By Matt Taibbi, Substack, 8/28/25

Judicial Watch today [August 28th] announced lawsuits filed against the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), for failure to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests in the case of longtime Donald Trump adviser Michael Caputo. For those who think Russiagate as ancient history, welcome to its second chapter, about Biden-era surveillance:

Judicial Watch submitted the requests in response to information that Caputo’s email was the subject of a secret search warrant of his Google email account in September 2023, three weeks after he began working for the Trump 2024 presidential campaign…

“The evidence shows that the Biden FBI and Justice Department were spying on the Trump campaign. Caputo used his emails to help devise strategy for the Trump campaign, and the Biden gang was rooting through it all!” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The lawsuits show that the lawfare and spying against Trump was only paused. These records can’t be released soon enough.”

Earlier this summer, after FBI Director Kash Patel and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard began releasing documents exposing the original Russiagate probe as the product of manipulated intelligence and alleging a “treasonous conspiracy,” critics dismissed the matter as old news. Russiagate never ended for some, however.

Not only did Patel, Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, and Regulatory Czar Jeff Clark all receive notices informing them of email monitoring from the last election cycle, but at least one longtime Trump aide is still under investigation by the administration he worked to elect.

A notice from Google in March told Caputo he’d been monitored by the FBI since September, 2023, weeks after he agreed to take on “Weaponization of Government” issues for the 2024 Trump campaign. In addition to Patel, Scavino, Clark, and himself, Caputo describes six other colleagues in a similar position. “If I know if there are ten, there are fifty,” says the garrulous Buffalo native with a radio voice. “The one thing I’m sure of is, I don’t know everything.”

Caputo hopes his lawsuit and efforts to get his case closed will jog something loose, from enforcement agencies he still doesn’t trust. “I think Kash and Dan and Tulsi have really big fish to fry,” Caputo says, “But the reason I’m bringing it up now is because my family has had enough. I want them to leave my family alone.”

The devout Catholic who nearly died of cancer during the scandal speaks of the original investigators as a spiritual horror. “These people,” he says, “are demons.”

The nightmare began on March 20, 2017. Caputo was in Moscow of all places, on a trip for his consulting business, staying at the Metropol hotel made famous by Master and Margarita author Mikhail Bulgakov. In the evening, a well-known American reporter called his cell.

“She said, ‘Michael, what the hell is this?’” Caputo recalls. “I said, ‘What do you mean?’ She said, ‘You just got name-checked in a House Intelligence Committee hearing by James Comey for being too close to Russia.’ I asked if she was kidding. She said, ‘I’m not kidding, where are you?’ I said, ‘Why do you need to know?’”

Caputo knew his life was about to be turned upside down. The Trump-Russia controversy was white-hot then. Four intelligence agencies concluded Russia meddled with the 2016 election to help Donald Trump. From there, the heads of anyone with even fleeting ties to Russia began rolling. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn was forced to resign after reported contact with Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak. Attorney General Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself from Russia matters. And Caputo didn’t know it, but Comey that day just announced the existence of an FBI investigation into Trump’s “links” to Russia in hearings led by California congressman and Russia-hunter-in-chief, Adam Schiff.

Walking outside, Caputo found himself at the foot the Kremlin, a stone’s throw from the Metropol, staring at its red brick. He thought of his family and felt ill. “I lean over with both my hands on the wall, and I vomited all over the wall,” he recalls. “I’m thinking, ‘Oh God, oh God.’ I was retching for two or three minutes.” He got up, tried to clear his head, and ducked into a nearby Western bar to clean himself up. Before he could get to a bathroom, he saw a man at the bar staring at him. “I look at him, and he points at the bar TV. My face is on the TV.”

The critical exchange in Congress involved an exchange between California Congresswoman Jackie Speier and Comey.

