Part I: "My Precious"
- Chronicle 1: Aragorn's Introduction: "I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me!"
- Chronicle 2: Ride to Ruin!: Obama’s Doctrine, Russian Wraiths during the Witch King of AGMA Trump's Interregnum 2017-2021, and Mordor Strikes Back During the Biden Residency
- Reference Scrolls in the Two Thousand Twenty-Sixth Year About the First Age of the Ukraine War
(Forthcoming)
Part II: "That Will Depend on the Manner of Your Return"
- Chronicle 3: Lord Denethor Biden's Follies: From “Don’t” to #IKindofStandWithUkraineNoMatterWhat
- Chronicle 4: The Grey, Old, Golden Man's Ships in the West: What is the end?
- Reference Scrolls in the Two Thousand Twenty-Seventh Year About the Second Age of the Ukraine War
Part I: "My Precious"
Chronicle 1: Aragorn's Introduction: "I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me!"
Like my Afghanistan post before, this Ukraine Chronicle is a long, two-part compilation of my informed views on the two phases of the Ukraine War after tracking them consistently for years. Why are there two phases? Well, the foreign policy of the (Barack) Obama Administration (2009-2017) failed to hinder the Russian annexation of Crimea, an important slab of territory with 200+ years of significance for this current version of the Russian nation. The Crimean War (1853-56), ever heard of it?
The Russian invasion of these lands since 2014 spread to other Ukrainian provinces in a low-level conflict that raged on until it largely simmered after 2017. With a long connection to Ukraine, Crimea was first given back to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954 a year after Josef Stalin’s death (ever heard of him?). His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, feigned benevolence to those firmly under the Soviet socialist grip as he didn't need to fear for the Soviet Black Sea Fleet based in Crimea. Back then, there wasn’t a serious challenge to his brutal communist party's dominance a year after one of history’s worst dictators died. The most horrible and destructive ideological system mankind has ever created had faded after the fall of the Soviet Union (communist socialism), and Crimea and other territories were confirmed as Ukrainian by their own popular vote in 1991.
"Democracy in Action!" Yet, no similarity or shared history between Russian and Ukrainian was enough to stop the avarice for what Stalin’s successor had given, foolishly if you ask Russian nationalist, dictator-premier-president whatever title Vladimir Putin (1999-present) claims as "his own, his precious" at any given time. He was a former communist party apparatchik and KGB spy spawned from that same abysmal socialist system. Reader, you must’ve heard of him?
It was this Gollum who lusted over precious lands that weren't really his at all. In 2014, Putin started the first war phase by annexing Ukrainian territory in Crimea and fomenting an insurrection in the Donbas region of Ukraine’s East and South a month after Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution threw out his puppet. More than just a beach vacation spot, Crimea is prime real estate with a strategic position on the Black Sea. The nearby Donbas is rich with coal, possessing heavy industry, and it also acts as an access point to the land bridges of the Crimean Peninsula itself. And Putin wanted it all and more as a buffer versus Russia’s traditional Western enemies.
International pressure merely annoyed Putin, but gave him pause because of the still connected Russian economy and its vital gas/oil exports. So, Putin’s underlings feigned peaceful intentions at diplomatic getaways in the Belarusian city of Minsk. By 2015, he agreed to let the conflict fizzle in his favor as this spymaster thought that any democratic concessions would be in his occupation’s favor. With the guns pointed at them and widespread voter IDs ready to prove they were kind of eligible, any vote would rubber stamp approval of unity with Russia, much as all votes had done in Russia's communist socialist past. In his own maniacal mind, Putin’s presumptive return as the “rightful” Slavic King of Rus to the ancient city of Kiev would be something akin to Aragorn returning to the city of Gondor after defeating the evil threats to Middle Earth in J.R.R. Tolkien's fiction. Putin has some serious main character syndrome issues!
History tells all but the most oblivious and delusional that democracy barely works when coalitions are formed with even slightly communist socialist parties since they are almost always duplicitous, and the temporary alliances they form with the politically naive beget authoritarian practices that eventually crush those that don’t conform to their official party line. After all, these forward thinkers believe history is only on their side of progress and everyone else is expendable on that rush forward.
Looking beyond the obvious Soviet socialist past in the Warsaw Pact countries after WWII, where “free” governments were subverted in favor of the repression of communist socialism, there are the more recent examples of Chechnya, or what’s left of it after “electing” a pro-Putin puppet’s son, Ramzan Kadyrov, or with the warm, smothering embrace given to the breakaway territories of the Western Asian Caucuses, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, after the Russian Federation bulldozed the nation of Georgia in just five days in 2008 in order to maintain pro-Russian influence and engineer supportive votes in elections down there.
Likewise in the occupied regions of Ukraine, Putin manipulated votes to ensure the Russian occupation's approval in 2014. Though they could merely hem and haw without broadening the war and sending whatever warriors they had to the frontlines, the sheepish Western World, with a fear that could take the heart of Aragorn himself, and directed from the sidelines by a less interested Obama Administration that was pivoted to East Asia and its Arab Spring quagmire in the Middle East and North Africa, grew in greater terror and hatred for the Russian conquerors as they watched and had many international meetings in order to complain about this most vexing, recent annexation that was but a preview of the years of slaughter to come.
This Grand Deterrence Scheme would have prevented Russian escalation by merely offering the future prospect of joining the NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) nuclear alliance to the rump Ukraine and that prospect would act as a potential deterrent to future Russian aggression. Hypothetically, an attack against the future member Ukraine would be an attack on all 30, later 32 member nations including the USA, which commanded the largest nuclear weapons arsenal on the planet. Nothing signed and delivered to Ukraine from the West, however, but the victims remained hopeful and even enshrined NATO membership in the Ukrainian Constitution in 2019. At least from the perspective of Western European democracies and the US, this annexation was not challenged as much as some strongly worded speeches would suggest it should, nor did the lust cease in the hearts of the Slavic men pushing for more. "Democracy not in Action!”
Thus, the Russians settled into their Crimean occupation nonetheless, increased the laughable, though mortally serious Russification of their already close Slavic brethren, and by proxy established the pro-Putin Donetsk and Luhansk Socialist Republics in the Donbas region in 2014-15. Official recognition wouldn’t matter much as Putin was merely “mediating” the conflict on everyone’s behalf until the full invasion began years later. Gee thanks!
And the Obama years passed on. Though the world smoldered in more places than just Eastern Europe, the Donbas conflict awaited its next American presidential prognosticator to see how they would handle the death, destruction, and the European handwringing over their own mishandled backyard. Believing in the disruptive effect of the false flag of Russian subversion in the 2016 American Presidential Election and after the election of a supposed Russian puppet from the Republican Party, Democrats expected the collapse of "democratic" Ukraine during the First Trump Administration (2017-2021).
Yet, that collapse hardly came to pass. Those years were actually a mixed bag because the Ukraine conflict generally subsided whether as the positive result of the flawed Obama-backed negotiations in the city of Minsk, the temporary satiation of Russian avarice, or the strong-arming of allies and anti-NATO rhetoric of the Orange Man Bad that placated Russia for a time, but still preserved the relative peace. Maybe, it was all of those things and more.
As the passage of those domestically tumultuous years went by in America, a still-autonomous Ukraine was able to rebuild its economy to an extent, forge economic connections with its neighbors in the European Union, which would prove key when they were under siege, all while those lands disputed by Russia remained largely quiet, but impoverished and broken, and despite the plethora of violations of the Minsk cease-fire from both parties.
And the static trench war dwindled to but a small amount of casualties by 2020. Yet, with "perfect phone calls," the First Trump Impeachment and still the first lethal aid packages to Ukraine, and finally Donald Trump I’s catastrophic exit from the Presidency in the rear-view mirror, the anti-Russia fever dream would once again rear its head even as the world continued its COVID Pandemic recovery in 2021 and Western internationalists searched for any possible pro-Russian “traitors” in their midst to hunt down rather than actually fighting the Menace directly. Under the quasi-leadership of the temporary Trump Slayer, President Joe Biden (2021-2025), US and Euro ambitions in Eastern Europe could be furthered without much of the anti-globalist restraints holding back the expansion of NATO into what the Russians perceived as their sphere of influence in their very own backyard.
However, the intended calm of “collective security” and "international decency” were not to last even for a year under the hand of an alleged foreign policy veteran (Biden). By 2022, the blister burst into open war again, but this time it was much deadlier. Like the war provoked by the fictional Dark Lord Sauron's Ring of Power, America’s real crisis management response was nestled under the protective if barely open Eye of an elderly, cognitively questionable Resident whose best way of protecting "his own, his precious" NATO alliance and to stop a greater, potentially nuclear war was to say “Don’t” and waive NATO flags over Ukraine to recklessly bait the Russian Bear.
Regardless of the intentions and pathetic efforts on the part of these internationalist collectivists, there was a complete breakdown in deterrence during the decrepit Biden Administration before and after the renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (Phase II). This massive escalation was effectively countered by the Biden Administration about as much as they did to stop the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban fanatics just a year before and after thousands of American deaths and twenty years of the War on Terror were thrown away in a few summer months. And both conflicts (2001-2021 and 2022-present) became some of the largest anticipatory failures in American foreign policy history, the Ukraine conflict (Phase II) itself leading to millions of deaths, years of costly setbacks, and a bleaker future for far greater numbers of people than any gas price-conscious American consumer might realize in 2026 after the start of the low-level Iran conflict and its dozen plus American deaths.
