By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 3/6/25

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 “New Détente” 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.

By Alexander Zaitchik, Drop Site News, 1/28/25

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.

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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.”

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 a January 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.”

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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.

By Paul Sperry, Real Clear Investigations, 1/30/25

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.

By Tarik Cyril Amar, Website, 3/3/25

This is another (fairly) short note trying to compensate for the Western mainstream media’s systematically inadequate coverage of Russia and its politics. This time, it is a clearly important interview given by foreign minister Sergei Lavrov to the media holding “Krasnaya Zvezda” that is bound to mostly escape their attention. But not ours.

Published on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, Lavrov’s statements range widely. The topics he addressed included the causes of the Ukraine War, his country’s relationship with the USA (and what difference the Trump administration makes and does not make), and NATO-EU Europe’s obstructionism. As what is on the ministry’s website is only a selection from a longer conversation, we can assume that these statements are the ones that Moscow wants to make sure reach the public and especially Western decision-makers. They would do well paying very close attention.

The first thing we learn from Lavrov is that “we were not blind.” By which he means, as he explicates, that the Russian leadership was not “naïve” – and should not have been treated as naïve by the West: Moscow long understood that Western overreach was not acceptable in the long – or even, really, fairly short – term, and that something had to change one way or the other. Indeed, Russia knew this for, at least, more than a decade before the full escalation of the Ukraine War in February 2022. Lavrov mentions in this regard, as you would expect, Putin’s historic warning at the Munich Security Conference of 2007.

If Moscow has never been “blind,” then Lavrov’s implicit but clear message is that it will not start now. Russia’s last attempt to prevent the escalation of February 2022 was, the foreign minister points out, made in December 2021: “To the very last moment, we gave them [the West] a chance,” namely, in essence, to avoid the large-scale war that started in 2022 by negotiating a new security architecture.

Yet the West, that is, most of all the US and in particular then secretary of state Antony Blinken made clear to Moscow that it would get no say on the crucial issue of Ukraine joining NATO. The only non-concession Blinken offered in January 2022, Lavrov reveals, was to “limit the number of medium-range missiles” the West would “station in Ukraine in a certain way.”

That, we can add, if you know the context, was not an offer but a slap in the face. And that is how it was understood in Moscow as well. Lavrov, in this context, speaks of Western “hypocrisy” and “impunity,” stressing that the West’s refusal of any genuine compromise was principally irrational, not even based on a (mistaken) calculation of geopolitical advantage, but on, literally, “hubris.”

Lavrov also spells out why and how this experience of both Western intransigence and irrationality will continue to matter for the future: Russia’s president Vladimir Putin has already declared that there will be no return to how things were before February 2022: “nikogda” – never. This is an important message in and of itself, especially at this moment.

For, as Lavrov acknowledges, there is real – though not unlimited – improvement in the Russia-US relationship now. But nonetheless, under no, even the most favorable circumstances, will Moscow either forget the West’s attempt to degrade and regime-change it via a proxy war in Ukraine, nor will Moscow pretend to have forgotten. If there is anyone in Washington left thinking that the Russian leadership will give an inch for promises alone or neglect its own national interests (for instance in its relationships with China and other partners), you’ve been put on notice: forget about it.

At the same time, a return from “hubris” to “common sense” is what Lavrov does credit the new American president Donald Trump and his team with. This is crucial, because it indicates that Moscow, while not prepared to forget may be ready to forgive, in the sense that the Russian leadership is open for a pragmatic (a term Lavrov uses repeatedly) rebuilding of a constructive and mutually beneficial relationship with the US.

And there the Russian foreign minister has yet another, very concrete message for Washington: “Common sense dictates that the US should step aside” from the Ukraine War. In that sense, we can conclude that Moscow clearly sees the new American administration’s behavior over Ukraine as a key test: If Washington will, as currently fortunately seems likely, finally disengage from this disastrous Biden-era project, then Russia will take that as evidence of a new “common sense” in action, and not merely in words. In that case, more perspectives of, in effect, détente will open up. If, on the other hand, the US should revert to playing stupid games over Ukraine, then Moscow will conclude that the new “pragmatism” has stumbled at the very first hurdle. In that case, goodbye détente.

In the best case, according to Lavrov, the relationship between the two nuclear great powers will return to a kind of normality that was abandoned and almost destroyed by the Biden administration, namely, a frank recognition of both diverging and converging interests through respectful and reasonable dialogue between “two serious countries” that do not issue orders to each other.