“All right, let’s move on to someone else in that web,” the Bay Area’s Speier said. “His name is Michael Caputo. He’s a PR professional, conservative radio talk show host. In 1994, he moved to Russia… In 2000 he worked with Gazprom-Media to improve [President Vladimir] Putin’s image in the United States.” She paused. “Do you know anything about Gazprom, Director?”

“I don’t,” the head of America’s top counterintelligence agency said about the world’s largest natural gas company, and Russia’s largest company. Completing the ignorance loop, Speier incorrectly explained, “Well, it’s an oil company,” then went on.

“What possible reason would the Trump campaign have for hiring Putin’s image consultant? No thoughts on that, Director?”

“No thoughts.”

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/_rCa16v3HzA?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

About Caputo as “Putin’s image consultant”: in Caputo’s defense, Putin at the turn of the century wasn’t a full-blown villain in the American diplomatic community. Ex-Ambassador to Russia and leading Russiagate finger-wagger Michael McFaul at the time lauded Putin as a “bright counter” to the gloomy international picture. Future Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland called him a “kindler, gentler sort of Kremlin chief,” welcoming his “quick pat” to her “third-trimester belly.” Even Bill Clinton declared Putin a “man we can do business with.” Only the dwindling independent Russian press absolutely recoiled from him.

Like me, Caputo worked in Russia through the nineties and early 2000s. When we met, he was working on “democratization” projects in the Yeltsin years with USAID-funded organizations like the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, along with groups like the International Republican Institute (IRI), helping launch a Russian version of the “Rock the Vote” campaign.

He was also part of an expensive group U.S. effort to get Yeltsin re-elected, one eventually memorialized in headlines like “Yanks to the Rescue!” in Time and in Hollywood movies like the Jeff Goldblum/Lieb Schrieber vehicle Spinning Boris. “I was part of the original meddling team,” Caputo laughs. He recalls that meetings on that subject were also often attended both by high-level Democrats who’d later become leading Russiagate torch-bearers, and a translator named Konstantin Kilimnik. A 2020 Senate Intelligence Report would later allege that working with Kilimnik was “what collusion looks like.”

Caputo’s life went downhill quickly after that night in Moscow. He and friend Roger Stone would co-earn their own chapter in the report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, under the heading, “Other Potential Campaign Interest in Russian Hacked Materials.” History unfolded differently, but the header should have read, “FBI Informants Offering Russian Aid to Trump Figures Without Success.”

In May, 2016, months before the official opening of the Trump-Russia investigation, a mysterious stranger named Henry Greenberg approached a partner in his business, Zeppelin Communications, in May of 2016, asking if they would do PR for his restaurant. It turned out he didn’t want PR for his restaurant at all ( it was never built, according to a Miami Herald article), just an introduction to Caputo’s friend Roger Stone. “Henry Greenberg” was really Henry Oknyansky, a.k.a. Gennady Arzhanik, a.k.a. Gennady Vorovtsov, a career criminal who by his own admission was also an informant for both the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security:

A satirist couldn’t have invented this footnote character to the Mueller report. In 1993, while still in Russia, Greenberg-Oknyansky-Vorovstov posed as Gennady Arzhanik, the son of a Soviet war hero, Admiral Vasily Arzhanik. Using this identity, he induced a company called FinInTorg to fork over about $2.7 million for a shipment of canned goods. The moment money was transferred, he swiped it, then fled to America. In a 2002 article, Russia’s Kommersant Daily described him as having been “a fugitive from national and international justice for more than six years,” suspected in the theft of “over $50 million.”

This is the person who asked Caputo to introduce him to Roger Stone, in order to pitch a deal: information about Hillary Clinton laundering money, for $2 million. Stone asked how much money Hillary allegedly laundered. “Hundreds of thousands,” answered Greenberg/Oknyansky. “That isn’t much money,” laughed Stone. Greenberg reportedly said it wasn’t Stone’s money he wanted, but Trump’s. Mueller wrote that Stone “refused the offer, stating that Trump would not pay for opposition research.” The Special Counsel wasn’t impressed with the episode, saying it “did not identify evidence of a connection between the outreach… and Russian interference efforts.”

