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.”
Trump Privately Dreams of Iran Regime Change Glory as Democrats Cynically Weigh Political Benefits of War
By Ryan Grim, Jeremy Scahill & Mutaza Hussain, Drop Site News, 2/20/26
Since mid-January, as U.S. war planners have presented President Donald Trump with a spectrum of options for military action against Iran, Trump has repeatedly opined in private about his desire to go down in history as the president who “changed the Iranian regime” that has remained in power since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Sources with knowledge of internal White House deliberations told Drop Site that Trump is emboldened by what he sees as a phenomenal success in his Venezuela strategy—issuing sweeping demands for capitulation under threat of removing the ruling government and then abducting President Nicolás Maduro when he refused to obey.
But, the sources said, Trump and his aides have pressed war planners for assurances that chaos produced by any U.S. military action would calm down in time for the midterm election season to kick into high gear.
Trump has suggested to aides that he would make a deal with Iran if its leaders bend to his central demands but he stands ready to unleash a massive military operation—potentially including one aimed at assassinating Iran’s leadership—if they do not. Trump has said he may consider an initial round of attacks in an effort to push Iran to submit. In that event, the massive firepower in the region would remain if he decided to move forward with a broader war. Iranian officials say they are currently working on a formal response to the U.S. position laid out in Geneva on Tuesday during indirect talks, but have cautioned Iran has its own red lines. Tehran, meanwhile, told the United Nations it would consider U.S. bases “legitimate targets” if attacked, putting U.S. servicemembers at serious risk.
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The potential for fallout in the event of a regime change war is at the heart of the meek response from Democrats, who see Trump walking into a trap of his own making. The Democratic political calculation was laid bare in an unusually frank conversation last June between a senior foreign policy aide to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and a top official in an organization opposing Iran strikes.
In June 2025, at the same time Trump was floating the possibility of a strike against Iran, he spoke positively about encouraging progress in ongoing nuclear talks—suggesting that if a deal was met, those strikes would be off.
Schumer responded by mocking the president as TACO Trump—using an acronym for “Trump Always Chickens Out,” a phrase describing Trump’s propensity to make major threats and then back away. For opponents of war with Iran, Schumer’s taunt was counterproductive, and a coalition of more than two dozen organizations sent a letter urging Schumer to delete the video and give Trump political space to reach a diplomatic solution.
The letter led to a phone call between one of the letter’s organizers and the top foreign policy aide to Schumer, who laid out the thinking of many Democrats in the Senate. The organizer who took the call agreed to share details of the conversation in exchange for anonymity. A congressional source briefed on the call shortly afterward confirmed the details. The foreign policy aide, whom Drop Site agreed not to name, explained that a substantial number of Senate Democrats believed Iran ultimately needed to be dealt with militarily. But those Democrats, the aide explained, also understood that going to war again in the Middle East would be a political catastrophe. That’s precisely why they wanted Trump to be the one to do it. The hope was that Iran would take a blow and so would Trump—a win-win for Democrats…
President Trump has spent two months ordering a rapidly expanding and now-massive military buildup near Iran, with a focus on the Persian Gulf and nearby permanent U.S. military bases in close proximity to Iran (Iran, of course, has no military bases anywhere near the U.S.). The deployment includes aircraft carriers and other assets that would enable, at a minimum, an extremely destructive air campaign against the whole country.
The U.S. under both parties has been insisting for two decades that it must abandon its heavy military involvement in the Middle East and instead “pivot to Asia” in light of a rapidly rising China. Yet in the midst of those vows, Trump has now assembled the largest military presence in the Middle East since 2003, when the U.S. was preparing to invade Iraq with overwhelming military force.
One of the most striking and alarming aspects of all of this is that Trump — outside of a few off-the-cuff banalities — has barely attempted to offer a case to the American public as to why such a major new war is necessary. This unilateral march to war resembles what we saw in the lead-up to the bombing of Venezuelan boats, culminating in the U.S. invading force that abducted (“arrested”) the country’s President, Nicolas Maduro, and took him and his wife to a prison in New York.
In the weeks preceding the Venezuela operation, we heard a carousel of rationales. It was all necessary to stop the flow of dangerous drugs into the U.S. We needed to free the repressed Venezuelan peoples from their dictator. Trump’s embrace and expansion of the Monroe Doctrine — now dubbed the Donroe Doctrine — meant that we cannot tolerate communist regimes in “our region.”
But as soon as Maduro was removed, all of those claims disappeared. Contrary to the expectations of many, the U.S. left in place Maduro’s entire regime rather than replacing it with the pro-US opposition (a wise move of restraint in my view, but one that negates the “liberation” rhetoric). Discussions of the drug trade from Venezuela (a source of drugs for the U.S. that was always minor if not trivial, and did not include fentanyl) have completely disappeared. The only real outcome seems to be that the U.S. has more control over that nation’s oil supply, and barrels of it are now being shipped to Israel for the first time in many years.
