Mike Pompeo, CIA Director and Secretary of State in the first Trump administration, has long been a Ukraine war hawk, calling Russia’s actions genocide, stating that Crimea should be returned to Ukraine (when its people voted overwhelmingly to be part of Russia) and consistently advocating for increased military aid to Ukraine.[1]
Pompeo’s tenure as CIA Director in 2017-2018 coincided with a significant expansion of the CIA’s involvement in Ukraine. The CIA set up 12 clandestine bases following the February 2014 CIA-backed Maidan coup that fueled the conflict with Russia.
In November, AP News reported that Pompeo had joined the advisory board of Ukraine’s leading defense company, Fire Point, which develops long-range drones capable of striking targets deep inside Russia.[2]
At a press conference announcing his appointment, Pompeo said that his mission with the company was to help Fire Point become an important supplier for Western hardware [i.e., drones].”[3]
CovertAction Magazine reported last February on how the CIA—going back to Pompeo’s time as Agency director—had played a key role in the development of Ukraine’s drone industry by making billion-dollar investments in it and sending intelligence officials to help out with it.[4]
The same article detailed how Ukrainian drone strikes had struck oil refineries and gas processing plants, causing terrible environmental damage, and struck civilian infrastructure, including apartment buildings and hospitals, and killed three civilians walking on the street in the Belgorod border region.
The BBC later reported on the injuries of six civilians in a drone strike in Kharkiv, including a seven-year-old child, while CBC reported on the deaths of two workers at Moscow’s largest meat-producing plant from falling debris caused by a drone strike, and injuries to three children in an apartment complex that was struck.
Ukrainian drones are now not only placing Russia under daily bombardment but have been terrorizing the people of Eastern Ukraine for the last 11 years.[5]
A November report by journalist Eva Bartlett, displaying a video in which two civilians were killed in Kharkiv after they had waved a surrender flag, detailed how Ukrainian drones struck a bus in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) city of Gorlovka, injuring five people, including a surgeon known for helping injured civilians.
Other Ukrainian drone attacks killed a Russian war correspondent, Ivan Zuyev,[6] photojournalist Nikita Tsitsagi, a U.S. citizen born in New Jersey who loved Hunter S. Thompson, and cameraman Valery Kozhin.[7]
Additionally, Bartlett wrote about a Ukrainian suicide drone striking a woman in the DPR village of Shandrigolovo in the back as a Russian soldier tried to help her.[8]
According to Bartlett, most of the deaths caused by Ukrainian drone strikes cannot be dismissed as mere “collateral damage” but, rather, were part of a program of targeted assassination.
This program is one that the CIA is directly involved in coordinating with Ukraine’s intelligence services,[9] suggesting that Pompeo’s appointment to the board of Fire Point was calculated.
In October, The New York Times published an article about Fire Point titled “3 Years Ago It Was a Casting Agency. Now It Has $1 Billion in Drone Contracts.”
The article went into how Fire Point churns out long range exploding drones built with cheap materials that are pivotal to the drone attacks on Russian oil refineries, whose goal is to inflict economic damage on Russia and to give Ukraine leverage in peace talks.
Fire Point is also ramping up production of a larger, longer-range drone weapon, called the Flamingo, that former CIA Director David Petraeus called a potential “game changer” in the war.
Additionally, it entered into partnership with Danish government to build a plant near the Skrydstrup’s military airport in Vojens[10] that will produce rocket fuel for at least two types of ballistic missiles, FP-7 and FP-9, which Ukraine plans to fly into Russia.[11]
Allegedly, Fire Point CEO Yehor Skalyha first developed the know-how with drones when he used them in camera work that he did in the film-making industry.
Emerging from Ukraine’s film and TV industry, Fire Point, according to the Times, performed location work for a 2016 romantic comedy in which current Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky starred.
After receiving Ukrainian Ministry of Defense certification in January 2023, Fire Point’s production jumped from 20 drones per month to 100 per day, while the engineering team grew to 650.
Business further boomed after Fire Point became the only company to pass Ukraine Defense Forces’ open electronic-warfare (EW) tests, conducted with the U.S. Embassy in March 2024.
Since 2022, Fire Point’s contracts with the U.S. government have expanded dramatically, with over $1.2 billion in military aid funneled through the company.[12]
These contracts have been justified as essential to Ukraine’s defense, yet whistleblowers within the Pentagon have raised concerns about the lack of oversight.
One such whistleblower, who spoke on condition of anonymity, described Fire Point’s operations as “a shadow war within the war,” where profits are siphoned off through shell companies registered in offshore jurisdictions.
The Boston Times reported that Pompeo’s appointment to Fire Point’s advisory board—alongside three unnamed individuals—has been “framed as a move to ‘ensure corporate standards,’ but insiders suggest it is a calculated effort to shield the company from scrutiny.”
