Le Monde, 7/20/25

Sections reserved for soldiers are at capacity. Across the country, teams of architects have been working on memorials that reflect not only the scale of the ongoing carnage but also the evolving ideas about national identity.

It’s a sandy track, well-hidden among the pines, off the highway connecting Kyiv to Odesa in the Hatne region. The outline of a newly dug off-ramp, carved by bulldozers and still unmarked, signals the start of a massive construction site. This is the highway exit that will serve as Ukraine’s future national military memorial cemetery. The project is enormous, highly sensitive and not just because environmental activists and residents of the small village of Markhalivka – 40 kilometers from the capital, but right at the base of the future cemetery – worry about deforestation and the loss of their rural quiet.

In the village, only a new brown sign, the color used to mark national sites, marks the road that leads trucks to the site. It reads in English: “National Military Memorial Cemetery.” A first section, designed to hold 10,000 graves and already laid out with broad granite paths, benches and lime trees, is due to receive its first burial this summer. But in the long term, “130,000 or even 160,000” people will be laid to rest at this future burial ground, explained architect Serhi Derbin, clad in khaki linen trousers and a straw panama hat, under the blazing July sun.

“Here will be the main entrance,” explained the young man leading this project, which has a budget of more than €37 million. “Below, there’s a shelter for 300 people, in case of bombardment.” The reinforced bunker is a first for a cemetery. Over there, a “house of mourning” for ceremonies, should it be cold or rainy. “And here, the memorial,” the architect continued, sweeping his arms wide to indicate the 120 hectares set aside for the future cemetery, and the 260-hectare estate beyond.

Perhaps the construction projects rising across Ukraine say more about the scale of the slaughter than statistics ever could. The number of soldiers killed in action since the start of the Russian invasion remains a closely guarded secret. In February, President Volodymyr Zelensky mentioned more than 46,000 Ukrainian military personnel killed and 380,000 wounded since February 2022, not including the “tens of thousands” listed as “missing” or held captive by Russian forces. The real death toll is likely much higher.

Passion for ‘memorial subjects’

The giant cemetery project, overseen by the Ministry for Veterans Affairs but closely monitored by the president’s office, has not emerged without controversy. “One day in June 2023,” recalled Anton Drobovych, former president of the National Institute of Remembrance, “I got a call from Bankova Street [the seat of the Ukrainian presidency]. They told me the memorial would be built at Bykivnia,” a site near Kyiv where victims of Stalin’s purges in the late 1930s were buried. At the time, Drobovych was serving with “the paratroopers” in the Zaporizhzhia area during the Ukrainian counteroffensive. He jumped: “You want to build a cemetery on what used to be a mass grave? That’s a grave, historic mistake!”

After much hesitation, public petitions and local protests, the Hatne site was chosen. “I was the only competitor, architects here have little interest in cemeteries,” admitted Derbin. Head of a Kyiv real estate project agency, he has been passionate about “memorial subjects” since 2021, working on projects like the towering flagpoles overlooking the cities of Dnipro and Kryvy Rih. War, unfortunately, has brought new perspectives. In Yahidne, a village near Chernihiv where 350 parents and children were held captive in the school basement in March 2022, and 27 died, he is preparing a museum to commemorate the occupation and Russian war crimes.

Each sector of the future Hatne military cemetery will be organized around a central columbarium, designed to encourage more Ukrainians to consider cremation, a practice that remains uncommon. Temporary white oak graves will hold the first “heroes” as well as the remains of unidentified soldiers. “No more than a year,” warned Derbin. “We are in the 21st century. In the age of DNA research, we reject the outdated “unknown soldier” concept.” To aid future identification, details that could help identify the deceased – distinctive marks (tattoos, scars, etc.) and genetic fingerprints – will be inscribed on the headstones of these anonymous graves.