Mueller left out the detail about Greenberg’s history as a federal informant. Sort-of Russians with vague government or party ties offering dirt on Clinton to Trumpworld figures would be a consistent theme in the scandal. Registered FBI informant Felix Sater suggested that Trump attorney Michael Cohen push for a hotel deal in Moscow. Donald Trump, Jr.’s meeting with Russian lawyer named Natalia Veselnitskaya in search of information on Clinton was “at long last, the smoking gun,” according to the Los Angeles Times, but even NBC’s Ken Dilanian was later forced to consider the episode in a “new light” after it emerged that the information Veselnitskaya offered came from the P.R. firm Clinton hired, Fusion-GPS.

Stefan Halper, another FBI asset, nudged Trumpworld figures like Carter Page with provocative suggestions, like one to seek Russian funding: “I imagine you could probably find funds” and “you could do alright there” and my favorite, “Nobody needs to know exactly where it’s from”:

George Papadopoulos, sold in the papers like the New York Times as the Patient Zero of Russiagate, had an experience similar to Caputo’s. He was approached out of the blue by a mysterious Maltese professor named Josef Mifsud, who made extravagant claims about access to Russian information. Papadopoulos ended up a national villain just for mentioning the story to an Australian diplomat, who quickly fed the story to American authorities, after which the FBI’s “Crossfiure Hurricane” probe was officially announced on July 31, 2016. Like Caputo, Papadopoulos is convinced he was set up, and that only the release of records about American cooperation with foreign governments like our main “Five Eyes” partners (the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada) will clarify who Mifsud was and why he was approached.

“I’m not mad that this has not been revealed yet, because I believe it will be,” Papadopoulos says now. “Recent trips by Gabbard and Patel to the UK and Australia signal that there is momentum towards this transparency.” Sources have told me the Trump administration is indeed making inquiries to some of those countries about older communications involving Russiagate.

When the story of Caputo’s interaction with Greenberg became public, the question the press should have been asking is how and why an FBI informant was trying to sell Trump aides information in May of 2016, or why another FBI informant in Halper was “ingratiating himself” to Page at a London symposium on July 12th, when the FBI investigation didn’t begin until July 31st, ostensibly because of Papadopoulos. Instead, Papadopoulos became a New York Times cover subject, and Caputo and Stone were denounced for failing to mention Greenberg when the House Intelligence Committee asked if he’d been approached by any Russians during the campaign.

California Congressman Eric Swalwell zeroed in on this testimony, telling Yahoo! reporter Michael Isikoff that Caputo and Stone “lied through their teeth,” to “protect the fact that they were willing and eager to take a meeting with Russians” — Russians, plural — “who were offering dirt.” He added Stone was “communicating with individuals associated with the Russian hacks.” There was never evidence that Greenberg had real restaurant plans, let alone connections to Russian intelligence. Asked this week which “individuals” were “associated with Russian hacks” and how he knew that, Swalwell didn’t reply.

In 2019 Caputo — whose wife is Ukrainian — produced a documentary called, “The Ukraine Hoax.” The film, which Caputo insists was a low-budget affair funded via his attorney with “no Russian money for obvious reasons,” was made with a few key points in mind. Though it criticized the Trump impeachment over a call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as baseless, its main message was historical. “I made a movie about how we’re going to go to war and we better watch out,” he says.

The film also dug into the Hunter Biden-Burisma story, with one scene even showing Caputo standing in front of Burisma’s offices. It aired on One America News (OAN) a day after Joe Biden’s inauguration, on January 21, 2021, and is still up on Rumble:

Caputo’s plan was to have the movie run, do a publicity tour, then publish a book. “Covid hit and the plan was scrapped,” says Caputo. The book was eventually published, but in March, 2020, Caputo joined Trump’s government, working for the Department of Health and Human Services as a spokesperson at the outset of the pandemic. Within six months he was diagnosed with head and neck cancer. “Russiagate almost killed me,” he said. “It was 100% stress.”

