Ukraine has agreed to the US proposal for a 30-day ceasefire.
Vladimir Putin and other representatives of the Russian government have repeatedly stated they are against a ceasefire and favour a “long-term peace agreement”, conditional upon the transfer of the entire territory of four regions of Ukraine, recognition of them as Russian territory, neutral status, etc.
The prevailing opinion among commentators is the Kremlin will reject the ceasefire proposal (as we have already written, this is exactly what Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is counting on, who initially did not want to talk about any ceasefire).
However, there are signals in the media that Putin may agree to a ceasefire. They have not been officially confirmed by the Kremlin, but this option cannot be 100% ruled out.
The key question is what will US President Donald Trump offer Russia in exchange for this?
If he lifts sanctions along with a ceasefire plus something else, that could be a strong argument.
In addition, there are other arguments:
The Russian Federation has the initiative at the front, and is achieving success, but this comes at a high price. To continue the war and achieve the goals declared by Moscow, even greater sacrifices and efforts will be needed. It will be necessary to declare mobilisation and completely transfer the economy to a war footing, cutting social and other items in favour of military spending (and the budget is already overstrained). In place of mobilised citizens, Russia will import migrants in ever greater numbers. All this could have grave consequences for the internal stability of the Russian Federation. Besides, according to all polls, a majority of Russians are for a ceasefire, provided that Russia retains the territories it has already captured.
Refusal to agree a truce could have negative foreign policy consequences for Russia. The United States will increase sanctions pressure, increase arms supplies to Ukraine, and a split in the West along US-Europe lines will become less likely due to the return of the “common enemy” in the person of Putin. In addition, the reaction of the global South could also be negative. Above all, China, which has long been calling for a speedy ceasefire. On the other hand, the end of hostilities will create an opportunity for Russia to begin normalising relations with both the United States and Europe. Moscow would be able to play a strong game in relation to growing contradictions between the United States, Europe and China.
Importantly, Russian troops have almost completely regained control over the Kursk region and the withdrawal of the UAF from there is only a matter of time. This removes one of the main arguments for the Kremlin against ending the war along the front line – the presence of the UAF on the internationally recognised territory of the Russian Federation.
The end of the war along the front line (if Ukraine’s armed forces are completely driven out of the Kursk region) will be a military victory for Russia, since it was able to capture part of the territory of a neighbouring state without losing its own.
The achievement of the political goals of the Russian Federation (both in domestic policy in Ukraine and in relations with NATO) can be achieved without military action. Trump already has a clear position on Ukraine’s non-accession to the Alliance. And other countries do not want to take it, so as not to run into the threat of war with the Russian Federation. As for internal processes in Ukraine, any prospects for normalising relations between Kyiv and Moscow are tied to one key point – ending the war.
We will find out about Putin’s decision out in the coming days. Perhaps he will refuse. Perhaps he will support a truce. Or perhaps he will set conditions for a ceasefire. But that will be a matter for negotiation. The main thing is a real readiness on both sides for a truce – which is still in question for Zelensky as well as Putin. Moreover, the “war party” in the West and in the Russian Federation will probably try to do everything possible to disrupt attempts to agree a truce.
As for the fact that the truce is not permanent, but temporary, the likelihood of a new war starting in 30 days is actually not very high. The balance of power between the parties is such that if hostilities resume, they will again turn into a war for one or two settlements without much meaning or prospects for a successful breakthrough – as is now obvious to everyone.
As I stated in an earlier piece, “There is zero evidence to support any of the casualty estimates published regarding the Russo-Ukrainian War.”1 I stand by this claim. Reading the Wikipedia page on the subject reveals a slew of activists who fail to distinguish what they want to be true from what is true.2 If someone wants to argue that Russia has suffered greater casualties in the war, they can find dozens of estimate supporting that claim. Similarly, if someone wants to argue Ukraine has suffered greater casualties, they have a whole menu of estimates to choose from.
This agenda-driven information environment is nothing new in war. Since the beginning of mass media and propaganda, almost all armies exaggerated enemy losses while strictly censoring friendly losses. Their fans and haters parrot the number that suits their agenda, portraying their preferred winner as invincible and their preferred loser as tactically inept and disposable. During WWII, Nazi Germany exaggerated Soviet losses to a cartoonish extent. Similarly, Israel today is exaggerating Hamas losses. Reporting on both conflicts have genuinely permanently altered the conventional public understanding of the truth.4
Since many people have strongly held beliefs about loss ratios, it is hard to cut through the nonsense of both sides and actually come to a realistic picture of the truth. I will do my best to clear up the confusion with respect to the Russo-Ukrainian War. A few recent pieces of media by Oleksii Arestovych, UALosses, and Defense Politics Asia (DPA) provided interesting insights into how casualty exchange ratios can be realistically estimated using a combination of verified casualty figures and some extrapolation. UALosses makes a compelling case, but Arestovych and DPA’s claims deserve some scrutiny.
