Ukraine will go down in history as the graveyard of neo-conservatism where imperial overreach has led to major world power shifts.
In late April, students at universities across the United States set up tent encampments and occupied buildings, protesting their campuses’ complicity in the Israeli war in Gaza.
The chant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” could be heard along with calls for divestment from weapons suppliers and companies that supported Israel.
While these protests were laudable, wouldn’t it have been nice if protesters had extended their critique of U.S. foreign policy to include Ukraine?
Particularly as the Biden White House has extended massive new military aid packages to Ukraine that include long range weapons designed to strike into Russia.
Two new books published by Clarity Press show the role that the U.S. played in engineering the Ukraine conflict—whose death toll eclipses Gaza—along with a proliferation of corruption in Ukraine that has been fueled in large part by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.
The first book, by Glenn Diesen, a professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway, is titled The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order; the second, by CovertAction Magazine writer Arnaud Develay, a lawyer who previously worked for former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, is called Foreign Entanglements: Ukraine, Biden & the Fractured American Political Consensus.
Diesen’s book argues that Ukraine is the graveyard for the post-Cold War neo-conservative dream of establishing American unipolar power.
In his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard, a bible for neo-conservatives, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Adviser, argued that, “without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire,” although “if Moscow regains control over Ukraine with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”[1]
Brzezinski’s book laid out the agenda of the neo-conservatives in trying to decouple Ukraine from Russia and integrate it with the West.
To help advance this strategy, the George W. Bush administration supported a 2004 color revolution that brought to power pro-Western leader Viktor Yushchenko who pursued North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) membership against the will of the vast majority of Ukrainians and ended his term with a 2.7% approval rating.
When Russia-friendly Viktor Yanukovych won 2010 elections and sought to strengthen Ukraine’s economy by keeping Ukraine’s access to the Russian market, the Obama administration backed the February 2014 Maidan coup.
The coup resulted in the replacement of Yanukovych with a regime that compromised Ukraine’s economic and political sovereignty, terrorized the political opposition, and deliberately provoked a war with Russia as Ukraine was turned into a de facto CIA base whose ports were upgraded to fit U.S. warships.[2]
Diesen emphasizes that the U.S. calculatingly sabotaged the Minsk peace agreements, which provided a way to resolve the conflict between western and eastern Ukraine that resulted from the 2014 coup. The Minsk agreement allowed for autonomy for the eastern section and called for an end to discriminatory policies by Kyiv, including its efforts to bar use of the Russian language in the Donbass.
Unfortunately, the agreement was never taken seriously by Germany, France and the U.S., which saw it merely as an opportunity to buy time to further militarize Ukraine so it could be used as a battering ram against Russia.
Debunking the myth of an unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Diesen shows that the U.S. purposely drew Russia into the war in eastern Ukraine by a) escalating the anti-terrorist operation targeting eastern Ukrainians, which left 14,000 dead between 2014 and 2022; and b) openly advocating for NATO expansion into Ukraine, which even CIA Director William Burns admitted was a red line for Russia.
Inspired by Brzezinski, the U.S. strategy was modeled after Afghanistan in the 1980s where the U.S. would draw the Soviet Union into a drawn-out quagmire that would deplete its military capability and ruin its economy as a result of the ratcheting up of sanctions.
Then the U.S. could advance regime-change efforts and ensure its own dominance of the Central Asian region—which Brzezinski and his acolytes viewed as key to world domination.[3]
The destruction of the Nord Stream II pipeline was further part of a strategy of severing Russia’s economy from Western Europe and trying to destroy its oil and gas industry.
Diesen shows that U.S. neo-conservatives and their British counterparts repeatedly spurned any peace proposals and supported far-right factions in Ukraine who had threatened President Volodymyr Zelensky if he made any peace overtures toward the Russians. The only countries trying to broker peace were Israel, Turkey and China.