Caputo stepped away from government. Government didn’t return the favor. On March 16, 2021, a few months into Biden’s presidency, the Director of National Intelligence released a National Intelligence Council report that identified “The Ukraine Hoax” as a product of the Russian Secret Services, by way of Ukrainian parliamentary member Andrei Derkach and the selfsame Kilimnik, with whom Caputo says he never got along, even when they were co-workers at the International Republican Institute in the nineties. “He wouldn’t buy me a drink in a bar in the nineties,” Caputo says. The key passage reads:

Derkach, Kilimnik, and their associates sought to use prominent US persons and media conduits to launder their narratives to US officials and audiences… They also made contact with established US media figures and helped produce a documentary that aired on a US television network in late January 2020.

The next day, March 17, 2021, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty identified Caputo as the subject of the report. Neither the NIC nor any of the media treatments explained what the basis was for connecting Caputo’s film and Derkach, Kilimnik, or Russia.

Two years later, considerably thinner but recovered, Caputo decided to re-unite with Trump and join his second re-election campaign. Asked what he’d like to work on, Caputo didn’t hesitate. Stung by the 2016 experience, he sent a memo on August 4th, 2023, headed, “SUBJECT: DIRECTING WEAPONIZATION REFORM.” He wrote to the campaign leadership:

This memorandum outlines a campaign strategy to develop and execute federal government reform policy, focused on transformation of the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and more.

Five weeks later, on August 21, 2023, the U.S. Attorney’s office in the District of Columbia issued a classified subpoena to Google, demanding access to Caputo’s emails, subscriber information, billing and finacial information (including Google wallet), VOIP calls, data transfer volumes, and other records. He didn’t find out about this until March 18, 2025. In another preposterous plot-twist, he was by that time himself an advisor to the new U.S. Attorney of the District of Columbia, Ed Martin.

“I actually was notified that this was an investigation initiated by the US attorney in the District of Columbia while sitting in the office of the US Attorney for the District of Columbia,” he recalls.

The classification on Caputo’s subpoena tolled, so like Patel, Scavino, and Clark, Caputo received a notice from the company informing him his data had been collected.

Across the years, a huge range of people connected to Russiagate received similar notices. Congressional investigators on both sides of the scandal were monitored in leak investigations, from Senate staff looking into Russiagate’s origins like former Judiciary Committee Counsel Jason Foster to members of Congress like Swalwell and Adam Schiff, who were pushing the probe in the opposite direction. Mueller targets like Rick Gates, too, received Google notices post-factum, and figures like Page and Paul Manafort were monitored under FISA.

Even Tucker Carlson appeared victim to the not-uncommon Russiagate cocktail of “incidental” FISA collection and media leaks, when Axios in 2021 reported he was “talking to U.S.-based Kremlin intermediaries about setting up an interview with Vladimir Putin.” The amusing source: “People familiar with the conversations.” A later story by Charlie Savage of the New York Times hypothesized that the NSA “may have incidentally” captured his conversations without “intentionally targeting him as part of any nefarious plot.” Savage didn’t hypothesize about the intentionality or nefariousness of the leak.

“It was definitely part of Russiagate,” Carlson says. “The NSA read my texts and leaked the details to the New York Times. Ultimately they admitted it, but no one was ever punished. I rarely think about it, but it infuriates me every time I do.”

Since Russiagate started it’s become common to learn that intelligence agencies were either intentionally or incidentally collecting information even on politicians. A December, 2021 Inspector General’s report quietly disclosed in a footnote that a U.S. Congressman was the subject of “overly broad” and “non-compliant” FISA searches (it turned out to be Illinois Republican Darin LaHood). Current Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was physically monitored by Air Marshals under the TSA’s Quiet Skies program. The New York Times even just reported that the leak case involving John Bolton involved communications captured by a Five Eyes ally in the Biden years. Who isn’t under surveillance now?

