Given the battlefield stalemate in Ukraine, Kyiv’s best remaining hope is attrition — inflicting losses on the Russian army heavy enough to persuade the Kremlin that continuing the war is pointless. In recent weeks, Ukrainian politicians and military commanders have been explicit about this goal. President Zelensky has even put a number on it: 50,000 Russian soldiers killed per month. At first glance, the data seem to suggest that Ukraine is closing in on that target: obituary databases and other open sources show Russian casualties rising sharply through 2025, and many Western analysts have accepted those casualty counts at face value. A new investigation by Meduza reveals that these estimates are almost certainly wrong.
Last year’s spike in recorded Russian casualties most likely reflects a bookkeeping lag, not a turning point on the battlefield.
For four years, casualty estimates have varied wildly, and a persistent methodological problem has made them nearly impossible to evaluate. Most published casualty figures are inflated by the inclusion of wounded soldiers, the majority of whom return to duty. What matters for assessing an army’s actual combat capacity is irreversible losses: the killed, the missing presumed dead, and the small fraction of wounded who are permanently incapacitated.
Researchers can measure one figure with reasonable confidence: the official death count — soldiers for whom death certificates have been issued. By late summer 2025, that figure stood at roughly 220,000 (excluding foreign nationals fighting with Russian forces and those conscripted in occupied Ukrainian territory). The independent outlet Mediazona’s crowdsourced database of named Russian war dead contained roughly 125,000 entries as of August 2025; researchers estimated that for every confirmed name, approximately 1.76 soldiers had actually died.
Western analysts continue to apply this multiplier to estimate Russia’s current losses.
The problem is that this multiplier is now badly distorted. Since late 2024, Russia’s open legal databases have been inundated with a new category of entry: soldiers previously listed as missing in action who have been declared dead by court order, without their bodies ever being recovered. A law enabling this procedure took effect in May 2023, but the mechanism only began operating at scale roughly 18 months later. The pattern strongly suggests a coordinated Defense Ministry campaign to pressure unit commanders to file missing-persons petitions with civilian courts. The likely motive is bureaucratic: officially declaring missing soldiers dead allows the military to close open cases and entitles families to death benefits they could not otherwise collect.
By late 2025, approximately 90,000 such cases had been opened. After Mediazona first reported on the campaign, courts began removing the filings from their public databases.
The inheritance registry — a notarial database that families typically access within six months of a soldier’s official death — lays the distortion bare. The first graph below tracks inheritance cases for men by the gap between the recorded date of death and the date of official registration. It shows a sharp recent surge in cases where that gap is abnormally long — the telltale pattern of missing-persons cases retroactively reclassified as deaths.
Men
The pattern does not appear in the women’s control group, confirming that the data reflect war deaths, not any broader administrative change in how Russian courts or notaries process cases.
Women
A third graph, tracking the men’s inheritance cases by the date the case was opened rather than the recorded date of death, shows that the vast majority of these delayed cases have been filed within the past year or two — precisely when the Defense Ministry campaign appears to have begun in earnest. Soldiers who went missing in 2022, 2023, and 2024 are now being declared dead en masse, and their deaths are appearing in the databases as 2025 casualties.
Men by case opening date
In the named-obituary databases, meanwhile, researchers have significantly improved their coverage over the past year, meaning the apparent jump in 2025 entries reflects better data collection as much as higher actual deaths.
The practical implication is that previous years were undercounted, and 2025 is being overcounted. This is not to say that losses were not rising in 2025: they were, but not as sharply as one might conclude from looking at the named casualty lists compiled from published obituaries. Strip out the retroactive missing-persons reclassifications and correct for the improved database coverage, and current Russian battlefield deaths likely do not exceed 600 per day. Adding the severely wounded who cannot return to service brings total irreversible losses to roughly 900 per day — about 27,000 per month. That is barely half of Zelensky’s target, and it is probably not rising fast enough to force a strategic crisis on the Russian side in the near term.
The broader lesson of this analysis is not simply that one set of numbers is wrong. Rather, the methodology underlying many published Western estimates has a structural flaw: it applies a multiplier derived from historical data to a database that the Russian state is now actively manipulating. As Moscow has grown more systematic about processing its missing soldiers, the raw inputs feeding Western casualty models have become less reliable, not more. The apparent spike in Russian deaths through 2025 is, in large part, a data artifact, and the strategic conclusions analysts are drawing from it deserve serious scrutiny.
“If you wait by the river long enough, the bodies of your enemies will float by.” Sun Tzu
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.” George Kennon
Introduction
The Soviet Union dissolved in 1991. Since then, the American military-industrial establishment has invented new enemies to justify the continuation of US militarism. After 1991, the US deindustrialized, financialized, and accumulated an enormous national debt. Neoliberalism and the rule of money became dominant, while economic inequality increased. Despite frequent failures, the military budget continued to increase. President Trump recently called for the military budget to be increased by $500 billion to $1.5 trillion. The US annual budget deficit is $2 trillion. The US national debt is now $39 Trillion. The interest paid annually on the national debt is over $1 trillion a year. Will Congress add another $500 billion in military spending?
US militarism has settled on the enemies to confront, defeat, and loot: Iran, Cuba, North Korea, Russia and China. Also on the agenda are South America, Canada, and Greenland. Israel is pushing the US to attack and destroy Iran. Will President Trump to order an attack Iran? We will soon find out.
A US armada has surrounded Iran. The armada includes two aircraft carriers, a dozen warships, and hundreds of fighter jets equipped with advanced air defense systems. In the last few days, more than 150 military cargo flights are rapidly transferring weapon systems and ammunition to US Middle East bases. This includes another 50 fighter jets, including F-35s, F-22s and F-16s.
This essay will discuss whether the avalanche of bullying and threats on the part of both the US and Israel are signs of strength or of weakness?
“For five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding – its missionaries, its pilgrims, its soldiers, its explorers pouring out from its shores to cross oceans, settle new continents, build vast empires extending out across the globe.”
“But in 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus, it was contracting. Europe was in ruins. Half of it lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”
“Against that backdrop, then, as now, many came to believe that the West’s age of dominance had come to an end and that our future was destined to be a faint and feeble echo of our past. But together, our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make. This is what we did together once before, and this is what President Trump and the United States want to do again now, together with you.”
The countries not featured in Munich; Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as countries from Africa, South America, the Middle and Far East must be shocked to hear that colonial Europe will rise again and join the US to dash their hopes for sovereignty, economic development, and prosperity. Is the collective west still powerful enough to recolonize and dominate the world?
Recent actions by the US in blockading Venezuela and Cuba are reminiscent of 1863 when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived off the coast of Japan with a fleet of modern war shipsdemanding that Japan open her economy “or else”. In 1864 the Treaty of Kanagawa was signed, and trade ports were opened to US ships. Less than 100 years later Japan lay in ruins from WW2, Tokyo had been firebombed, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki destroyed by US atomic weapons.
Meanwhile, in Gaza, a so called “Peace Plan” has been imposed without any input from the people who supposedly own the place, the Palestinians, who continue to be bombed and killed by Israel. The “Peace Plan” is to be administered by President Trump and seems to involve turning Gaza into a resort, designed by Jared Kushner. Meanwhile, the future of war and peace with Russia and Iran is being “negotiated” by non-diplomats, i.e. real estate developers Steven Witkoff and President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. If you think this is odd and possibly dangerous, you are not alone.
US Policy and “Enduring Security”
The US has been at war, in one form or another, since 1941. During this entire time, the US has applied pressure on allies and adversaries alike. At no time was reconciliation and peace offered as an option. The “Cold War” allowed the US to practice coercion around the world without restraint. The US fought several “hot wars”, in Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. In addition, the US overthrew governments it saw as uncooperative or “leftist”, assassinated uncooperative leaders, conducted regime change operations, and funded proxy wars all over the world. US meddling continued after the end of the Cold War including wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, proxy wars in Syria and elsewhere, mostly for the security of Israel. US bullying, financial warfare, economic sanctions, and the bombing countries in Africa and the Middle East has continued. The US has used sanctions to pressure and disrupt over 35 countries. The US imposed sanctions on Cuba (since the 1960s), Iraq (1990s), Iran (since 1979), Russia (after 2014) and Venezuela (since the 2000s). In each of these cases the US did not face an existential threat yet did not hesitate to use the dollar system and US financial power to weaken these countries. For over 80 years, the US has been structurally incapable of diplomacy, reconciliation, or accommodation.