In a somewhat recent interview with Patrick Bet-David, exiled Ukrainian politician Oleskeii Arestovych claimed Russia is certain to have suffered greater casualties because “The attacker always loses more than the defender.”5 This claim has zero basis in military history. It is a myth that originated from the doctrinal necessity of a 3:1 manpower ratio needed to guarantee an army could capture and hold territory.6
Indeed, the opposite of Arestovych’s claim is often true. For example, two of the largest land operations ever conducted, Barbarossa (1941) and Bagration (1944), each had 2:1 casualty exchange ratios in favor of the attacker. In Barbarossa, the Germans managed to kill 566,000 Soviets while only sustaining 182,000 KIA (killed in action).7 Similarly, during Bagration, the Soviets managed to kill 381,000 Germans while only sustaining 180,000 KIA.8 While modern weapon systems are more precise and lethal, and surveillance certainly makes maneuver less stealthy, there is no reasonable basis to expect the casualty exchange ratios to be the exact opposite of the historical precedent merely because of a misconception. Therefore, we must examine the verified figures and extrapolate ratios from them.
I assessed in early January 2025 that the verified casualty exchange ratio was ~1:1. Given the available verified evidence at the time, this was a reasonable thing to believe since the verified Russian fatalities from Mediazona9 and the verified Ukrainian fatalities from UALosses10 each stood at approximately 70,000. Mediazona and UALosses only count dead fighters that they have independently verified by name, so these are infinitely more useful numbers than estimates put out by governments or newspapers, which are worth as much as the paper they are written on.
In my estimate, I included the caveat that it is unlikely Russian losses exceeded Ukrainian losses since Russia has had artillery superiority over Ukraine since the start of the war and drone superiority for the second half of the war. Since these two weapon systems are understood to be responsible for the majority of casualties in this war, it is reasonable to predict greater casualties on the disadvantaged side. I did not have clear evidence of greater Ukrainian losses, but I argued it could be assumed given the context.
UALosses announced that they have changed their verified count to include MIA (missing in action), in addition to KIA. This was justified on the belief that verified KIA figures alone are “no longer representative of the real level of losses.” While the new figure has a “lower degree of confidence,” it is more likely to be accurate since “bodies are retrieved only a quarter of third of the time, which precludes official status as KIA.”11 Given this change, it is no longer possible to directly compare UALosses to the Mediazona count.
Previously, since UALosses was a count of dead regular army troops and since Mediazona had the total dead regular army troops (once you subtract PMC and inmate PMC volunteers, which are not counted in UALosses), a casualty exchange ratio of ~1:1 was observable throughout the entirety of the war. There is no verified count of PMC or foreign volunteers KIA on the Ukrainian side, so the default Mediazona figure cannot be compare to UALosses in good faith.
Since the Battle of Avdiivka, Russia has been capturing Ukrainian territory at an accelerated rate and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense has been sending huge numbers of troops to plug gaps, increasing the number of targets for the Russians. These two facts have two expected results. (1) The locations in which people die tend to end up under Russian control. Therefore, a large portion of Ukrainian MIA soldiers are likely to have been KIA. (2) Ukrainian casualties are likely to increase in proportion to Russian casualties since they are filling gaps and increasing the volume of targets for Russian forces. Because of these two observations, it can be deduced that Ukrainian losses have likely increased in proportion relative to Russian losses since early 2024.
For that reason, I do not fault UALosses for changing their methodology. Yet, two facts muddy the use of its database as a “verified” casualty count. Some unknown percentage of those MIA are definitely still alive, either having fled or been captured. Additionally, it is no longer comparable to the Mediazona count since it is not simply the known number of cadavers. Therefore, it is now impossible to know the likely casualty exchange ratio purely from the verified numbers. It incorporates statistical assumptions, rendering it unverified and no longer useful as a tool for deducing a realistic ratio. Despite this, it is the only decent count we have.
Based on the current figures from Mediazona and UALosses, we have a casualty exchange ratio of 1:1.7 in Russia’s favor given that have definitely been 75,631 Russian soldiers killed in action and there have probably been 127,290 Ukrainian soldiers killed in action. For all we know, the Russian MIA could be equally substantial, reducing this figure back to 1:1, but this is unlikely for the reasoned stated above. My conclusion is the real casualty exchange ratio is somewhere between 1:1 and 1:1.5 in Russia’s favor.
In a recent vlog, Wyatt Mingji Lim of Defense Politics Asia, who I consider to be the single best analyst on the Russo-Ukrainian War, extrapolated significantly higher KIA figures on both sides, and used artificial intelligence to corroborate his figures. While AI language models are fallible, as anyone who has used them for math or coding is aware, Wyatt was nonetheless able to extract some interesting information using Grok 3.
Wyatt personally estimated that Ukraine has suffered 1.2 million KIA and that Russia has suffered 500,000. These figures are so much higher than the verified figures that I am reflexively skeptical of their veracity. Grok was similarly skeptical, but eventually came to a similar conclusion as Wyatt once he explained his logic. They both conclude Ukraine can hold on for, at most, another year before their manpower shortage will cripple their capabilities.12
Wyatt showed his process for training Grok to be critical of mainstream sources and deduce what a realistic figure is using population size and a detailed history of the war. He had the program calculate how much available manpower Ukraine likely had based on its population size and other factors, narrowing it down to roughly 2,000,000 men. Then he asked the program to calculate how much manpower would likely be lost through each offensive push and from holding the frontline. Accounting for a 30% attrition rate in offensives and cyclical daily frontline attrition, Grok came to a final tally of 900,000 Ukrainian KIA. It similarly calculated the Russian figures based on population, duration of offensives, and estimated daily attrition, coming to a total of 250,000 KIA.