With American weakness on display in 2022, it's no coincidence that the Russians meant to finish the job they started eight years before. Their obvious, massive buildup and full-scale invasion were intended as a great knockout blow that would destroy Ukraine's sovereignty and so they thought, annihilate Ukrainian national independence in one fell swoop. Combined with repression and past Soviet socialist terror tactics like forced resettlement, child kidnapping and brainwashing, indefinite detentions, and forced cultural extinction, Putin hoped Ukraine would cease its independent identity and become "Russian.” And so it should be no surprise that to catalogue the second phase of this conflict, any chronicle, in my case the Second Chronicle, must show this transition to the worst violence in Europe since WWII.
Yet, despite the fear in the hearts of Europe and many in far away America, after Phase II began, help did come for the victims and combined with Ukrainian resilience, experience, and brilliance as well as Russian overconfidence and terrible planning, the invaders were turned back after brutal urban fighting in the outskirts of Ukraine’s capital Kiev, and for a time, the onslaught was kept at bay during the early war of 2022. NATO even expanded in 2023 by adding longstanding quasi-neutral nations Finland and Sweden to its roster, which put the most serious Biden dent into Putin's anti-NATO agenda, and which other than arming and financing Ukraine semi-adequately, was a major success of the alliance in the aftermath of the renewed invasion even if Ukraine itself was still not included in the same chummy handshakes as the new Nordic allies had received.
Threatened by greater regional conflict because of the directed fulfillment of NATO's self-fulfilling prophecy to protect Europe from its enemies (Russia), the nations of Northern and Eastern Europe, many non-Slavic ones, within the so-called Russian sphere of influence knew a lot more about the reality of actual aggression than the American pencil pushers and armchairs worrying about the 2019 red herring of Trump’s "perfect phone calls" with Ukraine’s president while Americans were still far away from accepting any danger. Yet, was this tardy, mostly unified Western resistance worth the Ukrainian human and material cost at the mere prospect of the Alliance’s expansion? That answer has yet to be determined, but at least since Phase II, the past four years show a trail of disastrous foreign policy wreckage and severe miscalculations from Russia and from the West.
In Chronicle 3, overly ambitious Ukrainian counter-offensives were bogged down by flawed strategy, overpromised results, and words of eternal, iron-clad support by leader-like people in the US and Western Europe while delaying or never delivering the help when it was most needed. Elevating the grandiose reconquest in public while severely doubting as much in private, the Biden Administration’s public egging on went beyond merely recovering as much leverage as possible before peace negotiations as one would expect a supposed seasoned foreign policy hand like Biden to do. Instead, the lockstep to retake everything became an orcish drumbeat for the total rollback of territory and Russian influence that would make any 1980s Reagan anti-communist cold warrior proud.
When US support was even slightly threatened, even by the timid Gondorian stewards in the Biden administration, when better or more weapons were dangled about, sent late, or never delivered, or when the advice from US war planners led to increased slaughter due to almost year-long “Spring” counteroffensives in 2023 and 24, western stupidity and Ukrainian battlefield attrition seemed to be working on behalf of the Russians because of the push to reclaim lost territories before war conditions were ripe for it. The Ukrainian Resistance Spirit of 2022 ebbed, and real victims seemed on the verge of a devastating loss.
Political factors had a massive impact on the aggressive push to continue the war as it appeared that an already extensive American support for Ukraine could be locked in perpetuity like the conflict itself or cancelled altogether depending on the results of the 2024 Presidential Election. Unfortunately, there’s rarely a middle ground with American politics these days even when other people’s lives are in peril, but perhaps it’s just my wish for a bygone era, a bucolic Shire where workable solutions aren’t immediately savaged by vicious goblins especially when those partisan poison-tipped arrows increase the suffering of everyone else.
However, it’s safe to assume that Biden's manic Democrat Party was certain that its great enemy, Trump, and less so his Euro/Ukraine skeptic supporters, would lose the election and they could easily justify all sorts of actions to make sure that outcome happened. For some certainty, they worked to ensure that then former President Trump would be unable to run for office ever again while he was locked away in prison for life even after the “Perfect Phone Call” and the “Retro-active January 6th Riot” impeachments failed. So, many Democrats reasoned that if they nailed down Trump they could also nail down Putin in time, not my straw man to beat down, but a real, fundamentally ignorant linkage that would have many consequences for an angry electorate given the binary choice they expected in modern American elections. The Democrats’ fiery retribution wasn’t just leftist fetishized fantasy political porn, but a serious, unified, legal reality pursued nationwide with serious unconstitutional and undemocratic underpinnings.
With no serious electoral opposition in the democracy they were protecting, many Democrats hoped that the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, robbed of their leader after voters picked him in democratic primaries and right on the eve of the general presidential election, would among other things no longer prevent unconditional support for Ukraine and simply disappear as some nightmare to be forgotten. With their opposition pieces knocked off the political chess board, Democrats hoped this support would continue regardless of the effect that those policies might have on prolonging the Ukraine War.
Peace in the Kingdom of Gondor (the good guys) would not be at hand any time soon if many of the #IStandWithUkraine performatives had their way over here in their comfy spare hobbit holes especially if one side of American politics viewed the 2022 invasion as an army of Uruk-hai specifically bred for war against mankind first in Ukraine, on to the rest of Europe, and then over here to America itself. The Time of Man would be over IF they were right! In fact, almost no senior Democrat, Never Trumper, or Hawkish Republican so much as uttered the word “peace” without numerous caveats during the 2024 campaign, let alone did any of them call for an imperfect, negotiated settlement that would even pause the death, for to do so would back themselves into the opposite corner of endless, righteous support for Good and bring about accusations of wanting Ukraine’s total surrender to Evil.
However, rife with hubris and concerned more with glittering generalities, virtue signaling displays, feelings rather than political or military reality, and deluded about their own worst nightmares coming true, the Democrats overestimated their chances with the two options they decided to force on America in 2024 (President Biden then Vice President Kamala Harris, whereby Kamala MUST be pronounced “comma” as in the punctuation mark with a “la”). Despite serious, normally career-ending/jail-finalizing black marks not limited to multiple felony prosecutions and the terrible January 6th Riot, Trump rose from the political grave because of his opponents' forced errors, their relentless, oftentimes reckless, alienating pursuit of him, and after losing the election argument to him on economics, immigration, and crime.
After becoming the not-so-loyal, #Resistance opposition again in 2025 and definitely in a collective shock, Democrats counted on the supposed "Putin Puppet’s" failure to reach a pro-Ukraine agreement with a fellow "dictator," believing "Drumpf" would just give up all of Ukraine with little to show for it much as they thought he would do when they impeached him in 2019 three years before the full invasion. As if to confirm their unbending beliefs, Trump's opposition watched the TV spectacle of the presidential Trump-Zelenskyy meltdown in February 2025 and assumed the reflexive position against Trump and in the corner of the foreign power over the one-month-old, just-elected US administration with a clear electoral mandate from the American people. The end of the era of endless support for Ukraine and the push for peace with Putin seemed to be signs of dark times ahead. "Democracy in action over there, just not here. And not with HIM!”
However, the person they saw as Putin’s puppet (Trump) forced a dramatic change in NATO countries to meet their required 4% defense spending contribution if they wanted to keep the US-dominated alliance intact. Tough love after some very tough American “democracy.” Still a non-NATO member after 12 years of war, Ukraine was no longer strung along by the US as the Trump (II) Administration essentially abandoned the NATO bait without abandoning military support at levels as high or higher than before. Ukraine still remained the primary defender of Europe versus Russian aggression by sacrificing more Eastern European blood than any matching contribution of the spineless Westerners who spent as much time confronting Trump II in defense of a vastly underfunded and directionless NATO than by directly offering military support for a conflict they enabled in the first place.
Using a typically annoying and predictable, “Art of the Deal” negotiation style, Trump threatened US withdrawal from NATO altogether in order to extract greater spending by those largely absentee nations while touting the supportive effort from the frontline NATO nations of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia that were doing the heaviest work to prop Ukraine up in the fight. By threatening American withdrawal, the US was able to extract greater aid for Ukraine despite the personalities behind those nations that hated collaboration with the Trump Devil even if it meant greater security on their own frontiers. They kicked and screamed about failing to support the conflict they had escalated to the current disaster in the name of NATO mostly because right, wrong, or something else, Trump asked them to do more or America was out.
Contrary to the hysteria that this hardline caused, by 2025-26, pressure on US allies actually led to an increase in defense spending, allowing for significant transfers to Ukraine in the form of weapons swaps, and with everyone’s feet to the fire, led to better, more accountable Ukrainian strategy in 2026 that has so far led to successful counteroffensives and the smallest percentage of Russian occupation of Ukrainian territory since 2022.
Peace is controversial in the midst of 12 years of intermittent conflict, heck, one Trump peace deal with strict conditions for the Taliban in 2020 was falsely blamed by Biden when he oversaw the complete collapse of Afghanistan 6 months later. He stuck to only one major Trump policy after shredding the rest with so much partisan glee and with so much anti-Trump malice that it could have been forged into its own Ring of Power in the fires of Mount Doom itself. Thus, Biden’s power came from a rage borne of what he was not (Trump). Ignoring the Afghan War under-rug sweeping by the Biden administration as a tragic and undercovered issue for the amount of blood and treasure invested in it, Ukraine became much more front of center and divisive in the early years of the second MAGA era no matter how many people died over there and regardless of America’s domestic political squabbles.
