By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 8/10/25

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On July 30th, the ODNI declassified damning evidence from a US intelligence community whistleblower. They attest to being aggressively – but unsuccessfully – pressured by superiors into signing off on the infamous 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment, which expressed “high confidence” Russia interfered in the previous year’s Presidential election to ensure Donald Trump’s victory. Their testimony indicates senior US spy agency officials not only well-knew the ICA’s findings were bogus, but consciously ignored and suppressed far more compelling evidence of widespread, non-Russian meddling in the vote.

The whistleblower is a US intelligence veteran who 2015 – 2020 served as Deputy National Intelligence Officer, at the ODNI-overseen National Intelligence Council. They specialised in “cyber issues”, including “cyber-enabled information operations”. Prior to the 2016 vote, they led the production of an ICA on “cyber threats” to US elections, at the order of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, for which they were “commended”. They were then tasked by the outgoing Obama administration to assist in the 2017 ICA’s production.

That Assessment purported to expose “Russian activities and intentions” in the Presidential election. The whistleblower’s role was to investigate alleged attempts by Moscow “to access US election-related infrastructure”, as “reporting suggested many Russia-attributed IP addresses were making connection attempts that the [US intelligence community] could not explain the purpose of.” However, an official – name redacted – subsequently “directed us to abandon any further study of the subject,” on the basis it was “something else.”

For the whistleblower, the “abrupt dismissal of the study effort” raised significant concerns about the true nature and source of the “Russia-attributed cyber activity.” They suspected their superiors were attempting to conceal how state or non-state actors closer to home may have been engaged in “Domain Name Service (DNS) record manipulation”, to falsely ascribe cyber meddling efforts to Moscow. Their anxieties only multiplied when superiors rebuffed their attempts to include references to “other nations’ efforts to influence the 2016 Presidential election” in the 2017 ICA.

The whistleblower’s “professional judgment…was multiple nations were seeking to shape the views of the US electorate,” and therefore influence their voting preferences. This assessment was based not only on relentless negative media coverage of Trump in allied countries – especially Britain, and other “NATO partners” – but the “interception of electronic communications from members of [Trump’s] incoming Presidential administration.” The source of this interception is redacted. So too is the identity of an official who repeatedly demanded the whistleblower conceal this from the National Security Council.

‘Tradecraft Standards’

The ICA’s release on January 6th 2017, 11 days prior to Trump’s inauguraration, ignited a media frenzy over the President-elect’s potential ties to Russia, and the Kremlin’s purported role in installing him in the White House. The New York Times dubbed the document a “damning and surprisingly detailed account” of Moscow’s “efforts to undermine the American electoral system.” The Washington Post boldly described it as “a remarkably blunt assessment”, and “extraordinary postmortem of a Russian assault on a pillar of American democracy.”

In reality, the ICA offered zero evidence to support any of its bombastic headline conclusions. This glaring deficit was justified on the basis “full supporting information on key elements of [Russia’s] influence campaign” was “highly classified”. Bizarrely, much of the Assessment’s content focused instead on the output of Russian media – both for domestic and international audiences – with no relevance whatsoever to the 2016 election. This included RT America coverage of topics including police brutality, fracking, and “alleged Wall Street greed.”

When the whistleblower learned the ICA was so heavily dependent on a “simplistic treatment” of “English language Russian media articles”, they expressed “substantial concern” over the “legitimacy” of the Assessment’s “analytic tradecraft”. They moreover “could not concur in good conscience based on information available,” and their “professional analytic judgement,” of a “decisive Russian preference” for Trump’s victory, as concluded by the ICA. The whistleblower thus refused to sign off on its findings.

This was not well-received by a senior US intelligence official, name redacted. Leading up to the ICA’s release, they sought to harass and suborn the whistleblower into endorsing the Assessment. After multiple failed attempts to bully the whistleblower to “abandon” their “tradecraft standards” and simply “trust” there was “reporting you are not allowed to see,” which “if you saw it, you would agree,” the official strongly implied the whistleblower’s subsequent promotion was contingent on their agreement.