My problem with this approach for casualty estimation is that, based on my experience using them, AI language models are polite and will concede to your argument if you point out their mistakes. They typically present the most widely read mainstream sources, which are quite often propagandistic, but then quickly abandon them as soon as you point out their flaws. This was certainly the case with Wyatt’s session on Grok 3. He pointed out that the mainstream sources were wrong, and the model quickly conceded to Wyatt’s numbers based purely on their logic, rather than finding supporting evidence. It is an interesting approach by Wyatt, but it doesn’t prove anything because we do not have verified evidence of anywhere near that many casualties.
Wyatt and Grok’s estimates are that Ukraine has suffered two to four times more casualties than Russia. While I also assess that Ukraine has suffered significantly more casualties than Russia (1.5 times), two to four times is beyond what I believe can be reasonably deduced given the available evidence.
I do not accept the premise that it is two to four higher because both army’s have used roughly equivalent style of warfare for the duration of the conflict with few exceptions. Both have been armed with huge volumes of precision explosive weaponry. Both have done occasional costly offensives that resulted in temporarily higher casualties like Russia’s initial invasion or Ukraine’s Kursk salient,14 but they both generally stayed safe. Therefore, I do not believe it can be argued, given the available evidence, that either side has suffered more than twice the casualties of the other.
If you, dear reader, think my conclusion is wrong, I would be happy to entertain arguments and accept additional sources. I do not claim to know the real answer here, but I encourage everyone to have a high degree of skepticism when they find a source claiming one side has suffered significantly greater casualties than the other.
French President Macron’s declaration on Wednesday that he’s flirting with extending his country’s nuclear umbrella over other continental allies shows that he’s throwing down the gauntlet to Germany and Poland for leadership of post-conflict Europe. Outgoing German Chancellor Scholz published an hegemonic manifesto in December 2022 that later took the form of what can be described as “Fortress Europe”, which refers to the German-led attempt to lead Europe’s containment of Russia.
This concept requires Poland subordinating itself to Germany, which unfolded over the first half of last year but then slowed as the ruling liberal-globalist coalition started taking a more populist-nationalist approach towards Ukraine ahead of May’s presidential election. Even if this started off insincerely, it’s since assumed a life of its own and created a new dynamic in the latest circumstances brought about by Trump’s return whereby “Poland Is Once Again Poised To Become The US’ Top Partner In Europe”.
Poland’s economy is the largest of the EU’s eastern members, it now boasts NATO’s third-largest army, and it’s consistently sought to be the US’ most reliable ally, the last point of which works most in its favor amidst the transatlantic rift. If these trends remain on track, Poland could prevent France or Germany from leading post-conflict Europe by carving out a US-backed sphere of influence in Central Europe, but it would have a shot at leadership in its own right if conservatives or populists come to power.
The sequence of events that would have to unfold begins with either of them winning the presidency, and this either pushing the liberal-globalists more in their direction ahead of fall 2027’s parliamentary elections or early elections being held on whatever pretext and then won by conservatives or populists. Poland’s former conservative government was very imperfect, but their country served as a bastion of EuroRealists (usually described by the Mainstream Media as Euroskeptics) during those eight years.
Should it reassume that role upon the return of conservative rule in parliament, perhaps in a coalition with populists, then this would perfectly align with Trump’s vision and could result in Poland either leading similar domestic political processes across the continent or at least in its own region. Even if only the second-mentioned scenario materializes, it would most effectively prevent liberal-globalist France or Germany from leading Europe as a whole by bifurcating it into ideologically competing halves.
France’s nuclear weapons are the ace up its sleeve though that it might play for keeping some conservative/populist-inclined societies under liberal-globalist sway by extending its umbrella over those countries which fear that Russia will invade but that they’ll then be abandoned by the US. That might help reshape some of their voters’ views if they come to feel dependent on France and thus decide to show fealty to it by keeping their ideologically aligned governments in power instead of change them.
This doesn’t mean that France will succeed, but what was explained above accounts for Macron’s unprecedented proposal in the context of his country’s Great Power ambitions at this historic moment. A lot in this regard will likely depend on the outcome of Romania’s domestic political crisis, which readers can learn more about here, since the liberal-globalist coup against the populist-nationalist frontrunner in May’s election redux could further entrench French influence in this geostrategic frontline state.
Few are aware, but France already has hundreds of troops there, where it leads a NATO battlegroup. It also signed a defense pact with neighboring Moldova in March 2024, which could hypothetically include the deployment of troops to there too. France’s military presence in Southeastern Europe places it in a prime position for conventionally intervening in Ukraine if it so chooses, whether before or after the end of hostilities, and suggests that Macron will focus on this region for expanding French influence.
Should progress be made, then three other scenarios would be possible. The first is that Poland and France compete in Central Europe, with the first eventually extending its sway over the Baltics while the second does the same over Southeastern Europe (within which Moldova is included in this context due to its close ties with Romania), thus trifurcating Europe between them and Germany. In this scenario, Germany would also have some influence over each Central Europe region, but it wouldn’t predominate.
The second scenario is that Poland and France, which have been historical partners since the early 1800s, cooperate in Central Europe by informally dividing the Baltics and Southeastern Europe between them in order to asymmetrically bifurcate Europe into imperfectly German and Polish-Franco halves. The Polish part would either remain under partial US influence if Poland continues aligning with the US even under liberal-globalist rule or the liberal-globalists might pivot towards France and away from the US.