The attitude supporting US aggression stems from the geographic isolation of the US and the idea that this isolation created “enduring security”. Protected by 2 oceans and surrounded by weak neighbors, the US has not faced the threat of invasion since the War of 1812. As a result, the US has consistently acted in a cavalier and coercive behavior towards the rest of the world.
At some point the countries of the world will be forced to find ways to confront and counter continued US aggression. Given the development of new weapons systems, and other offensive non-kinetic techniques, the “enduring security” the US enjoys is rapidly fading.
Israel and the Gaza War
As a direct result of what many are calling genocide in Gaza, Israel is losing the public relations battle. Despite what appear to be significant military advances, in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, Israel may be growing weaker, not stronger, as internal conflicts increase and international condemnation grows.
The very public efforts of the billionaire “friends of Israel” to censor and cancel people who criticize Israel and Zionism may be backfiring. This is especially true with younger people, including many young Jews. For decades it was forbidden to discuss AIPAC or Zionist political, economic, and media power in the US. Now, Zionist influence in all these areas is common knowledge and openly discussed. At some point the use of Zionist money to buy and control policy and politicians may even backfire. If these trends continue, the continued profession of undying support and loyalty to Israel, could become a political liability and Israel could lose US support.
The US Learns from the British Empire
As Secretary Rubio’s speech at Munich demonstrated, the age of colonialism is not yet dead. The foreign policy followed by the US today closely resembles the way the British managed their colonial empire. The British used indirect control via financial leverage, elite co-option, and selective violence, all enforced by naval dominance to control her empire. Britain also tried to manage rivals by encouraging peripheral conflicts, and the use of economic pressure, and coercion. A few of the results were the Opium Wars against China and the use of colonial policing in India, Africa and the Middle East.
As Kautilya the Contemplator states: “Three features of British imperial statecraft are especially relevant. The first was control of chokepoints rather than territory. Britain dominated trade routes, insurance markets and global finance — clear precursors to America’s later control of the dollar system. The second was proxy governance through indirect rule, in which local elites were empowered so long as they aligned with imperial interests. The third was a reliance on punitive expeditions rather than negotiated settlements. Resistance was met with exemplary violence, not reconciliation. This pattern was vividly illustrated by the brutal suppression of the 1857 Indian mutiny.”
“The United States inherited this logic wholesale but expanded it to a planetary scale. Where Britain controlled sea lanes and imperial trade, the United States dominates both the global maritime commons and the financial plumbing of the international system. Where Britain managed colonies, America manages alliance hierarchies and client states.”
The dollar being the global reserve currency is what allows the US to run huge budget deficits and to finance a global military empire. The dominance of Wall Street and the spread of dollar denominated debt provides the financial control that allows the US to bully other nations into submission. What would happen if the belief in US financial and military dominance was severely damaged?
The International Environment
The Middle East, and perhaps the entire globe, is at an economic, political and social turning point. For over 500 years Europe, and since World War 2, the US, have dominated global affairs. Vladamir Putin has called the colonial era “the Vampire Ball”. Today an absurd number of large and small wars continue in strategic locations, often instigated, organized, and funded, by the US and allies like Israel, the UK, and the EU. These wars are designed to destabilize countries and maintain control and global hegemony on behalf of the “Golden Billion”. Regions that were part of colonial empires, remain undeveloped, their wealth owned, extracted and funneled to countries in the northern hemisphere. The youth of these countries forced to migrate north due to the lack of education and opportunity.
To an unsustainable degree the prosperity of the US and especially the EU, still depends on maintaining a relationship of inequality and dominance with the rest of the world. The world’s wealth finances the US budget deficit and the world’s capital flows support our stock, bond, and real estate markets.
Yet today, China has become the dominant manufacturing power, and Russia leads the world in the development of hypersonic and other weapons. These trends, when taken as a whole, raises the question of whether the power of the US/UK/EU/Israel is weakening.
US economy and markets
The global quest for continued US financial and military dominance is no longer sustainable. Continued aggression and militarism risks confrontation and counter measures. The US is spending huge, and increasingly unaccountable amounts of money, on a military industrial complex that produces expensive weapons that rely on inputs the US no longer produces at home and on a manufacturing base that no longer exists. The US has nuclear weapons as a deterrent; but the US has lost the industrial capacity to produce the weapons in the amounts needed to fight a conventional war for longer than a few weeks, even against a mid-level power like Iran. This represents a serious change in the global balance of power.
Modern weapons place the US Navy and Air Force at risk. Iran, Russia, and China have the capacity to sink US battle ships and Aircraft carriers. The F-35 is being delivered without radar because the US lacks the needed rare materials. Instead, free weights are being loaded in the nose to balance the aircraft. In a war against a peer competitor, this aircraft is vulnerable.
The US is stretched militarily with 800 bases that cannot be reliably defended or even resupplied in a real crisis. Here’s a short list of US domestic vulnerability: The US depends on imports for basic needs, including critical areas such as maintaining the electric grid. A growing number of Americans are financially insecure and completely fed up with the cost of living, inflation and foreign wars. US federal budget deficits are on track to top $2 trillion a year. The US is experiencing a low-level conflict over immigration enforcement that could destabilize the country. The US population is deeply divided by ideology. The US stock market is very stretched and has been captured by what appear to be several bubbles, including a bubble in artificial intelligence.
The US stock market is globally dominant and now represents 2/3rds of equity values globally, yet the US population is only 5% of the global population. A huge percentage of the world’s savings are invested in the US stock, bond, and real estate markets–without these flows the US cannot sustain current spending. Should these capital flows reverse, the US economy would deteriorate rapidly.
US/Israeli Aggression is Bad for Business
The Middle East is no longer an undeveloped back water. Sophisticated cities have been built, and many countries manage huge investment funds and strategic assets. The region is a significant energy producer. The prospect of another war means all these valuable assets would be at risk. This makes resolving the political situation in the region a priority. Such a resolution implies that the entire Middle East’s geopolitical architecture needs to change. When Benjamin Netanyahu banishes a map of “Greater Israel” including all of Syria, Lebanon, Jordon and parts of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, it means Israel poses a direct threat to each of these countries. Israel’s behavior as a conquering power has a history. in 1948 Israel used violence and terrorism to depopulate Palestine and confiscate the property, businesses, and homes of the people living there–over 700,000 people. Given this history, even oil-rich states that have been aligned with the US and Israel must now recognize the risk. Why would Greater Israel treat the current residents of these countries any differently that they have treated the Palestinians?
Here’s a quote from a Substack that asks “Is Israel The Bankrupt Colony?: “What no one says aloud, at least not in official transcripts or press conferences, is that the Middle East’s geopolitical architecture is being quietly restructured not because conscience finally awakened in the imperial capitals, but because the balance sheet no longer closes. The numbers simply do not add up anymore. The debts are too high, the costs too visible, the returns too uncertain. What the world is witnessing is not a moral awakening but a foreclosure. The repossession of a region by creditors who were once clients. The quiet disposal of an asset, Israel, that has turned toxic on every ledger that matters to the men who actually move capital around the world.”
“This is not a story anyone in power particularly wants told. It cuts too close to the bone, exposes too many comfortable lies, implicates too many respectable institutions. But the numbers, the bond spreads, the capital flight, the downgrades from ratings agencies, and the trillion-dollar deals being signed in desert palaces suggest it is the story being written nonetheless, whether we choose to read it or not.”
This is the Arab League–almost Identical to the old Ottoman Empire. It represents the crossroads of global trade, the opening to Africa, and the ability to develop an area of the world that has been in the crosshairs of colonialism. Looking at the map–what’s odd in this picture?