When this approach didn’t work, the “visibly frustrated” official fulminated, “I need you to agree with these judgments, so that DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] will go along with them.” This prompted discussion between the pair about the DIA’s “supposed trust” in the whistleblower, and “the necessity” of them proving their “bona fides” as an intelligence community officer “by doing what it took to bring DIA on board as an additional [intelligence] Agency signing on to the 2017 ICA.”

Refusing to compromise on “standards, tradecraft, and ethics”, the whistleblower defied his superior’s direct order “to misrepresent my views to DIA.” While unexplored in the declassified file, the official’s desperation for the DIA to endorse the ICA is understandable. In September 2020, it was revealed the entire US intelligence community had no “confidence” in the Assessment. In fact, then-CIA director John Brennan personally wrote the report’s incendiary conclusions, before selecting a coterie of his close Agency confidantes to sign off.

Many US intelligence analysts conversely assessed Russia favoured Hillary Clinton’s victory, and viewed Trump as a potentially dangerous “wild card”. As such, creating the false impression of US intelligence community unanimity over Brennan’s concocted conclusion was of paramount importance to the CIA chief. In the end, only the Agency, FBI, and NSA publicly endorsed the ICA’s findings. Even then, the NSA – which closely monitors communications of Russian officials, and could therefore detect any high-level discussions about the 2016 election in Moscow – merely expressed “moderate confidence”.

‘Something Else’

The whistleblower was surprised the FBI expressed “high confidence” in the 2017 ICA. They were aware “as recently as September 2016,” the Bureau “pushed back” against suggestions “of Russian intent to influence” the Presidential election, believing “such a judgement would be misleading.” The whistleblower notes the FBI “altered its positions…without any new data other than the election’s unexpected result [emphasis added] and public speculation Russia had ‘hacked’ the vote – a scenario [US intelligence] judged simply did not occur.”

They were furthermore shocked to learn years later disgraced former MI6 spy Christopher Steele’s ‘Trump-Russia’ dossier was a core component of the “highly classified” material, upon which the ICA’s dynamite conclusions heavily relied. It was their understanding the ODNI viewed the dossier at the time “as non-credible sensationalism”, the Office’s chief James Clapper considered it “untrustworthy”, and Steele’s ludicrous claims “had never been taken seriously” by US intelligence more widely.

The whistleblower’s grave, myriad qualms about the Assessment’s construction led them to approach a variety of US government oversight agencies, including the Intelligence Community Inspector General, with what they knew. Despite receiving acknowledgement they “had witnessed malfeasance”, the whistleblower was stonewalled, and their evidence never appears to have reached any relevant authority, let alone been acted upon. Given the explosive nature of the whistleblower’s insider testimony, ominous questions abound over why they encountered such resistance – and where the non-Russian interference they identified truly emanated from.

The whistleblower’s account of being tasked to investigate alleged Russian hacking of “election-related infrastructure” the US intelligence community found inexplicable, only to be told to leave it alone as it was “something else”, is particularly striking. There are several explanations for this activity, all of which point to concerted attempts to falsely concoct the narrative of Russian election interference for malign purposes. For example, in September 2016, Hillary Clinton-connected lawyer Michael Sussmann approached the FBI, claiming to possess explosive evidence of Trump’s collusion with Moscow.

The material comprised DNS logs, supposedly indicating the Trump Organization used a secret server belonging to Russia’s Alfa Bank for back-channel communications with the Kremlin. This was fed to the media, and excitedly reported by certain liberal outlets prior to the election. However, The Intercept rubbished the trove, given the DNS records supplied couldn’t “prove anything at all, and certainly not ‘communication’ between Trump and Alfa.” In sum, “no one…can show that a single message was exchanged between Trump and Alfa.”