In sum, we were given a low-effort smorgasbord to enable supporters of Trump’s actions toward Venezuela to mount arguments in favor of the operation, but there was no systematic attempt to convince the country at large. There was not even a live television address to the nation beforehand to explain it. And the role that Congress played was close to non-existent. All of that is similar to what we are seeing now concerning a far riskier, more dangerous, and complex war with Iran.
This massive build-up near Iran also signifies the U.S.’s complete inability — or lack of desire — to extricate itself from the Middle East and endless American wars there. In the first year of his second term — 2025 — Trump has already ordered sustained bombing of Yemen; extensive military deployments to support Israel’s attacks on Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen; and Operation Midnight Hammer, which was sold to Trump’s base as a one-night-only bombing run that is now close to exploding into something far more protracted.
No matter how fast China’s power grows, the U.S. — despite emphasizing the vital importance of doing so over the last four administrations — simply cannot or will not reduce its massive military commitment to the Middle East. The real reasons why the U.S. does not sharply deprioritize the Middle East as a military focus deserve serious examination (oil is often cited as the reason, but the U.S. is a net exporter of oil, and multiple oil-rich countries in that region are perfectly eager to sell the U.S. as much oil as it wants to buy).
In this regard, it is hard not to notice that Trump’s very rapid movement toward war with Iran comes in the midst of yet another visit to the White House by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is not hyperbole to say that Netanyahu’s great dream for decades has been inducing the U.S. into a regime-change war with Iran to rid Tel Aviv of its most formidable adversary, and his dream is closer than ever to being realized.
There is no way to minimize the gravity of the moment. Trump himself has made clear that this huge armada on its way to Iran — far larger than the one deployed to Venezuela — is not for show. He has spent many weeks ratcheting up his war rhetoric. Trump’s public posture is ostensibly one of deterrence: he proclaims that his overarching desire is to strike “a deal” with Tehran in order to avoid the need for war, but he then quickly adds that the US will impose massive damage and violence on the country in the event that negotiations fail to produce the agreement he wants. In sum, he depicts threats of war as motivation for Iran to accept his terms.
That may seem to be a cogent theory of deterrence (or extortion) if one looks at it in isolation. Many world leaders, in general, and Trump, especially, believe that threats of war and military attack are often necessary for extracting the best diplomatic solution possible. But thus far, it has not averted wars.
One reason this tactic is losing efficacy is that it has lost its credibility. As I documented in my report last Tuesday, Trump’s words and actions about the current situation with Iran track almost completely his actions and words which preceded Israel’s surprise attack on Iran in June and the accompanying U.S. bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Up until the hours before Israel started a war with Iran by bombing Tehran in June, Trump was repeatedly trumpeting how great negotiations with Tehran were going, and he predicted with great confidence that all issues would be resolved without the need for military action against Iran. Central to this scheme was the Israeli “reporter” for Axios, Barak Ravid, who — before his overnight ascension to key reporter in the US for all matters Israel — served in Israel’s notorious Unit 8200 military intelligence unit as well as the IDF Reserves until 2024. This former IDF soldier, from his key perch at Axios and CNN, continuously circulated reports based on anonymous sources in both governments announcing a growing and virulent “rift” between the two leaders, all due to Trump’s refusal to allow Netanyahu to bomb Iran.
That public theater, by design, created the impression that a U.S. or Israeli military attack on Iran was highly unlikely because of how opposed Trump was to it. And that, in turn, manipulated Iran out of adopting a posture of maximum war readiness, given their belief in the sincerity of Trump’s assurances that a deal would be made.
But in the midst of all that, Israel suddenly launched a major attack on Iran, only to have the U.S. join in, with Trump eventually taking credit for all of it. This — quite understandably — created a global perception that Trump’s diplomatic conduct and statements, amplified by Ravid, were an obvious ruse to lure Iran into a false sense of security, so that Israel and the U.S. could attack Iran without much resistance.
When the Israeli attack on Iran was touted in Western media as a success, Trump instantly proclaimed that he and Netanyahu planned it together. He heralded Netanyahu (and implicitly himself) as a “war hero” and, on that basis, demanded that the Israeli president pardon Netanyahu on pending corruption charges.
When journalists asked Trump why the U.S. would not simply be in the exact same situation months from now, when Iran began rebuilding its nuclear program, Trump insisted that it would and never could happen. The U.S. “totally and completely obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program, he insisted, and Iran learned its lesson and knows not to try to rebuild.
Yet here we are just eight months later, seemingly closer to a full-on war with Iran than ever before. “Trump appears ready to attack Iran as U.S. strike force takes shape,” reads the headline in The Washington Post on Friday morning. The paper cites “current and former U.S. officials” as saying that “the Trump administration appears ready to launch an extended military assault on Iran.” While such a war is not yet inevitable, it is clear that the probability increases each day with more and more military assets arriving. That the U.K. is thus far refusing to allow the U.S. to use its military base in Diego Garcia as a launching ground for air attacks is proof that the U.S. is, at the very least, in serious, high-level preparation stages…
Among the many revelations brought by the Epstein files recently released, one has been overlooked, if not almost entirely ignored. Buried amid many sordid sex-trafficking messages, there is a set of references to biological laboratories in Ukraine. They point to experimental research of an ethically extreme nature, tied to Jeffrey Epstein’s long-documented obsessions with eugenics, genetics, and human engineering. The near-total silence of the Western press on this is mind-blowing, to say the least.