For eight decades the “democratic government” of Israel has functioned as a military base. Israel provided the US and the UK with leverage over the most energy rich part of the world. The model, which was not widely discussed at the time, used Israel and Israeli brutality to destabilize, divide, and dominate the region. As this Substack has pointed out, sectarian grievances were fomented, the most brutal sects of Islam were empowered and used to divide and destabilize the region. Brutal Sunni Islamic sects were financed and armed to overthrow governments and to provide Israel with a cover for her own brutality. Operation Timber Sycamore is just one example of the covert programs, this one authorized by President Barack Obama. It funded Islamic groups to overthrow the Syrian Government, an enemy of Israel. The Sunni Monarchies were persuaded to support the overthrow on Sadam Hussein, Basher al Assad, and Quaddaffi in Libya Also not discussed was the ultimate intent; to make sure that no Arab power would ever be able to consolidate enough strength to challenge Western interests.
Until now. Israel has been a profitable deal for the US. US arms manufacturers sold weapons. Oil was priced in dollars, keeping the US debt machine afloat. Israel used her domination over the West Bank and Gaza to develop surveillance tools, border security, and cyber capabilities and systems that were then sold to the west and to the Gulf states to control a population increasing opposed to Israel depredations against the Palestinians, and to the US militarism that protected Israel! But the model is now breaking down everywhere.
Despite the clear intent to depopulate and redevelop Gaza on top of the blood and bodies of the women and children murdered there, the Palestinians have refused to leave. Egypt refused to open the Raffa crossing and Gaza has been left as festering wound for Israel and Donald J. Trump.
What changed over the years that could empower the Arab states to defy western power? China. Over the last decade China has become a buyer of Saudi, Iranian, and Russian oil, paying in Yuan and offering an alternative to the dollar system. The Belt Road Initiative also pumped development money into the Gulf and North Africa offering an alternative to western investment. This is yet another reason why China is a target.
In 2023 China persuaded the Saudi’s and Iran to normalize relations. News of this deal sent a shock wave through the region and reconfigured security arrangements without the involvement of the US. The Saudi’s and Iran had spent decades fighting proxy wars across the region in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq–but after talks in Bejing they agreed to restore diplomatic relations.
Then there’s financial wealth and power. Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds control $5-7 trillion with other countries controlling billions. They are no longer coming to the west, hat in hand begging for investment and for weapons.
Perhaps certain American interests are also now in conflict. The military industrial complex and the “forever war lobby” makes money off war, conflict, destabilization, and destruction, but the financial industry makes money off investment returns. Profitable long-term investments require peace, development, stability, and security. Militarism and war are incompatible with profitable investing. Yet, despite all the trillions being discussed, the Palestinians are still being bombed, any surviving structure is still being destroyed, and justice for Palestine is still a distant hope.
Countering US Aggression
The Ukraine War has become a fulcrum point for global change. First, contrary to the thousands of times the phrase “unprovoked” has been repeated, Russia was forced to intervene in Ukraine. The plan seems to have been to use sanctions, excluding Russia from SWIFT, and the confiscation of $300 billion in Russian Central Bank assets to destabilize, regime change, and open up Russia to western exploitation. To that end the entire financial and military capacity of the US/UK/EU/ and Israel has been used to support Ukraine including US ISR capabilities. President Joe Biden promised to fund Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” Weapons and money flowed into Ukraine. But Russia did not collapse and instead fought a slow war of attrition that may have been designed to grind down and exhaust the west and achieve the objectives of the SMO. Meanwhile, during this long and horrible war, Russia reorganized her military and strengthened supply chains, trained a battle-hardened army, and developed technologies in drones, missiles, and missile defense that now lead the world.
But it was the confiscation of Russia assets, not only Central Bank assets, but the assets of individual Russians that may come back and haunt the US and the West. If assets are not safe in the US, the UK or in the EU, alternatives will be found. US dependence on the world’s savings requires maintaining confidence in the system. Supporting the confiscation of sovereign and individual assets weakens confidence.
If the US dollar lost reserve currency status the US would be unable to fund not only Militarism and war, but most social programs. The US would be forced to retreat and implement austerity measures that would be both deflationary and socially destabilizing. The dollar seems secure, for now.
Below is a list of potential counter measures an adversary could use to weaken the US economy and blunt US aggression:
1–The stock market bubble could be attacked. The US stock market plays an incredibly significant role in the US economy. It is the repository of the nation’s and, increasingly the world’s savings. The stock market is stretched and is also in the middle of an AI bubble. The AI bubble is dependent on a constant supply of high-performance chips from Taiwan. China could blockade Taiwan and prevent the chips from being delivered.
2–The invincibility of the US military could be attacked and undermined. As pointed out, both the US Navy and Air Force are vulnerable to modern weapons. The US is increasingly involved in blockades including boarding and seizing oil tankers. The ships and aircraft involved in these activities are vulnerable to modern weapons. There are efforts to blockade Russia in the Baltics, to seize ships carrying Russian oil. To blockade China and prevent the delivery of oil. War with Iran is being threatened. What if the naval assets engaged were sunk? What if the US attacked Iran and Iran sunk an aircraft carrier?
3–The ability of the US to roll over the national debt could be attacked. The US is dependent on the world’s savings continuing to be invested in US stock and bond markets. Problems rolling over the debt could lead to the Fed having to buy the debt. This would be a serious blow to confidence and create serious problems with inflation.
4–The US electric grid could be attacked. Cyber weapons are real and highly developed. The US electric grid is old and highly vulnerable. A significant part of the US going dark for any period would lead to a huge national crisis. Electric transformers could also be attacked.
5–The ability to import goods could be attacked. The US is dependent on imports for almost all consumer goods. What if the container ships stopped arriving?
6–Political divisions in the US could be exploited. The US is deeply divided. There are millions of people in the US who do not have legal status. Some of the states could try and leave the union. What if a foreign power found a way to exploit these issues? The US has supported “color revolutions” all around the world, including several in just the last year. What if a successful color revolution was organized in the US?
Conclusion
The real question is how the US and Israel will react if the war in Ukraine, or Iran goes badly, if a battleship or aircraft carrier is sunk, if Israel is being pounded. Would the US or Israel turn to nuclear weapons? If so, how will the other nuclear powers react. Given the changes afoot, we live in dangerous times.
Iran has concluded a clandestine €500mn (approximately $541mn) weapons agreement with Moscow to procure thousands of advanced portable air defence systems, as Tehran moves to replenish military capabilities lost during its conflict with Israel last year, the Financial Times reported on February 22.
The contract, concluded in the Russian capital in December following a visit by Iran’s security chief Ali Larijani, obligates Moscow to supply 500 Verba shoulder-fired launch units alongside 2,500 9M336 missiles, with deliveries phased across three tranches running from 2027 to 2029.
Earlier, IntelliNews reports previously indicated an increased number of flights coming from both Belarus and Russia, in the run-up to the deadly protests that left several thousand dead.
The FT said it based its reporting on leaked Russian documents and multiple sources with direct knowledge of the arrangement. Russian media has also reported the British paper’s report without confirming it.
Iran’s defence establishment submitted its request for the systems in July last year, shortly after a 12-day military confrontation in which US forces joined Israeli strikes against three of Tehran’s nuclear facilities.
The transaction was brokered by Ruhollah Katebi, an Iranian defence official based in Moscow, who had previously facilitated the transfer of Iranian Fath-360 short-range ballistic missiles to Russian forces fighting in Ukraine.
Negotiations were held in Moscow between Rosoboronexport, the Kremlin’s arms export body, and a representative of Iran’s Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces Logistics.
Individual 9M336 missiles are priced at €170,000 each under the contract, with launch systems costing €40,000 each. The package also covers 500 night-vision targeting sights. The total contract value is listed at €495mn.
The Verba system uses infrared guidance and can be operated by small mobile units, allowing forces to establish dispersed defensive positions without fixed radar infrastructure, which proved vulnerable during last year’s strikes.
Iran has seen increased shipments of weapons since December, with flights from Russia, China and Belarus allegedly supplying the latest technology those countries have to offer, including scramblers used in the recent protest movements.
Iran has strengthened its defensive capabilities since its 12-day war with Israel in 2025 and is prepared to protect itself should hostilities resume, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in an interview with CBS on February 22.
“We are in an even better position than during the previous war. We are in a strong position in terms of self-defence. We know how to protect ourselves. We did it during the 12-day war and are fully prepared to do so again if necessary,” Araghchi said.
Acknowledging that Iran had faced difficulties with its air defence systems during the conflict, Araghchi said Israel had confronted similar problems.
