The Same People Who Ran Ukraine For Joe In 2014 Are Still Running It, But They've Been Promoted

The two people in the photo above, conveniently almost unrecognizable behind their COVID masks, are Secretary of State Antony Blinken on the left, and Victoria Nuland, currently Acting Deputy Secretary of State, on the right. I quoted Seymour Hersh Wednesday on Nuland:

. . . “ultra-hawkish” Victoria Nuland was promoted by Biden from Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs to Acting Deputy Secretary of State ”over the heated objections of many in the State Department,” Hersh writes. “She has not been formally nominated as the deputy for fear that her nomination would lead to a hellish fight in the Senate. “

The one other figure who really ought to be in the same photo is Amos Hochstein, described by Politico as "perhaps, the most influential Joe Biden adviser that most people don’t know about. He wants to keep it that way," which is probably why we'll never see him in such a photo, with or without a mask. For good or ill, these three are indisputably running current US Ukraine policy, especially as Joe progressively loses interest in the day-to-day job of president. But let's start with Ms Nuland.

She in particular found herself present at the creation of a new Ukraine policy in 2013-1014, because in the State Department under both the Bush and Obama administrations, she'd done a great deal to bring the circumstances about that caused the US to become more visibly involved. According to Wikipedia,

From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, exercising an influential role during the Iraq War. From 2005 to 2008, during President George W. Bush's second term, Nuland served as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, where she concentrated on mobilizing European support for the NATO intervention in Afghanistan.

. . . In May 2013, Nuland was nominated to act as assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs[18] and was sworn in on September 18, 2013. In her role as assistant secretary, she managed diplomatic relations with fifty countries in Europe and Eurasia, as well as with NATO, the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

. . . During the Maidan Uprising in Ukraine, Nuland made appearances supporting the Maidan protesters. In December 2013, she said in a speech to the US–Ukraine Foundation that the U.S. had spent about $5 billion on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since 1991. The Russian government seized on this statement, claiming it was evidence the U.S. was orchestrating a revolution.

On February 4, 2014, a recording of a phone call between Nuland and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt on January 28, 2014, was published on YouTube. Nuland and Pyatt discussed who they thought should or shouldn't be in the next Ukrainian government and their opinion of various Ukrainian political figures.

. . . Nuland was the lead U.S. point person for Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity [Maidan revolution], establishing loan guarantees to Ukraine, including a $1 billion loan guarantee in 2014, and the provisions of non-lethal assistance to the Ukrainian military and border guard.

. . . Nuland's husband, Robert Kagan, is a historian, foreign policy commentator at the Brookings Institution, and co-founder in 1998 of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC). She has two children.

It's hard to ask for more solid neoconservative credentials. Her thumbnail at the Carnegie Endowment reads in part,

She was also a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, distinguished practitioner in grand strategy at Yale University, and a member of the Board of the National Endowment for Democracy.

So, with her neoconservative husband Robert Kagan, whose brother is Frederick Kagan of the neocon Institute for the Study of War, she's part of a nepotistic neocon power network that's been ingrained in the Deep State irrespective of political party. But let's look in particular at the National Endowment for Democracy and its relationship with Ukraine's Maidan revolution:

Obvious examples of Central Intelligence Agency covert action abroad are difficult to identify today, save for occasional acknowledged calamities, such as the long-running $1 billion effort to overthrow the government of Syria, via funding, training and arming barbarous jihadist groups.

In part, this stems from many of the CIA’s traditional responsibilities and activities being farmed out to “overt” organizations, most significantly the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

. . . [In September 2013,} Carl Gershman, NED chief from its launch until summer 2021, authored an op-ed for The Washington Post, outlining how his organization was hard at work wresting countries in Russia’s near abroad -– the constellation of former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact states -– away from Moscow’s orbit.

. . . Along the way, he described Ukraine as “the biggest prize” in the region, suggesting Kiev joining Europe would “accelerate the demise” of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Six months later, Ukraine’s elected president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in a violent coup.

. . . on February 3rd 2014, less than three weeks before police withdrew from Kiev, effectively handing the city to armed protesters and prompting Yanukovych to flee the country, NED convened an event, Ukraine’s lessons learned: from the Orange Revolution to the Euromaidan.

[US Senator John] McCain flew to Kiev in December 2013 to give an address to Maidan protesters, flanked by known Neo-Nazi Oleh Tyahnybok. Then-State Department official Victoria Nuland, now Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, was also present, notoriously handing out motivational cookies to attendees.

On February 4th 2014, . . . an intercepted recording of a telephone call between Nuland –- now [2022] Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs –- and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt was leaked, in which the pair discussed how Washington was “midwifing” Yanukovych’s ouster, and named several handpicked individuals to head the post-coup government.

Most discussions of the Maidan revolution treat it in isolation from the Russian annexation of Crimea, which took place in February and March of 2014, but the timing strongly suggests it waa a Russian response to increased US interference in Ukrainian domestic politics, in particular the US-sponsored ouster of the pro-Russian elected president Yanukovych under the pretext of corruption. Whatever the pros and cons of this US skulduggery may ultimately be, especially in the context of Nuland's call with Ambassador Pyatt, there's a most unfortunate connotation of Viet Nam-era Ugly Americanism, in which a quasi-colonialist clique of US diplomats manipulates right-wing factions in a client country to fight a proxy war against Russia.

It's hard to avoid thinking Putin was fully aware of what Nuland was engineering, and in fact the Maidan revolution might reasonably be seen as a US provocation that started the Russo-Ukraine War in the first place. Putin's 2022 invasion must be seen as a flareup in a war that had begun eight years earlier in response to a US-engineered coup.

But this is the context in which we can see Joe Biden's flight to Kyiv on April 21, 2014 following not just the success of the Yanukovych ouster but also the outbreak of the the Russo-Ukraine War, which is still going on, in which we first encounter the shadowy Amos Hochstein. I'll have more to say about him tomorrow.

But here's a question to ponder: as best we know, Barack Obama didn't think much of Joe Biden as either a diplomat or a policy guy. All of a sudden in February and March of 2014, we're looking at a portentous pair of geopolitical developments on Russia's border, both provoked by the US. Why did Obama make Joe, who was little more than comic relief in his administration, the point man to deal with this?