The U.S. and UK sent Ukraine depleted uranium and cluster munitions that were deployed against the civilian population of eastern Ukraine, as well as long range missiles that could be used to attack deep inside Russia—leaving the world on the threshold of World War III.[4]
Long-range HIMARS rockets. [Source: nytimes.com]
The tragedy of it all is that Russia and Ukraine have similar cultural ancestry in Kievan Rus and had co-existed for centuries without fighting each other. Moscow’s leadership had been accepted historically after it had led the regional defeat and expulsion of the Mongols in the late 15th century under Ivan the Great.[5]
The neo-conservative gamble, according to Diesen, is headed toward failure as Russia succeeded in regaining its Black Sea naval base in Sevastopol, has reclaimed Ukrainian territory, and adapted to sanctions by reorienting Russia’s economy to the East and strengthening the Eurasian Union.
The new Russia-China alliance is part of a new world power bloc that has upended 500 years of Western domination. Diesen quotes former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki who said: “If we lose Ukraine, we will lose the world for decades. The defeat in Ukraine could be the beginning of the end of the golden age of the West.”[6] This indeed looks to be the case.
An American Fiefdom
Develay’s book, Foreign Entanglements, shows how Ukraine–which UK Prime Minister Boris Johnon’s top adviser recently called “a corrupt mafia state”–was at the center of the Biden family and Democratic Party corruption in the age of Russia Gate.
Develay starts his book by detailing incriminating tapes assembled by a Ukrainian member of Parliament named Andrii Derkach, which detailed high-level Ukrainian government corruption—including a scheme to embezzle $142 million in technical assistance through a charitable organization helping people living with HIV-AIDS[7]—and the external management of Ukraine by U.S. government officials.
The external management was evident when Vice President Joe Biden blackmailed Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko by threatening to withhold a $1 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan if he did not fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin.
Shokin was prosecuting Burisma, an oil and gas company that appointed Hunter Biden to its board and that, according to Derkach, transferred $16.5 million in funds to offshore shell companies owned by Hunter.
Derkach’s tapes exposed how one of Biden’s most trusted advisers, Amos Hochstein, a special envoy for international energy issues at the U.S. State Department, set up a gas-reserve scheme using a Ukrainian state-owned provider company, Naftogaz, in order to “rebrand” Russian gas into more expensive European gas and sell it to Ukrainian consumers.[8]
Derkach calculated that Ukraine overpaid almost $1.5 billion for so-called European gas over five years, with Poroshenko increasing gas prices for the Ukrainian population by 75%.[9]
Additionally, Derkach provided lists of Ukraine’s members of parliament, members of the Cabinet, employees of the Office of the President and individuals sitting on the state-owned companies’ supervisory boards who were in the pay of Open Society founder George Soros, a billionaire financier of color revolutions in Eastern Europe who shared the neo-conservative dream of using Ukraine as a tool to weaken Russia.[10]
The tapes further revealed conversations between Biden and Poroshenko in which Poroshenko riles Biden over the fact that his faction in Ukrainian politics [the Samopomich faction] was losing its edge; indicating that key elements in the Ukrainian government were subservient to the U.S. Vice President in a blatant example of neo-colonialism.[11]
In order to try to neutralize Derkach, the U.S. a) revoked his U.S. visa; b) had his television show put off the air; c) accused him of being a Russian spy; d) encouraged his prosecution on money-laundering charges; and e) applied sanctions to him.[12]
Turning its head on the Russia Gate narrative, Foreign Entanglements argues that it was Ukraine—not Russia—that interfered in U.S. politics, including by engineering a fake scandal that brought down Paul Manafort, one of Trump’s closest advisers, in order to make Trump look bad.[13]
The case against Manafort centered on the delivery by a former Ukrainian intelligence agent official of a “notebook” that supposedly pointed to payoffs dished out in exchange for favors rendered to Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s Party of Regions.[14]
According to Develay “the ‘evidence’ leveled against Manafort which led to his downfall never had any legal basis.”[15]
Neither, says Develay, was there any legal basis for the impeachment hearing targeting Donald Trump who was accused of trying to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in an attempt to get him to investigate Joe and Hunter Biden.
Develay makes clear that an investigation of the Bidens was absolutely warranted.
The Burisma affair epitomized how Biden basically ruled Ukraine like a viceroy, helping to oversee the imposition of a surrogate government after the 2014 Maidan coup that advanced U.S. business interests, including in the oil and gas sector.