“They started the war but after 12 days asked for a ceasefire — an unconditional ceasefire. Why? Because they could not defend themselves against our missiles,” he said.
Israel launched a military operation against Iran on June 13, 2025. Iran responded within 24 hours. The United States entered the conflict nine days later, striking Iranian nuclear facilities at Fordow, Natanz and Isfahan on June 22.
Tehran responded the following day with missile strikes against Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, the largest US military installation in the Middle East. A ceasefire took effect on June 24, 2025.
Every time I visit Moscow, I make it a point to walk through Victory Park (Парк Победы) on Poklonnaya Hill and the Aleksandrovsky Gardens. I do not go as a tourist. I go as a student of the Second World War, having spent years studying the Eastern Front and its human cost. Standing before the Eternal Flame, walking past the long granite walls etched with the names of cities reduced to rubble, one is struck less by spectacle than by silence. Victory Park is not triumphal in spirit. It is solemn. It is a place where memory is a sacred inheritance – not an abstraction, not a rhetorical device, but a lived continuity between generations.
To walk there is to confront scale: 27 million dead. Entire regions erased. Families extinguished. Whatever one thinks of the Soviet political system, the memory of that sacrifice occupies a foundational place in Russian historical consciousness. It is not merely history. It is civilizational memory.
Yet, outside Russia, the meaning of that memory is shifting. History is no longer about what happened. It is about who and what is being allowed to be remembered. It is being reclassified as a security domain. Across the West, memory is no longer treated primarily as a field of inquiry that is contested, archival and necessarily uncomfortable, but as a terrain of geopolitical alignment. Certain interpretations are framed as stabilizing, others as dangerous. Commemoration becomes policy and “correct remembrance” a loyalty signal. Once history is scrutinized this way, nuance ceases to be a scholarly virtue and becomes a liability.
Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in the West’s recoding of twentieth-century Eurasian history, especially the Second World War and its aftermath, into a simplified moral grammar. This recoding sustains a series of concrete, documentable cases of selective revisionism and factual distortion. It also reflects identifiable institutional drivers and is creating strategic blind spots that liberal societies are poorly equipped to recognize.
The logic of this recoding becomes clearest when one examines how it has been formalized at the institutional level.
Europe’s Recasting of the Soviet Union as Nazi Germany’s “Twin”
The European Parliament’s 2019 Resolution on the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe1 does more than commemorate the past. It rewrites it. By declaring that the Second World War was “started as an immediate result” of the 1939 Nazi–Soviet Pact and equating Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union as symmetrical “totalitarian” perpetrators, the resolution rewrites causation. By further framing alternative historical interpretations as “information warfare,” it recodes twentieth-century history to fit present geopolitical alignments.
This framing is false at the level of causation. Attributing the war’s outbreak to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact erases the decade of European appeasement that made Hitler’s aggression possible: the remilitarization of the Rhineland, the Spanish Civil War, the Anschluss, Munich and the dismantling of Czechoslovakia.
It also omits the collapse of the last serious attempt to prevent war. Michael Jabara Carley, one of the leading historians of interwar diplomacy and a scholar deeply grounded in the archival record of that period, offers an account of early 1939 that reads almost like an indictment. In his work 1939: The Alliance That Never Was and the Coming of World War II, he argues that as Hitler dismantled the European order, the Soviet Union advanced a concrete proposal on April 15, 1939, for a binding military alliance aimed at deterring German aggression. Yet, London stalled, Paris hedged and Warsaw refused even the practical necessity of allowing Soviet transit in the event of invasion. Anti-communist suspicion outweighed the urgency of the Nazi threat. In Carley’s telling, the Western powers chose to gamble on Hitler rather than forge an alliance with the USSR. The price of that hesitation was paid within months. From Moscow’s perspective, the Pact with Germany followed the exhaustion of diplomatic alternatives with London, Paris and Warsaw, not ideological convergence with Nazism.2
This was later acknowledged by Winston Churchill himself. In his memoir-history work The Second World War, vol. I, The Gathering Storm, he conceded that there was “no means of maintaining an Eastern Front against Germany without the active participation of Russia,” and that had such an alliance been concluded, “the whole course of events might have been changed.”3
By presenting the Nazi–Soviet Pact as the war’s “immediate” cause, the European Parliament resolution excises Western diplomatic failure and reallocates moral responsibility eastward. This erasure enables the resolution’s deeper move of moral equivalence. Nazi Germany, a genocidal regime committed to racial annihilation, and the Soviet Union, a repressive system that nonetheless bore the main military burden of destroying the Third Reich, are collapsed into a single category. The Red Army’s decisive victories on the Eastern front are marginalized to sustain symmetry. Memory is flattened, causation is inverted and history is securitized. What emerges is not remembrance, but alignment where history is repurposed as policy.
Blinken at Babi Yar: Holocaust Memory as a Geopolitical Weapon
The most striking individual example of Western memory distortion remains former US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s 2023 statement marking the anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre. Blinken wrote:
“Eighty-two years ago, Nazis murdered 34,000 Jews at Babyn Yar. The Soviets buried this history, which today Putin’s government manipulates to provide cover for Russia’s abuses in Ukraine.”4
The crime itself is undisputed. What is distorted is the charge of “burial”. Soviet investigators documented the Babi Yar killings as early as 1944 through the Extraordinary State Commission, incorporating them into war-crimes dossiers and postwar trials. Victims were typically described as “Soviet citizens” rather than explicitly as Jews. This was an ideological distortion and historians like Karel Berkhoff have shown how Soviet wartime propaganda universalized Jewish suffering for political ends.5 However, the massacre was not suppressed, concealed or denied. It entered official investigation, legal record and public awareness, albeit within a constrained interpretive framework.
That framework reflected Soviet nationality policy. The Soviet state did not conceptualize the war primarily through ethnic victimhood or the Holocaust as a distinct category. Nazi crimes were universalized as violence against the Soviet people as a whole. Emphasizing Jewish specificity at Babi Yar risked foregrounding ethnic division, while highlighting Ukrainian nationalist collaboration risked inflaming inter-nationality tensions within a fragile, multiethnic state. The result was moral distortion, not erasure.
These limits were openly challenged in 1961, when the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem Babi Yar publicly confronted both Nazi atrocity and Soviet antisemitism, igniting national debate. Blinken’s formulation collapses this layered history into a narrative of “burial,” converting ideological constraint into complicity and repurposing Holocaust memory as a bridge to contemporary geopolitical messaging against the modern Russian state.
Normalizing Collaboration: The Canadian Waffen-SS Scandal
On September 22, 2023, members of Canada’s House of Commons, in the presence of then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, gave two standing ovations to Yaroslav Hunka, who was introduced as a WWII-era Ukrainian-Canadian who had fought “for Ukrainian independence against the Russians” during the Second World War. It soon emerged that Hunka had served in the Nazi 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division “Galicia,” prompting domestic outrage, international condemnation and the resignation of Speaker Anthony Rota.6 It is striking that members of the House of Commons who joined the standing ovation appeared to overlook that Canada and the Soviet Union were wartime allies within the Grand Alliance against Nazi Germany.
The episode acquired an additional layer of historical irony through the participation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who joined the ovation. Zelensky’s own grandfather, Semyon Ivanovich Zelensky, was a decorated Red Army officer who fought Nazi Germany and received two Orders of the Red Star in 1944 for personal heroism in combat. While one generation of the Zelensky family fought as part of the Soviet force that destroyed the Third Reich, the next stood in applause for a man who had served in a Waffen-SS formation subordinated to that same regime. The juxtaposition is emblematic rather than personal. It illustrates the degree to which historical reference points have been reordered.
At left, 98-year-old Yaroslav Hunka, a veteran of Hitler’s SS, returns the salute from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Canadian Parliament | Screengrab / AP
Such inversions are only possible within a memory regime in which the Soviet Union is remembered primarily as an occupier rather than as a principal force in the defeat of fascism, and in which Russia is recast not as a historical co-victor but as a civilizational antagonist. The Hunka ovation thus stands as a concentrated expression of how wartime categories of perpetrator, collaborator and liberator are being destabilized under the pressure of present-day strategic alignment.