The final scenario is that all three employ their Weimar Triangle format to coordinate tripartite rule over Europe, but this is dependent on the liberal-globalists capturing the Polish presidency in May and then aligning with Berlin/Brussels over Washington. It’s therefore the least likely, especially since the liberal-globalists might pivot towards France instead of Germany/EU as a compromise between their ideological, electoral, and geopolitical interests ahead of fall 2027’s parliamentary elections.
Regardless of what ends up transpiring, the “military Schengen” that was pioneered between Germany, Poland, and the Netherlands last year and to which France expressed an intent to join will likely continue incorporating more EU members in order facilitate these three aspiring leaders’ interests. Germany needs this for its “Fortress Europe” plans, Poland needs its allies to swiftly come to its aid in a hypothetical war with Russia, while France needs this to entrench its influence in Southeastern Europe.
What’s ultimately being determined through the interplay of France, Germany, and Poland’s competing leadership plans for post-conflict Europe is the continent’s future security architecture, which will also be influenced to varying degrees by Russia and the US, be it jointly through their “NewDétente” and/or independently. There are too many uncertainties at present to confidently predict what this emerging order will look like, but the dynamics described in this analysis account for the most likely scenarios.
This story is co-published with Drop Site News and Truthdig.
On November 24, at the southeastern frontier of the European Union and NATO, Romanian voters delivered an unexpected victory to a rightwing populist named Călin Georgescu in the opening round of the country’s presidential election. Always considered a longshot, Georgescu had been polling in the single digits just weeks before surging to claim first place with 23 percent of the vote. The result shocked Romania’s two dominant parties, who found themselves on the sidelines as Georgescu campaigned for the runoff against another anti-establishment candidate who came in second place, Elena Lasconi of the reformist Save Romania party.
Then, on December 4, four days before the deciding round was to take place, Romania’s Supreme Defense Council (CSAT) released a small clutch of heavily redacted documents from the country’s foreign intelligence service. The documents outlined allegations of a Kremlin-backed social media campaign that supported Georgescu in violation of national election laws. “Data were obtained,” the accompanying government statement read, “revealing an aggressive promotion campaign that exploited the algorithms of some social media platforms to increase the popularity of Călin Georgescu at an accelerated pace.”
Within hours, the U.S. State Department expressed its “concern” over the allegations. Two days later, on December 6, Romania’s Constitutional Court unanimously ruled the November 24 vote invalid. “The entire electoral process for electing the President of Romania is annulled,” the court announced, citing government claims of irregularities on social media. Six weeks passed before a redo date of May 4 was finally announced on January 16.
Thus did Romania become the first member state in the history of the European Union to cancel an election. The government had not called into question the legitimacy of the votes or vote-counting process. At issue is social media activity, primarily on TikTok, that boosted Georgescu’s profile and amplified his Euro-skeptical, far-right campaign in the final days before the tally. The cancellation of an election on these grounds marks a milestone in the development of Internet-age information war—one that underscores the fragility of the west’s collective commitment to democracy.
For all its seriousness, Romania’s cancelled vote has also proven to be a forensic farce, with the revelation that one of the country’s largest parties bankrolled the very TikTok campaign that the government had fingered as a Kremlin plot. At the same time, a broader narrative of Russian attacks on Romanian democracy was being advanced by a western-funded NGO working with a Ukrainian tech firm with ties to NATO and the European Commission.
“The Constitutional Court’s decision has divided us into two camps,” Elena Lasconi, the reformist candidate who placed second in the scratched first round, wrote on Facebook. “Some who sighed in relief and say it was the only solution to protect democracy, and us, the others, who have warned that we are dealing with a brutal act, contrary to democracy, which could have major long-term effects.”
The declassified documents released on December 4 described the election as tainted due to bad actors engaged in “a massive promotional activity” in violation of TikTok policy and Romanian law. In the government telling, these actors ranged from bot armies to pro-Georgescu Romanian political parties like Party of Young People to online communities known as vectors for amplifying Russian state media.
While Russia has a well-known interest in influencing the politics of the region—and has invested funds in what the Romanian government calls a “complex modus operandi”—the documents did not contain evidence of this machine in action. Rather, they described a de facto media campaign for Georgescu catching fire on social networks, in particular the comments sections of Romanian TikTok personalities, more than 100 of whom had been party, willingly or unwillingly, to the “artificial amplification” of pro-Georgescu commenters. Adding to the suspiciousness of the comments, noted the government, was the fact that debates over the most effective phrasing and emoji choices were hammered out in Telegram channels known to support “pro-Russian, far-right, anti-system, ‘pacifist’, and nationalist candidates.”
Central to the government’s case were a series of hashtags that began springing up across Romanian TikTok in the weeks before the November 24 vote. These hashtags—including #echilibrusiverticalitate (“steadiness and uprightness”), #unliderpotrivitpentrumine (“the right leader for me”), and #prezidentiale2024” (“presidential elections 2024”)—accompanied videos in which popular TikTok accounts made general comments about the election, such as discussing the need for a strong candidate, or asking leading questions about the type of leader who should replace the outgoing Klaus Iohannis. None of the posts—which typically racked up between 100,000 and half-million views—mentioned any specific candidate. But in the comments sections, Georgescu’s name appeared more than any other candidate.
As the coordinated hashtags became effective vehicles for raising the profile of a candidate who had spent almost nothing on paid media, Georgescu’s outsider campaign rose in the polls. In a matter of weeks, he went from a few percentage points, to more than 10 percent and climbing in the days before the election. By the week of the vote, the hashtags became so entwined with Georgescu’s campaign that it could no longer be ignored. On November 22, a Romanian Twitch streamer named Silviu Faiăr flagged the hashtag campaign’s rapid metamorphosis and noted that many of the influencers could be connected, not to Russia, but to a local pay-to-play influencer agency called FameUp. Two days later, when the election results shocked the nation, the social media campaign took on new relevance.