Where interests, then, converge, mutual advantage can be extracted; where interests keep diverging, they can be managed to avoid escalation into conflict. This as well is a basic model of rational diplomacy that Western observers should pay close attention to. Lavrov explicitly compares the relationship that might ensue between Russia and the US to that between China and the US. That means, there is no hint of flowery-powery dreaming here: Tensions will persist, but at the same time, cooperation is possible and a “degradation into conflict” need not take place. The good news here is that the Russian foreign minister, at least for now, stresses that he is finding that rational attitude on the other side, for instance with the new US secretary of state Marco Rubio.

Where Lavrov does not see much hope is, you may have guessed, the NATO-EU Europeans. Not wanting to “be anti-European,” his remarks on them nevertheless are signally and – rest assured – deliberately unforgiving. To such an extent indeed that I, for one, feel he is letting America off all too lightly.

But regardless, Lavrov has, of course, a message, in blaming Europe in particular for hundreds of years of shaping a disruptive and violent West. Here is Russia’s foreign minister inviting the US to disassociate itself from that tradition. Fat chance, you may well say (and he would probably agree, actually). But historical veracity and future likelihood are not the point here. This is Moscow driving a wedge, as it should, between the NATO-EU Europeans and the US. So much for a real “reverse Nixon-Kissinger”: Future historians may well discuss the origins of the great American-European split of 2025 and how deftly Russia used it.

Lavrov had more to say. But let’s keep this note reasonably short. The essence of the above can perhaps best be summarized as: Get the US back in (on cautious, realistic terms), get the NATO-EU Europeans out, and keep the escalation potential down.

In other words, there is an optimistic message here: We can have a better world, slightly less prone to tumbling into World War III, on the basis of a new Russia-US relationship. Yet for the NATO-EU Europeans, to quote Dune, nothing. And they, I will add, have only themselves to blame.

Here’s to Russian-American pragmatism.

Russian Foreign Ministry

Excerpts from an interview with the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation S.V. Lavrov to the media holding “Red Star”, March 2, 2025

Machine translation: https://mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/2000799/

S.V. Lavrov: We were not blind. Back in 2007 in Munich, Russian President V.V. Putin warned that although we work with NATO, the European Union, and the G7 (while already being a member of the G8), we should not be made naive and taken for those who do not understand or see anything. If we are equal, then let us work equally.

We continued. V.V. Putin patiently explained to each country and partner from the Western “camp” at numerous meetings what he meant when he spoke in Munich, if anyone there did not understand something.

Until the very last moment, we gave them a chance not to bring things to a hot conflict. In December 2021, we told them, you are “talking down” the Minsk agreements , creating threats to our security, let’s sign the Treaty on European Security , where it will be ensured without drawing anyone into NATO. We were ignored.

Back in January 2022, I met with then US Secretary of State E. Blinken. He said that NATO is none of our business. They can only promise that the number of medium-range missiles they will deploy in Ukraine will be limited in a certain way. That’s all. This is also hypocrisy, impunity, exceptionalism, superhumanity. And what did it all lead to?

It was not for nothing that President V.V. Putin said at one of his major events last year that things would never be the way they were before February 2022. That is, he hoped until February, already understanding the futility of these hopes. But he gave them a chance until the very last moment. Sit down at the table, let’s agree on security, including the security of Ukraine, but so that measures to ensure it do not undermine ours. All this was being decided.

Now many politicians, former members of the government, public figures with “hindsight” (that is, they have something in common with the Russian peasant, who is strong “in hindsight”) say that it should have been done differently. But it turned out the way it did.

Our goals are clear, our objectives are defined, as they used to say in the Soviet Union.

Question: Speaking about 2022, everyone remembers that you had long negotiations with E. Blinken. When did you realize, at what stage, that it would not be possible to reach an agreement? How was the decision made that it was time to begin a special military operation ? Another month passed between your negotiations with E. Blinken.

S.V.Lavrov: I hoped that reason and common sense would prevail. But pride prevailed.

Not only the plans to materially draw Ukraine into NATO, to create bases in Crimea, on the Sea of ​​Azov – all these plans existed. But in addition to this geopolitical plan, pride also played a big role. How is that possible? They say – no need, but we will agree? I am not exaggerating. This is in its “naked” form what they were guided by. This is sad. This is not common sense.

It is not for nothing that Donald Trump is constantly saying about any conflict, considering America’s position, that there must be common sense. And Washington’s common sense dictates to “step aside.”