From Revisionism to Falsification: Recent Public Claims
Some contemporary claims do not merely re-interpret but outright falsify. In a December 2025 interview with the Kyiv Post, the Austrian aristocrat Karl von Habsburg asserted that Russia “was not exactly successful” in major conflicts and explicitly listed the Second World War and the Winter War with Finland as wars that Russia “lost”.7
The statement is not a matter of angle or emphasis but a categorical reversal of basic outcomes. The USSR was the principal victor against Nazi Germany and the Winter War ended with Finnish concessions of territory as part of the Moscow Peace Treaty, despite Finnish battlefield performance and Soviet costs. The significance is diagnostic in that the rhetorical convenience of portraying Russia as historically “losing again and again” overrides elementary factual structure.
On May 2, 1945, Soviet troops occupied the Berlin Reichstag, planting the Soviet flag on its roof after a two-week battle.
Similarly, EU High Representative Kaja Kallas’s previous statements that it is “something new” to claim Russia and China fought and won the Second World War, and that Russia “attacked 19 countries in the last 100 years”, are emblematic of this discursive environment.8 Finnish Foreign Minister Elina Valtonen used the same formulation of Russia attacking 19 countries but none attacking Russia, in public messaging.9 As I and many other authors have analyzed in previous essays, these claims collapse basic historical realities and substitute them with convenient geopolitical narratives. The claim that no country has attacked Russia in a century collapses on contact with June 1941, when Germany, Italy, Finland, Romania, Hungary, Slovakia and Albania all formally declared war on the Soviet Union and joined Hitler’s invasion as part of his war of extermination.
The contrast with the West’s own wartime record is stark. In November 1943, at the height of the US–Soviet alliance, the US Department of War released “Why We Fight: The Battle of Russia”, an official orientation film produced under Frank Capra for American troops and later shown to civilian audiences. The documentary was produced following Soviet victories at the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad and Kursk. The film opens with unequivocal statements by senior American political and military leaders recognizing the decisive role of the Red Army and its centrality in the fight against Nazi Germany. The first minute of the film’s opening is captured below. The full documentary is publicly available.
Far from marginal, the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in December 1943, reflecting mainstream wartime acceptance of this assessment. Irrespective of its propagandistic intent, the film stands as a primary-source record of official US wartime acknowledgment of the Soviet contribution, underscoring how far Western discourse has since shifted from recognition to revision.
This assessment is not confined to wartime messaging. As a matter of historical record, major Western scholarship likewise treats the Eastern Front as the principal theater of Germany’s land war and the Red Army as the force that bore the heaviest share of the fighting – an interpretation widely supported by historians like Stephen Cohen, Michael Jabara Carley, David Glantz, Antony Beevor, A. J. P. Taylor, John Keegan and Paul Kennedy.
When Culture Becomes a Battlefield: Institutionalized Russophobia After February 2022
After February 2022, the weaponization of memory extended beyond resolutions and rhetoric into the cultural sphere. Russian language, literature, music and art were increasingly treated not as politically sensitive, but as morally suspect. The implicit message was that Russian culture no longer belonged to a shared European or human inheritance, but constituted an adversarial presence to be removed from public space.
The performing arts provided early signals. On March 1, 2022, the Polish National Opera cancelled Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Days later, the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra removed Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture from a scheduled program, a move later echoed by the San Diego Symphony Orchestra*. These cancellations targeted canonical works composed long before the modern Russian state and bearing no connection to contemporary politics, functioning instead as symbolic acts of cultural sanction.
Museums followed a similar logic. In Britain, the Museums Association endorsed suspending cooperation with Russian institutions, freezing exhibitions and loans nationwide. In Spain, Reuters documented the return of Russian artworks after exhibitions were postponed under political pressure.10
The long-term danger is structural. When cultural institutions abandon the principle that art transcends state power, they impoverish liberal culture itself. By teaching societies to associate a people’s language and artistic tradition with inherent threat, Western institutions erode the universalism they claim to defend.
Structural Drivers of Western Historical Revisionism
Several structural forces have enabled the normalization of historical revisionism in Western political culture. Foremost is the erosion of expertise. Since the 1990s, sustained cuts to area studies and foreign-language programs, particularly those focused on Russia, Eastern Europe and China, have hollowed out institutional knowledge. Linguistic competence and archival familiarity have given way to a foreign-policy discourse dominated by generalists operating within an English-language media and policy ecosystem, where repetition substitutes for evidence and inherited assumptions go largely unchallenged.
Closely linked is the collapse of historical education itself. Undergraduate history degrees have declined sharply across the United States and Europe. By 2019, the number of history BAs in the United States had fallen by nearly half from late-2000s levels. A public without training in source criticism, historiography, or causal reasoning is poorly equipped to distinguish archival scholarship from strategic narrative. This deficit is widely understood by political elites. Under such conditions, false or selective histories need not be sophisticated. They need only be repeated by credentialed voices.
A third enabling factor is the securitization of memory. The European Parliament’s 2019 resolution explicitly frames historical remembrance as part of a counter-disinformation strategy directed at Russia, collapsing the boundary between scholarship and security policy. Once history is treated as a domain of resilience rather than inquiry, disagreement becomes suspect, nuance destabilizing and interpretation a matter of political alignment. Memory ceases to constrain power and instead becomes an instrument of statecraft.
Finally, these trends converge in a condition of generational amnesia. Public surveys show a marked deterioration in basic historical literacy, including knowledge of the Holocaust. A 2020 US study found that nearly two-thirds of millennials and Gen Z respondents could not identify Auschwitz.11 If even the most extensively documented genocide is fading from public understanding, the far more complex histories of the Eastern Front or China’s wartime resistance are especially vulnerable to distortion. In such an environment, revisionism is not merely easier to impose; it is harder to detect.
Taken together, these conditions create a public sphere in which history no longer functions as a discipline capable of checking power. Instead, it becomes a set of authorized talking points governed from above. The result is a society increasingly vulnerable to manipulation, where dissenting interpretations are recoded not as scholarship but as deviation.
Consequences: Strategic, Moral and Democratic Dangers
The consequences of historical revisionism extend beyond interpretive error to concrete political risk. A West that erases or trivializes Russian and Chinese wartime trauma – Russia’s 27 million dead and China’s 35 million between 1931 and 1945 – will misread contemporary security behavior. When these experiences are denied legitimacy, the strategic red lines shaped by them appear irrational or fabricated, increasing the risk of miscalculation and escalation rather than restraint.
The moral costs are equally severe. As memory is reshaped to fit present geopolitical alignments, historical categories invert. The rehabilitation of anti-Soviet collaborators, exemplified by the Hunka scandal, shows how actors once aligned with genocidal violence can be reframed as symbols of resistance when they fit the current enemy narrative. In such a climate, memory itself becomes collateral damage, subordinated to strategic convenience.
This process also corrodes democratic culture from within. Governments that instrumentalize history while professing liberal values undermine trust in democratic discourse. The securitization of memory turns historical debate into a loyalty test, narrowing the space for legitimate dissent. When official narratives are enforced rather than contested, citizens learn not to reason historically but to align politically.
Western states routinely accuse Russia and China of manipulating history. Yet, credibility requires confronting the West’s own revisionism. The Soviet Union and China were indispensable to the defeat of fascism. Their contributions are foundational to the modern international order. Erasing or distorting this reality weakens not only historical integrity but the moral authority of those who claim to defend it.
Resisting this trajectory demands more than rhetorical balance. It requires reinvestment in historical education, the rebuilding of area-studies expertise and a firm defense of scholarly autonomy from geopolitical agendas. Without these correctives, North America and Europe risk becoming societies that no longer understand how they survived the twentieth century and are therefore poorly equipped to avoid repeating its disasters.
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By Ryan Grim, Murtaza Hussain, and Emily Jashinsky, Drop Site News, 2/10/26
In the decade before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the U.S. and Russia were engaged in high-stakes exchanges of advanced technology involving the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Skolkovo Innovation Center—a Russian government-backed technology hub that aimed to jump-start a “venture” innovation ecosystem in Moscow.
Jeffrey Epstein sat at the crossroads of academia, philanthropy, and venture finance as these global capital flows were threatened by the brewing confrontation in Ukraine.