An alternative may be the Department of Homeland Security was responsible for targeting election infrastructure. In December 2016, The Wall Street Journal reported an attempted hack into the state of Georgia’s voter registration database traced back to a DHS IP address. The incursion came at a time the Department was lobbying for election systems to be regarded as “critical infrastructure”, therefore making their protection part of the agency’s formal purview.

On January 6th 2017, the same day the ICA dropped, DHS secretary Jeh Johnson jubilantly announced he had designated “election infrastructure” part of the agency’s already vast domestic spying remit. He acknowledged “many state and local election officials…are opposed to this designation.” It was certainly a good day to bury bad news. And assist the CIA and Clinton campaign in furthering nonsense conspiracy theories about Russian attempts to “hack” the 2016 Presidential election, therefore hopefully invalidating its “unexpected result”.

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By Julie Hollar, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), 7/29/25

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Even as media report more regularly on starvation in Gaza, coverage still tends to obscure responsibility—as with this CNN headline (7/26/25) blaming the baby’s death on the “starvation crisis” rather than on the US-backed Israeli government.

The headlines are increasingly dire.

• “Child Dies of Malnutrition as Starvation in Gaza Grows” (CNN, 7/21/25)
• “More Than 100 Aid Groups Warn of Starvation in Gaza as Israeli Strikes Kill 29, Officials Say” (AP, 7/23/25)
• “No Formula, No Food: Mothers and Babies Starve Together in Gaza” (NBC, 7/25/25)
• “Five-Month-Old Baby Dies in Mother’s Arms in Gaza, a New Victim of Escalating Starvation Crisis” (CNN, 7/26/25)
• “Gaza’s Children Are Looking Through Trash to Avoid Starving” (New York, 7/28/25)

This media coverage is urgent and necessary—and criminally late.

Devastatingly late to care

An informative Wall Street Journal chart (7/27/25) shows the complete cutoff of food into Gaza at the beginning of 2025—a genocidal policy decision by Israel that was not accompanied by increased coverage in US media of famine in the Strip.

Since the October 7 attacks, Israel has severely restricted humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, using starvation of civilians as a tool of war, a war crime for which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Yoav Gallant have been charged by the International Criminal Court. Gallant proclaimed a “complete siege” of Gaza on October 9, 2023: “There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.”

Aid groups warned of famine conditions in parts of Gaza as early as December 2023. By April 2024, USAID administrator Samantha Power (CNN, 4/11/24) found it “likely that parts of Gaza, and particularly northern Gaza, are already experiencing famine.”

A modest increase in food aid was allowed into the Strip during a ceasefire in early 2025. But on March 2, 2025, Netanyahu announced a complete blockade on the occupied territory. Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir declared that there was “no reason for a gram of food or aid to enter Gaza.”

After more than two months of a total blockade, Israel on May 19 began allowing in a trickle of aid through US/Israeli “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” (GHF) centers (FAIR.org, 6/6/25)—while targeting with snipers those who came for it—but it is not anywhere near enough, and the population in Gaza is now on the brink of mass death, experts warn. According to UNICEF (7/27/25):

The entire population of over 2 million people in Gaza is severely food insecure. One out of every three people has not eaten for days, and 80% of all reported deaths by starvation are children.

According to the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 147 Gazans have died from malnutrition since the start of Israel’s post–October 7 assault. Most have been in the past few weeks.

Mainstream politicians are finally starting to speak out—even Donald Trump has acknowledged “real starvation” in Gaza—but as critical observers have pointed out, it is devastatingly late to begin to profess concern. Jack Mirkinson’s Discourse Blog (7/28/25) quoted Refugees International president Jeremy Konyndyk:

I fear that starvation in Gaza has now passed the tipping point and we are going to see mass-scale starvation mortality…. Once a famine gathers momentum, the effort required to contain it increases exponentially. It would now take an overwhelmingly large aid operation to reverse the coming wave of mortality, and it would take months.