With a failed unity of purpose towards a negotiated peace and god-awful hyper-partisanship here in the US, it’s little wonder that the purported Diplomatic Revolution of 2025-26 was a failure based on stated objectives and campaign promises. Why support the negotiation of an end to the war if Trump’s allied enemies will insist on support for Ukraine forever regardless of the results, with them reclaiming every lost scrap of everything pre-2014 regardless of 12 years of brutal conflict? Why not evict every unfriendly Russian from the vicinity in a counter-ethnic cleansing, or like President Biden himself suggested go on to topple an “evil regime” back in the Russian Federation even if it means a nuclear world war to get to all of that? Maybe he didn't want WWIII to overthrow Putin, but with his extremely limited availability during the last years in the Residency, there's little way for the American people to know any time soon even as the Ukrainians trod over the millions of corpses of their own people.
Why give in to Trump’s mania for peace and the lauding he’d be due after success if he’s just a Russian puppet and the Nobel Peace Prize Committee might grant him a most undeserved award for stopping the worst war in Europe in generations? Any wish for peace, especially HIS, can’t be real, right? And especially if he’s asking for credit, right, so they should just continue the battle because of our Trump hangups until at least he's gone from office?
Why shouldn't Putin just wait it out until Trump's leverage is demolished because of US politics after the 2026 midterms and he's impeached again or jailed? And in his most merciless form, why shouldn't Putin just shred more of both combatant nations to achieve a pyrrhic victory in a war where he possesses more advantages on paper than his enemies and when those enemies want to politically fight each other or use others to grind on to death while they sit on the sidelines mostly to hashtag (#) cheer them on? What other international figure out there has any standing to settle the war in a way that doesn't extinguish the remaining 80% of Ukraine or bring about nuclear World War III to save every last meter of 100% of it?
This recent, failed Diplomatic Revolution is still significant in its change, however, not because Putin was forced by Trump to give back territory or settle the conflict like Trump, the only major candidate to call for peace, assured the country he’d do on “day one” if he was re-elected, but because Putin rejected any attempts at it while the strain on his country as well as on his personal health were heaviest. With no serious, actual diminishment of US and Western support under Trump II and despite the public confrontations among allies, the diplomatic cover that the failed peace negotiations provided to Ukraine was even more significant.
Despite the 2025 Ukraine-US presidential dustup on camera, Russia’s leadership showed themselves to be incapable of peace after rejecting the more favorable conditions offered by Trump. Massive new anti-Russian sanctions were nearly unanimously passed and signed by the supposed puppet (Trump) in September 2026 even in the bitter partisan atmosphere. Prior to the October uproar over the Diesel Sanctions Pause between Trump and Putin to ease gas pressures prior to the US mid-term November Election, these were the tightest penalties yet from any US administration and the sanctions further constricted Russian participation in the global economy and squeezed them so much that continuing the war might be unbearable even for a stubborn people notorious for enduring impossible hardship. Afterall, even the “Evil Empire,” the Soviet Union, was forced to abandon its own invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s after Soviet moms saw too many of their sons dying to prop up another failed, corrupt government. Russian intransigence with a more pliable Trump is another major Putin error that some in his country will come to regret.
It’s important to demonstrate the severe strain that American politics has had on trying to stop further war as Trump's peace negotiations were never going to be acceptable to his bitter partisan opponents despite the fact that many thousands of lives could be saved if compromises were made even with a dictator like Putin, or maybe with Trump’s equally bitter Democrat and Never-Trumper opposition on the "home front." Just kidding. Ever hear of it?
Finally, there is the turnaround of this last year (2025-26). Chronicle 4 "What is the End?" will demonstrate the deteriorating conditions in Russia as a result of the successful Ukrainian counteroffensives, better tactics in 2025-26, and the demand for results before expenditures are increased or left at status quo levels. It's uncertain yet what specific role American policy changes have had on the renewed optimism, but certainly the Ukrainian change of tactics to drone warfare, risky demoralization campaigns inside Russia, and the renewed focus to regain territory of actual value rather than symbolic worth makes Ukraine earn continued US support despite the foreign policy blunders that maneuvered all parties into this thankless and bloody position.
Attrition finally seems to be turning in the favor of the Ukrainians with massive damage to Russian positions in the Fortress Belt region, and many demoralized conscript troops are surrendering or fleeing the frontlines despite the importation of “volunteer” cannon fodder from North Korea, a helpful communist socialist ally of Russia, or a tamed Chechnya, no longer resisting the repression of its native Islam because its clan leader has an agreement to build fantastic mosques over the bones and rubble of its capital Grozny so its imams can preach the right rhetoric.
Yet, the view of American foreign policy resides in the battle dome of the MAGA world for at least the next two years. Trump is watching, waiting to be seen backing the "winner," and though his peace efforts have largely vanished beneath his double-sided public blustering, unlike most of the Biden years, clearly the Russians are doing far worse in 2026 than any year since 2022 with some analysts predicting a greater Russian collapse if the war continues on these terms. We’ll see.
Moving forward from my gentle yet devastating criticism, it's important to note that this is NOT a history of the conflict, yet neither is it a partisan screed, the variety of which we too often get from lay (lazy) people commenting on world-changing events on their Twitters or Instagram Reel pages in the relative safety of America. Admittedly, we lack the inside, classified information that a history of this conflict requires, which is why this is merely a chronicle that’s reflective of my perception, instincts, and reaction to events with my vision partially clouded by this lack of information from then to now.
Despite the information gaps from the record, my instincts have been mostly correct especially when judging political and civilian policies regarding this conflict. I am an historian by training even if this shouldn't be considered a history as there is clear bias, the record is incomplete, and the time elapsed from these events is not great enough to compose an objective history. See how easy that bias disclaimer was, you partisan hack “historians?” (Biden speechwriter John Meacham etc.) When compared to the stagnant meat grinder of 2023-24, the conflict is changing rapidly within this second or maybe new, third phase, and the rapid flow of recent events is too near to stop the passions of the moment from skewing historical analysis.
As found in each Part I and II's Reference Scrolls section, my most consumed sources for this post are not partisan cable news, political party talking points, or even the mainstream media, which do inform and change public perception as policymakers decide what to do often as a reaction to these public sources and the mainstream they inform. Though well-versed in popular and unpopular opinions, my priority resources from 2022 to present were defense think tanks such as the Institute for the Study of War, the Council on Foreign Relations, The Atlantic Council, Foreign Policy magazine, and The Center for Strategic and International Studies, which for sure have a general bias for continuing the war until Russia's defeat, but still provided critical voices during the era of gluttonous support for Ukraine and never-ending NATO expansion.
Also, and unfortunately for me, I have watched, listened to, or read almost every Biden and Trump speech, question and answer session for the few times that Biden gave them or the far too many that Trump gave on the subject. Though not directly cited in every case, my primary sources for US executive impact include key speeches, meetings, and even some of their key cabinet members or military leaders (like Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin when he wasn’t in an unknown, medically induced coma for cancer treatment when the nation was in crisis or Secretary of War Pete Hegeseth when he wasn’t texting sensitive policy over SignalChat to hostile left-wing media personalities who are notorious for leaking). Other than a press staff member from any of these US administrations or from some cheater using A.I., I’m confident that I've processed most of their administrative output perhaps even as much as the highest paid foreign policy analysts watching them. Enjoy this free distillation without the fear in the hearts of man or womankind, but paid sponsorships would be very much appreciated!
"Onward to Minsk!" dictated French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte to his multinational troops in 1812. Soon after conquering the city, he diverted his efforts to subdue the Russian Empire in the name of his political-economic Continental System by attacking Russia’s symbolic capital, Moscow, instead of St. Petersburg. "Ride to Ruin!" and down the French went to the notorious and barbarous horsemen of the Great Eurasian steppe. Napoleon's famed defeat in the snows and muds by the shadowy Cossacks hunting his columns from Moscow back to France are legendary, but it was Minsk among other places in the region that were his original objectives.
Minsk is a major city and the current capital of Russian ally, Belarus. Though not as symbolic to some unified Eastern Slavic civilization, this city and region signified something like Kiev in Ukraine does to Russia now: a major metropolis in a buffer zone, a hub in vital hinterlands that were seen by Russian leaders rightly or wrongly as inseparable to their history. These lands were strategic points that had to be protected as a last ditch before enemies from the South (Ukraine) or the West (through Belarus's next-door neighbor and NATO member Poland) reached the heart of their Empire. The historical threats came often whether from the 17th century Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, the 18th century Swedes especially under Charles XII, the French Empire under Napoleon in the 19th, and twice by Germany in both World Wars during the 20th. And that doesn't cover the invasions of Russia from the vast expanse of the East, a legacy of terror that haunted it for centuries.
"If Russia can't dominate them, no one can!" thought its possessive, reactive, and wrathful tsars and dictators. "Damn the people living in those border lands" if they got in the way of the security paranoia and the irredentism of a common “Russian” civilization that in reality was largely obliterated by the Mongols in the Doom of 1240! The collective memory of it and its former glory loomed large over the Eastern Slavs. “The dead do not suffer the living to pass,” said the King of the Dead to Aragorn, so unless the modern Russians have a key to unlock its once-great-again glory, so long to you too, medieval Kievan Rus!
