis in Ukraine and the Arab Spring and believes that the overthrow of former Ukrainian President Yanukovych is the latest move in a long-established pattern of U.S.-orchestrated regime change efforts …”

Is Putin paranoid about “U.S. regime change efforts?” D.I.A. did not think him paranoid. And surely Putin has taken note of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s remarks in April 2022:

“One of the US’s goals in Ukraine is to see a weakened Russia. … The US is ready to move heaven and earth to help Ukraine win the war against Russia.”

In sum: Russia has both the will and the means to prevail in Ukraine – no matter how many dollars and arms Ukraine gets.

Obama was right; Russia sees an existential threat from the West in Ukraine. And nuclear powers do not tolerate existential threats on their border. Russia learned this the hard way in Cuba in 1962.

Last, there is zero evidence that after Ukraine, Putin will go after other European countries. The old Soviet Union and its empire are long gone. Thus, President Trump’s recent remarks, in which he threw doubt on the U.S. commitment to defend NATO countries from a nonexistent threat, is nonsense – sheer bombast.

Ray McGovern, former army infantry intelligence officer and later chief of C.I.A.’s Soviet Foreign Policy Branch; was also C.I.A. one-on-one briefer of The President’s Daily Brief 1981-1985.

Lawrence Wilkerson, Colonel (USA, ret.), Distinguished Visiting Professor, College of William and Mary; former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell.

By Stephen Bryen, Asia Times, 3/3/24

On July 25, 1943, Benito Mussolini, after being voted out of power by his own Grand Council, was called to a conference with King Vittorio Emanuele in the Villa Ada park at the special bunker known as the Villa Ada Savoia.

The King told Mussolini that the new Italian prime minister would be General Pietro Badoglio. Tired, unshaven and shaken, Mussolini walked out of the meeting only to be arrested by Carabinieri troops.

He would be held at different hiding places until he was transferred to the Hotel Campo Imperatore, Emperor’s Field Hotel (Albergo di Campo Imperatore) in the Apennine mountains.

Under Hitler’s personal orders, a German team made up of Nazi paratroopers (Fallschirmjäger) and a team drawn from the Waffen SS assembled in 10 gliders at Rome’s Pratica di Mare Air Base where they were towed to within striking distance of the hotel.

On September 12, 1943, the gliders carried an Italian general whose role was to convince Mussolini’s jailers not to fire on the Nazi rescue force. Four days before, the Italian government signed an armistice with the Allies, an event closely tracked (via communications intercepts) by Nazi intelligence. Allied forces had already taken Sicily and were lodged in southern Italy.

Hitler ordered his army to not only free Mussolini but also to take Rome, which they dutifully did. As this happened, the new government headed by Badoglio and the King escaped Rome and joined the allies at Bari, on the Adriatic in the south of the country.

The Germans established a military line of defense called the Gustav Line. Mussolini was flown out of Italy, first on a Storch light aircraft, and then transferred to more long-range aircraft that first took him to Vienna and, after a refresh, on to Berlin. Hitler would receive him and put him in charge of a rump Italian government called the Italian Social Republic (Repubblica Sociale Italiana, or RSI). 

In April 1945, as German defenses crumbled, Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci attempted to flee to Switzerland but they were captured by Italian communist partisans and summarily executed on April 28 near Lake Como. Their bodies were taken to a service station in Milan where both were hanged by their feet for public display.

This bit of World War II history could well be a model for US Pentagon plans to rescue Volodymyr Zelensky should his government in Kiev collapse. 

The US has launched a number of trial balloons and encouraged French leader Emmanuel Macron to propose the idea of sending NATO troops to Ukraine to somehow save the Ukrainians from the Russians.

This sort of thing would not have been discussed in polite circles until the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive and the collapse of the defense of Avdiivka. Now it is obvious that Russia has increased the tempo of its operations and is taking gobs of territory held by Ukraine’s army.  

It is also now clear that Ukraine has significant manpower problems and its attempt to use forceful means to corral potential recruits is causing unrest in the country, including in major cities such as Odesa, Kharkiv and Kiev.

The problem for Washington is the lack of political support for any NATO military operations in Ukraine. The revelations, especially in the European press, including a recording of German military officers discussing how they could blow up the massive Kerch Strait bridge with Taurus missiles and hide the operation, are undermining the German government’s already badly eroded credibility at home. A French “instant” poll, meanwhile, showed two-thirds opposed to sending troops to Ukraine.

US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who recently emerged from a serious prostate operation to testify on Capitol Hill, argues that if Russia “wins” in Ukraine, then pretty soon after the Russians will attack NATO territory, suggesting that the first attacks might be against the Baltic states.