At Biden’s urging, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the leader handpicked by the U.S. to run Ukraine, began zealously removing Russian gas lines from Ukraine while promoting the interests of Burisma, which dramatically increased its portfolio of licenses to develop new gas fields in Ukraine after the 2014 coup.
Petro Poroshenko also pushed through parliament the laws necessary to ensure a precipitous drop in Russian gas deliveries in favor of supplies from the European Union (EU).[16]
The new post-coup finance minister, Natalie Jaresko, had worked for many years for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and U.S. State Department and U.S. embassy in Ukraine.[17] Born in Illinois, she received Ukrainian citizenship the day she was appointed Finance Minister.
Viktor Shokin complained that “the most shocking thing is that all the [government] appointments were [being] made in agreement with the United States. Washington’s behavior indicated that they believed that ‘Ukraine was their fiefdom.’”[18]
Through their control of the Supervisory Board of Ukraine’s railway company, “Ukrzaliznytsia” and other national companies, Americans “managed to create a system of shadow management of Ukraine’s public sector,” according to Develay.[19]
Americans also, according to Develay, established a network of bio-weapons labs—something Victoria Nuland, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs between 2021 and 2024, admitted to before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2022.
These labs produced deadly bacteria and toxins that resulted in disease outbreaks within Ukraine, including of cholera.[20]
One of the companies involved, EcoHealth Alliance, is a CIA front organization accused by whistleblower Andrew Huff of being behind the manufacture of COVID-19.[21]
Black & Veatch, a global company receiving Pentagon contracts to operate the biolabs, received substantial funding from Rosemont Seneca, Hunter Biden’s investment fund.[22]
This points to the sinister profiteering of the president’s son off of Frankenstinian initiatives that may have resulted in a global pandemic.
Ukraine is ultimately a black hole in American politics that has been heralded by today’s Democratic Party as a heroic country deserving of massive U.S. investment and weapons supplies. After Congress recently voted to appropriate $60 billion in additional military aid, many congressmen and women waved Ukrainian flags.
The real Ukraine, as Develay and Diesen’s books show, is a corrupt playland for American imperialists who have used the country as a pawn in a great game that they are losing.
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Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2024), 153. ↑
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Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, 215. ↑
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In The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1998), Brzezinski called for the U.S. to work to facilitate the break-up of Russia into a “loosely confederated country—composed of a European Russia, Siberian Republic, and a Far Eastern Republic—a decentralized Russia would be less susceptible to imperial mobilization.” Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates recalled in his memoir that Dick Cheney “wanted to see the dismantlement not only of the Soviet Union and the Russian empire, but of Russia itself so it could never again be a threat to the rest of the world.” Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, 215. ↑
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Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, 238. ↑
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Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, 154. ↑
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Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, 218. ↑
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Develay writes that billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars were deliberately left unsupervised by American authorities, thus, allowing for the embezzling of funds by local parties. ↑
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Arnaud Develay, Foreign Entanglements: Ukraine, Biden & the Fractured American Political Consensus (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2024), 15. ↑
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 76. ↑
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 15. ↑
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 16. ↑
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 10, 11. ↑
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 32. ↑
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 31, 32. The SBU and other Ukrainian intelligence services were deeply penetrated by the CIA; a former U.S. intelligence official referred to the GUR, Ukrainian military intelligence, as “our little baby,” suggesting that the Manafort operation was intricately tied to the Russia Gate coup attempt against Donald Trump.
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 35. ↑
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 76. ↑
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The Minister of Economic Development and Trade, Aivaras Abromavicius, was a Lithuanian citizen educated in the U.S. and Deputy Prosecutor General had been an American state prosecutor in New York. ↑
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Diesen, The Ukraine War & the Eurasian World Order, 193. [NOTE: Is this citation correct? Or is it from Develay?] ↑
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 74. ↑
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 110-15. ↑
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 107. ↑
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Develay, Foreign Entanglements, 117. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
You do not answer your headline question: why are students not protesting US proxy war in Ukraine.
Although Hamas and Abbas have a very cozy relationship with Putin, as a whole the Palestinians and Pro Palestinian protesters are neither anti Ukraine or Pro Russia. Actually many Palestinians identify with the Ukrainians, millions of whom fled their country to escape the war.