White stone

Burial space is running out across Ukraine. In Lviv, a major city in western Ukraine, the city hall avoided controversy by involving families in its plans. A year ago, it began a wide-ranging public consultation to rethink the redevelopment of its “Field of Mars,” a plot with 1,000 graves adjacent to the famous Lychakiv Cemetery, the city’s version of Paris’s Père-Lachaise Cemetery, where sculpted tombs and statues tell the story of a vanished century: writers’ quills, violins, sheet music and manuscripts. Around 6 pm, as the workday ends, a stream of cars comes to lay flowers on the fresh graves that have appeared since February 2022, their yellow and blue flags – or red and black nationalist flags – snapping in the wind. Here, no two graves are alike.

For 12 months, the families of the deceased gathered in Lviv city hall’s vast hall with a team of architects to rethink a cemetery that had sprung up too quickly. “Lighting, flowers, the stone – we discussed everything. Sometimes widows would come with four children,” recounted Anton Kolomeitsev, the city’s architect. The winning design, chosen on May 30, underwent revisions, but the final plan is now set. Each plot will be redesigned with terrazzo stone, juniper bushes among the graves, niches for candles and so on.

But the “Field of Mars” faces another problem. “There are already only 40 plots left. That will last barely two months,” admitted the young Kolomeitsev in his stylish, minimalist office in the 19th-century city hall. The city is now also planning a new military cemetery. “It will be built somewhere in the city or outside Lviv – an announcement is imminent.” It will likely follow the new trends of Ukrainian funerary aesthetics: park-like spaces, large esplanades for ceremonies, white stone…

Read more Subscribers only War in Ukraine: No peace, even in death, in Hroza village

All graves are the same size, regardless of the rank of the deceased. And, for the vast majority of believers, they are decorated with “Cossack” crosses – the Maltese cross shape – a military tradition from the 19th century. The benches near the graves, where families once shared a meal or a glass of vodka, have disappeared: “That was a Soviet tradition,” explained Derbin, “because it was the only place the KGB wouldn’t listen in.”

American influence can also be seen. “I visited Arlington Cemetery near Washington,” said Kolomeitsev, “where veterans of all American wars are buried. Here in Lviv, we too had to answer a difficult question: How do you bring together the dead from various conflicts since the early 20th century?”

Families of veterans of the Donbas war in 2014 want their loved ones included in these new cemeteries. And what about those who defended Ukraine outside front-line brigades – civilians who gathered intelligence for the Ukrainian military in occupied territories, volunteers who evacuated the wounded and families, raised donations or built drones, Ukrainian journalists reporting on Russian war crimes? The debate has not yet officially begun, but the idea has been gaining traction in Ukrainian society. “Military memorials are bricks in the wall of national identity,” argued Drobovytch.

Building cemeteries in Ukraine also means marking, in real time, the shifting frontlines of war – even in the worst ways. In Milove, on the Russian border, architect Derbin’s “bell of memory,” dedicated to Ukraine’s liberators in World War II, has already been toppled. “Before the major invasion [in February 2022], I designed the ‘Avenue of Heroes’ honoring those killed since 2014 in Sievierodonetsk.” That gallery of portraits was dismantled by Russian forces. “They want to erase memory and memories,” sighed the Kyiv architect. “I try to chase the dark thoughts from my mind, but I have no doubt that ‘they’ will bomb a cemetery one day.”

YouTube link to Redacted’s interview with John Kiriakou on possible CIA involvement in Ukrainian protests against Zelensky here.

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 7/30/25

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is an academic who analyzes and critiques propaganda.

On the battlefield, Russian forces are reliably confirmed to have a strong presence to the south of Pokrovsk and to be fighting Ukrainian forces in the center of Pokrovsk Reports suggest that Russia forces are now moving north of Pokrovsk with a view to outflanking cities in Donbass such as Sloviansk and Kramatorsk that are still held by Ukraine, as Russians move north from Pokrovsk, and north and east of Kamianske in Zaporizhzhia.

Increasingly Russians encounter Ukrainian positions that are no longer defended or poorly defended. Some reports suggest that in effect Ukraine is expecting to retreat west of the Dnieper where it may already be working to establish a major new line of defense. Reports also seem to be converging in agreement on the increasing superiority of Russian drones, in quantity and impact. Russian drone production facilities in Kazan are expanding. The best of Ukrainian forces is said to be being transitioned to the Sumy region, which is critical to the defense of Kiev, which is likely to be Zelenskiy’s paramount concern.