Caputo’s notice read, saying, “Hello, Google received and responded to a legal process issued by the Federal Bureau of Investigation”:

In conjunction with news about other Google notices, he lost it. “Come on,” he says. “The future Director of the FBI? Dan Scavino, the one of the President’s best friends, and the member of the campaign? Me, a member of the campaign, and they popped me weeks after I send a memo on how to pursue a Weaponization of Government policy? That’s a huge mop-up operation.”

Caputo turned to Judicial Watch, which filed FOIA requests to the DOJ, FBI, and ODNI, asking for records of his case. All were ignored, prompting the lawsuits filed today. He worries that elements of the FBI and other agencies who brought the original cases are still in place, using spy tools far too easy to access, with too little oversight. The only thing that would even begin to justify any of this would be evidence of Russian money backing his movie, but Caputo is steadfast on that score. “It’s been four and a half years by now,” he says. “You think they’d have found some kind of Oleg.”

Fifty years after Watergate, the idea of spying on aides to presidential candidates, Congressional staff, journalists, even candidates and presidents no longer shocks much of the country. Can that pattern be reversed?

By Simplicius, Substack, 8/27/25

Trump made a very interesting comment during a press conference yesterday (8/26/25) which entirely summarizes the West’s misguided approach to Russia:

Trump is asked on his opinion regarding Lavrov’s statement that Russia could not sign a deal with an illegitimate leader like Zelensky. Trump responds by saying such statements are irrelevant because “everyone is just posturing”, and “it’s all bullshit”.

Trump could not be more wrong that a civilizational state like Russia is merely “posturing” about its existential interests, and understanding this key divergence is essential for grasping the far larger implications of the ideological rift between West and East.

It also explains why observers have been tearing their hair out trying to comprehend why Russia’s consistently clear elucidations of its demands always seemingly fall on deaf ears. Russia issues the exact bullet point reduction of its demands, and the very next day Trump’s various reps and envoys muddle things by claiming they aren’t sure what Russia wants, or that a meeting is needed to further iron things out.

Trump demystifies things by explaining that these weren’t misunderstandings or a US inability to properly listen to Russia’s demands—even worse, these were outright US dismissals of Russian concerns all along. In Trump’s decadent, reality-TV-inspired world view, every global conflict is just another daytime soap opera production you can throw enough money at, ‘rizz’ up its hosts, and things fall into place.

He cannot seem to grasp the existential implications for the parties involved, a theme I recently alluded to:

The world’s a stage for silver-spooned Donnie, and its ‘inconvenient’ conflicts mere sideshows to be quickly dispensed with for the prize of accolades. That is what being uncultured gets you—the inability to understand rooted histories, barring the odd toss-off like “these people have been fighting for thousands of years” that Riviera Don occasionally rattles off about Gaza in pale imitation of erudition.

This is likely the real reason for Putin’s infamously pedantic exegesis on Russian history for Tucker Carlson, to signal to Western audiences that the conflict has much deeper roots and implications than their leaders are willing to admit.

Another implication of Trump’s crude dismissal of Russian legal objections has to do with the same so-called ‘Rules Based Order’ so often pedestaled as the sacred geometry on which the entire Western system rests. Trump callously pulls at the threads of this Order’s very seams by ignoring clearly legitimate concerns about one of the party’s legal standings, again signifying to the world that the ordurous odor coming from this Order is one of fickle arbitrariness and hypocrisy.

On the occasion of shedding light on this ideological divide between Russia and the West, it is interesting that Putin had just recently again shared his views on the origins of the West’s demonization of Russia. Many have debated this for years, citing Russia’s fraternal involvement with both US and UK in previous centuries and often attributing the ‘fall’ to the pre-WWI, Milner’s Roundtable and Mackinder’s “Heartland” years.