After Napoleon's 1812 retreat from Muscovite claimed lands, the menace was ever present in the minds of these more northern “Russian” leaders. The most serious of these later foreign threats after Napoleon watched Moscow burn came from National Socialist (Nazi) dictator Adolf Hitler whose forces also occupied Minsk as part of Operation Barbarossa in 1941. For Nazi Germany, it was a strategic target in their conquest of the Soviet Union and also a central hub for the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Millions of Jews, Slavs, and "undesirables" were processed there for death in concentration camps. Like many cities devastated by WWII but especially in a Nazi occupied, non-"Aryan" defined region, Minsk took a long-time to recover and it had to do so under the weight of the Communist Iron Curtain, a death shroud which wouldn't prove to be that much of an improvement.
The oppression and stagnation was a lot already and Belarus had barely thrown off the weight of the old socialist “utopia” in the 1990s before slipping back into another tainted dictatorship, but most importantly for our subject matter a pro-Russian one to boot. "Wait," you the reader might say, "I thought this was a series of chronicles about the Ukraine War?" Well of course it is, for you see, Belarus is one of the nations bordering Ukraine and Russia, one like Poland that shared a communist past, but one that backpedaled on what were already limited freedoms in 1994 unlike in Poland during that same period.
Then as now, Belarus was a potential invasion point for Northern Ukraine as well, but until Ukraine threw off its masters, it wasn’t considered much of a security concern to Russia. Border security always goes both ways if one wants to have a stable nation, but there might not be a mutual agreement if the Belarusians allow Russian overflight rights and troops to pass through their territory to attack and take Kiev a hundred kilometers away. And that they tried to do in the late winter of 2022, when about 30,000 Russian troops rolled across the Belarusian border in coordination with offensives driving West from the Donbas occupation areas, entered the Chernobyl nuclear hot zone, and proceeded to try taking Kiev from the North. Since they were led by Slavic “fascists” and historic injustices were being remedied, Ukraine’s security be damned!
A little less than a decade earlier, the Ukraine of 2013-14 had high hopes after street demonstrations and the resulting police violence caused the Revolution of Dignity (or the Maidan Revolution). Like Belarus, Ukraine was nominally independent after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, but it remained safely in Russia’s orbit as most of the former socialist republics were expected to do. However, unlike the Belarussians, Ukrainians grew tired of the corruption, economic stagnancy, and lack of freedoms as a satellite under yet another pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.
Reaching peak fervor in February 2014, the crowds put the Ukrainian president to flight and into a Russian exile after his police forces were ordered to open fire and kill protesters. The venom-tongued infiltrator, Yanukovych, a kind of pro-Russian Grima Wormtongue was gone from Edoras (Kiev) and the Riders of Rohan (Ukraine) could breathe the fresh air. The clearer-eyed interim leaders immediately set new elections that brought in a pro-European Union, less overtly corrupt, more business-friendly, and certainly more capitalist government under Petro Poroshenko. They looked to sell their abundant natural resources of oil, gas, and coal, feed the world from their extremely fertile grain fields, and provide access to the historic sites and sounds of their nation as a tourist-friendly, relatively open place, just like their happy but vigilant neighbor, Poland. Flush with liberty and perhaps not realizing the full implications of their re-assertion of nationalism outside of the mandatory Russian orbit, they looked to the 2004 Constitution of Ukraine, dispelled the constraints of the past decade of nasty domestic politics, and threw off the authoritarianism that came with the Russian yoke.
With Ukraine basking in the temporary aura of overthrowing its puppet rulers, their buzzkill came fast as the mostly peaceful, mostly capitalist revolutionaries returned home from the streets. There was great trauma to come. Ukraine was immediately challenged with the annexation of Crimea (March 2014) by an infuriated Putin who claimed the ironic role of mediator while his Russian infiltrators were rooting out “fascist” groups, “protecting” ethnic Russians, and preserving what they thought was historically Russian, not Ukrainian territory.
Wrapping the Maidan Revolution in with the visible US actions raging across the planet at the time, Putin railed against the Western push into “his realm” and justified his support for the separatist groups in a speech on March 3rd, 2014, by saying "those who stood behind the latest events in Ukraine had a different agenda: they were preparing yet another government takeover; they wanted to seize power and would stop short of nothing. They resorted to terror, murder and riots. Nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes and anti-Semites executed this coup. They continue to set the tone in Ukraine to this day." This attack on an emerging though flawed capitalist democracy in Ukraine wasn’t some routine, hyperbolic speech by some Democrat or pre-Never Trumper attacking supposed dictator Donald Trump with the same exact labels, minus Russophobe, while driving him out of power for a time and nearly sending him to a life in prison. Laugh out loud, sillies, Trump didn't even exist as a significant political entity in 2014! Instead, Putin's speech was a deadly serious warning given the actual dictator’s propensity to scheme, connive, and back up threats against the “fascists” with direct violence, forever encasing his circuitous war justifications with 15 years of proof of his ever-increasing violent willpower.
Enraged at Ukraine's "fall" to the West, but ready for war, the Putin-backed separatists chose violence. They secured the Perekop isthmus land bridge and the Kerch strait entrance points to the Crimean Peninsula, administrative buildings and networks within, and their existing naval facilities in Sevastopol. Then after gobbling up the majority Russian territories of Crimea, they expanded into the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk by April 2014 where unlike Crimea, ethnic Russians were in a sizeable minority, but not majority populations.
Throughout the rapid campaign, present were the comical, yet deadly “little green men,” who were obviously trained Russian soldiers and who occupied key buildings and engaged in violent confrontations with Ukrainian officials and security forces. When one such orcish separatist was asked by reporter Steven Rosenberg in April 2014, he stated that Ukraine and its nationality was a deceptive invention, and he was defending a unified "Novororussiya." With these strange, unflagged militants often armed with AK-47s strapped to their shoulders and watching, a vote took place in Crimea that gave 95% approval to joining Russia with around 80% turnout despite a pointless boycott vote among pro-Ukraine voters and being swamped by motivated and well-protected ethnic Russians. The other more perilous option was to remain with the government of Ukraine, by then depicted in a continual barrage of Russian propaganda as corrupt and led by the far-right. Thus, on March 18th, Putin announced the annexation of Crimea just a few weeks after clearly indicating his thoughts on the matter.
Source: David Miller, https://airspacehistorian.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/miller.png
As the war raged in the Donbas region after 2014 to 2015, deaths amounted to between 14-15,000 (United Nations Human Rights High Commissioner) as the sides settled into atrocity, human rights violations, and costly strategic indecisions. Ukraine’s President Petro Poroshenko was dealt a difficult deck of cards amidst the war that started before he even entered office in May 2014. He had to call for elections in the separatist occupied regions to determine sovereignty knowing full well how the Russians operated.
And after initially gaining some momentum against the separatists, the encirclers found themselves encircled and nearly crushed in the bloodiest battle of Phase I at the Battle of Ilovaisk in August. Ukraine barely achieved political independence in an unstable political environment and had poor training and equipment among its armed forces.
It also faced skepticism in Europe over the ability of Ukraine to resist further aggression as well as US apathy and distraction. Assaulted, the Ukrainians had to push for peace without much Western support and at a disadvantage on the battlefield, but in a way that didn't give up what they had left nor subordinate their government back under Putin's grip. Though this was the price Ukraine had to pay to stop the thousands of casualties being inflicted on them by the Russian separatist rebellion in 2014, it also started an iron-clad resistance to peace negotiations especially after what such diplomatic entreaties brought upon them by 2015.
Less haunted by Russia and more in dread of the ongoing horrors in the Middle East, the Obama Administration tried twice at the end of that year (2014) and the next to get others in Europe to enforce a ceasefire and stop Russian re-expansionism. For its part, the US of 2014-15 merely approved of the ensuing agreement it had managed from the sidelines, and used limited economic sanctions, promises of international unity, and mean words, while publicly refusing to deploy US troops, trainers, or even to sell weapons to Ukraine. This effort was done to avoid soiling the upcoming ceasefire negotiations despite the eventual soiled product of the summits. Obama's State Department was quite distracted as we’ll see, thus it did a greater favor to Putin in Ukraine than most of what Trump did in those same disputed spaces as a supposed pro-Russian puppet after 2016.
Regardless of the baggage that we have now in 2026, it came to pass that in 2014-2015, the First Age of the War of Ukraine, key Putin ally and invasion-enabler, Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko, himself a former Soviet bureaucrat, hosted two summits in the aforementioned city of Minsk with the warring parties and the two great powers, the Russian Federation and the USA, “mediating” and finger-crossing from the background respectively. Sending its foreign ministry officials, Russia negotiated on behalf of the separatists, and then Ukrainian President Poroshenko, plus the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) led by French Prime Minister Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and who both chiefly (and meekly) represented the woodland sprites of Western Europe and the dronish pixies of Obama’s America by proxy.
In two separate agreements in the dark fortress of Minas Morgul (Minsk), a political settlement was indirectly overseen by the Obama administration to stop the fighting in the Donbas Conflict and settle territorial claims to prevent further war. Far worse than any ephemeral Trump concessions to Putin ever since, Minsk II was more directly flawed and instructive for any peace moves in 2026 and beyond. It consisted of 12 general points mainly related to the implementation of a ceasefire, acknowledgment of alleged atrocities by separatists and other parties (a performative label only), determination of the status of the self-styled new republics of the Donbas region (Donetsk and Luhansk), organization of elections in those regions preceded by the withdrawal of armed forces, OSCE monitors for those elections, and prisoner swaps.