Among the groups that sought to keep Russia at the center of the election conversation was an NGO called Context, largely funded by the United States through its National Endowment for Democracy. On November 29, the outfit published a report that included a summary of an analysis it conducted using software from a Ukrainian tech firm whose clients include NATO and the European Commission. In other words, five days after the election, a US-funded watchdog was relying on a NATO-funded analysis to purport to expose foreign interference, shortly before the government released its own report.
When the government declassified its “top secret” documents on December 4, they told a story that, in its basics, mirrored the gaming-chair analysis by Faiăr, the Twitch streamer. Little of the information was new except for some of the details, such as the fee paid to influencers by FameUp (roughly $80 per 20,000 followers on TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram). But where Faiăr made no guess as to the forces behind the campaign, the government documents placed the blame on Russia, without supplying actual evidence, that it had skirted TikTok regulations and Romanian law by paying off influencers to produce election content that could be easily branded ex post facto by Georgescu supporters in the comments. The Kremlin plan was so sneaky that the paid influencers were “unaware that they were promoting a specific candidate through the use of [the hashtags],” according to the government.
Two days later, on December 6, the Constitutional Court’s annulment of the election was met with acclaim and approval in the west. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty reported Romania had become the latest victim of an “aggressive hybrid war” waged by the Kremlin. Four U.S. senators issued a statement condemning “Vladimir Putin’s manipulation of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-controlled TikTok to undermine Romania’s democratic process.” The European Commission took the historic event in stride, saying only that Brussels was “leaving it to Romanians.” Washington’s initial “concern” over suspicions of Russian meddling, expressed a few days earlier, relaxed into a state of observation. “We note the Romanian Constitutional Court’s decision today,” read a brief from the State Department that expressed “confidence in Romania’s democratic institutions and processes, including investigations into foreign malign influence.”
In Romania the cancelled vote was more controversial. And the backstory, it turned out, far from settled.
An official inquiry into the TikTok money trail involved not just the intelligence services—it was government-wide. Among those tasked with getting to the bottom of Russia’s interference was Romania’s revenue service, or ANAF. In the days following the court’s decision, one of the tax investigators assigned to the case contacted the Romanian investigative news outlet Snoop with information that had not been included in the December 4 cache of declassified documents.
On December 12, Snoop published a report revealing that the TikTok influencer campaign had been paid for, not by the Kremlin, but by Romania’s National Liberal Party (PNL), which has governed the country for much of the last three decades; its most prominent member, Nicolae Ciucă, is president of the senate and stood as a (losing) candidate in the November 24 election. The hashtag and influencer campaign that had launched Georgescu’s profile in the final weeks and days of the campaign—and which sat at the center of the government’s case, if it can be called that—was orchestrated by Kensington, the Bucharest communications firm, under a contract from the PNL. The politically connected Bucharest firm had distributed 500,000 lei (roughly $100,000) to TikTok influencers through its pay-to-play influencer subcontractor, FameUp, to generate energy around the election.
Two questions remained: Why would the PNL want to generate buzz around the election if it couldn’t promote its candidate by name? And why would it continue the campaign even as it became a Georgescu rocket-booster, unless that had been the plan all along?
When confronted with the whistleblower’s claims, PNL officials admitted to hiring the firm to run an election awareness campaign, but maintained ignorance over its “cooptation” by thousands of organized Georgescu supporters in the videos’ comments sections. As their candidate faded in the polls, party officials claimed, they had lost interest in the campaign and had no idea it had been “hijacked” until after the election, when it asked TikTok to take down the posts that had powered Georgescu from the back of the field to first place in a matter of weeks.
Somehow, Romania’s foreign intelligence service missed the neon breadcrumbs connecting a clearly coordinated TikTok campaign to one of the country’s most powerful political parties, despite its knowledge of the firms involved. The documents released on December 4 contained no mention of the PNL; the word Kensington had been redacted.
“Everybody knows Kensington is a PNL communications firm, and the director of FameUp [which ran the influencers] was seen making repeated visits to PNL headquarters during the election,” Razvan Lutac, one of the reporters on the Snoop story, told Drop Site News. “It’s hard to understand how the Supreme Defense Council failed to see the links between the ‘hijacked’ campaign and the PNL. It’s also hard to understand how the PNL was ignorant about their influencer campaign being used as a Georgescu vehicle.”
Few in Romania buy the idea that the PNL was ignorant. Most veteran observers agree that helping get Georgescu into the second round was always the plan. This includes the whistleblowing tax official, who says flatly that “public money provided by taxpayers for the PNL was used to promote another candidate.”
“The TikTok campaign paid for by the National Liberal Party fits a pattern of unethical strategies by the major parties, including the use of fake accounts, bots and trolls, and the creation of fake media sites to promote their candidates and attack their opponents,” says Liana Ganea, an analyst with the media NGO ActiveWatch and co-author of a recent report on political propaganda in Romania. “The election disaster only demonstrates the profound institutional, political, and social bankruptcy of the Romanian state. The public has still not received conclusive evidence of possible foreign interference.”