And there are long-term, permanent health consequences to famine, even when lives are saved (NPR, 7/29/25). Mirkinson lambasted leaders like Cory Booker and Hillary Clinton for failing to speak up before now: “It is too late for them to wash the blood from their hands.”

Barely newsworthy

Major US media, likewise, bear a share of responsibility for the hunger-related deaths in Gaza. The conditions of famine have been out in the open for well over a year, and yet it was considered barely newsworthy in US news media.

A MediaCloud search of online US news reports mentioning “Gaza” and either “famine” or “starvation” shows that since Netanyahu’s March 2 announcement of a total blockade—which could only mean rapidly increasing famine conditions—there was a brief blip of media attention, and then even less news coverage than usual for the rest of March and April. Media attention rose modestly in May, at a time when the world body that classifies famines announced in May that one in five people in Gaza were “likely to face starvation between May 11 and September 30″—in other words, that flooding Gaza with aid was of the highest urgency.

But as aid continued to be held up, and Gazans were shot by Israeli snipers when attempting to retrieve the little offered them, that coverage eventually dwindled, until the current spike that began on July 21.

FAIR (e.g., 3/22/24, 4/25/25, 5/16/25, 5/16/25) has repeatedly criticized US media for  coverage that largely absolves Israel of responsibility for its policy of forced starvation—what Human Rights Watch (5/15/25) called “a tool of extermination”—implemented with the backing of the US government.

The current headlines reveal that the coverage still largely diverts attention from Israeli (let alone US) responsibility, but it’s a positive development that major US news media are beginning to devote serious coverage to the issue. Imagine how different this all could have looked had they given it the attention it has warranted, and the accountability it has demanded, when alarms were first raised.

FAIR’s work is sustained by our generous contributors, who allow us to remain independent. Donate today to be a part of this important mission.

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By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 8/22/25

Reuters reported on Thursday that Russia’s demands for a peace deal in Ukraine include Ukrainian forces withdrawing from the Donbas, a guarantee that Ukraine won’t join NATO, and for Ukraine to keep Western troops out of the country.

Russian sources told Reuters that Putin had compromised on his initial conditions, which included the Ukrainian withdrawal from the territory in the southern Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts. Under the current offer, Russia is willing to freeze the lines there and also return small amounts of territory it controls in Kharkiv, Sumy, and Dnipropetrovsk.

For his part, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has publicly rejected the idea of ceding the territory Ukrainian forces still control in the Donbas, and European leaders appear to be backing his position.

When it comes to NATO, the Reuters report said that Moscow is seeking a legally binding pledge from the alliance that it wouldn’t move further eastwards. A guarantee that Ukraine wouldn’t join NATO was one of Russia’s main demands to avoid the invasion, but the Biden administration refused to engage on the issue.

While the Trump administration has ruled out the idea of Ukraine joining NATO as part of a potential peace deal, the alliance’s leadership is still insisting on its “open door” policy. NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte said this week that Ukraine is on an “irreversible path” to NATO membership.

Russia’s other condition is related to the security guarantees for Ukraine that are being discussed by the US and its European allies, who are insisting on some sort of arrangement where European troops are deployed to Ukraine and backed by US air power. But Russia has made clear repeatedly that the idea is completely unacceptable, and the insistence on it could tank the peace process.

Sources speaking to Reuters floated the idea of some kind of three way deal between the US, Russia, and Ukraine on security guarantees or revisiting an idea from short-lived peace talks in 2022 that would have involved the five permanent members of the UN Security Council providing the guarantees, which was also brought up by Russian Foreign Minsiter Sergey Lavrov on Wednesday.

While Russia continues to engage in negotiations, it has also made clear that it’s willing to continue the war if its conditions aren’t met. “There are two choices: war or peace, and if there is no peace, then there is more war,” one of the sources told Reuters.

Dave DeCamp is the news editor of Antiwar.com, follow him on Twitter @decampdave.