Rumors – fed both by a recent story by Seymour Hersh and by a Russian intelligence statement – are swirling of destabilization in Kiev and the possible overthrow of Zelenskiy in favor of General Zaluzhnyi, currently Ukrainian ambassador to the UK. Such a development, long anticipated, in itself means little. The installation of a new President by coup would simply replace on illegitimate leader, Zelenskiy, with an even more illegitimate leader. The new leader would still be accountable to the kinds of western intelligence, Banderite militia and comparable sources of pressure against making considerable concessions to Russia’s demands as articulated by Putin in July of 2024, and there are few indications to suggest that those demands will be reduced any time soon – quite to the contrary, they will have increased in line with military advances – I dont expect to see Russia give up any territory.

We wait to see whether Trump will move, as he has threatened, to impose further sanctions on Russia, and on the major clients for Russian oil (China, India, Turkey). Russia and China have made it clear that they will not be intimidated. Trump had already been talking about imposing 25% tariffs on India; India has expressed exasperation with US negotiators and their terms and will almost certainly be enraged if Trump now imposes further heavy sanctions on them for their purchase of Russian oil, especially if they end up being charged more than China.

Predictably, the price of oil is rising. Europe, along with being subjected to tariffs of 15% are also committed to spending $750 billion on US LNG (even though there are insufficient European ports available for processing LNG), thus increasing their dependence on US oil very considerably). This will place additional strain on US production and US prices at a time when many experts believe that peak shale oil production in the US has passed and that from now the amount of available oil will be in decline.

On the Middle East, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said that the UK will join France in recognizing a Palestinian state in September if there is no ceasefire agreed by that time. This makes the question of an absolute – the right to national recognition – conditional on what another state, Israel, does or does not do. In reality of course, the UK has more responsibility (yes, OK, it is complicated) than other nation for the original creation of Israel in 1947 (not accompanied, note, by a UN insistence on nation for Palestine) and for the civilizational injustice to the Palestinians that has resulted and is now made egregiously worse as a result of the genocide, a process to which the UK has contributed by its disastrous loyalty to Netanyahu, its direct complicity in making its Cyprus base available for Israeli planes and its transfer of intelligence about Gaza collected by the RAF to Israel. And in so many other ways.

Elsewhere in West Asia, there is growing confirmation that proposed US long lease of the Zangezur corridor in Armenia, along Iran’s border, between Turkey and Azerbaijan, is indeed intended to be a new and significant front in the West’s long-term aim to surround Iran and Russia, perhaps igniting a conflict no less threatening than the West’s proxy war with Russia over Ukraine. The corridor will greatly facilitate the possibility of transfers of military personnel and materiel right to Iran, where Iran must rightly be concerned about the loyalty of its 20 million Azeris in its north even as it continues to send back to Afghanistan a potential four or more million undocumented Afghans, under national conditions of increasing temperatures and water shortage.

Meanwhile to the south and west of Iran the destabilization and possibly ultimately balkanization of Syria is in rapid progress. We learn today that the horrific and brutal slaughter of Druze in the southeast of Syria was the result of a carefully planned joint operation between Israel and the terrorist and illegal HTS regime in Damascus in which the Kurdish SDF also participated alongside HTS forces in a bid, among other things, to consolidate Israeli control over southern Syria and to create a direct line of progress for Israel toward northern Syria and eastwards into Iraq. The US and Israel continue to intimidate the government of Lebanon to crush the country’s major force for civil order, Hezbollah.

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 6/7/25

Brian McDonald is an Irish journalist based in Russia for many years. Writing about politics, sports and culture.

You’ve seen the line before. Usually delivered with blue-check sneer: “Russia’s GDP is smaller than Texas.” Or Italy. Or Belgium and the Netherlands combined. This week, it’s Spain and Portugal.

As if geopolitics were a pub quiz and nominal GDP the mic drop.

It’s nonsense. Lazy nonsense chasing engagement from the prejudiced and poorly informed—and the kind of barstool analysis that’s fuelled decades of failed Western policy on Russia.