But Putin, for his part, traces the lineage of this schismatic hatred much farther back, to the days of Ivan IV, when he believes Papal representatives sought to convince Russia to shed its Orthodoxy, to no avail. After Ivan IV’s rebukes, Putin says the first inklings of the now-notorious “otherness” began to be applied to Russia, with Ivan deemed to be a mad tyrant and branded ‘the Terrible’.

So, how did we get from Trump’s casual table rants to plumbing historical myths? The underlying continuity can be explained simply: the West does not understand Russia, and does not care to understand it. This comes from an ingrained superiority complex and exceptionalism dating back centuries.

Rhetorical question: How can you resolve a conflict between two parties whose deepest cultural, spiritual, and geopolitical epistemologies you shroud in deliberate obfuscation?….

By Francesco Sisci, Asia Times, 9/1/25

In 1972, US President Richard Nixon’s trip to China didn’t end the Vietnam War, but it helped offset the political fallout there and put a different turn on the ongoing Cold War. It ultimately worked, although it still took time to materialize into meaningful collaboration against the USSR.

The American strategy of engaging with Russian President Vladimir Putin is a reverse Nixon—an attempt to pull Russia away from China’s embrace. The August 15 meeting between Putin and US President Donald Trump in Alaska failed to achieve the desired result, but at least the effort in this direction was clear.

However, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s August 18 trip to India put a very different spin on the whole story. It appears as though Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping are running circles around Trump.

Not only did Putin not abandon Xi, but the two also managed to woo Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who on August 30 flew to Beijing, effectively ending a tense relationship.

The Nixon paradigm did work in reverse, but not as the US had hoped; that is, this time Moscow outmaneuvered Washington this time.

Modi will certainly be very cautious with China. He visited Japan first, stressing their strong bilateral bond. He also called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and pledged to work for peace with Moscow.

But August 31 was a sad moment for America—losing, at least partly, a crucial friend that it had spent nearly 25 years drawing closer. It also represented a setback for Modi, who has tied his political legacy to aligning with the Western camp through the Quad military pact, moving India away from its traditional policy of non-alignment.

Putin is the total winner of the day. He can frame Trump’s erratic behavior as proof of influence, boasting to Xi and Modi: “I control Trump, stick with me, no need to talk with the Americans.”

Whether true or not, the narrative may seem believable, and if so, then anything can spin out of this spiel. Indeed, the next Trump-Xi summit, apparently scheduled for October, could take place under a Russian cloud. Is the US cornered? Trump now needs to prove that Putin is not in control. It could be very tricky.

If the US doesn’t redress its ties with India effectively and quickly, the entire international framework that has held the world together since World War II could begin to unravel. India’s sense of betrayal is felt to varying degrees by many US allies.

What many Asian diplomats find mind-boggling is the reason behind the betrayal. Reportedly, it stemmed from a testy phone call, where Trump insisted Modi nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize, as the US president had helped resolve the recent India-Pakistan clash (see here). The damage to the US is compounded by how trivial the cause appears, casting a deep shadow over its reliability as a partner.

Russia can now boast a political victory greater than any it has achieved in Ukraine, gaining significant political leverage points from which it can upend the current world order.

China’s position is a mixed bag. Its friction with the US has moved somewhat to the background, but chaos in the world order threatens its trade, its main economic driver, possibly more than Trump’s tariffs. While Russia may have an interest in chaos, China could simply be looking for a distraction.

Nothing is certain or set in stone. “The world’s two most populous countries need to be friends,” Xi told Modi on Sunday (August 31), underscoring there is still a long way to go between China and India to improve their relations.

Meeting on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Tianjin, Xi reportedly told Modi that the two countries could be good neighbors and play a key role in the Global South.

The Chinese press has emphasized that the visit comes at a pivotal moment, as both countries work to resolve long-standing disputes and seek common ground amid growing strains in their relationship with the United States – the proverbial elephant in Beijing’s room.