The Agreement also stipulated that Ukraine should be neutral to future NATO involvement, meaning it should never join if it knew what was good for it. This stipulation was especially unacceptable considering what would become the violation of the other terms of the agreement. And with buyer's remorse, Ukraine refused to allow this concession as it was increasingly seeing alliance membership as critical to its survival. NATO and the US for their part were leading Ukraine on to a potential marriage promise much like Eowyn, a princess of Rohan, futilely sought the hand of Isildor’s heir and her eventual place on the throne of Gondor if he ever took it. The Maidan wouldn’t have her marriage to the king that was promised just yet (or maybe ever)!
Perhaps the most important aspect of the Minsk settlements is that they were not a single binding treaty, which meant the chances were lessened that the Ring-Wraiths of Russia would ever abide by them. Minsk II (2015) also set a date for referendums in the disputed territories without specifically forcing Russian occupying troops out, which in true dictatorial fashion rubber stamped the pro-Russian results onto Crimea and the Donbas as demanded by those holding the guns. This sleight of hand meant that sure, the shooting would stop, kind of, and elections in Crimea and the Donbas would determine whether the violent burglar (Russia) or the burgled (Ukraine) would rule, but the agreement didn't exactly demand the Russian Occupation withdraw its soldiers and authorities nor did it provide a mechanism to ensure the fairness of the vote it set up.
The flaws of the agreement were legion but primarily related to the nature of the elections meant to declare the intent of the people living there, meaning pro-Russian voters with dual citizenship could also vote with a passport or some other government-issued instrument, which shouldn't be a problem in a part of the world notorious for forging documentation. So, even with the bare minimum of requiring legitimate voter IDs in an illegitimate "democratic" election, and unlike many places in the US that see voter ID as Jim Crow 2.0 (segregationist and racist), the interlopers had little trouble proving who they were if the pro-Russian guards even cared to check, thus there was minimal enforcement mechanisms in place to prevent illegalities.
The persons backed up by the guns simply had their way. With the ever-present "oppression" of asking for free, widely available voter IDs and lacking the kind of food and drink that was supposed to be provided by partisan American poll watchers for those waiting in line to do their most basic yet important civic duty of voting in the US, how did these pro-Ukrainian voters in Crimea or the Donbas ever work up the courage to present their IDs and cast their votes in a rigged election with armed men actually intimidating them? Democracy most definitely not in action in either case?
In classic Eastern European fashion, the votes conveniently worked in favor of those pointing weapons. Despite the ongoing Minsk talks and long afterwards, the breakaway enclaves (conquered territories) chose Russia, and all ceasefires eventually broke down, the violence carried on, and thousands died to everything from landmines, trench traps, artillery bombardment, and missile strikes on civilian targets including the July 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which killed all 298 on board.
Therefore, Minsk II was critical in shaping how all of the parties viewed the war going forward and what strategic realities they had for Eastern Europe. Russia claimed its dark realm of Mordor, directly or with Isengard's orcish hordes (the separatists) as well as thousands of miles of territory including Belarus by proxy, Ukraine by conquest, and most areas next to it, all part of its sphere of influence much as the US views Canada, Mexico and most of the Western Hemisphere as being under the watchful eye of the Monroe Doctrine. Russia demanded the absence of hostile powers much like those that were pushing NATO to expand into their border regions and that wanted security from the Russians.
We should not forget the dronish pixies in 2015 America either as the Ukrainians were fighting and voting for their lives. The Obama administration was keen to not be involved in financing more wars, or better yet not to be directly fighting anywhere after promising to get out of Iraq and solve Afghanistan while simultaneously managing crises in Syria and North Africa. Too distracted for Ukraine is an understatement!
Despite being billed as a cleanser of the "War on Terror" in 2008 and a minimizer of Russian ambitions versus Republican Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential election, this Obama variety of foreign policy was such a problem in this environment for many reasons. Called the Obama Doctrine, it sought to lower the imprint of American power by “leading from behind,” lowering the financial burden by choosing soft instead of lethal aid, while emphasizing covert operations and drone power (Lofflman, 2019). After all, because of his reliance using pixy prick strikes at his enemies to finally nab terrorists like Osama Bin Laden, or to use drones throughout Middle East and Africa, Obama earned the title of "Drone President," which can later be judged in histories as to whether that's a positive or negative epithet. Yet, to only rain fire down from the sky is much different than winning a war and achieving objectives.
Instead of the Obama Doctrine becoming anti-septic to new conflicts in a way that wiped away the stains of decades of American negative imagery, it became a new rot that reeked of weakness and a lack of confidence in America’s purpose for what it was doing overseas especially after the human and financial costs to American foreign policy weren’t about to lessen any time soon. Broader failure largely originated from the US sponsorship of the 2010 Arab Spring, the resulting mass slaughter, and the US government's pursuit of "liberal democracy" that left parts of North Africa ungovernable and more violent than under its previous indigenous dictatorships.
With Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's (2009-2013) famously churlish quote “We came, we saw, he died,” the US leadership from the sidelines called upon the conquest mentality of Julius Caesar, but without the conquest. It engineered the toppling of long time Libyan dictator Mouammar Quadayfi with much glee only to watch extremists brutally murder the captive leader and for the nation to plummet into a civil war of competing Islamic extremists. Sure, there was the tragic 2012 Benghazi Debacle in the American consulate in Libya that killed 4 and saw sovereign US territory invaded for two days by terrorists. That travesty led to a decade of congressional hearings and campaign slogans that in a very tiny preview of the partisan hell that would be unleashed during the Trump (I) administration, tormented Clinton and her deleted emails during her own failed presidential campaign in 2016.
Yet, it was the US intervention in the Syrian Civil War (2011-2025) combined with the Obama Doctrine, that was most instructive for Ukraine especially as both places became playgrounds for Russian military experimentation and political puppetry of its clients after September 2015. The Syrian Civil War was a complex rebellion that blossomed out of the failed Arab Spring and that evolved into a regional bloodbath with multiple foreign powers, great (the US and Russia) and small (Israel and Iran), backing competing rebel groups. Perhaps a half million people died in atrocities ranging from gas attacks, systematic torture, mass public executions, and the intentional targeting of healthcare facilities. This blight on humanity was only recently resolved by an understanding with the Trump (II) administration and its support of questionable, victorious Syrian Rebel forces after they finally exiled the dictator, Bashar Al-Assad, and his Russian and Iranian puppeteers after 12 years of brutal civil war.
Since they too are thinking individuals and not merely unreasoned demons, the Russians and their intervention didn’t take place in a vacuum. Instead, the intervention was a real-time adaptation to Russia's own interests, however malignant, in propping up allied nations like Syria. In fact, Putin was initially hesitant with Syria, and it took the contact of the great Iranian terrorist general, Qassem Soleimani, to convince Putin that direct Russian military involvement was needed in the dire situation to prop up their mutual ally, Assad.
Much of the slaughter and an additional decade of violence in the Middle East is attributable to this triad of Russia, Iran, and Syria. An orcish general like Sauron's Gothmog, in the film "Return of the King," Soleimani himself was a real piece of work as he engineered the deaths of hundreds of Americans throughout the years because of improvised explosive devices (I.E.D.s) in Iraq and due to his personal terrorist sponsorships throughout the region. If no one person other than the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei (1989-2026), represented that nation’s hostility to American causes, it was Soleimani. Alas, one of the key diplomatic architects of the Russian intervention and brutality in Syria was himself killed by the Trump (I) Administration in 2020 at an airport in Iraq, but only after the Terror Triad wreaked havoc for over a decade throughout the Middle East.
And in a preview of its treatment of Ukraine in 2022, when Russia went into Syria in 2015, it went in hardcore. It specifically targeted civilian areas much as it would in Ukraine less than a decade later in order to demoralize them and degrade key infrastructure in non-government-controlled areas, which was meant prevent the semblance of normal life. In short, Russia cut its teeth in destabilization operations in low and high intensity conflicts in response to the fires set by Obama’s Doctrine. It’s no surprise that not much democracy and freedom blossomed, but a whole lot of death and destruction did poison the soil in the process.
Concurrently to those events in Syria and thriving in the power vacuum of regional instability and American weakness, there was the rise of the terrorist group ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), and a famously, belittling label by President Obama as the "JV League" in 2014, a statement akin to 2003's President George W. Bush declaring "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq by banner. Despite the liberal/progressive preference for harsh, performative words directed at and intended to silence "mean, bad, and evil" people who probably don't care, ISIS still spread like an infection after 2014 no matter how many people, by some estimates up to 3,400, even US citizens were droned to death in the then prioritized Afghanistan conflict and prior to the disastrous American defeat under Biden's military-like people a decade later.
Alas, from 2011 onwards, ISIS cut off people's heads after lecturing about Islam while the victims awaiting execution were trapped in cages. Not the so-called "border cages" of the Obama or later Trump administrations holding those who broke US immigration law as they awaited deportation in relatively humane conditions, mind you, but actual victims of violence who were intentionally marked for death by a vile group. ISIS kept sex slaves as wives, and threw indigenous, what would now be "Queers for Palestine" allies from tall buildings throughout the region because of their sexual orientation. So much for fostering a Western-style liberal democracy where people still don't want one despite the failures to do the same in Iraq and Afghanistan only a few years before.