The relevant material appears in email exchanges released by the US Department of Justice. In one message (file EFTA02625486) dated August 30, 2018, Epstein’s correspondent, Bryan Bishop, writes of “proceeding with more mouse testing at my Ukraine lab (surgeries/microinjection)”.
In another message from August 5, 2018 (file (EFTA01003966), the same individual outlines a project whose ambition is, simply put, staggering: “This gets us out of our self-funded ‘garage biology’ phase to the first live birth of a human designer baby, and possibly a human clone, within 5 years. Once we reach the first birth, everything changes and the world will never be the same again, much less the future of the human species”. The same exchange mentions the “use of funds” spreadsheet for a “designer baby and human cloning company”.
The author of these messages, Bryan Bishop, is a Bitcoin developer, self-described transhumanist, and biohacker with a public footprint in cryptocurrency and radical life-extension circles. His interest in funding cloning research has long been known, but the Epstein angle is only coming to light now. In fact, a forgotten 2019 piece by Antonio Regalado (senior editor for biomedicine for MIT Technology Review) details how Bishop was funding “a Ukrainian lab” to conduct experiments on mice connected to his “designer baby” project.
Bishop here is not a marginal crank emailing a nobody. He was actively seeking funding from Epstein, whose power, influence and financial reach was enormous, as we are increasingly learning. The correspondence suggests logistical planning rather than idle speculation, with Ukraine explicitly named as a site for laboratory work. Anyone can search for these messages in the Epstein Library.
Sputnik covered the exchange, explicitly mentioning Bryan Bishop, Ukraine, and the laboratory reference. By contrast, the Telegraph reported on the same email chain but, interestingly enough, carefully omitted any reference to Ukraine, reframing the story as a general tale of Epstein’s interest in eugenics and “designer babies”.
One may recall that Epstein’s fascination with genetics and selective breeding was already documented years ago. In 2019, before these emails were public, the Guardian reported that Epstein hoped to “seed the human race” with his DNA, allegedly planning to impregnate women at his infamous Zorro ranch in New Mexico ranch, where underage sexual abuse and human trafficking had been denounced. The New York Times also reported this, describing Epstein’s fixation on genetic engineering, and noting that prominent scientists attended his gatherings even after his 2008 conviction. No wonder: he was funding many of them.
What the newly released emails do is add is shift the story from grotesque fantasy to something that looks uncomfortably like an attempt at implementation. Be as it may, the mention of Ukraine as a site for such work inevitably intersects with a much older debate.
For years, allegations concerning biological laboratories in Ukraine have circulated, often dismissed in Western media as “Russian propaganda”. Yet the record is quite solid.
Speaking before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 8, 2022, then Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland confirmed that the US was working with Ukrainian biological research laboratories. Documents dating back to 2012 show that the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency funded bioresearch in Ukraine, and leaked materials from March 2022 indicated that an agreement under the Obama administration led to the construction of laboratories handling “especially dangerous pathogens”.
One should also keep in mind that Ukraine has long been a hub for CIA activity, as even the New York Times acknowledged when reporting on the expansion of US covert operations there for over a decade. Epstein himself was no stranger to arms-dealings and CIA connections, even including Iran-Contra links.
I have recently argued that allegations of biological and chemical weapons use in Ukraine deserve serious scrutiny. Accusations involving prohibited weapons are not new, and claims about shady biological research facilities have surfaced repeatedly over the years. Again, Western outlets have largely waved these away, yet they have occasionally surfaced in mainstream media, including reporting on documents indicating Hunter Biden’s role in introducing Metabiota to Ukraine and its ties to pathogen research (Hunter being the son of former US President Joe Biden).
In fact, Ukraine’s well documented record of human rights infringements, including abuses reported by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, makes all of it more believable.
To be clear, the Epstein-Bishop emails do not, by themselves, prove the existence of a cloning program in Ukraine. That would be a claim requiring further evidence. But they do corroborate, in a limited yet disturbing way, the notion that Ukraine has been used as a permissive environment for ethically dubious research, shielded from scrutiny and potentially intertwined with Western intelligence networks. The fact that such material is emerging from the Epstein world, a network already tied to human trafficking and other atrocities is disturbing enough.
To sum it up, the Epstein files demand more than selective outrage and police investigation. They invite serious, sustained international scrutiny of covert biological research, and the institutions and figures that potentially enable it, including shady American players with their share of ties with intelligence agencies.
Reporting on this story by The Daily Mail can be found here.