Beijing is also using the SCO summit as an opportunity to showcase its leadership and build solidarity among the Global South amid mounting geopolitical challenges. It’s a very different narrative from the one coming out of Washington.

By Scott Ritter, Substack, 8/22/25

We, the People of the United States of America, are the custodians of our Constitutional Republic. Through our free and democratic processes, we elect officials to represent us in government, and through these very same processes, backed by the rule of law, we hold these same officials accountable for what they do in our name. The processes of good citizenship, however, are not defined by passivity, limited simply to participation in elections, but rather dynamic actions that promote constant engagement across the full spectrum of issues that define our collective daily existence. Good citizenship sets the standards through which we hold elected officials accountable, and good citizens lead by example. This applies to both the domestic and foreign policies being implemented in our name.

The issue of Russophobia in America today should be a concern for us all. Russophobia is designed to exploit the ignorance of the American people by promulgating falsehoods about the reality of Russia that are designed to generate fear, fear which is then exploited by those whom we elect to support policies which postulate Russia as the eternal bogeyman. This mage is then used to justify defense spending and national security postures that have put the United States on a highway to hell that can only end with a nuclear Armageddon. In short, Russophobia represents an existential threat to the security of the United States and the entire world. It is one of the most dangerous threats facing the American people today, and yet it is fostered by mainstream media, academia and the permanent bureaucracy of government, all of which are deeply infected with the intellectual poison produced by Russophobia.

The antidote to this poison is knowledge and information that can only be garnered through direct contact between the American and Russian people.

This is where citizen diplomacy comes in.

I have been actively engaged in citizen diplomacy with Russia since April 2023, when I first travelled to Russia to promote the cause of peace through nuclear disarmament. At that time, I engaged in the practice of repairing trust between the American and Russian people “one handshake at a time.”

I shook many hands during this trip.

I returned to Russia in December 2023 to bring in the New Year, promoting the concept of “Waging Peace” by learning more about the Russian reality, and bringing that reality back with me to the United States, where I sought to share it with anyone and everyone willing to listen and learn.

The poison of Russophobia, however, runs deep in the blood of the United States, and my efforts at conducting citizens diplomacy were deemed a threat by the administration of President Joe Biden, which sought to criminalize my efforts, dispatching the FBI to my home under the false pretext that I was acting as an agent of the Russian government. The Biden State Department revoked my passport, deliberately preventing me from travelling to Russia in the summer of 2024, where I planned on engaging in citizens diplomacy on a scope and scale greater than previously practiced.

I refused to be intimidated by this obvious lawfare being waged against me and the cause of peace I promoted. While I fought to get my passport returned, I continued to engage with the Russian people, attending several functions at the Russian Embassy (including a piano recital, and both Russia Day and Victory Day celebrations).

I shook many hands during these visits.

I also worked with a Russian counterpart, Pavel Balobanov, to resurrect the landmark 1985 “Spacebridge” organized by the late American journalist, Phil Donahue, and his Soviet counterpart, Vladimir Pozner. One June 18, 2025, Pavel and I conducted a three hour “Citizens Summit” bringing together an American audience in Kingston, New York with a Russian audience in Saint Petersburg, Russia.

The reaction of all involved was overwhelmingly positive.

On July 15, 2025 (my birthday) my passport was finally restored to me. Shortly thereafter, the FBI began returning property they had seized in the raid on my home. Elections matter, and the results of the November 2024 Presidential election saw the Russophobia of the Biden administration replaced by the policies of peace promoted by Donald Trump. These policies were founded in the notion that America was best served by learning to live in peace with Russia. Free speech was once again a concept protected by the government, even when the concepts promoted—such as good relations between Russia and the US—ran afoul of the Russophobic narratives promoted by mainstream media, academia, and the permanent government bureaucracy.

