UPDATE TO “Did the West Intentionally Incite Putin to War?”

The recent New York Times (NYT) piece on the CIA’s 14 intelligence-gathering and special operations bases in Ukraine somewhere along ‘Russia’s borders’ adds an additional element in support of my hypothesis that US and NATO policies may have been intended to provoke Russian Vladimir Putin’s “unprovoked, brutal invasion of Ukraine” (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/25/world/europe/cia-ukraine-intelligence-russia-war.html). In a recent article I noted that the pattern of US and NATO military and ‘diplomatic’ activity in and with regard to Ukraine and Russia certainly provoked the war but also has the appearance of intentional provocations, the purpose of which was to nudge Putin to invade Ukraine in the hope that the border of the political, military, and economic burdens of a major war would collapse Putin’s regime (https://gordonhahn.com/2024/02/27/did-the-west-intentionally-incite-putin-to-war/). This might not have been a concerted policy of a unified rational actor functioning single-mindedly, but rather a function of various bureaucratic interests favouring NATO expansion and other provocative policies in relation to Russia for various geopolitical, domestic political, economic reasons, only some of which were intended to provoke Putin. Others provoked Russia accidentally. Together, the one or both of these two processes provoked Putin. Furthermore, the unintentional tier certainly persists and perhaps the hypothesized tier as well. But now all the different NATO members with different multiple bureaucratic interests unintentionally and perhaps intentionally continue to provoke Russia to go further, take more territory in order to force the West and Kiev to the negotiating table they keep smashing to pieces. They do this by way of repeating the insistence on Ukraine’s eventual NATO membership, the escalation in the type of weapons being supplied to Kiev, ever provocative statements about sending to Ukraine expeditionary forces (Britain) or otherwise sending forces (France), and press revelations about the extent of Western military and intelligence presence in Ukraine before, during, and after the war. 

The recent NYT article notes that 12 such bases were created and operated in the period of the failed Minsk peace treaty — 2014-2022. Two more were built after the 2022 Russian invasion. In addition, these intelligence bases were directly involved in training and organizing special Ukrainian units, such as Unit 2245, which carried out various assassinations on pro-Russian Donbass separatist leaders and on Russian opinion leaders as well as other attacks. All of these operations were supposedly, according to the article, neither planned nor otherwise supported by Western officers or servicemen at these 14 intel bases, and Western officials supposedly complained to their Ukrainian counterparts about these attacks. This news is a provocation in and of itself, but it also demonstrates the likelihood — indeed, the certainty — that Russian intelligence knew something about these operations not just before the NYT article’s publication but before the 2022 invasion. Indeed, the article itself notes there was a “shadow war” surrounding the CIA and its Ukrainian bases’ activities. In the last months of the Obama administration and in between Obama era assassinations of pro-Russian separatists this shadow war was “in overdrive.” “The Russians used a car bomb to assassinate the head of Unit 2245, the elite Ukrainian commando force. The commander, Col. Maksim Shapoval, was on his way to meeting with C.I.A. officers in Kyiv when his car exploded,” the NYT reveals now.

Again, as with NATO military training and equipping of the Ukrainian army before the war, this CIA-tied intelligence and operational activity of the Ukrainians informed Putin’s decision to invade and was designed by the CIA or elements within it or the government at-large (Victoria Nulled) to do precisely that. In addition to all the above, the fact that the article attributes many of the assassination s and other attacks to the CIA-trained Ukrainian GRU chief Kyryll Budanov, who was the star of the CIA training programs at the noted bases, as the article emphasizes.

In addition, the article notes: “The C.I.A. and the HUR have built two other secret bases to intercept Russian communications, and combined with the 12 forward operating bases, which General Kondratiuk says are still operational, the HUR now collects and produces more intelligence than at any time in the war — much of which it shares with the C.I.A.” This is interesting in several ways in terms of the provocation thesis. First, the two new bases are not mentioned as forward-based as are the 12 pre-war bases. This means they could be located farther from the front line and even beyond the Dnepr in western Ukraine. Furthermore, the entire article suggests that the 12 forward-based centers have been or are being dismantled or moved—perhaps to locations such as those of the two new bases. It is interesting that the NYT authors write that Gen. Kondratiuk “says” the bases are still operational rather than writing that they ‘are’ still operational. Fourteen Western Ukrainian CIA bases, producing ‘now collecting and producing more intelligence than at any time in the war,’ could be cause to expand to expand Russia’s invasion and territorial presence if not annexations to western Ukraine—a motivation absent otherwise. This in turn can be used to claim U.S. claims about Putin wanting to seize all of Ukraine from the start of his invasion were accurate.

Another interesting possible provocation contained in the article, particularly if one reads between the lines, is the revelation that former Ukrainian SBU chief and known neofascist, Valentin Nalyvaichenko is “the C.I.A.’s trusted partner” and that “(d)uring a previous stint as spy chief, Mr. Nalyvaichenko started a similar partnership with the C.I.A., which dissolved when the country swung back toward Russia.” Should one believe that the relationship ‘dissolved’ and non-existent during the period of Viktor Yanukovych’s administration which Maidan put an end to and brought Nalyvauchenko back to power?

It is especially curious that when the NYT article refers to Putin’s war near the end of an article that demonstrates just how much Moscow was provoked into invading, it refers to the war as “Putin’s war” without the usually inevitable, obligatory adjective ‘unprovoked’. It appears even the NYT’s editors understood that the contents of the article — its litany of CIA-related and -induced terrorist attacks, assassinations, and other intelligence and operational activity — demonstrated just how much Putin’s invasion was in fact provoked. The contrast between the article’s provocative content and a claim that the NATO-Russia Ukrainian war is “Putin’s unprovoked war” was even clear to the NYT. 

Finally, it should be remembered that this article could not have been published without Langley’s top officer approving its publication. Is Mr. Burns also in on the provocation game? In this war, the West, Russia, and Ukraine share of responsibility; to be sure, some more than others. As soon as the Washington, Brussels, and Kiev admit that to themselves and their peoples, the sooner the war will end, perhaps saving Ukraine.

ORIGINAL ARTICLE’S LINK AND INTRODUCTORY PARAGRAPHS:

Did the West Intentionally Incite Putin to War?

Over the last year the US and NATO countries have undertaken no effort to convince Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelenskiy to begin talks with Putin, despite: the death of more than half a million Ukrainians; the destruction of much of Ukraine’s economy, finances, physical infrastructure, human capital, civil society; and the West’s inability to sustain financial and military support even as Ukraine loses the war when said support was at its height. The West’s war strategy now seems to be to prolong a ‘long war’ in the hope either that the war begins to affect Russia and Putin’s standing there or that Putin’s health wanes and his system destabilizes. All this and much more written below raises suspicions the West intentionally, maybe even ‘subconsciously’ – the actions of small policy victories won in order to ‘confront Putin’ by competing elements within it, especially inside Washington – drew Russia into the NATO-Russia Ukrainian War. Aside from the background cause and main driver of this decision – NATO expansion – and more immediate precipitants of Putin’s decision in mid- to late  February 2022, what efforts, of any, did the West undertake perhaps intentionally to drive this decision?

If we look at the course of events in reverse chronological order it seems to me even more glaringly so that the West sought this war and indeed drew Russia into it intentionally with the the strategy of using the war to weaken Russia’s economic and political stability. The strategic goal is the reinforcement of US hegemony and power maximalization by achieving two long-standing, interrelated sub-goals: (1) NATO expansion and (2) the removal from power of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Let’s reverse engineer the course of events. …….

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About the Author –

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.

Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.