***

Hopes Fade on ‘Breakthrough’ in Ukraine Talks, Russia Keeps Gaining Land

Russia Matters, 8/22/25

Despite the past week’s initial hopes that Donald Trump’s subsequent meetings with Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders would advance talks on the Ukraine conflict toward a breakthrough, the negotiations on the subject remained riddled with contradictions and stalled outcomes as of Aug. 22. For instance, Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff claimed Putin was amenable to “Article 5-like” guarantees for Kyiv, yet Russia’s top diplomat Sergei Lavrov insisted Moscow must hold veto power over any guarantees, suggesting that the P5 should provide them. Lavrov also discouraged Trump’s public hopes for quickly organizing a Zelenskyy-Putin summit, making clear Russia would presently agree to negotiate only at levels lower than heads of states. Meanwhile, European leaders flatly rejected giving Russia the veto on security guarantees, while Zelenskyy also ruled out China as a postwar security guarantor. It remains unclear whether and how these differences¹ can be reconciled.

In the period of July 22–Aug. 19, Russian forces gained 237 square miles of Ukrainian territory, which marks a 2% decrease from the 241 square miles these forces gained in the period of July 15–Aug. 12, 2025, according to the latest issue of RM’s The Russia-Ukraine War Report Card. Comparing shorter periods, such as the past week to the preceding week, shows that in the period of Aug. 12–19, 2025, Russia gained 25 square miles of Ukrainian territory (roughly one Manhattan island), which marks a 67% decrease from the 76 square miles Russian forces gained in the period of Aug. 5–12, 2025. One of the reasons Russia has been able to make gains every week² is that it has more personnel than Ukraine to employ in combat. “Today, Russia recruits about 1,000 soldiers a day,” which is “about twice as high as Ukraine’s” recruitment, according to The New York Times.*

A map that Trump showed to Zelenskyy during their Aug. 18 meeting indicates that Russian forces control 99% of the Luhansk region and 76% of the Donetsk region, which together constitute Donbass. U.S. intelligence estimates on whether and when Russia could take the rest of Donbass vary. “One assessment posits that Putin could seize all of Donetsk by October. Another predicts a far harder and inconclusive slog,“ according to Axios.

Russia has more than doubled the number of missiles and drones it has fired monthly into Ukraine since January, according to the Wall Street Journal. Most recently, the night of Aug. 20 to 21 saw Russia launch the third largest strike of the war, launching 574 drones and 40 missiles against 11 locations in Ukraine, according to ISW. The number of Russian long-distance strikes can be expected to increase further, and it is likely that more of them will reach targets in Ukraine as Russian drone and missile production increases (in fact, Russia may soon fire 2,000 drones a day), further attriting Ukraine’s already strained air defenses.³

India is under increasing pressure from the Trump administration over its continued purchases of Russian oil, with White House trade adviser Peter Navarro expecting punitive tariffs of 50% on imports from the South Asian nation to kick in next week. But is such pressure justified or are the Indian leaders right to complain about “double standards in Washington, which continues to buy Russian uranium hexafluoride, and in the EU, which remains a key buyer of Russian liquefied natural gas,” as the Wall Street Journal reported? Here are three facts which may help you decide if Indian leaders have a point: First, the U.S. continues to import enriched uranium from Russia. In fact, in 2024, the U.S. imported $624 million worth of Russian HEU, according to Comtrade’s international trade data. Second, the U.S. imported $1.3 billion of fertilizers from Russia, according to the New York Times. Third, Russia was the second largest source of gas imported by the European Union in 2024, with Russian supplies to the EU increasing by 18% that year. The EU also purchased $8.5 billion worth of LNG from Russia that year, according to CREA and The Economic Times.

***

US Approves European-Funded Long-Range Cruise Missile Deal for Ukraine

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 8/25/25

The Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday that the US has approved a deal that will arm Ukraine with thousands of Extended Range Attack Munition (ERAM) air-launched missiles, which have a significantly further range than other missiles that the US has sent into the proxy war.