Speaking of people who don't want the liberal/progressive kind of "democracy" either, but who are white Europeans and who don't conform to our sappy armchair expectations here in America, there are those pesky, numerous, and powerful Russians. They keep showing up for a reason and the foreign policy elites screwed up handling them for a long time. They dabbled in all of these Middle Eastern and North African failures of America, propping up or directly engaging in most of the conflicts of the Obama era in direct opposition to American interests.
And from the Russian perspective, it was America's Dronish Pixy Doctrine that was at fault, like the fairies in Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" since J.R.R. Tolkien really didn't have a pixy or fairy equivalent of note. Obama officials felt they could just drop in, take credit for their meddling, and screw around with the locals and get them to fall in love with their version of liberal democracy without having to take any blame or acknowledge the consequences of their machinations.
This sort of (Hillary) Clintonian glee relished in toppling Russian friends while letting proxies and drones do the work in an effortless, destabilizing way of hybrid war that even without the drones, the Russians were used to being at the forefront of for decades and that threatened the Russian perception of the world order for once. Don't go declaring victory just yet, Russophobes! Despite the paranoia this inspired in Putin and his allies, under three US administrations, these destabilization efforts were not very successful in achieving the objective of less violence and more freedom, for you see millions of more dead people were yet to come.
It’s not surprising either that such master infiltrators spawned by the Lord of Deception, Putin, would adapt with alarm mixed with scorn to American machinations. Enter Russia's 2013 "Gerasimov Doctrine," a policy digestion of existing American actions by a Russian general and his staff during the Arab Spring that was blown out of proportion, then ironically used to justify further American intervention in a variety of places to stop Russian re-expansionism. Through him, the Doctrine would become the Mouth of Sauron, a vile and deformed sorcerer who spoke his master's (Putin's) deceptions to the free peoples of Middle Earth (everywhere internationalists believed to be "free").
According Ofer Friedman (2019), the Gerasimov Doctrine was just a Russian general’s reflection on the invasive effects of American foreign policy in matters considered important to Russia. General Valery Gerasimov did not yet achieve the importance in Russian military affairs that he would in Syria and Ukraine though by Friedman's time of writing in Prism magazine (2019) the General could be seen as making semi-official policy. But to westerners particularly during the bookends of the Obama and Biden eras, he offered the dark, seeing stone of Orthanc because these ideas allowed Americans to peer into the mind of the Enemy and see his great plans. Thus, this Mouth of Sauron's prescriptions for Russian counter-interference were distorted by American policymakers, partly due to translation errors, and their media mouthpieces to justify opposing Russia much as the NSC-68 or George F. Kennan’s Long Telegram were twisted into justifying rabid anti-communism during the Cold War, but at a time when Stalin was much worse and also much less known to the world than Putin is today.
According to J.M. Olde, this "group think" based on Gerasimov, "this single source gained a life of its own and became a catalyst of major strategic groupthink which is the death of any effective strategic thoughts and solutions." And oh, down the Mines of Moria the dwarven miners at the US State and Defense Departments would go to find Gerasimov's (and Putin's) interference. Never directly related, still, Russian influence would transition over the years from happening over there to over here and potentially everywhere from Trump's "perfect phone calls" with the Ukrainian President that had merely a whiff of non-Russophobia to proposing any amount of peace once the full invasion of Ukraine began because what opponent of evil would ever publicly call for that?
The analyst responsible for this new high-tech domino theory, Mark Galeotti, publicly apologized because anti-Russian policymakers took his analysis of Gerasimov and bent it into what I would define as cover for their foreign policy failures especially the surprise they felt after Georgia and Crimea despite all of the signs and Russian patterns of behavior (Friedman). Much as pseudo-historians like Richard Hofstadter sought to find group psychological characteristics in order to discredit and defeat all of a group of political opponents of his established "1960s liberal middle," so too was the largely invented Gerasimov Doctrine used to display a singular mentality on Russian motivations especially when later, even more convenient evidence from Ukraine or Syria popped up to solidify this adversarial mindset towards Russia. Rather than the non-ideological, non-partisan realpolitik that should've guided policy makers in preserving American interests, or at the very least giving the Americans true, honest causes and earning their support for causes which might costs them their lives and livelihoods, instead, many let fear of the Russian Wraiths reign supreme while the bureaucrats managed the downward spiral.
One Russian source appeared to many an expression of a new form of military doctrine preaching every sort of underhanded tactic short of open war that would destabilize unfriendly governments and shoot and kill where needed with spies and special forces without engaging significant forces. Yet, Charles Bartles (2016) writes "some analysts in the West, having read Gerasimov’s article and viewed current Russian operations in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, have created models for a new Russian way of warfare. Although these models may be useful analyzing past actions, not much stock should be put in them for predicting the nature of future Russian operations" (p.34). He also cautions against viewing this doctrine as an explain-all as Gerasimov writes that each case should be viewed in context and in isolation. And the full, direct invasion of Ukraine in 2022 with hundreds of thousands of Russian troops is exactly NOT what the scary Doctrine called for Russia to do to oppose American interventionism and subversion.
Down to see the mountain king some American analysts went especially over at the influential news source, Politico, who has some of the best access to left-wing and Democrat circles. A Politico analyst, Molly McKew was an advisor (2009-2013) to the same Georgian government under President Mikheil Saakashvili that was leveled by the 2008 Russian invasion over the breakaway republics of the Caucuses. Obviously influenced by her advisees in forming her arguments, she gave weight to the Gerasimov Doctrine in early 2017 even after the election paranoia of 2016 was still lingering and the Trump (I) administration was plummeting into the firing of James Comey, the so-called Russian Collusion narrative, and the Mueller Report.
McKew obviously has knowledge of Russian cyberwarfare tactics and modes of operation, but she also had a reactive bias to prevent the fall of more dominos due to her experience working with the Georgians after she saw the aftermath of Russian hard power. Because of witnessing this defeat and knowing that technology has shifted, she writes that Russia has been deploying this doctrine for years (which is true), but in a "new Cold War" that she argues the Obama administration largely ignored especially with the once-captive nations of Georgia, Estonia, and Lithuania. Though the Obama administration may have ignored or failed at many aspects of foreign policy, it also thankfully didn't create a new Cold War.
However, hard military power in the form of kinetic strikes and boots on the ground are open and obvious to see. The softer, more hybrid form is harder to detect and less direct in its outcomes. "Hybrid" can also become a kind of fill-in-the-gap shortcoming whereby even routine hacking or phishing can be indicative of even more sinister influence without the evidence of a greater connection. Unbiased, nonpartisan, level-headed professionals have been significantly lacking from the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, and the evidence of conflicts and the political paranoia that is reactive to those conflicts is widespread and apparent. The US needs better officials who are better able to draw the right connections between foreign actions especially regarding Russia or reject those opinions regardless of politics even if it doesn't suit their personal interests as members of the defense and intelligence sectors.
McKew's article is exactly the circular sort of argument that generated increased fear over the doctrine in the first place. Seeing the Russians under Putin as insidious evils now omnipresent because of cyberwarfare, actual threats to humans, their ideas, specific places, and things were simplified and lumped together into a Balrog abstraction, a demonic, catchall idea for the fears and anxieties of people who can't approach massive, global threats without simply chasing shadows (abstractions).
Despite McKew's analytic experience, most foreign policy watchers already knew that Russia would influence and interfere in America if given the opportunity. This doctrine was effectively abandoned at the same time as Putin's claimed role as "mediator" in the Donbas Conflict was abandoned in favor of full invasion (hard power). Russia became an open, not back door aggressor, and threw off the laughable veil of a neutral third party.
Yet, wanting to believe in Russian meddling when they had something to prove about their domestic opponents, instead, 40 years of cold war spying, conspiracies, and political entanglements with leftist parties in America and throughout the world were pigeonholed. Because McCarthy was craven in his witch-hunting, the radical left of the Cold War were just innocent "peaceniks" who championed the two worst dictators in world history (Stalin and Mao Zedong of the People’s Republic of China). Thus, Putin's Russia is Sauron's Morgoth as it fulfills an important role in current American politics even though it's not the same one once filled by the defunct Soviet Union, the (rightfully) great boogeyman of anti-communist conservatives and most rational people during the Cold War (1947-1989).
As the Obama Administration ended in 2017, a new type of instability borne of paranoia was on the horizon, as Democrats' Witch King of AGMA came down the Golden Escalator on June 15, 2015, ready to declare war on the establishment of pixies and high elves. Contrary to the interpretations of this King Nazgul's intentions, the instability was not really of Russian origin but was a domestic reaction to it and was dragon flame of reaction from the US government established bureaucracy among other things.
In this atmosphere of Gerasimov paranoia and fears that Russia was planting operatives inside of the US to meddle in the US election, vote-changing didn't happen the way that many were expecting nor in the way the clung to after it was disproven. Even in 2018, years after the doctrinal myths were corrected repeatedly, links were still being drawn to it especially after the 2016 Presidential Election. Lawfare author Susan Landua highlights not the failures of deterring Russia from kinetic wars, but hybrid war simply being an offshoot of this aggression as if it's somehow different to add technology to actions, things the Russians have been doing for decades. In short, rather than solving the violence overseas with better policy and better bureaucrats after years of failure, much of the focus became internal and focused on the red herrings of the First Trump Administration and the visions of Collusion granted to them by the great Palantir seeing orb of Orthanc, which was shown to them by Geramisimov, the Mouth of Putin.
