The CIA Was Waging a (Cold) War Against Russia Way Before the Ukraine Invasion

The 2014 coup against Viktor Yanukovych wasn't as bloodless as it seemed.

The term “cold war” is often used to describe the period following World War II, which pitted the Soviet Empire against America.

But more broadly, the term is defined as “a state of political hostility between countries characterized by threats, propaganda, and other measures short of open warfare.”

History teaches us that the Cold War ended in 1991 (see below), but this isn’t entirely true.

The Cold War might have ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, but cold warfare between the United States and Russia did not. And proof of this can be found in a new story from the New York Times.

The story, which is based on more than 200 interviews conducted by reporters Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz, explains that the CIA currently operates a dozen secret bases in Ukraine along the Russian border, and were doing so well before Putin’s 2022 invasion.

The reporters recently toured one base and offered a detailed description.

“Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed, its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early in the war.

But that is above ground.

Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive drone threading through Russian air defenses from a point in central Ukraine to a target in the Russian city of Rostov. The underground bunker, built to replace the destroyed command center in the months after Russia’s invasion, is a secret nerve center of Ukraine’s military.

There is also one more secret: The base is almost fully financed, and partly equipped, by the C.I.A.”

Many Americans naively believe the Ukraine war began in February 2022 when Vladmir Putin invaded the country. It didn’t.

In fact, fighting in Ukraine goes back nearly a decade earlier—to February 2014.

That was when Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was forced to flea his own capital in Kiev following a successful coup. The Coup was no accident. Yanukovych was democratically elected, but he was friendlier with Putin than the West.

This put Yanukovych in the crosshairs of US politicians and bureaucrats, including Victoria Nuland, a US diplomat and lifelong employee of the US State Department who became an open supporter of regime change in Ukraine, going so far as to orchestrate protests and hand out cookies (!) to agitators in the streets of Ukraine.

Nuland didn’t stop at toppling Yanukovych, however.

The Cato Institute explains that she even helped pick his successor, detailing a conversation she had about the three leading candidates, which included former heavyweight boxing champion Vitali Klitschko

“Washington’s conduct not only constituted meddling, it bordered on micromanagement. At one point, [U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffey] Pyatt mentioned the complex dynamic among the three principal opposition leaders, Yatsenyuk, Oleh Tyahnybok, and Vitali Klitschko.

Both Pyatt and Nuland wanted to keep Tyahnybok and Klitschko out of an interim government. In the former case, they worried about his extremist ties; in the latter, they seemed to want him to wait and make a bid for office on a longer‐​term basis.

Nuland stated that “I don’t think Klitsch should go into the government. I don’t think it’s necessary.” She added that what Yatseniuk needed “is Klitsch and Tyanhybok on the outside.”

US media gushed about the bloodless coup in Ukraine, though at least the Washington Post noted that the event carried “the risk of further conflict.”

Today we know the coup wasn’t bloodless at all.

Ukraine became the battleground for Cold War II. The US government began arming Ukraine to the hilt and setting up CIA bases throughout the country, waging political warfare against Russia from its own doorstep.

Tensions slowly boiled until they erupted in February 2022, when Putin invaded Ukraine. Today hundreds of thousands are dead as a result.

Putin has plenty of blood on his hands for using raw force in a Quixotic effort to cling to the shattered shards of what was once part of the Soviet Empire.

But so do Victoria Nuland, the CIA, and others in the US government who couldn’t resist doing what the Agency has always done: meddling in other countries democratic elections to cement and advance their own power and interests.

Many Americans will be blind to the roll its own government played in the war in Ukraine. The great British author George Orwell can help you understand why.

"The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them," Orwell wrote in “Notes on Nationalism.”