My week in Russia (August 9-18) was one of the most productive examples of citizen diplomacy I have ever been engaged in—and keep in mind I travelled to Iraq in September 2002, where I was the first and only foreigner to address the Iraqi parliament in a valiant but ultimately failed effort to prevent a war by getting the Iraqis to allow UN weapons inspectors to return to work. The timing of this visit was serendipitous—I landed as the Alaska Summit between President Trump and President Putin was announced, and as such I was perfectly located to take the pulse of Russian public reaction, both to the potential of the summit, and its results.

One of the messages I received repeatedly from the scores of interviews I conducted with Russians from every walk of life was how important it was to the Russian people that President Trump understood that, when it came to the issue of peace between Russia and the US, the Russian people were fully supportive of his efforts. I promised that I would do my best to relay this message to President Trump, and today I am making good on this promise.

As part of my Project 38 initiative, I have brought together a team of like-minded people, all experts in their respective fields, for the purpose of helping craft a vision for arms control with Russia, built on the premise that the last remaining treaty between the US and Russia which limits the size of our respective nuclear arsenals—the New START treaty—should be extended (it expires on February 4, 2026), and that the need for limits on intermediate range nuclear forces which were lifted with the demise of the INF treaty (President Trump withdrew from this treaty in August 2019) are essential for European and global security and stability. Together with this team—former Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich, former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, and MIT Professor Ted Postol—I have written a letter praising President Trump for his courage in agreeing to meet with President Putin, appraising the President of the results of my recent trip to Russia, and informing the President that this team—which we call the Poughkeepsie Peace Initiative—stands ready to support his peace efforts with Russia by engaging in citizens diplomacy for the betterment of relations between the US and Russia.

This is Citizens Diplomacy in action.

If you support the cause of waging peace and the work of citizens diplomacy, please consider donating to the cause. Our work is solely funded by your contributions. Thank you!

RT, 9/1/25

Ukrainian law enforcement has detained a suspect in the killing of far-right MP and former parliamentary speaker Andrey Parubiy, Vladimir Zelensky announced on Monday. The arrest comes less than 48 hours after Parubiy was gunned down in broad daylight in the western city of Lviv.

Zelensky said he was informed of the development by Ukraine’s minister of internal affairs, Igor Klimenko, and Security Service (SBU) chief Vasily Malyukon on Sunday night.

“I have instructed that the available information be presented to the public,” Zelensky said in a post on X. “I thank our law enforcement officers for their prompt and coordinated work. All the circumstances of this horrendous murder must be clarified.”

The identity of the suspect remains unknown while “necessary investigative actions are ongoing,” Zelensky added. In a separate statement, he said he had spoken with Prosecutor General Ruslan Kravchenko, who confirmed that the suspect had already given initial testimony.

“Urgent investigative actions are currently underway to establish all the circumstances of this murder,” Zelensky stated, adding that “the entire law enforcement team and the prosecutors are working around the clock.”

Parubiy, 54, was shot eight times by an unknown assailant on Saturday while walking along a sidewalk in Lviv. Surveillance footage shared online appears to show a man posing as a food delivery courier approaching Parubiy from behind before raising a firearm and fleeing the scene.

The motive behind Parubiy’s killing remains unclear. A prominent figure in Ukraine’s far-right political circles, Parubiy co-founded the Social-National Party of Ukraine in 1991 – known for its neo-Nazi symbolism and ideology.

Parubiy played a central role in the 2014 Maidan coup, where he coordinated paramilitary protest groups and served as commandant of the protest camp in central Kiev. After the ousting of President Viktor Yanukovich, he was appointed secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, overseeing early military operations in Donbass and the government crackdown on anti-Maidan protests.

Parubiy’s career was further marred by his alleged role in suppressing protests in Odessa in May 2014, which culminated in a fire at the Trade Unions building that killed more than 40 activists opposed to Kiev’s coup-installed government. In 2018, he drew international criticism for stating in a televised interview that “the greatest man who practiced direct democracy was Adolf Hitler in the 1930s” – a comment he later claimed was misunderstood.