You can forgive X for favouring punchlines over substance. But when this thinking seeps into diplomatic briefs, “expert” commentary, or editorial pages, the damage is real. Russia becomes a caricature: a “gas station with nukes,” a fading petrostate ripe for sanctions and collapse. And we wonder why each new round of economic war fails to crack the Kremlin.

Here’s the truth: if you want to gauge the scale and resilience of Russia’s economy, you need more than exchange-rate illusions and a glance at the oil ticker. Nominal GDP is a crude lens—distorted by sanctions, currency manipulation, capital controls, and the whims of global markets. It tells you what a bank in Zurich might see—not what Russia can actually do.

Measured by nominal GDP—using current exchange rates—Russia does rank lower than many Western economies. Even trailing Texas. But this isn’t just misleading—it’s economically meaningless.

Exchange rates are volatile and don’t reflect real productivity. In Russia’s case, the ruble is distorted by sanctions, oil fluctuations, and heavy state management. Comparing that to the euro or dollar is like comparing pineapples to hand grenades.

In order to understand Russia’s real weight, look at Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which adjusts for local prices and actual living costs. A ruble may not go far in Paris, but in Kazan or Yekaterinburg, it stretches much further.

Russia’s economy was worth over $6.9 trillion in 2024 (IMF) in PPP terms. The fourth-largest in the world—ahead of Japan and Germany.

Now let’s look at the week’s favourite punchline, and compare it to Spain ($2.74 trillion) and Portugal ($0.51 trillion). That’s a combined $3.25 trillion.

Russia’s economy, even just on official numbers, is more than twice that size. Not a little bigger—double. That’s a gulf, not a rounding error.

And those are just the numbers we count.

The irony is that Russia’s real economy might be even larger, while Spain and Portugal’s might be smaller. Why? Because of what each includes in its GDP.

In the EU, national accounts include estimates for drug sales, prostitution, and other “non-observed” activities. Eurostat mandates this. Even if a country doesn’t legalise them, statistical agencies estimate their value and add them in.

Russia doesn’t. It leaves out vast swathes of the informal economy—under-the-table wages, grey-market services, barter, unregistered small business, and rural trade. Entire segments of economic life, particularly outside the big cities, simply go uncounted.

So we end up comparing apples padded with cocaine and brothel receipts to potatoes traded for firewood. No wonder the numbers look strange.

This isn’t a moral critique. It’s a statistical one. And when people glibly claim “Russia’s economy is the size of Spain and Portugal,” they’re peddling fiction dressed up as fact.

None of this is to say Russia is an economic superpower. It’s not. It faces real challenges—demographics, investment, capital flight, a tech gap. But it’s also a globally significant economy with vast resources, strategic industries, and real industrial capacity.

It builds jets, icebreakers, submarines, nuclear plants. It feeds itself. It fuels half of Eurasia.

Dismissing that with a GDP soundbite isn’t analysis. It’s self-soothing. And it leads to bad policy.

Russia is not Spain and Portugal. It’s Russia. And we’d do well to treat it accordingly.

By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 7/14/25

All my investigations are free to read, thanks to the enormous generosity of my readers. Independent journalism nonetheless requires investment, so if you value this article or any others, please consider sharing, or even becoming a paid subscriber. Your support is always gratefully received, and will never be forgotten. To buy me a coffee or two, please click this link.

On July 5th, Bloomberg reported that a BlackRock-administered multibillion-dollar fund for Kiev’s reconstruction, due to be unveiled at a dedicated Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome July 10th/11th, had been placed on hold at the start of 2025 “due to a lack of interest” among institutional, private, and state financiers. The summit is over, lack of investor enthusiasm persists, and “the project’s future is now uncertain.” It’s just the latest confirmation the West’s long-running mission to carve up Ukraine for profit verges on total disintegration.

BlackRock’s Ukraine Development Fund has been in the works since May 2023. It was originally envisaged as one of the most ambitious public-private finance collaborations in history, which would rival Washington’s Marshall Plan that rebuilt – and heavily indebted – Western Europe in World War II’s wake. With vast returns promised, initially investors were reportedly “ready to plow funds” into the endeavour, due to widespread optimism Kiev’s much-hyped “counteroffensive” later that year “might end the war quickly.”