In 2013, during the early cryptocurrency boom, Epstein sought an audience with Vladimir Putin to encourage the Russian president to shift course from the MIT–Skolkovo model. Instead of playing “catch up” with the United States through venture-backed startups, Epstein proposed, Russia could help lead a new financial system based on a novel global currency.
Epstein funded the early development of cryptocurrency through the MIT Digital Currency Initiative, founded in 2015. MIT’s Bitcoin Core Development Fund helped pay bitcoin’s early developers to maintain the open-source software authored by Satoshi Nakamoto, bitcoin’s anonymous inventor. Epstein was an early investor in Coinbase, and he was friends with Brock Pierce, the co-founder of U.S. dollar stablecoin company Tether, which operates, in effect, the world’s largest crypto bank.
Epstein was also recruiting cryptographers to a more ambitious project: hacking the human genome. In an email to a redacted recipient in August 2012, Epstein wrote, “My biology gurus at harvard all agree that the signal intelligence used by the various agencies , could be put to work on breaking the dna code or protein signal problems. breaking foreign codes is the expertise of the us and nsa.” Epstein prompted the recipient to help him recruit “code breakers” from the various intelligence agencies: “it would be great to know which agency button to push.”
In an interview with Steve Bannon months before his death, Epstein revealed that he had purchased a property in New Mexico—the Zorro Ranch—as a research facility to attract the nation’s top scientists from the former “Manhattan Project” campus in nearby Los Alamos after the U.S. government cut funding for high-energy physics at the end of the Cold War. “In our world, the physical world, there were things that were just unexplainable,” he told Bannon. “I wanted to see if we could build tools so others smarter than me could help investigate it.”
The millions of documents published by the Justice Department last month reveal Epstein’s disturbing fascination with eugenic science, expressed through research linked to the intelligence services of multiple governments. Epstein covertly negotiated access to dangerous and ethically dubious technology, between financial elites, often alluding to grand ambitions for reshaping both the human genome and the world order.
Drop Site News has spent the past several months exposing Epstein’s ties to U.S. and Israeli intelligence. Our full series is available here. We also partnered with Jmail in their effort to make the full Epstein files accessible and searchable. View the archive at https://jmail.world/.
From left, Jeffrey Epstein, Bill Gates, and Boris Nikolic. Photograph from 2011 found in Epstein’s New York mansion.
Jeffrey Epstein Recruited NSA Codebreakers for Genome “Manhattan Project”
The financier pursued cryptographers to “hack” the genetic code, and develop “new signals intelligence” to understand inter-cellular communication.
In January 2010, Ilya Ponomarev, a member of the Duma—the Russian parliament— helped arrange a visit to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) by a group of senior Russian officials. He told a Latvia-based outlet he was in Boston to explore cooperation between Russian and American startups.
Vladislav Surkov, deputy of then-President Dmitry Medvedev, was part of the delegation. At the time, Surkov was seeking to develop the “second leg” of a managed multiparty system to counter-balance Putin’s dominant United Russia Party. After the visit, Surkov asked Ponomarev, a popular member of A Just Russia, the controlled opposition party, to become a “technology transfer” advisor for Viktor Vekselberg, a Russian-Israeli billionaire.
Vekselberg, owner of the conglomerate Renova Group, was in charge of the Skolkovo Innovation Center, dubbed Moscow’s “Silicon Valley,” a high-tech business district subsidized by Russian state-owned enterprises and administered by the non-profit Skolkovo Foundation.
With Ponomarev’s help, Vekselberg established the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology, or “Skoltech,” a $300 million research partnership paid by the Skolkovo Foundation to MIT. MIT and Skolkovo share profits and royalties from the partnership, which includes intellectual property related to CRISPR gene-editing technology. Skoltech supported research on RNA-targeting methods using CRISPR, and also owns rights to diagnostic technology based on the same RNA-targeting effector.
Former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, right; Li Keqiang, former Chinese premier, center; and President of Skolkovo foundation Viktor Vekselberg, left, visit the Skolkovo facility in Moscow. Photo: Wikimedia Commons
Like many of his ultra-wealthy peers, Jeffrey Epstein was fascinated by gene therapy and life-extension technology. He once suggested to news anchor Katie Couric—to her shock and disgust—that he even planned to clone himself. But his interest in genomics was more than a passing fancy; it was an enduring obsession during the final decades of his life.
In December 2006, before Epstein was jailed for prostitution of a minor in Palm Beach, Ghislaine Maxwell invited Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his then-girlfriend Anne Wojcicki to Epstein’s Little St. James Island, according to emails in Epstein’s hacked Yahoo! inbox vetted and published by Distributed Denial of Secrets. Wojcicki had founded a personal genomics startup called 23andMe, and Maxwell encouraged Epstein to cultivate a relationship with her. “Be v nice to her not stupid,” Maxwell wrote. “She is interested in mapping DNA etc ..she is key :)”
Email exchange between Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell regarding Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki’s visit to Little St. James. Source: DDoS. View on Jmail.
That same year, Epstein had been in contact with leading Harvard geneticists George Church and Gary B. Ruvkun, who won a Nobel Prize in 2024 for his research into micro RNA. Epstein planned to fund Church’s Personal Genome Project at Harvard, and Ruvkun sought Epstein’s support for genomics research to elucidate “pleasure signals in the brain.” Ruvkun wrote to Stephen Kosslyn, later Harvard’s Social Science Dean, “let me know if this subject is too strange for our patron.” The correspondence was forwarded to Epstein, who wrote back, “the patron has no boundaries.”
After Epstein’s release from prison on sex crime charges in 2010, he began funding Church’s CRISPR gene-editing research. In November 2011, Church stirred some controversy by telling an interviewer that he hoped to clone a Neanderthal.
Epstein wrote to Church a few weeks later, after the scientist declined an invitation to an event, “did the cloning issue , give you pause?” Church replied, “Yes. I’m working toward this goal fairly rapidly but trying to do so in a way that minimizes risk to the field.”
“Why don’t you come and i won’t mention it,” Epstein coaxed him. “I just find it intellectually amusing.” Church did not reply to request for comment.
Email exchange between Jeffrey Epstein and George Church, likely referring to MIT scientists Marvin Minsky and Martin Nowak, whose research was funded by Epstein. Source: U.S. Department of Justice.
“Find Me The Top Hacker”
Epstein’s interest in gene-editing was not purely intellectual; it was personal. Joe Thakuria, Church’s Harvard Medical School colleague, helped Epstein conduct research on his own genome. In June 2014, Thakuria sent Epstein a $193,400 invoice for a package deal to mutate his adult stem cells “to increase longevity,” noting that “If we do this, he, like George Church, would be one of very few people in the world to have this done.” Later that year, Epstein tried to arrange a meeting between Church and Bill Gates to discuss “anti aging” and “genetic fabrication.”
MIT received millions of dollars in donations directed by Epstein to support pet projects that happened to closely intersect the frontier research conducted under the Skoltech partnership.
Epstein gave his first gift to the MIT Media Lab in 2002, to fund the research of artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. Over the next decade, Epstein gave several large gifts to Seth Lloyd, a quantum computing researcher featured at the Russian Quantum Center in Skolkovo, who co-authored papers with Skoltech-funded researchers.
Microsoft, the technology conglomerate of which Bill Gates is a founder and major shareholder, also had formal ties to Skolkovo. In 2010, Viktor Vekselberg and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer signed a memorandum in Moscow to begin “a wide-ranging series of collaborative initiatives that will underpin the Russian Federation’s technology innovation agenda,” later opening an R&D center at the Skolkovo Innovation Center.
Skolkovo was one of several foreign funders of the MIT Media Lab, led by Epstein’s close friend Joi Ito. The Skolkovo partnership funded research grants for high-profile principal investigators like Chilean physicist César Hidalgo and Neri Oxman, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman’s wife, whose research Epstein had personally backed.
Epstein was also supporting the work of Madars Virza, a Latvian research scientist working on cryptocurrency at the Media Lab. In 2011, the Skolkovo Foundation funded Virza and Israeli scientist Eli Ben-Sasson’s research on Zerocash, a design for an anonymous cryptocurrency based on “zero-knowledge” cryptographic proofs—also backed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
In emails released by the Justice Department last month, Epstein discussed the cryptographic theory behind Zerocash with Italian hacker Vincenzo Iozzo, “ZeroCash…is essentially a ‘privacy preserving’ version of Bitcoin,” Iozzo wrote to Epstein. “If we use…similar [zero knowledge proofs] for our currency, we can enforce arbitrary rules on how the currency is spent.” Epstein invested in Ben-Sasson and Virza’s Electric Coin Company, to create the Zcash blockchain based on their research. Later, Epstein helped Virza make a bank transfer in the Virgin Islands before a “fork” in the Zcash code. Virza did not reply to request for comment.