A man wearing a Romanian flag with a portrait of presidential candidate Calin Georgescu talks to participants in front of the “Monument of the Heroes” in Bucharest on January 24, 2025. Photo by DANIEL MIHAILESCU/AFP via Getty Images.
The PNL is not the only mainstream party suspected of advancing Georgescu’s candidacy as part of an electoral strategy, reminiscent of the Clinton campaign’s support of Donald Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries. In early December, mayors from small villages reported receiving regular calls from leaders of Romania’s ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD), telling them to quietly support George Simion, leader of a far-right party called Alliance for Uniting Romanians, and on election day to support Georgescu. The tactic appears to be part of an established playbook; in 2000, the PSD was caught helping the campaign of far-right candidate Vadim Tudor advance to the second round of the 2000 presidential campaign.
“Giving votes to the candidate who is easiest to beat [has remained] in the imagination,” said the political scientist Cristian Preda in aJanuary 19 interview with a Romanian news outlet. In the recent election, “the PNL wanted a controlled sharing of power. Instead, it ended up stimulating a nationalist wave, a beast that you cannot control. Beyond the lack of honesty, we are slipping into absurdity. You enter politics, you fight for your own camp, not for that of others.”
Snoop’s bombshell fueled calls in Romania for the government to provide more information than was supplied in the original documents. In response, President Klaus Iohannis issued a brief statement saying that no further information would be released. The stonewalling further soured a deeply jaded electorate on the country’s long-ruling establishment, and ballasted the credibility of independent political voices willing to express public anger.
“The annulment of the elections is a very significant matter, and we must be convinced and clear that it was the right decision,” said Nicușor Dan, Bucharest mayor on January 5. “For now, we do not have that clarity.”
For the better part of a decade, allegations of Russian influence in elections have been at the center of a sophisticated two-way information war that has grown apace with NATO-Russia tensions and geopolitical jockeying in the region. This competition has been especially fierce along the southeastern frontier of the western military alliance, with Romania emerging as perhaps the most important chess piece. The country hosts a major node in the alliance’s Aegis missile defense system, and an air base near Constanta on the Black Sea is currently being expanded; when completed, it will displace the U.S. Air Force-NATO Ramstein base as the largest U.S. military outpost in Europe.
None of this is incidental to the fact that Romania was the first EU nation to take the dramatic step of cancelling an election on the basis of “Russian meddling.” When releasing the documents that led to the cancelled election, the government foregrounded Russia’s motive in boosting Georgescu’s campaign. “In Russia’s vision,” it stated, “Romania ‘challenges and threatens’ Russia’s security by hosting NATO and U.S. military potential.” Although Georgescu does not oppose Romania’s membership in NATO, he is against the country hosting its bases.
Of course, the U.S. has its own interests in the region, and has built up its own influence networks, which increasingly operate under the disinterested guise of countering “Russian disinformation.” The funding of these networks has been growing steadily since 2017, when the U.S. Congress created a $1.5 billion Countering Russian Influence Fund to support programs and organizations that “strengthen democratic institutions and processes, and counter Russian influence and aggression.” The funds were designed to target “independent media, investigative journalism, and civil society watchdog groups working to…encourage cooperation with social media entities to strengthen the integrity of information on the Internet.” The dollar-spigot was loosened following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, allowing more media related grants to flow through the USAID’s Strengthening the Foundations of Freedom Development Framework (formerly known as the Countering Malign Kremlin Influence Development Framework.)
Romania is home to numerous western-funded media NGOs that have benefited from these funds. Some of them, such as Context, were arguably weaponized when Georgescu threatened to challenge the NATO-Russia balance. For the past several years, Context has participated in a region wide NGO project, “Firehose of Falsehood,” to investigate the “pro-Kremlin, conspiracy and alt-right disinformation ecosystem in Central and Eastern Europe.” The participating groups often have similar funding streams and various western institutional connections. In the case of Context, its budget is overwhelmingly covered by funding from the State Department-funded National Endowment for Democracy, and its executive director, Mihaela Armaselu, spent 20 years working in the press office of the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest. (Context is also a member of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a global reporting network also heavily funded by the U.S. government.)
Five days after November’s first-round vote, on November 29, Context anticipated the imminent government report by releasing its own social media analysis, headlined, “EXCLUSIVE: Operation Georgescu on X, Telegram and Facebook.” It was topped by a credit to a Ukrainian tech firm, Osavul, which identifies Kremlin social media narratives for a client list that includes the British, Canadian, Ukrainian and Estonian governments, the European Commission, and NATO. According to the report, Osavul’s “AI-powered software” had detected “possible coordination between…a series of Russia-linked accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers and with obvious pro-Russian, anti-Western and conspiratorial sympathies that constantly promote Călin Georgescu.” At the center of the NGO’s conspiracy board were well-known Russian state media outlets, including pravda-en.com and pravda-es.com.
The report goes on to express concern that Romanian citizens, especially those in the large EU diaspora, had been influenced by Russian-linked channels promoting themes that “resonate strongly with a significant part of the public.” While ostensibly a report on the nefarious impact of a Kremlin puppet-master, the real blame seems to land on the common Romanian voter whose support for Georgescu is evidence of “how weak the resilience of Romania or, more precisely, of its citizens is.”