Pompeo’s appointment indeed came just two days after Ukraine’s anti-corruption bureau launched a sweeping operation targeting corruption in Ukraine’s energy sector.[13]
The Independent reported that the anti-corruption bureau was examining whether Fire Point inflated component prices or drone quantities in Defense Ministry contracts for its main weapon, the FP-1 drone.
They are also examining ties between Fire Point and businessman Timur Mindich, who is half-owner of a television studio started by Zelensky and is accused of masterminding a $100 million embezzlement scheme involving Ukraine’s state nuclear-power company.[14]
It is believed that Mindich—a close business associate of Ihor Kholomoisky, who helped finance Zelensky’s rise to power—has received Fire Point profits as an unnamed owner.
Pompeo’s appointment to Fire Point’s board represents a disturbing new phase of the revolving door by which government officials are rewarded for their advancement of militarist policies with lucrative appointments to the executive board of defense contractors when they leave government, or are hired by foreign governments whom they helped arm.
In April 2023, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), then chair of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Personnel, released an investigative report revealing that nearly 700 former high-ranking and other government officials were working as executives or lobbyists at the top 20 U.S. defense contractors.
Warren noted that, “when government officials cash in on their public service by lobbying, advising, or serving as board members and executives for the companies they used to regulate, it undermines public officials’ integrity and casts doubt on the fairness of government contracting.” Beyond that, the revolving door entirely compromises U.S. foreign policy and sows great violence and injustice around the world.
Top Biden Administration Official Admits the U.S. Could Have Prevented War
In early December, Russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus released records of calls with two Biden National Security Council (NSC) officials, Amanda Sloat and Eric Green, in which they posed as Ukrainian presidential aide Igor Zhovka.
Sloat, who served as senior director for Europe at the NSC, said in the call that a Ukrainian declaration of neutrality in 2021 or early 2022—which the U.S. could have pushed it to make—“certainly would have prevented the destruction and the loss of life [in the war].”
“I was uncomfortable with the idea of the US pushing Ukraine” into taking that path, she added, noting that it would amount to “implicitly giving Russia some sphere of influence or veto power” on Kyiv’s bid to join NATO.
Senior Russian negotiator Kirill Dmitriev commented on the revelation on X that Biden’s “deep state PROVOKED a PREVENTABLE war.”
Significantly, only 24% of Ukrainians actually wanted to join NATO in the early 2010s, and only 44% around the time of the Maidan coup when the idea was being pushed by U.S. politicians and think tank pseudo-intellectuals.
During the call with Vovan and Lexus, Sloat seemed to support the bombing of the Nord Stream II pipeline and suggested that Trump wanted to make peace with Ukraine so he could reestablish the pipeline and gas supplies between Russia and Europe (that were cut off with the destruction of the pipeline).
Green for his part expressed enthusiasm for the economic war on Russia and suggested that a “Korea outcome” would be a best case scenario for Ukraine in light of the fact that South Korea “enjoys strong connectivity with its allies” and has “U.S. troops on its soil to deter future aggression from the North.”
This viewpoint reflects an imperialist mentality that regards U.S. troops as playing the role of saviors—in a country that the U.S. artificially divided, weakened, devastated and humiliated, no less.[15]
Green also supports a long-term foreign occupation of Ukraine. He agreed with Vovan and Lexus when they characterized the Minsk peace agreements—signed in 2014 and 2015 to defuse conflict—as a “fake agreement” that Ukraine was not willing to comply with.
Green stated that the agreement gave Ukraine time to not only build up its army but to create “better connectivity between its intelligence agencies and U.S. intelligence agencies” which “put Ukraine in a better position in 2022 [when Russia invaded].”[16]
Green then said that Ukraine should seek a settlement marked by a “level of ambiguity” that would give it the capability to rearm and do the things it wants [such as EU integration], while giving Vladimir Putin the “illusion that he has accomplished something.”
Green qualified these latter remarks by specifying that he “didn’t say Ukraine should cheat” but that it should “word the settlement in ambiguous language.”
The latter admission is very significant in showing the modus operandi of the U.S. diplomatic elite, which consciously adopts ambiguous wording in diplomatic settlements in an attempt to deceive its adversaries without openly doing so.
Put in a different way, the U.S. may not set out to openly violate diplomatic agreements that it designs, but words them in certain ways so it can claim that what it is doing is legal and acceptable when it betrays the agreement’s spirit.