Question: We remember that President of Russia Vladimir Putin said that the ball is in their court. For many, the talks in Riyadh came as a surprise. What preliminary work did you carry out and when did you start it to make these conversations happen?

Sergey Lavrov: There was no preliminary work. The presidents had a phone call at the initiative of Donald Trump. President Vladimir Putin threw this ball to him in 2018 in Helsinki at a news conference after the World Cup (this ball was the official FIFA ball). Donald Trump caught him, twisted him and threw him to the members of his delegation who were sitting in front of him.

We all proceeded from the fact that it was not D. Trump who cut off relations, but J. Biden, but it is one country. D. Trump was well aware of this and called himself. Before that, literally the day before, he sent his close adviser to Russia for a detailed conversation. Then, during a telephone conversation , at his suggestion, we agreed to meet in Riyadh. We flew there three days after the telephone conversation. Therefore, there was no preparation. I mean bilateral. Of course, each “team” prepared: ours in the Foreign Ministry, theirs in the State Department.

This was a completely normal conversation between two delegations. What is striking is that this normality was perceived as a sensation. This means that our Western partners during the term of J. Biden have managed to bring world public opinion to such a state that it perceives a normal conversation as something out of the ordinary.

We will never think alike on every issue of world politics. We acknowledged this in Riyadh. And the Americans acknowledged it. They themselves, in fact, said it. Where we see a coincidence of interests, common sense suggests that it is foolish not to use it in order to translate it into some practical actions and obtain mutually beneficial results. Where interests do not coincide (US Secretary of State M. Rubio also said this), it is the duty of responsible powers to prevent this mismatch from degenerating into confrontation. This is absolutely our position.

By the way, this is the format in which relations between the United States and China are built. They have a huge number of disagreements. The Americans are announcing many sanctions against China in order to suppress a competitor. Not so much as against us. Americans and Europeans are imposing 100% duties on electric cars. This is just unscrupulous competition. But I return to the model of relationships. Despite all these disagreements, and the fact that from time to time the top leaders of the United States and China and ministers accuse the other side of some illegal actions, primarily in the economic sphere, politics and security are also heard.

Read how Chinese ministers talk about the West’s plans in the Taiwan Strait or in the South China Sea. This is a very sharp counteraction. I understand the Chinese comrades when the West says that they adhere to the “one China” policy, which means that China is united and Taiwan is part of it. But having said that they are in favor of the “one China” policy, they are all saying that the status quo cannot be touched. And what is the “status quo”? It is an independent Taiwan. Therefore, there is a lot of cunning here.

It is not for nothing that a representative of the Chinese Ministry of Defense recently said that they are firmly in favor of a peaceful settlement, but do not rule out the use of military force if we are “led by the nose.” Something like this. At the same time, the dialogue between Beijing and Washington has never been interrupted. I believe that this is exactly the model that should be in relations between any two states. Especially between Russia and the United States, which, on the one hand, can find coinciding interests and do a lot of mutually beneficial things, and on the other hand, they are obliged not to lead to war in the event of a divergence of interests.

Even when Donald Trump was first elected, many politicians fell into euphoria. Now they also fall into it.

The United States still has the same goal – to be the first country in the world. Under Joe Biden, under Barack Obama and the Democrats in general, they tried to do this, subjugating everything and everything, paying for this support, as they pay for NATO, as they paid Japan and South Korea by creating outposts with the participation of NATO with nuclear components.

Donald Trump, he is a pragmatist. His slogan is common sense. It means (everyone sees this) a transition to a different way of doing things. But the goal is still “MAGA” (Make America Great Again). Now he has a new cap: “Everything that Donald Trump promised has been done.” This gives a lively, human character to politics. Therefore, it is interesting to be with him.

His team, Secretary of State Miguel Rubio and National Security Adviser Mark Waltz, are absolutely sane people in every sense of the word. They talk on the basis that they do not command us, and we do not command them. It’s just that two serious countries sat down to talk about where they had something wrong and what their predecessor had messed up in four years, destroying all channels of contact without exception, imposing a number of sanctions, followed by the expulsion of American companies, and suffering losses of hundreds of billions of dollars.

Question: Apparently, this has been going on for quite a long time, if not for the entire post-war history. During your work at the UN, you were in a constructive dialogue and signed joint documents with the American side. And they violated these agreements, what was declared, literally in a matter of months. This was the case with Kosovo, with Iraq. A month before former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech, you had a joint document with the US representative on the need to settle the dialogue, etc. How did you react to such things?