Austin knows there is no evidence supporting his argument. The same sort of claims, also coming from European leaders, are based on assumptions and assertions without any facts. Speaking on the occasion of his State of the Nation address in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin said emphatically that Russia has no intention of attacking Europe.

Austin and the Pentagon are in a dilemma. Without a provocation of significant magnitude to justify a NATO intervention (another Gulf of Tonkin exercise of what was a manufactured casus belli), what can the US do to save Ukraine? How can it get away with an intervention that most wouldn’t object to in Europe or the United States?

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin listens during a Senate committee hearing on Capitol Hill earlier this year. Photo: Chad J McNeeley / Defense Department

The US cannot just send in troops to start fighting Russians. That would surely start a war in Europe. Putin has already put down a marker that if there was a war in Europe, Russia could use its “tactical” nuclear weapons.

While NATO has been playing chicken with the Russians for many months, urging Ukraine to use NATO-supplied weapons to attack Russian cities, for example, or attempting to take down the Kerch Strait bridge or other critical Russian infrastructure, the introduction of NATO frontline troops can’t be hidden behind a facade of non-intervention or plausible deniability.

On what basis could NATO troops get away with some sort of intervention without a Russian counterattack? The Nazi example of freeing Mussolini may be a model that, in a modern interpretation, might do the trick.

No one can say how long the Zelensky government can hold on in Kiev. With a steady Russian military advance, growing turmoil at home, the refusal to hold elections, the jailing of people opposed to Zelensky and a host of unpopular measures, Zelensky’s hold on power is entering the zone of desperation.

The Russians may see an opportunity for a power transition to leadership in Kiev inclined to make deals with Moscow. Zelensky probably can’t do that: he is too committed to expelling every last Russian from Ukrainian territory and demanding war crime trials, as he also insists that he will never deal with Putin in Russia. Zelensky’s security situation in Kiev could rapidly come under a terminal shadow.

In these circumstances, the Pentagon could rescue Zelensky and move him elsewhere, with Lviv (Lvov) being the most likely place, as it is far in the west and challenging for the Russians to reach if they wished to deal with Zelensky using military means. Rescued by NATO “forces”, the Russians might happily see Zelensky and his government go.

That would make the relocation possibly unobjectionable or at least not the worst outcome for the Russians. They could then deal with a more flexible replacement government.

In effect, just as Italy was temporarily divided (more or less) in half, with the Gustav line the demarcation until allied forces finally took Monte Cassino in May 1944, Ukraine might also be divided, although exactly how would depend on what remained of Ukraine’s army supporting Zelensky.

Should someone of the quality of former commander-in-chief Valerii Zaluzhny take over in Kiev, it could mean that Zelensky’s stay at Lviv would be brief and he would go into retirement elsewhere. From the perspective of NATO and the Pentagon, such a process would take some time, perhaps even a year, allowing President Joe Biden to hang on until the US elections in November.

There are not many good choices for NATO or Washington. Biden cannot afford another Afghanistan debacle but one is rapidly creeping in his direction thanks to Russian military victories and the crumbling of Ukraine’s defenses. Biden has the option of opening peace negotiations with Russia but Moscow may not be interested. There is a lot of water that has poured over the dam.

Of course, the military situation in Ukraine could stabilize and the Russians could decide to wait until after the US elections in November, but this seems unlikely now. The Russians are under their own domestic pressure to wrap up the “Special Military Operation” and there is no reason at present to believe that Putin and the Russian army will slow down or back off.

In this light, the Mussolini rescue at the Hotel Campo Imperiale model may be one of the few alternatives available.

By Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation, 3/5/24

As people flooded Moscow’s streets March 1 protesting Aleksey Navalny’s death in an Arctic prison camp, the outpouring became a display of dissent at a time of growing repression. As the Russian Orthodox service unfolded in the working-class Marino district, where Navalny and his family lived for decades, other Russian antiwar dissidents are confronting a new and expanding wave of repression and arrests.

Perhaps in anticipation of Presidential elections slated for March 17 (no cliffhanger), the growing strength of nationalistic “siloviki,” or part of an attack on the Russian Left movement, Russian authorities are handing out harsher sentences to those who appeal their charges. Prominent Russian activist Oleg Orlov, a veteran human rights campaigner and a leader of the Memorial human rights organization that jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2022, was initially fined $1,630 for an article “discrediting the armed forces.” When Orlov appealed the ruling, a Moscow Court sentenced him last month to two and a half years for opposing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

And on February 13, a military court sentenced Boris Kagarlitsky, prominent sociologist, Marxist scholar and labor activist, to five years in prison for criticizing the war in Ukraine. This was after a Moscow court initially ordered him to only pay a $6,500 fine for “justifying terrorism,” charges which Kagarlitsky denied. Prosecutors appealed the lower court’s decision to fine him, calling it “excessively lenient.” Kagarlitsky, the founder and chief editor of the left-labor news organization Rabkor, and director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (which was labeled a “foreign agent” in 2018), was first detained in July 2023 in connection with a since-deleted YouTube video about the 2022 Crimea bridge explosion.