Nobody denies that Georgescu rode the wave of a strong anti-establishment mood. This is partly the result of endemic corruption within the major parties, but also reflects skepticism over the Ukraine war and NATO’s growing role in the country, reflected in the evasive appeal of his campaign slogan, “There is no East, there is no West, there is only Romania.” Georgescu’s positions are streaked with QAnon-style conspiracy theories and odious historical echoes with the country’s fascist past—including praise for the World War Two-era Iron Guard—but the main themes of his independent campaign have broad appeal at home, where he benefited from the work of military groups, church networks, and an active diaspora that gave him 80 percent support. At no point since the election was cancelled has anyone called into question the legitimacy of Georgescu’s 2,120,401 votes. Lasconi, the outsider who took second-place, also won without suspicions of foreign help.
“Wherever you look—healthcare, education, transportation, environment, justice—we see big problems in every sector,” says Nicoleta Fotiade, president of the Bucharest-based Mediawise Society. “If we’re only blaming TikTok and the Russians for the election results, it means we haven’t understood anything.”
In May, the government and media will likely have a second opportunity to show how well it understands the dynamics driving Georgescu’s success. On January 22, the other far-right party in the race threw its support behind Georgescu, whom polls now show in first place with 38 percent support—15 percent more than his voided victory. Lasconi, the reformist candidate who took second place in the first November ballot and might have triumphed in the scratched second round, is now polling at just six percent.
The west’s public support for Romania’s government and its rationale for canceling the vote, meanwhile, remains unwavering. It was re-stated at the U.S. embassy in Bucharest during a mid-January press conference held by a senior State Department official named James O’Brien.
“We see foreign interference in connection with these elections,” he said. “If I were Romanian, I would ask who is paying for what, and who will benefit from a certain outcome. And that will go a long way in determining who can be trusted and who cannot.”
Fair and important questions. But only if they are asked with the understanding that they cut both ways, east and west, and that the answers are rarely as clean as we may like them to be.
Though even Donald Trump’s harshest critics now concede he may not be the “Russian agent” they once speculated he was, the consensus among Washington’s elite remains that he’s a beneficiary of Kremlin skullduggery.
This persistent belief springs from a January 2017 U.S. intelligence document crafted by the Obama administration, which classified the sourcing behind it at the highest levels.
Known as an intelligence community assessment (ICA) and titled “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections,” its unclassified finding that Russian President Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump win has gone largely unquestioned by the Washington media and by Democrats and Republicans alike. They’ve accepted its conclusion that Putin abetted Trump as incontrovertible fact, and many suspect he continues to cast a spell over the now-reelected president.
Hillary Clinton still blames her 2016 loss on Putin. She’s asserted, “There’s no doubt in my mind [that Putin] wanted me to lose and wanted Trump to win,” echoing the ICA’s judgments, which she and other leading Democrats continue to cite to explain Trump’s ascendency.
But former intelligence czar John Ratcliffe has seen the evidence underlying the ICA, and is not convinced it supports that conclusion. His skepticism, reported here for the first time, appears in written testimony he submitted to the Senate in advance of his confirmation hearing for CIA director.
Ratcliffe was confirmed last Thursday as Trump’s nod for the top Langley job.
In a pre-hearing questionnaire obtained by RealClearInvestigations, Senate Democrats asked Ratcliffe, “Do you agree with the ICA’s judgments,” specifically that “Putin’s goals in influencing the 2016 presidential election included ‘denigrat[ing] Secretary Clinton, and harm[ing] her electability and potential presidency’ ”?
They also asked Ratcliffe if he concurred with the ICA’s finding that “Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.”
Ratcliffe answered that after reviewing the ICA’s underlying intel, including sources and methods, he could only agree that “Russia’s goal was to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic institutions and sow division among the American people,” according to page 38 of the document.
He noted that “Russian social media campaigns included efforts to both support and criticize candidate Trump as well as candidate Clinton, further suggesting an overarching goal of promoting discord.” In other words, he saw no concrete evidence to support a plot by Putin to side with Trump against Clinton.
In the questionnaire, Ratcliffe also pointed out that Moscow has “long used” propaganda, disinformation, and cyberattacks to target not only U.S. elections but also those in other Western democracies, implying its 2016 influence operation was nothing new.
Ratcliffe saw for himself the underlying evidence while acting as Trump’s director of the Office of National Intelligence.
In 2020, he discovered a CIA document from 2016 stating that Clinton, in July of that year, had approved “a plan” by her foreign policy adviser, Jake Sullivan, to create a scandal tying Trump to Putin and the alleged Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The CIA material seemed to contradict the findings of the ICA, prepared and widely disseminated just months later by his predecessor John Brennan, who, as Barack Obama’s CIA director, was tasked after Trump’s surprise victory to assess Russia’s role in the election.
Raising more alarms, Brennan had attached as an annex to the ICA false rumors about Trump and Putin conspiring during the election, plucked from a political dossier underwritten by the Clinton campaign.
Suspicious, Ratcliffe decided to look deeper into how the ICA was developed, according to his Senate confirmation testimony.
“I requested a briefing from the CIA from some members of the team that were involved in that,” he said.
After interviewing CIA analysts who helped draft the ICA and examining the underlying intelligence, he reached different conclusions. Ratcliffe’s review found the evidence was much weaker than Brennan had claimed and did not support his explosive judgments about Putin and Trump.
This flies in the face of what the public has been told about one of the most consequential pieces of intelligence in modern American history.
By painting Trump as a Trojan Horse for Putin, the ICA triggered years-long investigations by a special counsel and by both the Senate and House intelligence committees. It also provided the foundation for thousands of Russiagate articles questioning the patriotism, credibility, and legitimacy of the Trump presidency, including stories that won a Pulitzer Prize for both the Washington Post and the New York Times.