In the event, the counteroffensive was an unmitigated disaster. Ukraine suffered up to 100,000 casualties, with much of its arsenal of Western-supplied armour, vehicles and weapons obliterated, in return for recapturing just 0.25% of the territory occupied by Russia in the proxy war’s initial phases. As BlackRock vice chair Philipp Hildebrand explained, the results killed off investor exuberance, as they required “the cessation of hostilities, or at the very least a perspective for peace.” Concerns about Ukraine’s ever-reducing skilled workforce were also widespread.

Fast forward to today, and there is no indication of any peace deal on the horizon, Russia is rapidly advancing across multiple fronts, and the Ukrainian government estimates the country has lost around 40% of its working-age population due to the proxy war. No wonder BlackRock’s Development Fund has failed to attract a single dollar. Quite what will remain of Ukraine when the conflict is over, and whether any financial returns can be gleaned from its ruins, are open, grave questions.

The collapse of BlackRock’s Ukraine Development Fund is not only a microcosm of the impending, inevitable defeat of Kiev and its overseas puppetmasters in Donbass. It also reflects the death of the dream of breaking apart Ukraine’s industries and resources to untrammelled rape and pillage, long-held by Western corporations, oligarchs, and governments. Planning for this eventuality dates back to the country’s 1991 independence, producing concrete results following the 2014 Western-orchestrated Maidan coup, and becoming turbocharged once all-out proxy war erupted in February 2022.

‘Investment Climate’

From the start of 2013, Western corporations began moving en masse to buy up Ukraine wholesale. It was widely expected Kiev would that year enter into an “association agreement” with the EU, facilitating privatisation, and tearing up of longstanding laws restricting foreign purchase and ownership of the country’s untold agricultural riches. The former “breadbasket of the Soviet Union” is home to the equivalent of one third of the EU’s total arable land, and projected profits were voluminous.

That January, Anglo-Dutch MI6-linked energy giant Shell signed a 50-year deal with the Ukrainian government to explore and drill for natural gas via fracking in areas of Donetsk and Kharkov “believed to hold substantial natural gas.” Then, in May, notorious, now-defunct chemical giant Monsanto announced plans to invest $140 million in constructing a corn seed plant in the country’s agricultural heartlands. The company was a founding member of the US-Ukraine Business Council, established in October 1995 to “improve” Kiev’s “investment climate.”

USUBC’s treasurer was and remains David Kramer, who during Maidan also served as president of Freedom House, a National Endowment for Democracy division. NED was avowedly founded by the CIA to do publicly what the Agency historically did publicly. The Endowment and Freedom House were responsible for Ukraine’s 2004 “Orange Revolution”, which brought pro-Western puppet Viktor Yushchenko to power. He immediately implemented deeply unpopular neoliberal economic reforms, including slashing regulations and social spending. Yushchenko was voted out in 2010, securing just 5% of the vote. 

Following Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s rejection of the EU association agreement in favour of a more advantageous deal offered by Russia in November 2013, the mass Maidan protests in Kiev were ignited by NED-affiliated actors, and fascist agitators. They raged until late February 2014, when Yanukovych fled the country. In the intervening time, Ukraine was plunged into total chaos – yet, firms associated with USUBC weren’t deterred. Many, including major companies with representatives on the organisation’s executive committee, continued making sizeable investments in Ukraine throughout.

Their undimmed enthusiasm may be explained by David Kramer being an alumni of Project for the New American Century, a neoconservative think tank widely credited with masterminding the Bush administration’s “War on Terror”. The organisation’s cofounder Robert Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, at this time the State Department’s point person on Ukraine. She visited Kiev repeatedly during the Maidan “revolution”, and hand-picked Yanukovych’s replacement interim government. Nuland was thus well-placed to know USUBC member investments in Ukraine would be safe long-term.