Two US officials told the Journal that the ERAMs can hit targets up to 280 miles away, nearly 100 miles further than the range of the Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), munitions the US began providing Ukraine in 2023.

The deal will provide Ukraine with 3,350 ERAMs as part of an $850 million weapons package that will mostly be funded by European countries. This year, NATO began a new scheme to provide Ukraine with more US weapons in deals funded by other NATO allies, known as the Prioritized Ukraine Requirements List (PURL) initiative.

The ERAMs are expected to arrive in Ukraine within six weeks, and the US officials said that the Ukrainian military will need Pentagon approval to use them.

The Journal report said that the Trump administration had been quietly blocking ATACMS strikes on Russian territory, which the Biden administration first greenlit toward the end of 2024. At the time, the US-backed ATACMS strikes marked a significant escalation of the proxy war, and Moscow responded by altering its nuclear doctrine to lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons.

The Journal report said that the Trump administration hasn’t allowed any Ukrainian ATACMS strikes on Russian territory since late spring, but the ERAMs deal signals that the US may be prepared to support missile attacks inside Russia once again. The news comes as there has been little progress toward a peace deal following the summit between President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

CCI posted this article in its entirety with the permission of the author.

By Gilbert Doctorow, Center for Citizen Initiatives, 8/7/25

Today’s European media carry the story of the agreement on tariffs that Ursula von der Leyen reached with Donald Trump at their Scotland meeting. In France, we hear that not only Marine Le Pen, on the Right, but Emmanuel Macron’s Centrist prime minister Francois Bayrou denounced the agreement, suggesting that France will oppose ratification. German chancellor Friedrich Merz called it ‘a black day for Europe’ but hinted that he will reluctantly back the agreement as the best that could be achieved under the circumstances.

Today’s leading French-language daily in Belgium Le Soir carried a front page editorial on the subject. It stated openly that this trade deal will greatly damage national economies across Europe which are already experiencing stagnation for more than two years. They predict that large flows of investment will now be directed by European manufacturers to the United States, meaning that jobs will be created there while they are lost here. They place the blame for the unequal relations with the USA which made it possible for Trump to win the tariff war on Europe’s excessive dependence on exports to maintain growth instead of promoting domestic demand. However, the editors willfully ignore the reality that the Chinese economy is also export driven and is doing very nicely, with more than 5% annual GDP growth.

The editorial board makes no mention of the way the trade deal ensures that European goods will be uncompetitive on world markets for years to come by obliging the EU to purchase still greater quantities of American gas and oil. If the deindustrialization of the German economy can be attributed to any single factor today it is precisely the switch from cheap Russian pipeline gas for very expensive LNG gas from the United States, Qatar and other global suppliers.

The Soir editorial notes that part of the logic in agreeing to Trump’s trade terms was to keep the American president engaged with them. Engaged over what? The editorial gives a slight hint at what I see also in other European media: that the engagement is over continued military and financial support to Ukraine in its war with Russia. There, indeed, is the key to understanding how and why European economic sovereignty is being sacrificed with only a few tears shed.

Note the disappearance from European media of their recent gloating over an imagined U.S. brain drain to these shores as American professors seek to immigrate to Europe in protest over Trump’s threats to university independence.

We cannot be certain that von der Leyen will triumph over all the objectors to what she has agreed with Trump. However, the objectors may be bought off by some small corrections to her deal at the margins. France, for example, may get a better tariff on its champagne and Bordeaux wines.

In an essay on these pages a few days ago, I referred to my recommendation to Europe’s leaders 10 years ago when they were first seriously discussing creating a European army: “what Europe needs is not a new army but a new foreign policy.” The same kind of recommendation is in order today: “what Europe needs is not stimulus to domestic consumption to bring back growth but a new foreign policy.”

The new foreign policy must be based first on a glance at the map, at who is Europe’s big neighbor to the East.