Sergey Lavrov: This has already become habitual. You are absolutely right. The attempt to “cheat” everyone, to present their position as the only correct one, continues.

This was the case even under US Secretary of State Colin Powell. We also worked closely with him. I am sure that he did not know what was in the test tube (what kind of white powder it was) that he shook at the UN Security Council and said that the then President of Iraq Saddam Hussein “did not live.” He was simply framed by CIA officers.

I don’t want to be anti-European. However, the current situation confirms the idea that many historians explain. Over the past 500 years (when the West has more or less formed in the form in which it has survived to this day, of course, with some changes), all the tragedies of the world originated in Europe or happened thanks to European politics. Colonizations, wars, crusaders, the Crimean War, Napoleon, the First World War, A. Hitler. In retrospect, the Americans did not play any inflammatory or “incendiary” role.

And now, after Joe Biden’s “term”, people have come who want to be guided by common sense. They openly say that they want to end all wars, they want peace. Who demands the “continuation of the banquet” in the form of war? Europe.

Danish Prime Minister Mark Frederiksen said that “for Ukraine now peace is worse than war.” British Prime Minister Kevin Starmer, who followed French President Emmanuel Macron to persuade US President Donald Trump not to end “this story” so quickly, and at the same time boasted that this year Britain would make its largest contribution in the form of weapons to Ukraine, that is, directly contradicting Donald Trump and stating that they would “pump up” the Kiev regime. President Emmanuel Macron is running around with some ideas, just like Christopher Starmer. They say that so many thousands of peacekeepers are being trained, they will provide them with air cover. This is also impudence.

First of all, no one asks us. President Donald Trump understands everything. He said that it is too early to say when there will be a settlement: “This issue can be discussed, but the consent of the parties will be needed.” He behaves correctly.

This plan to introduce “peacekeepers” into Ukraine is a continuation of the “incitement” of the Kyiv regime to war against us. These “guys” are “trampled” on the Minsk agreements . They admitted this quite recently. Their co-authors (our western neighbors) were not going to comply with them, and by handing over their weapons, they brought to power first Petr Poroshenko and then Vladimir Zelensky “on their own bayonets.” It was they who “inspired” him to make a 180-degree turn, although German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock might have regarded it as 360 degrees.

Vladimir Zelensky turned 180 degrees from a man who came to power on the slogans of peace, on the slogans “Leave the Russian language, this is our common language, our common culture” (this is all on the Internet) and in six months turned into a pure Nazi and, as President of Russia Vladimir Putin rightly said, into a traitor to the Jewish people.

Just as they brought him to power “on bayonets” and pushed him forward, they now also want to prop him up with their “bayonets” in the form of peacekeeping units. But this will mean that the root causes will not disappear.

When we ask these “thinkers” what will hypothetically happen to the part that they will take under control, they answer that nothing – Ukraine will remain there. I asked one “comrade”: will the Russian language be banned there? He said nothing. They cannot utter words of condemnation of what has happened. No other language has been subject to such aggression. But imagine if French or German were banned in Switzerland, or English was banned in Ireland. Now the Irish there want “a little” self-determination. If they tried to ban English now, they would “shake” the entire UN for all its “columns”, demanding the condemnation of Ireland.

And here it is “possible”. You talk to them in the face, but they don’t answer. This is just like I (soon to be three years old) publicly at UN meetings, and meeting with the press, I ask to help us get at least some information on Bucha (a tragedy that was used to impose sanctions on us). These scenes were shown by the BBC two days after not a single one of our soldiers was already there. We are asking for only one thing now (I have already despaired of counting on anything more): can I see the list of those people whose corpses were shown on the BBC channel? I even publicly asked UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres about this at a meeting of the Security Council, and more than once.

The last time was in September 2024. I was in New York for the General Assembly session. I had a final press conference , the entire world press was there (there were about seventy of them), and I told them: “Guys, you are journalists, aren’t you professionally interested in finding out what happened there?”

We have officially requested information from the UN Human Rights Office (they have a “mission on Ukraine” within this Office, which was not created by consensus – they did not consult with anyone) about the names of those people who were shown there already dead. There is no reaction at all.

And I shamed the journalists too. It was already 2.5 years after this tragedy, when this BBC Bucha was shown on the screen and in social networks. It was a “news explosion”. “Three days and it’s all gone?” I say, “Did they tell you to keep it down?”

I know half the journalists there well. They have been working there for a long time. Can’t they send a journalistic request to the Ukrainians? No one does anything. The “command” came through and that’s it.

YouTube link here.