The events of the First Trump Administration (2017-2021) as detailed in the introduction do not need to be repeated not because they weren’t important, but that they are tangential to the actual conflict and relate only to the spillover effect of it on American politics. However, what is important is the role of Russia in the 2016 Election, and its wraith-like ability to become an issue that warranted investigations, special prosecutors, and much spent emotional energy.
After a surprise election win against Hillary Clinton, the Trump (I) administration floundered in its early days as the bureaucracy actively worked against its newly elected bosses. In 2016, the American electorate was not used to the open access that the internet provided with its wild conspiracies, platforms accessible by anyone across the world nor did many have the critical thinking skills, media literacy, and nor the time and patience to go beyond 30 second TikToks and question the information spewed at them by influencers.
The real veil of Morgoth reached the US during the 2016 Election, the unproven accusations of Russian collusion, actual Russian interference and hacking, which led to the prosecution of 12 Russians, and the crippling spillover effect that had on the entire Trump I era. Beyond the Clinton campaign's paid efforts to tank the Trump campaign as it grew as a threat like the debunked Steele Dosier, the real battle started its fight over the firing of FBI Director Jim Comey, an executive department official under the employ of the president, but who passed on setting up a similar prosecutor of 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton over her email scandal because it would negatively affect her election.
Despite the constitutionality of the Comey firing, this event caused an uproar that furthered destabilized the newly elected government. It led to the initiation of the special investigation and eventually to the Mueller Report, which was a special prosecution that Trump was forced to accept after his own Attorney General betrayed him and selected former FBI director Robert Mueller. The investigation started from a point of bias against Trump as it had a basic acceptance of Trump's guilt in colluding with Russia, and it sought to find proof of wanting to illegally tank the Clinton campaign from outside of government with Russian help. The coverup of these nonexistent activities was supposed to have taken place through many means not limited to the firing of the aforementioned FBI director. The coverup is supposed to be worse than the crime! And veteran, bureaucratic knifeman, Robert Mueller, though very much aged by the time of his appointment made quite a career prosecuting just such coverups.
The Special Prosecutor's Report led to countless congressional investigations, and all investigators found that Russia actively sought to sway voters with a misinformation campaign on social media, hack voter rolls and registration lists in places like Durham County, North Carolina. This truth became a red herring when clumped together with the original mission of finding Trump's collusion with Russia and his coverup of an unproven crime. Even though no investigator found any evidence that a single vote was stolen at a single polling place anywhere in the country as Russia had no access to any voter database directly, Mueller released his report, barely defended it during Congressional hearings, yet still came up with a famous standard of justice about Trump's involvement with Russia whereby a person is "not, not guilty." I wrote about this topic extensively for its un-American, unjust way of condemning an accused person and giving them no recourse to be exonerated.
First, the narrative of Trump’s "Russian Collusion" was also put into doubt in the Mueller Report first because "collusion" and "coordination" are not legal terms so the term "conspiracy" with Russians had to be used so that it could be prosecuted under federal law, for which Trump was never prosecuted. Second, there was the firm conclusion that:
However, there was much political fodder after Mueller's "not, not guilty" report was released with all of its accompanying evidence and no way to contest the accusations or put the evidence into context and into a defense. It fueled the #Resistence mission to stop the Witch King of AGMA and help to cripple Trump's First Presidency in ways that weren't related to disputing extremely disputable policies. For the Russians and their mission to stop American influence in Eastern Europe, it was almost as great a success as their initial actions in Ukraine in 2014 and after.
Dollar for dollar, from the Russian hacking, disinformation campaigns, and the political war sparked in the US, it was the greatest psychological campaign victory of Putin, the Great Deceiver, Lord of Mordor. They needed to only hover over the American battlefield as flying Nazguls, hack some voter registration lists, spread more lies around for the media ignorant and for those frantic partisans of both sides to gobble up in an already cesspit social media. And the Russian crippling wasn't over yet for it was a gift that kept on giving.
In 2019, as the embers of the Ukraine war were still yet smothered, the Americans became distracted over "perfect phone calls" between President Donald Trump and newly elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy over election interference in the US and alleged corruption by the Biden Family in Ukraine while the first US weapons packages were still shipped to the still non-NATO allies. These distractive events led to the first failed Trump Impeachment late in 2019. Yet even then, the Russian powder largely stayed dry. Even then with a supposed Putin puppet in the White House and tepid Ukraine support front and center, Russia did not fully invade.
So, while the conflict actually slowed down by 2020 and Russia was a distant menace to most American voters, Ukraine aid and Russian influence was central to most of the major political controversies of the first Trump era. This search for spies and traitors where they weren’t would have made 1950s anti-communists in the McCarthy era proud! It’s a fact that despite anti-Russian rhetoric over here, by December 31st of 2020, the amount of daily deaths in the conflict had been reduced to a low, but still sad number of 149. Effectively the conflict had entered a slow simmer, not totally over nor were territorial issues resolved, but also not the full onslaught of two years later.
Most importantly, the Trump administration reversed the Obama decision not to send lethal aid in 2017 and never stopped the support even in the middle of impeachments alleging an aid quid pro quo. It was only in 2017-2019 that the weapons flowed to Ukraine in the form of javelin anti-tank missiles and other direct lethal aid that had remained stuck in debate during the Obama years because of what Atlantic Council writers called a hesitancy stemming from "a unified Transatlantic strategy" (or the Obama Doctrine). This reluctance, or as some would label weakness, was opposed to an effective policy that deterred further Russian aggression regardless of the coalition assembled against invasion.
The Trump administration also expanded security assistance in an effort to punish Russian violations of the ceasefire and meddling in Ukrainian affairs, which came in the form of maritime and aerial defensive aid for use in the Black Sea and its northern extension, the Sea of Azov, which isolates Crimea into almost an island. The 2017 CAATSA (Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) provided severe economic penalties on any entities doing business with Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Trump had reservations about the law infringing on the ability of the Executive branch to be able to make deals, and with Europe crying foul despite wanting greater opposition to Russia, it became delayed and almost unenforceable because it had little ability to get allies or those being punished to comply.
The Witch King of AGMA (Trump) also targeted the European’s prized, but unfinished Nord Stream 2 pipeline to Russia, which would have further linked Russian energy exports with European nations and made them more dependent, before it was blown up in September 2022 in mysterious circumstances. Germany and Russia condemned the energy sanctions right as the Western energy buyers were supposed to be monitoring Russian actions in Ukraine.
Trump railed as much against European dependence on Russian energy as he did about NATO being an alliance with cheap, unsupportive members. If when he was annoying, he was also consistent in his criticism when he attacked Europe's dependence on Russia energy as the First Age of Ukraine's War was still ongoing. Connecting resources with war ability more than most Europeans, AGMAS's King (Trump) had a consistent view of the irony Russia's economic ties versus their Ukrainian support:
And many Europeans, especially from Germany and France, rejected the prospect of secondary actions to punish Russia and starve it of energy profits as it was sponsoring the Ukrainian separatists, with leaders of both countries calling the penalties “illegal” under international law. So, during the Trump (I) administration, even aggressive action to hinder Russia's wealth was resisted while on the homefront Trump was depicted by the Democrats and hostile media as a puppet. Yet still, the Russians held off the crushing blow they wanted to deliver.
That opportunity would come after the virulently anti-Putin party, the Democrats, achieved a clear election victory in the Presidential Election of 2020 with the almost too veteran politician, Joe Biden, campaigning from the sidelines during the first global pandemic with the internet. Biden called for a return to normalcy and reasonable political discourse while letting Trump’s COVID handling do the election hanging for the Republicans.
Yet, if moderation was what Americans were expecting and a return to normal partisan discourse, they got the opposite for the Fellowship of the Ring's Council would argue a lot about what the future would be and it was clear the Witch King of AGMA and in fact all of AGMA, nearly half the country, had to be cast into the fires of Mount Doom. The early Biden years were chocked full of rigorous investigations, social media deplatforming, debanking, and the prosecutorial purge of the Witch King and his AGMA “insurrectionists” after the January 6th Riot, which later morphed into to a wild claim that it was an "Insurrection" despite every court charge on the books not charging that.
This Riot (not insurrection) rightly led to thousands of jail sentences for the Witch King's supporters for resisting arrest, assaulting officers, illegal entry of federal property, defiling the capitol building, and conspiracy to commit the previous crimes. One person even died on that day, Ashley Babbit, an AGMA rioter who was shot point blank by a capitol policeman as she crawled through a window. Other officers were seriously injured and some died of drug use or pre-existing health issues after that abominable day.
The Purge continued with the infamous FBI raid and the subsequent trashing of Mar-a-Lago over classified documents, almost all of which should have been considered part of executive privilege and excused by the reigning Steward of Gondor (President Biden) since he was a serial document mishandler himself. Instead of being magnanimous towards his predecessor like Trump was to Obama and every president was before regarding executive powers to declassify, the Document Case was wrapped into six, total felony prosecutions for the former President, and a major multi-state attempt was underway to disenfranchise voters who selected him in the 2024 Republican primary elections.
This domestic political vengeance, rabidly partisan diatribes like Biden’s infamous and imperial Dark Biden Speech, on top of renewed COVID lockdowns and vaccine mandates, blinded the already limited awareness of an exhausted public to international happenings. Gone were the days where shipping lethal aid to Ukraine while calling for anti-corruption investigations led to impeachments, instead, during the Biden era, a time that matched or exceeded the vitriol of the first Trump era, a whole war could be lost and Americans could be humiliated with a forced retreat equal to fleeing Saigon after South Vietnam collapsed.