‘Trade Opportunities’

Nuland’s fascist interim government was replaced in June 2014 by an administration led by far-right Petro Poroshenko, who stood on an explicit platform of privatising state industries. The President passed legislation enabling this in March 2016. Two years later, his government adopted sweeping laws to further facilitate the auctioning off of Kiev’s public assets and industry to foreign actors. However, a moratorium on private sale of arable land, imposed in 2001, remained in place. No matter – in August 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ruled this was illegal.

There was still one problem, though. Opinion polls consistently showed Ukrainian citizens overwhelmingly rejected privatisation, and the sale of their country’s agricultural land to overseas buyers. As luck would have it, the proxy war’s eruption, and imposition of martial law, allowed for industrial scale trampling by Volodomyr Zelensky’s government over public opinion, and political opposition. Throughout 2022, a series of controversial laws intended to “make privatization as easy as possible for foreign investors” were passed without hindrance.

In the process, close to 1,000 nationalised enterprises were offered up for overseas sale, and auctions for purchase of these entities “under simplified terms” convened. The next year, these efforts intensified, with further legislation enacted enabling “large-scale privatisation of state assets and state companies.” This was reportedly motivated by “the attractiveness” of Ukraine’s “large state assets to institutional investors.” They included an Odessa-based ammonia factory, major mining and chemical firms, one of the country’s leading power generators, and a producer of high-quality titanium products.

Encouraged by the West’s reception to these moves, in July 2024 Kiev announced a dedicated “Large-Scale Privatisation” plan, with yet more prize assets under the hammer. Little wonder two months later, a British Foreign Office briefing document openly acknowledged it viewed “the invasion not only as a crisis, but also as an opportunity.” London’s primary economic aid project in Ukraine is explicitly concerned with ensuring the country “adopts and implements economic reforms that create a more inclusive economy, enhancing trade opportunities with the UK.”

The previous January, the World Economic Forum’s annual congress was convened in Davos, Switzerland. The proxy war, and Kiev’s economic future, loomed large on the event’s agenda. Its centrepiece was a breakout breakfast attended by political leaders and business bigwigs, where Zelensky appeared via videolink. The President thanked “giants of the international financial and investment world,” including BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and JP Morgan, for buying up his country’s assets during wartime. He boldly promised, “everyone can become a big business by working with Ukraine.”

Subsequently, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink pledged to coordinate billions of dollars in reconstruction financing for Kiev, forecasting the country would become a “beacon of capitalism” resultantly. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs chief David Solomon spoke with intense optimism about Kiev’s post-war future, and the gains his firm and other major Western financial institutions would reap. “There is no question that as you rebuild, there will be good economic incentives for real return and real investment,” he crowed.

Zelensky spoke at multiple events held in Davos over the five-day-long conference’s course, where pro-Kiev sentiment was reportedly “overwhelming”. The President spoke of recapturing Crimea, and demanded attendees “give us your weapons.” His audiences were invariably highly receptive. On one panel, Boris Johnson, who personally sabotaged fruitful peace talks between Kiev and Moscow in April 2022, urged Zelensky be provided “the tools he needs to finish the job.” The disgraced former British Prime Minister boomed, “Give them the tanks! There’s absolutely nothing to be lost!”

In years to come, the January 2023 Davos summit may be viewed both as the high point of Ukraine’s proxy war effort, and roughly when everything began to spectacularly unravel. The desired weapons arrived in huge quantities, to no effect. Kiev’s three biggest military efforts since, all British-planned – that year’s counteroffensive, the Krynky incursion, and Kursk “counterinvasion” – were deeply costly cataclysms, leaving Ukraine undermanned and ill-equipped to fend off Russian advances. Countries that supplied munitions borderline disarmed themselves in the process.

The Ukraine Recovery Conference passed without much media interest, despite a literal red carpet being rolled out for Zelensky, and multiple senior EU officials – including Ursula von der Leyen – and European state leaders attending. It ended with vague commitments to drum up €10 billion in private sector investments for Ukraine. Evidently, Western ambitions of making a mint out of Kiev haven’t been fully jettisoned – even if the World Bank calculates the total cost of rebuilding the country to be $524 billion.