Russia happens to be a nuclear super power that is fast becoming a conventional weapons super power while also becoming a major global economic force. Russia in the last year roared past Germany to become Europe’s largest economy and the fourth largest economy in the world. Common sense and a Realist approach to the conduct of international affairs dictate that some accommodation has to be sought with that neighbor rather than the ongoing policy of building barbed wire and 4 meter high concrete barriers against the neighbor with whom you do not deign to talk and allocating hundreds of billions of euros to expanding European production of tanks, armored personnel carriers, missiles, drones and air defense units.

I have been rereading my notes on a very interesting conference in Varna, Bulgaria that I attended ten years ago. The sponsor was the Bulgarian office of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the think tank of the SPD, the Social Democrats of Germany. The keynote address was delivered by a certain Hannes Swoboda, an Austrian Member of the European Parliament who had for 3 years been chaired the bloc of Socialists and Democrats, the second largest group of deputies in the Parliament. Swoboda was no apologist for Putin, but he told us all that Europe had to rethink how it deals with Russia. The values based approach to international dealings is fine within the European Union, he said. Each Member State can and should intervene in the internal affairs of other Member States when they violate shared values. But de facto, Europe practiced Realpolitik in its dealings with many countries around the world, for example the Gulf States. Why, he asked, cannot the same common sense approach be applied to its relations with Russia instead of the hectoring, the attempts to punish and isolate Russia for not living up to Europe’s values?

Why indeed?

The fact of the matter today is that Mr Trump’s USA is showing in every way that it is no friend of Europe, that it sees Europe as a geopolitical and economic competitor and will do anything to trip up European ambitions in both sectors.

Today’s European presidents and prime ministers who do not respond to this threat from the USA and do not respond to the opportunity for advantageous trading relations with Russia to obtain, as in the past, critical raw materials at prices that are affordable, such ‘leaders’ are enemies of their own peoples and should be voted out of office or impeached at the earliest opportunity.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 8/21/25

By the time Michael McFaul gets round to flogging his latest volume (Autocrats vs. Democrats), the title alone has already done the heavy lifting for him. It’s the sort of binary that reads well on a publisher’s spring list, even if it crumbles like a cheap biscuit once it meets reality. And his insistence that Vladimir Putin is some kind of messianic ideologue is a fine example of this; neat for a blurb, but hopeless for a diagnosis.

It also confirms the notion that he’s become a Walmart Anne Applebaum. A cheap tribute act to a veteran master of calculated myopia on Moscow and beyond.

If Putin has a guiding star, it isn’t some grand creed stretching from the Neva to the Urals. Rather it’s much simpler, and tougher to blunt: let’s call it Russia first. The rest (Orthodoxy, talk of “values,” the occasional flirt with tradition) is merely paint on the bonnet. Underneath, the engine is all about survival and jockeying for advantage. Of course, there’s an ideological patina; the essays about the ‘Russian world,’ and the talk of civilisational clashes with the West. But these serve more as instruments than ends, leading a vocabulary of legitimacy rather than a vision to die for.

He picked it up in the wreckage of the Soviet Union, as he watched a superpower bleed out with shelves bare, figures fiddled and whole ministries running on lies. And then the humiliation of its grandees or their families heading west with their bags packed. The truth was hammered home: any faith that leaves your own pensioners hungry while you keep Cuba on the drip is a form of suicide.

And he saw the other imperial capital crack too, with misguided adventures in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan leaving Washington’s sermons of democracy turned to rubble. Of course, hubris can rot a state faster than any tank battalion.

When Joe Biden decided to hold his grand “Summit for Democracy” in 2021 and pointedly left out allies like Hungary, Putin will have seen it for what it was: an attempt to sort the world into neat ideological blocs, as if Orban in Budapest and Merkel in Berlin were playing the same sport. The Soviet Union long tried that sort of categorisation; and it didn’t end well.