Instead of screaming Vietnamese refugees calling for helicopter evacs and those visuals scarring an entire generation of network TV viewers, under Biden, not enough Americans watched with care as people fell off airplanes to escape the Taliban’s triumphal reoccupation of Kabul in 2021. As the Purge of AGMA continued full blast and was in fact only just stepping into high gear, the Afghan War (2001-2021) became the second major lost war in American history. It was a human travesty that shred billions of dollars of high-tech American bases and as much military equipment as the Taliban could ever want or need. It put a gaping hole in American power despite the so-called Over the Horizon strategy of Biden's State and Defense departments that was meant to counter China's influence by controlling access points in Central and South Asia (like in Afghanistan with its massive Bagram Airbase offered before it was occupied by the Taliban). In tragedy, thus America’s War on Terror was thrown on the trash heap of great military failures with only nominally independent Iraq, ridden with Iranian terror squads left wobbling in an uncertain future. And how little effort the Biden people put in to help the flimsy government of Afghanistan survive, Obama’s once-priority, let alone did a liberal democracy develop, at least one that didn't stone people to death or ban the education of women.
As it was in terminal collapse, one day in Afghanistan in 2021, the Abbey Gate terrorist attack on the Kabul, Afghanistan airport by affiliates of the same terrorist groups the US had been fighting for 20 years. This attack led to 13 US and scores of civilian deaths, and hundreds of casualties. It also nearly matched the six-month, supposed carnage of the slow, unresolved Iran Conflict of 2026, with no people falling out of planes to escape the carnage of US defeat. All tragic, some deaths were in America's interests, yet some were the result of stupid, rigid policy, and thus most definitely not worthy of the sacrifice.
Sitting in their grand dictatorial offices in Moscow, Minsk, Damascus, and Tehran and watching America still remain torn apart over the Trump (I) presidency, January 6th, and the Purge of AGMA, these monstrous regimes of Mordor likely thought: why not finish the job in Ukraine especially when America just forfeited Afghanistan while blustering about NATO expansion without the backbone to make it happen?
Source: BBC 20 January 2022.
Alas, we must return to the subject of these Chronicles though the domestic tumult in America proved fertile for instability overseas. Last we left Ukraine of 2017-2021, the conflict was at a low simmer. Violent, but contained within the remaining shards of Minsk to just a few regions and definitely not involving flagged Russian armies moving from Belarus to take the rest of Ukraine. During the Biden Residency, however, the events of 2021-22 turned ominous to all consumers of the news especially considering the response to the Afghan problem and more NATO saber-rattling and talk of expansionism.
The Dark Lord (Putin) ratcheted up the rhetoric by portraying Russia as backed into a NATO corner. He said in a December 21, 2021 speech that "what the U.S. is doing in Ukraine is at our doorstep... And they should understand that we have nowhere further to retreat to. Do they think we’ll just watch idly?" This refers to a classic anachronism with Russian leaders like Putin where something past (the civilization known as the Kievan Rus) can exactly become a reality again. In Putin's view, if the borders of Ukraine were violated and Russia's neighbor succumbed to a hostile nuclear alliance, what would be next? Would it be Russia's fortress enclave, Kaliningrad, inside Poland and thus inside NATO itself, where the Russian Baltic fleet, upwards of 30,000 soldiers, as well much heavy industry is surrounded by hostiles? Would its Nordic and Arctic territories taken from Finland (Karelia etc) be given away? Or are more of its authoritarian allies going to be threatened in Belorussia, or what about the traditional Russian cities of St. Petersburg or Moscow itself? Are they in play?
Putin continued on that "if the aggressive line of our Western colleagues continues, we will take adequate military-technical response measures and react harshly to unfriendly steps." And the sirens blazing to the West and particularly to the Biden administration that didn't seem to get the messages across. With his December 2021 warnings not being taken seriously, and the West seemingly doing much little publicly to effectively stop the clock just 14 days before Phase II's start on February 25th, Putin upped the ante even further when he declared that Ukraine joining NATO would lead to nuclear war. It was at this late stage and on the precipice of war, that no one knew they f'ed up.
Other than what we know of his twisted mind of metal, full of rage and paranoia, his public speeches, which unlike Trump's negotiated tactical lying, bluster, and a lot of failure as one often saw in Trump's political and business career, are sometimes deceptively honest and simple if that's possible from a former KGB agent. Yet without time and a greater record, there's no way yet to determine what finally led Sauron to grasp after his precious.
The Biden administration was certainly engaged in diplomacy and the president himself spoke some words that were typically imprecise, mangled, and unclear. The US and the West delivered their answers to the NATO question by January 2022 stating that they'd only negotiate on arms controls, not a sure-fire winner with Putin after most such agreements were already dead. This was the final, last chance for the NATO-bait to stop, to show Russia that their force would be resisted, but NATO would not be in Ukraine's future for the foreseeable future so long as a proven killer had one of the largest land armies in existence cocked and loaded for Gondor's fall.
As to NATO, the Biden leader-like diplomats and their European thralls couldn't deny the Ukrainians their NATO prey however, as they would not force that country to deny any future eligibility nor would they back down to the military exercises and threats. For his doddering part, Biden confused almost everyone by his typical form of speaking by saying "What you're going to see is that Russia will be held accountable if it invades and it depends on what it does...."It's one thing if it's a minor incursion, and then we end up having to fight about what to do and not do etc." A typically flaccid statement if taken literally, the kind that lost the US supportive allied governments throughout the decade, but to others this appeared to green light a "little invasion," as long as it did no harm to NATO countries of which Ukraine was still not one.
Thus, shortly after threatening nuclear consequences for Ukrainian membership in the Alliance and it was doing nothing to soften the sleepy Steward of Gondor, Lord Denethor Biden or NATO, Putin backed up his threats once again by deploying up to 150,000 soldiers positioned on all parts of Russia and Belorussia's borders with Ukraine. Gone were the Minsk pretenses of mediation and on came full recognition of the Donbas Republics. Gone were the Gerasimov Doctrine and secret hybrid wars, and on came the first full Russian invasion that NATO had been founded in 1949 to prevent. And the target wasn't even a NATO member even then. The dread fear of Russian tanks and artillery came true. Democracy in action is not really a consideration at that point!
When the shotgun was fired to begin his great and bloody adventure in 2022, the Dark Lord Putin had Kiev in his sights and he fully intended to topple the Zelenskyy government. And for sure, we know that no matter what the US or West did at this point was enough to stop Putin who (miscalculated) that the East would rally to his cause and that the "fascist, neo-Nazi, right-wingers" would be crushed quickly.
How Kiev and Ukraine lasted is a story not of legend, but of real life. There were heroes and villains, death and destruction, nuclear power plants and possible nuclear fallout exposure, renegade and rebellious mercenary soldiers, and a thwarted coup of Putin, and the forgiven coup leaders conveniently killed in a plane crash, the Baltic Fleet's near destruction, and WWI style tactics that grinded men and women into dust as they breached trenches or were blown up using Iranian drones. All of that is a story that must be told. Alas, the tale of that desired demolition is for another day.
The End of the First Age of the Ukraine War
Reference Scrolls in the Two Thousand Twenty-Sixth Year About the First Age of the Ukraine War:
Biden, Joe. "September 1, 2022: Remarks on the Continued Battle for the Soul of the Nation." Miller Center, University of Virginia, 1 Sept. 2022, millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/september-1-2022-remarks-continued-battle-soul-nation.
Brunstetter, Daniel. "Over-the-Horizon Counterterrorism: New Name, Same Old Challenges." Modern War Institute, 24 Nov. 2021, mwi.westpoint.edu/over-the-horizon-counterterrorism-new-name-same-old-challenges/.
Carter, Brandon. "READ: House Intel Committee Releases Whistleblower Complaint On Trump-Ukraine Call." NPR, 26 Sept. 2019, www.npr.org/2019/09/26/764071379/read-house-intel-releases-whistleblower-complaint-on-trump-ukraine-call.
Getmanchuk, Alyona. "Afghanistan Collapse Sparks Wave of Alarm in Ukraine." Atlantic Council, 16 Aug. 2021, www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/afghanistan-collapse-sparks-wave-of-alarm-in-ukraine/
"Grand Jury Indicts 12 Russian Intelligence Officers for Hacking Offenses Related to the 2016 Election." The United States Department of Justice, 13 July 2018, www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/grand-jury-indicts-12-russian-intelligence-officers-hacking-offenses-related-2016-election.
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"Remarks by President Trump and NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at Bilateral Breakfast." The White House, 11 July 2018, National Archives Identifier: Trump White House Archived Website, trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-nato-secretary-general-jens-stoltenberg-bilateral-breakfast/.
United States, Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Ukraine 2014 Human Rights Report. U.S. Department of State, 25 June 2015, 2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/236800.pdf.
Zenko, Micah. "Obama's Final Drone Strike Data." Council on Foreign Relations, 20 Jan. 2017, www.cfr.org/articles/obamas-final-drone-strike-data.
Żochowski, Piotr, Rafał Sadowski, and Marek Menkiszak. "The Russian Military Intervention in Eastern Ukraine." OSW Centre for Eastern Studies, 3 Sept. 2014, www.osw.waw.pl/en/publikacje/analyses/2014-09-03/russian-military-intervention-eastern-ukraine.
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