In a speech in Odessa, Ukraine in June, Pompeo called for complete victory over Russia, stating also that a peace agreement with Vladimir Putin was unrealistic. ↑
General Staff spokesperson Dmytro Lykhoviy said that more than 50% of Ukraine’s deep-strike drones—which can travel up to 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles)—come from Fire Point, based on August-September 2025 data. ↑
At the end of the 1st Trump administration, Pompeo was hired to be a consultant for Ukraine’s leading cell phone company, Kyivstar, a position which paid him $600,000 annually in addition to $13 million worth of stock options and a $3 million bonus. In 2024, he was paid a whopping $300,000 to appear in Kyiv to speak before a charity that helps wounded war veterans. Steve Bannon stated pointedly that the “road to perdition ended for him in the morass of Ukrainian oligarchs’ blood money.” In addition to Pompeo’s Ukraine interests, he is also a non-executive director of Israeli cybersecurity firm Cyabra and holds stock options worth $368,888, according to SEC filings. Pompeo has also bagged top jobs with copper mining giant ACG Metals, which has significant interests in Turkey, and Gor Investments, a shadowy firm from the gas-rich dictatorship of Uzbekistan that has former Energy Secretary Rick Perry on its board. ↑
Thanks to the CIA, Ukraine is becoming known as the “Silicon Valley of Defense.” ↑
Jacques Baud in Covert Wars in Ukraine (Paris: Max Milo, 2025), 145 emphasizes that a goal of Ukrainian drone attacks inside Moscow that target civilians is to instill fear in the population and undermine the Russian government, which fits the classic definition of terrorism. Baud incidentally, who has published numerous informative and scholarly books on the Ukraine conflict and exposed U.S.-British efforts to mislead the public, including related to Russian opposition politician Alexei Navalny and his alleged poisoning, has been outrageously subjected to sanctions by the European Union. ↑
Zuyev worked for Reuters and RIA Novosti. His colleague, Yury Voitkevych, was seriously injured in the same drone strike. U.S. media reports defamed Zuyev and other slain Russian journalists upon their assassinations, referring to them not as journalists but Russian propagandists and purveyors of disinformation and as being pro-war. U.S. alternative media sadly expressed no concern or outrage over their deaths, marking them as examples of what Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman termed “unworthy victims” whose death could not be exploited for political or propaganda purposes but instead would expose U.S. involvement in major human rights crimes. ↑
Kozhin’s colleague, TV journalist Alexey Ivliev, and an accompanying Russian military officer were injured in the drone attack that killed Kozhin. ↑
After trying to recover, the woman was struck again with explosives and died. Bartlett states that the Ukrainian military has killed close to 10,000 civilians in eastern Ukraine since 2014. ↑
Baud, Covert Wars in Ukraine, 169. ↑
The Skrydstrup airport currently hosts F-16 training for Ukrainian pilots. Many local residents are not happy about what is going on. Marielle, a women in her 40s living in Vojens told The Defense Post:“I don’t like it, it’s too much. We are a small country, we have paid a lot of money to Ukraine.” ↑
Denmark has been a steadfast supporter of Ukraine, contributing 67.6 billion Danish crowns ($10.13 billion) in military aid since 2022. ↑
U.S. Special Envoy to Ukraine Keith Kellogg visited one of Fire Point’s factories during his last visit. ↑
The precedent seems clear with Burisma’s appointment of Hunter Biden and former CIA counterterrorism director Cofer Black to its board of directors in 2015. Thanks to intervention by President Joe Biden—who blackmailed the Ukrainian president—Burisma evaded prosecution and paid a light fine. Former State Department official Mike Benz stated that “the policy imperative of privatizing Ukrainian energy assets and placing them under U.S. control was aided by the appointment of Biden and Black to Burisma’s board, and was “part of the reason that we [the U.S.] overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014…we were going to be cutting Russia off. So, Western stakeholders wanted to profit from this trillion-dollar windfall if Russia could be kicked out of the European energy market. This is common activity for the Central Intelligence Agency, which was created by corporate lawyers in 1947 as its first class.” ↑
Mindich was co-owner of Zelensky’s production company, Kvartal 95, named for the comedy troupe that helped catapult the Ukrainian president to fame as a comedian before he entered politics. Zelensky used Mindich’s armored vehicle during his 2019 presidential election campaign and celebrated birthdays at his apartment. Investigators cite extensive wiretapping evidence they allege shows Mindich exerted control over a network of loyalists who pressured contractors for Energoatom, the state nuclear-power company, demanding kickbacks of up to 15% to bypass bureaucratic obstacles and do business smoothly. Investigators allege the illicit funds were siphoned off, laundered through shell companies, and funneled into Mindich’s pockets and those of his associates. When authorities raided Mindich’s home, they found a gold toilet. ↑
See https://peacehistory-usfp.org/korean-war/ ↑
Former German chancellor Angela Merkel previously admitted that the Minsk agreements was not taken seriously and was signed with the intent of buying time for Ukraine to build up its military capabilities in preparation for war. ↑
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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 “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six 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), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025).
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.