Epstein’s interests in genes and cryptocurrency were deeply intertwined. He regarded the human genome as a cryptographic puzzle, and wanted to “hack” the genetic code.
As early as December 2009, Epstein reached out to Daniel Dubno, a CBS News producer who previously worked with DARPA and the Department of Homeland Security, to “find me the top hacker codebreaker, nsa type,” to assist in analysis of proteins.
That month, Epstein contacted MIT parallel computing pioneer Danny Hillis with the same request: “i am looking for nsa quality code theorist. biology at every level involves a host of Alice and Bob interactions, authentication, signnal processing. Noisy channels.” (In cryptographic theory, Alice and Bob are common placeholders for two parties trying to communicate with each other.)
In his messages to Hillis, Epstein seemed somewhat conversant in the frontier methods in artificial intelligence research at the time, writing, “THe math gets quite complicated. algebraic topologists ,sometimes look at the intersections in multidimensional spaces,” referring to the practice of representing a high-dimensional object as a collection of overlapping regions, then studying the pattern of their intersections.
Dubno followed up with Epstein a few months later, to inform him about a crypto workshop he was planning, with some promising recruits. “A bunch of Israeli hackers are in this with me as well as the chief disruption officer at Darpa, Dr. Peter Lee,” Dubno wrote. He added, “I’d design this so you’d get your questions answered if you’d help me get mine.” Epstein replied, “Im in.” Dubno visited Epstein’s island within a matter of days. Hillis and Dubno did not reply to requests for comment.
For the next decade, Epstein continued to recruit engineers from U.S. national security entities, including DARPA, to his genome hacking project. He asked Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House attorney who had handled the legal fallout from the Edward Snowden leaks, to help him source cryptographers from the National Security Agency. “Can you find a guy from nsa that can think about signal intelligence applied to DNA,” Epstein wrote . “I want to intercept communication between living cells in organisms.”
In late 2012, he had sent the same request to Boris Nikolic, Bill Gates’ top aide: “do you have any contacts at nsa so that we can use de encypriton (sic) in biological systems?” “Yes,” Nikolic replied, “There are no many places where I do not have someone ;)”
“A New Form Of Money”
Despite an auspicious start, the partnership between MIT and Skolkovo came under strain in 2012, caught between rising tensions between Washington and Moscow, and an increasingly restrictive political climate within Russia itself.
That year, major street protests broke out in Moscow and St. Petersburg against the Russian government. In response to the demonstrations, Putin accused the U.S. of fomenting unrest, and his foreign minister claimed the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was attempting to influence Russia’s elections through “pro-democracy” non-profit and non-governmental organizations.
USAID was funding a major Russian civil society organization to conduct election monitoring, documenting allegations of voter fraud that fueled the protests. Ponomarev—now seen as a liberal opponent of the government—did not have public ties to USAID, which was a close partner of the Gates Foundation. Even so, as concerns mounted over his safety inside Russia, Nikolic, Gates’ science and technology advisor, quietly sought Epstein’s help to protect him.
In an email dated January 11, 2012, Nikolic asked Epstein to travel with him to Russia to meet Ponomarev. Nikolic forwarded a message from Ponomarev requesting an invitation to speak at the World Economic Forum that year “so that not only official Putin’s voice is heard.”
“He is a member of Duma,” Nikolic explained to Epstein, “and he and Alyona (his very smart and cute girlfriend) are the main organizer of the uprising against Putin…I am afraid what will happened to him. The stakes are huge.”
Nikolic believed that Ponomarev was in imminent danger. “He might replace Putin and become a president by himself (he will sooner or later) if he does not [get] killed before. It is super dangerous – any idea how to help him???” Nikolic signed off, “Pls do not forward this email.”
Nikolic invites Epstein to Russia to meet Putin rival Ilya Ponomarev. Source: U.S. Department of Justice.
The documents do not show whether Epstein responded, or if he acted on Nikolic’s email at all. Ponomarev did not speak at Davos that year. As Nikolic had warned, Ponomarev’s status in Russia quickly became more precarious. After Putin’s return in May 2012, Ponomarev led a failed filibuster to stall a bill drastically increasing penalties for participating in protests. In June 2012, Nikolic sent another message encouraging Epstein to build a relationship with Ponomarev, writing, “It is somewhat dangerous for me to spend more time with him. But I think it is worth it.”
The next month, the Russian government adopted a new “foreign agents” framework for foreign-funded NGOs, restricting the activities of civil society organizations. In September 2012, USAID was banned from Russia.
The MIT-Skolkovo partnership became a political flashpoint as the Kremlin moved to contain Ponomarev. In March 2013, Ponomarev resigned from his political party, A Just Russia, after being forced to break with the protest movement. Ponomarev and other high-profile figures connected to Skolkovo were investigated for suspected embezzlement, and a Moscow court ordered Ponomarev to pay back his lecture fees from Skolkovo.
The same month that Ponomarev was separating from his political party in Russia, Ehud Barak stepped down as head of Israel’s Defense Ministry. With Epstein’s help, Barak quickly negotiated a lucrative consulting agreement with Renova Group—the conglomerate owned by Vekselberg, the billionaire head of Skolkovo.
Epstein offered Barak a strategy he often employed: using non-governmental multilateral institutions to engage state leaders through backchannels. Within days of Barak’s retirement, on March 27, 2013, Epstein and Bill Gates visited Thorbjorn Jagland, a member of the Nobel Peace Prize committee, accompanied by representatives of the International Peace Institute (IPI), a non-profit think tank specializing in multilateral diplomacy.
Barak and Epstein were simultaneously using the IPI to cut a security deal for Israel in Mongolia, in hopes of accessing mining interests in that country. Barak traveled to Ulaanbataar in late April 2013, and emailed Vekselberg to set up an urgent phone call: “met with most of the leaders from the President downwards and several business people. If your plans for Tuesday [have] not been changed I have a thought that could probably help.” That Tuesday, Vekselberg and Putin attended a meeting for the Board of Trustees of the Russian Geographical Society in St. Petersburg.
From left, Bill Gates, Terje Rød-Larsen, Jeffrey Epstein, Boris Nikolic, Thorbjorn Jagland. Source: U.S. Department of Justice.
On May 9, 2013, Epstein updated Barak on his efforts to engage Putin through Jagland: “jagland is going to see putin in sochi, jagland asked that I make myself availble to meet with him sometine in june, to explain how russia can structure deals in order to encourage western investment.” Barak wrote back: “i know Jagland for long time. probably we have to talk about it.”
The next day, Epstein laid out his proposal for Putin, in a May 10 email to Jagland: “When sputnik was announced, the West was caught flatfooted. The same can now happen with Russia taking the lead in finance.” Epstein suggested that Putin was chasing the wrong modernization model, “copying silicon valley, looking for start ups, playing catch up to Microsoft . apple google and the like.”
In place of the “Skoltech” model, Epstein wanted to offer Putin an alternate path: Russia could “get out in front and leapfrog the global community by reinventing the financial system of the 21st century.”
The American financier proposed a framework for a new global currency: “A new form of money, on a world wide basis… much larger than any single project envisioned by any govt. and at its core not really that difficult to bring to fruition.”
Jagland had no clue what Epstein was talking about. “Hi Jeffrey, all this is not easy for me to explain to Putin,” he wrote. “You have to do it. My job is to get a meeting with him.”
Epstein dialed back the message for Putin, writing, “You can tell him that you and I are close, and that i advise Gates. this is confidential, . I would be happy to meet him , but for a minimum of two to three hours, not shorter.”
Jagland’s pitch to Putin appears to have worked. On May 22, 2013, Epstein claimed to Barak that he’d received, and rejected, an invitation to meet with Putin at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum the next month: “Putin asked that i meet him in st petersburg the same time as his economic conference…i told him no, . If he wants to meet he will need to set aside real time and privacy.”