Some Western pundits like to believe that Putin’s sudden turn after 2011, with a choke on the media after Dmitry Medvedev’s relatively freewheeling interlude and the lurch into family-values sermonising, was the blossoming of some long-hidden conviction. In truth, it looked more like a counter-insurgency kit cobbled together on the run, and meant to be a hard break with Vladislav Surkov’s theatre-state. Bolotnaya Square had filled with the largest crowds Moscow had seen since the nineties, and the Kremlin didn’t read them as citizens finding their voice but as Washington dusting off its colour-revolution manual. Hillary Clinton was at State, Obama in the White House, and on the stage were Alexey Navalny, once a nationalist outflanking Putin from the right, and Garry Kasparov, both lifting their lines from the Merkel-Obama hymn book. Even the pampered darlings of state TV, Ksenia Sobchak and Vladimir Pozner among them, drifted into the square for a cameo, as if to remind the Kremlin how thin the loyalty could be once the crowd began to roar.

Two years later came the Kiev Maidan, which followed the Orange Revolution in 2004, and the Rose in Georgia a year earlier. Each one, at least in Moscow’s telling, was carried on the shoulders of Western-funded NGOs and political fixers flown in from abroad and it hardly escaped the Kremlin’s notice that the US media quickly tried to label Bolotnaya the ‘Snow revolution.” For a government paranoid about systemic security, after the turmoil of the 20th century, the signal was blunt enough: liberalism wasn’t just another faction inside the house; it had turned into a breach in the wall. The conservative turn allowed Putin to brand these forces as alien to Russia, even treacherous… people willing to sell the country to the West for a place at someone else’s table.

All the talk of birth rates and “non-traditional propaganda” were just fronts, handy covers for something plainer: bolting the ideological doors before another colour revolution tried to walk through them.

If Putin were the stiff ideologue those playing to the gallery keep sketching, the guest list would be much tidier than the far from smooth reality. What you see is a patchwork quilt pulled from every conceivable ragged corner. You’ve got Belarus the hard dictatorship stitched beside Kyrgyzstan, which is half a democracy and half a shambles. On the friends side of the ledger can be found North Korea and China propped up on one flank, with Israel and Brazil grinning from the other. One week the Kremlin is bowing to Gulf monarchs, the next it’s raising toasts with Latin leftists. And India is nearer now than it’s ever been, regardless of the fact it’s the world’s largest democracy. No gospel binds that mess together and it looks more like the hand of a 19th-century statesman marooned in a nuclear age, playing the cards as they tumble, and not caring a damn if they match.

This is why the “Cold War” frame continues to mislead. Moscow isn’t selling its dogma like the Comintern once did and it doesn’t need converts. All the Kremlin really wants is space to breathe at home and partners it can count on abroad. Some will say this pragmatism is a liturgy in its own right, and you could call it the playbook of survival. Maybe they’re right, but it’s a far cry from the holy mission McFaul tries to hang on Putin.

Of course, you can throw sanctions at Moscow and lock it out of SWIFT, and cut it off from capital markets, but there’s no Warsaw Pact to dismantle and no utopian Soviet dream to unpick.

The trouble with McFaul’s reading, and with much of the Western mind in policy circles, is the hunger to hammer Russia into a single mould. First comes the Cold War script: Moscow cast again as the ideological foe and its principles written off as incompatible with ours. Then, after 1991, it switches to the transition-state tale: Russia as a misfiring liberal project that can be nudged back onto the “right” path. Now, in McFaul’s telling, it’s back to the first version, only painted with 21st-century anxieties about “illiberal nationalism.”

McFaul’s Autocrats vs. Democrats might sell because it flatters liberals’ need for a morality tale. But morality tales are for children and think-tank panels. Putin doesn’t view his mission as being about converting you, nor is he concerned with saving your soul. Instead, he believes he’s here to make sure Russia survives, and even thrives, on terms you may not like. That’s his ideology.