In a speech, von der Leyen pledged to support Ukraine “militarily, financially, and politically” for “as long as it takes.” Meanwhile, there is little indication that Britain has given up on making Kiev safe for neoliberalism and its own profit, despite London’s covert commitment to “keeping Ukraine fighting at all costs.” Of course, the longer the lost proxy war grinds on, the less Ukraine there will be to rebuild, and reap returns from. But apparently, this unambiguous reality is lost on the proxy war’s sponsors. God help us all.

---

By Chip Gibbons, The Dissenter, 7/22/25

The following article was originally published by Defending Rights and Dissent.

On the weekend of June 1, 2018, activists, academics, and writers gathered at John Jay College of Criminal Justice for the annual Left Forum conference. With roots in the Socialists Scholars Conference, Left Forum was regularly one of the largest gatherings of the U.S. left. The crowd of over a thousand people ranged from members of small, socialist sects hawking newspapers to academics presenting their latest scholarship. That year, Defending Rights & Dissent convened a panel on “Defending Dissent in the Age of Trump.” Also attending Left Forum that year, we can now report, were multiple Special Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, including FBI Unit Chief Andrew Thomas Mitchell.

The agents were there to attend a panel entitled “Russiagate and WikiLeaks.” The panel was organized by Randy Credico, a comedian and activist who hosted the radio programs “Live on the Fly” and “Assange Countdown to Freedom.” Other panelists included Dennis Bernstein, host of KPFK’s Flashpoints; Max Blumenthal, founder of the Grayzone; Anya Parampil, at the time with RT; and Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst turned peace activist. According to the copy of the Left Forum program retained by the FBI, Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, was supposed to speak as well. Defending Rights & Dissent reviewed a recording of the panel and Miller did not participate. 

The revelation that FBI agents surveilled the panel of journalists and activists stem from documents the FBI turned over to Defending Rights & Dissent as part of ongoing litigation under the Freedom of Information Act. The two-page document is an “FD-302,” a report used by FBI agents to document investigatory activity. These reports are most typically used to memorialize interviews.https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/26018095-fbi-fd-302-left-forum-russiagate-and-wikileaks/?embed=1

Since September 2024, Defending Rights & Dissent has been suing the FBI in order to compel them to turn over their files on WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange. Although the FD-302 is not labeled by investigation, all other files in the document set are part of the investigation titled “Roger J. Stone, Jr.; Foreign Agents Registration Act; Sensitive Investigative Matter.” 

Although the caption of the investigation mentions the Foreign Agent Registration Act, the opening communication makes clear that Stone was being investigated “in connection with his activities related to the unauthorized access of computer data belonging to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the unauthorized transmittal and disclosure of the data to persons not entitled to see it.” The FBI was investigating Stone’s prior knowledge of publications internal DNC emails by WikiLeaks and whether he had been in contact with Guccifier 2.0, a hacking group the U.S. government claims was a front for Russian intelligence.  

Other documents make clear Stone is being investigated under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as conspiracy and aiding and abetting statutes. There is no mention of Stone being an unregistered foreign agent. Ultimately, Stone was not charged under any of these statutes but instead was charged with obstruction of justice, making false statements to the FBI, and witness tampering. He was convicted in November 2019 but pardoned by Donald Trump the following year. The investigation was opened as a counterintelligence matter on July 25, 2017. Files obtained by Defending Rights & Dissent show that Peter Strzok, then Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division, approved the investigation.https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/26018100-roger-stone-investigation-opening-communication/?embed=1&title=1

Credico, who hosted the Left Forum panel, was accused of being Stone’s “back channel” to WikiLeaks. Credio was subpoenaed both by the House Intelligence Committee and by Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Under oath during Stone’s trial, Credico denied being a back channel. The comedian and radio host referenced the subpoena from the House Intelligence Committee during the panel discussion. He also said, “Stop giving [Roger Stone] any credibility. Just leave him out. Stop. He loves it. He’s eating it up. He had nothing to do with it at all. He insinuated himself into the story because he’s an egomaniac and Trump had dumped him and he wanted to get back in. So he went fishing. He came to me and I blew him off a bunch of times.”