Perhaps because Boris has been arrested before as a dissident—in 1982 during the Brezhnev years and in 1993 when he protested Yeltsin’s shelling of the country’s elected Parliament—he responded to the decision with calm and dignity: “We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country.”

I met Boris Kagarltsky in Moscow in 1982. He was a research assistant to the Marxist dissident historian Roy Medvedev, author of On Socialist Democracy and Let History Judge. My late husband, Stephen Cohen, who was living in Moscow on IREX’s academic exchange in 1976, met with Medvedev—who lived far from the city’s center—every few weeks to exchange ideas and historical documents. Our visit was unusual because of Boris’s presence, but even more so due to the presence of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s first wife, Natalya Reshetovskaya. She had asked Roy whom she might trust to take her typescript/manuscript about her life with Solzhenitsyn to the West for safekeeping. Steve had experience with taking out—and bringing in—books, from Russia to the West and vice versa, and he agreed to do so. (It may have been one reason why neither Steve nor I could get a visa to travel to Russia from 1982 to March 1985. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev came into office.)

Boris became a friend, introducing me to the Rabkor team, the Fellows at his Institute, sharing insights, history, and gossip about the media and political scene. He visited The Nation many times over the years and contributed articles. Boris is a person of integrity, great intelligence, and, yes, irony, humor, and creativity, qualities necessary to keep living and working in Putin’s Russia.

Boris has been a steadfast and productive dissident. He was editor of the samizdat journal Left Turn from 1978 to 1982, which led to his arrest for “anti-Soviet activities” in 1982. He was released in 1983. In 1988 he became coordinator of the Moscow People’s Front, and in 1990, he was elected to the Moscow City Soviet. He cofounded the Party of Labor. In 1993, he was arrested for his opposition to President Yeltsin during the September-October constitutional crisis—but was released quickly after international protests. Later that year, his job and the Moscow City Council were abolished under Yeltsin’s new Constitution.

Boris wrote in a letter to global supporters when he was arrested last year:

“This is not the first time in my life. I was locked up under Brezhnev, beaten and threatened with death under Yeltsin. And now it’s the second arrest under Putin. Those in power change, but the tradition of putting political opponents behind bars, alas, remains. But the willingness of many people to make sacrifices for their beliefs, for freedom, and social rights remain unchanged.

“I think that the current arrest can be considered a recognition of the political significance of my statements. Of course, I would have preferred to be recognized in a somewhat different form, but all in good time. In the 40-odd years since my first arrest, I have learned to be patient and to realize how fickle political fortune in Russia is….”

The experience of the past years…does not dispose much to optimism. But historical experience as a whole is much richer and gives much more grounds for positive expectations. Remember what Shakespeare wrote in Macbeth?

“The night is long that never finds the day.”

Boris’s daughter, responding to Navalny’s death, made this statement: “And for all of us, this is a special sign, especially for those of us who have relatives, friends, associates, in the hands of Putin’s regime, we are all not safe. Now when Boris is behind bars, it is especially important…to show even more solidarity around Boris, around his case and around other political prisoners.”

Last week, in a post on Telegram, Boris said he was “in a great mood as always” and that he plans to continue collecting materials for new books, “including descriptions of prison life.”

Last year, galvanized by Boris’s detention, a “Free Boris” movement arose globally and, perhaps more importantly, across Russian cities and towns. Spontaneous demonstrations were held; online protests and coordinated international actions commemorated Boris’s birthday in August. Thousands of signatures were collected from prominent intellectuals, activists, and political figures. Brazilian President Lula da Silva criticized Boris’s detention, as did leaders in other BRICs countries whom Putin counts as allies.

Significantly, when Boris’s first arrest occurred last year two pro-Kremlin figures, RT’s Margarita Simonian and analyst Sergei Markov, were quoted in The Washington Post stating what a mistake it was.

When Boris was released on December 13, 2023, it was a demonstration that international pressure and solidarity works.

According to the Moscow court’s decision, Boris will be sent to pretrial detention center No. 12 of the Federal Penitentiary Service of Russia in Moscow. In Moscow, this center is known as one of Russia’s harshest lockups—word is that he is being held in a cell with 15 other men.

For information on how to show solidarity and support, use Patreon or Busti. Visit freeboris.info.