In her witness testimony, Trump aide Hope Hicks told Special Counsel Robert Mueller that the ICA report was viewed internally as the then-president’s “Achilles’ heel” because even if the Russiagate “collusion” scandal were a hoax, “people would think Russia helped him win, taking away from what he had accomplished.”
Aside from Ratcliffe’s startling new disclosure, the national media have ignored several red flags about the ICA’s spycraft and even gone along with demonstrably false spin about its veracity and dependability. For example:
-Despite widespread press accounts that the report reflected the consensus view of “all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies,” it was rushed out in just a few weeks by a tightly controlled group of CIA analysts led by Brennan, who only consulted with the FBI and National Security Agency.
-Yet even the NSA, which intercepts signals intel from Moscow and monitors the communications of Russian officials, dissented from the key judgment that Putin plotted to install Trump as president. And Brennan had to convince a highly skeptical FBI Director James Comey to join that judgment.
-Two agencies specializing in Russian intelligence – the State Department and the Defense Intelligence Agency – were never consulted.
-Brennan dismissed input from experts from the CIA’s own Russia House, a unit within Langley officially called the Mission Center for Europe and Eurasia that for decades had been locked in battle with Russian intelligence. When two senior managers from Russia House visited Brennan in his office to tell him they agreed with the NSA, the then-CIA director overruled them, arguing that they were not privy to all the intelligence that he had seen.
-In another significant departure from previous intelligence assessments, the ICA did not attach an annex with dissenting views.
-It did, however, attach material from a political campaign dossier – a first – which happened to support Brennan’s findings that Putin ordered the influence effort with the aim of defeating Clinton and electing Trump. A summary of the Clinton-paid, so-called Steele dossier was included as a two-page annex.
The report of Special Counsel John Durham on the origins of the FBI’s Trump-Russia probe would later shred every allegation from the dossier, one by one, using subpoenaed emails, texts, and phone records to prove they were all simply made up by Clinton advisers and paid opposition researchers. None of the information actually came from Kremlin sources, yet Brennan still included it as part of the ICA, not knowing that Clinton’s secret role in it would be uncovered years later. At the time, the dossier was deceptively referred to as “Crown material” since it was written by former British spy Christopher Steele.
-The assessment suddenly changed after Trump upset Clinton. Before the election, the intelligence community agreed Russia was merely meddling in the election to create chaos and wasn’t siding with either candidate. But after Trump won, new intelligence emerged claiming Trump was personally aided by Putin, which provided a convenient excuse to explain Clinton’s stunning defeat. It also helped Obama, who endorsed Clinton, to save face after voters effectively repudiated his agenda. He’d assured them Clinton would continue his policies. Again, it was Obama who ordered the hastily drafted assessment.
-And Obama timed the release of the unclassified version of the ICA just two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, knocking his presidency off balance before it could even get started.
Brennan has insisted the ICA didn’t rely on the Clinton campaign’s anti-Trump dossier and that his team obtained separate Russian intelligence that was highly classified and could not be shared publicly.
It wouldn’t be the first time Brennan, a Democrat who openly supported Clinton and previously worked in the White House with Obama, has played politics with U.S. intelligence.
Trump last week stripped Brennan of his top-secret security clearance, arguing he signed an intelligence community letter just weeks before the 2020 election falsely claiming that incriminating emails found on Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop by the New York Post appeared to be Russian disinformation. On MSNBC, Brennan dismissed Trump’s order as part of “his effort to try to get back at those individuals who have criticized him openly and publicly in the past, and I think very legitimately.”
It’s not clear if Ratcliffe plans to declassify the evidence behind the ICA or his review of it. Attempts to reach him were unsuccessful. He said he has not yet briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee about his findings.
But he also testified that what he learned about the ICA’s shoddy spycraft “influence[d]” his move to declassify and release the Brennan memo about Clinton’s plan to stir up a Russia scandal against Trump to the Senate Judiciary Committee in September 2020.
Former CIA analyst Fred Fleitz, who drafted intelligence assessments and Presidential Daily Briefings, said he hopes Ratcliffe issues a report on his own findings so the public can see how the Obama administration “cooked up” the anti-Trump intelligence judgments in the assessment.
“There should be an unclassified report on how the ICA was drafted, who drafted it, and objections by certain IC agencies and CIA officers that were excluded,” Fleitz said in an RCI interview.
Ratcliffe’s revelation undercuts the prevailing narrative that Putin has been meddling in U.S. elections to help Trump and to shape U.S. foreign policy, particularly as it pertains to the war in Ukraine. The Washington press corps, which essentially has staked its reputation on this narrative, continues to beat the drums.
The Atlantic, for instance, ran an article this month – and before Ratcliffe’s confirmation hearings – confidently assuming that even Trump’s “partisan” pick for the CIA would have to go along with the “unanimous, unclassified assessment on Russian election interference in 2016.”
“Ratcliffe has never said publicly whether he agrees with one of its key findings: that the Russians were trying to help Trump win,” wrote Atlantic staffer Shane Harris, who previously covered Russiagate for the Washington Post. “But his silence is telling.”
Of course, the new CIA director has since broken his silence and revealed information that is inconvenient for many in the media who still hold fast to the Trump-Russia storyline. Things could get more inconvenient as Obama-era intelligence is finally declassified.