Assuming this connection was what led FBI agents to attend the Left Forum panel, it is difficult to see any legitimate investigatory value to their actions. The two-page investigative report is mostly redacted, including what the agents made of the discussion. Unredacted text in the second paragraph reads, “The small classroom was packed with observers including people standing in the back, sitting on the floor, and peering in through the door. The panel lasted approximately 1 hour and 50 minutes. At the conclusion of the panel, [redacted].” The second page of the report appears to indicate that an unspecified individual was interviewed. It is unclear if the redacted text deals with the interview, a report of the panelists’ remarks, something else, or some combination thereof.

Defending Rights & Dissent reached out to panel organizer Randy Credico. He informed us that on that same day at Left Forum, he also performed a comedy set. After the set, “a young man and woman, who were dressed like Disney tourists, came up to me as I was walking alone and told me how much they loved the show.” As Credico was walking away, they revealed themselves to be FBI agents. After speaking with the agents for “a minute,” Credico put them on the phone with his attorney who made arrangements to speak with them at another date. It is likely this is the “interview” referenced in the FD-302.  

If the FBI’s goal was to interview Credico, why the FBI felt the need to attend both a panel of journalists and activists and comedy show before approaching him is unclear. The FBI’s actions in this case are chilling from the standpoint of First Amendment rights. Left Forum was a political conference, held at a college campus. By attending the panel, the FBI learned no information of utility to a criminal investigation into violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. But they did observe political speech. 

Although there are serious First Amendment implications to allowing the FBI to secretly attend a political panel, the Attorney General guidelines for FBI investigations considers information learned from observing an event open to the public to be “public information.” For decades, Defending Rights & Dissent and other civil libertarians warned the loose rules for attending public events opens the door to allowing the FBI to spy on First Amendment-protected activity. The files received in response to the Defending Rights & Dissent lawsuit are yet another documentation of their abusive nature.

Although the FBI spoke with Credico for about a minute before making arrangements with his lawyer, they sat through an entire panel during which speakers shared their dissenting views on U.S.-Russia relations and the Russiagate investigations. Panelists rejected the official explanation that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked by Russians or that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Many of their remarks were openly critical of the FBI, with McGovern criticizing Strzok by name. McGovern also stated that his criticism of Russiagate led people to believe he was pro-Trump, but he wasn’t. “Trump is the worst president of the United States ever had,” the former CIA analyst said. “But if you don’t have enough reason to get rid of him on all these other things, including the fact that my grandchildren, nine of them will not have clean air to breathe or clean water to drink when they’re my age, if you can’t get rid of this guy without a phony set up here like Russiagate then you know there’s no hope for you.” Other panelists echoed concerns that by focusing on Russiagate as opposed to other issues like the economy, Democrats were ineffective at resisting Trump. Bernstein criticized the disparate coverage between Russigate and the U.S.-backed Saudi war in Yemen, noting the country was on the brink of famine. 

Bernstein also criticized Rachel Maddow, noting that when it came to Russigate, “no minutiae escapes her.” “She loves Russiagate right. And she loves the collusion story. She loves that word collusion. Collusion and the Trump administration. Well, there was collusion,” the Flashpoints host said. “The collusion was between the emerging Trump administration and the Israelis to suppress a pro-Palestinian vote at the United Nations. That’s what we miss with this kind of horrific reporting.”

Ironically, Blumenthal warned that Russiagate would become a form of McCarthyism used against the left – a remark later confirmed by the presence of the FBI at the panel. At the end of the discussion, Credico asked each panelist to explain why WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are important. 

On top of the panelists’ remarks, audience members also made political comments during the question and answer session, unaware the FBI was quite literally watching and listening to them. All of this First Amendment-protected speech is unrelated to any legitimate law enforcement purpose. But it is precisely the type of speech the FBI has surveilled in the past. Having any government agent present and listening in on a political discussion has a chilling impact. That the FBI is a joint law enforcement and national security agency with a long history of spying on the First Amendment only compounds the chilling impact. 

Defending Rights & Dissent’s lawsuit against the FBI for their files on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange is ongoing.