But, with close guidance from Epstein behind the scenes, Barak finally met Putin in late June 2013, during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
“Access Remote Parts of Africa”
On August 6, 2013, the Kremlin extended Skolkovo’s funding through 2020, reversing the prior decision to gut the program. Barak and Epstein swiftly found an opportunity to profit from the Kremlin’s decision, making use of Epstein’s connection to the Gates Foundation.
Shortly after returning from St. Petersburg, Barak joined the advisory board of Parasight, an Israeli biotech company in the Skolkovo Innovation Center, which was developing technology to detect malaria in blood samples using computer vision AI. On August 10, 2013, Epstein connected Barak to Nikolic to get support for Parasight (now called Sight Diagnostics) from the Gates Foundation. Nikolic’s invitation to Barak appears in both the hacked dataset published by Distributed Denial of Secrets and the DOJ release last month, further corroborating the authenticity of the hacked Barak email cache.
Nikolic made plans to meet Barak in New York during the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) in late September 2013. Nikolic wrote Barak: “I will be in NYC that whole week and I look forward to seeing you and catching up – most likely at Jeffrey’s – it is more interesting there than at CGI ;)”
Like most of the startups advised by Barak, Parasight’s roots were in Israeli military research units. Parasight co-founder Yossi Pollak is an alumnus of Talpiot, an elite Israeli Defense Forces science and technology program; Sarah Levy, a founding engineer and eventual chief technology officer, is also a Talpiot graduate and veteran of Unit 81, the secretive special technology unit of the Israeli Military Intelligence Directorate.
Barak’s point man on the Parasight project was his brother-in-law and business partner Doron Cohen, who served under Barak in Sayeret Matkal, the Israel Defense Forces’ elite special operations unit. Cohen and Barak were working together, in secret, on a security deal between Israel and the West African nation of Ivory Coast. In parallel, Epstein was shepherding the Gates Foundation into Ivory Coast, leveraging his close relationship with Nina Keita, the niece of President Alassane Ouattara; he tried to coordinate a meeting between Ouattara, Keita, and Gates on September 16, 2013, before the U.N. General Assembly that week.
Barak met Nikolic at Epstein’s mansion on September 20, 2013, and Barak introduced Nikolic to Parasight co-founder Daniel Levner via email. Levner later conveyed Nikolic’s feedback on next steps with the Gates Foundation: “Dr. Nikolic’s view is that the Gates Foundation’s driver in choosing technologies is the ability to access remote parts of Africa.”
Two months later, in November 2013, Barak received an email from Parasight’s founders asking for Vekselberg’s support for additional grant funding from Skolkovo. Barak discussed on the phone with Cohen, and one week later, the grant application was approved: Skolkovo pledged an additional $2.5 million to Parasight, on the condition that Parasight put $1.25 million of its own money into a new Russian entity.
Sight Diagnostics later developed portable malaria detection in collaboration with the U.S. Army Medical Research Directorate at Kisumu field station in Kenya, where the army runs programs for the U.S. Presidents’ Malaria Initiative, a USAID-led partner of the Gates Foundation. Drop Site was unable to confirm if Gates Foundation was directly involved in the Kenya trial. The Foundation, Nikolic, and Ponomarev did not respond to requests for comment.
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“Designer Babies”
The files released by the U.S. Justice Department and House Oversight Committee have shown Epstein deeply preoccupied with theories of racial and genetic superiority. In an anonymous essay recovered from Epstein’s files, titled “Africa, parasites, intelligence,” the writer mused that “For Africa, the environmental factor is parasites—disease—known to exert a strong negative effect on intelligence.” “And what is special about Jewish intelligence?” the author asked. “Surely it is that it emerged in mercantile settings, natural home of numbers, logic and mathematics.”
Calculations about the long-term viability of the Israeli state, and anxieties about the demographics of its Jewish population, formed a backdrop to Epstein and Barak’s engagement with Putin. In the last years of Epstein’s life, Barak shared grave concerns with Epstein about Israel’s looming demographic crisis. During a dinner at Epstein’s New York mansion in February 2013, Barak told former Obama economic adviser Larry Summers that Israel needs to solve its Jewish population shortage “before it’s too late” and stop “the slippery slope to a one state nation … with an Arab majority.”
Barak believed the best hope for Israel’s future was allowing for conversion into Judaism to promote migration, by breaking the orthodox Rabbinate’s authority to define who is a “Jew.” “Open the gates for massive conversion to Judaism,” Barak said. “It’s a successful country, many will apply.”
Russian migration had been essential to Israel’s past success, and Barak hoped to repeat the pattern: “The Russian million changed Israel dramatically. Many would prefer to be Jews rather than Russians. Lots of young people, including women. We can easily absorb another million.” He proposed restricting migration from Arab and North African countries, telling Epstein and Summers, “We can control the quality much more effectively, much more than the founding fathers of Israel did. They took whatever came just to save people. Now, we can be more selective.”
As the relationship between the U.S. and Russia continued to deteriorate over the subsequent decade, Israel was forced to manage an increasingly tenuous balancing act between the two great powers. Epstein himself took a quiet interest in Russia’s growing conflict with Ukraine and NATO. On March 13, 2014, three days before a referendum on whether Crimea should join Russia, Epstein wrote to his broker at Deutsche Bank, “let’s play,” and instructed her to place a $250,000 bet against the Russian ruble. By the end of the year, the ruble had lost nearly 50 percent of its value relative to the U.S. dollar.
After the referendum, on March 18, Epstein messaged Ariane de Rothschild and her senior advisor Olivier Colom, a former aide to Nicolas Sarkozy and expert in the African mining industry: “ukraine upheaval should provide many opportunites , many.”
On March 20, 2014, Ilya Ponomarev was the sole “no” vote in the Duma on Russia’s annexation of Crimea. He was vilified in Russian state media, and placed on a billboard in the center of Moscow which labelled him as a “national traitor.” Ponomarev fled to the United States soon after.
The next year, in June 2015, Epstein asked for Nikolic’s help obtaining asylum for a Russian woman whose name is redacted in the emails. Nikolic offered to introduce her to Ponomarev. “He knows most of leadership of LGBT community in Russia and has helped such application for asylum in USA in past,” Nikolic wrote, adding, “He will help.”
By this time, Nikolic had departed the Gates Foundation, and was helping steer major private capital into the gene-editing boom. In August 2015, Epstein’s Deutsche Bank banker, Paul Morris, forwarded a write-up on the CRISPR startup Editas Medicine, highlighting a $120 million funding round led by Nikolic.
In the final year before his death, Epstein supported a bio-lab in Ukraine for the production of “designer babies,” led by hacker Bryan Bishop. On July 21, 2018, Epstein wrote to Bishop, “i have no issue with investing the problem is only if i am seen to lead.” Bishop wrote back, “I have always envisioned there would be anonymity requirements about babies– we can’t publicly identify who these are or their parents or benefactors, it would brand the child as (essentially, and sadly) a freak for life in the media.”
Bishop planned to brainstorm with Epstein about ways to protect the anonymity of all persons involved. “I had always assumed the investor would need absolute anonymity, for these kinds of products,” Bishop wrote. “So the financial structure needs to be designed with these details in mind.”
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russian state media began spreading a “conspiracy theory” that the United States was operating secret military biological experiments to create “monster” soldiers in Ukraine. U.S. and Ukrainian officials categorically denied the allegations.
As the war unfolded, Ilya Ponomarev became a leader of the Freedom of Russia Legion, a volunteer militia of Russian defectors fighting for Ukraine, and joined the Congress of People’s Deputies, a shadow parliament of Russian opposition figures.
In 2019, a redacted sender wrote to Epstein regarding another vocal critic of Putin, Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy. “Zelensky looking for help,” the person wrote, “Putin dismissive, saying he is run by Israelis.” According to Epstein’s calendar, he planned to stay at the Hyatt Regency in Kyiv in February, one month before the first round of Ukraine’s presidential elections. In another message, Epstein received a link to a May 2019 New York Times article on Ihor Kolomoisky, Zelenskyy’s Ukrainian-born, Israeli backer. Epstein wrote back, “I’m following the situation. Lot of fun.”
