UPDATED: 13:37 GDT I added stuff about the “51 former intelligence officials” and the MSM eating crow about the laptop being confirmed to be real.
Russia’s “unprovoked” invasion of Ukraine didn’t just happen. It was a passion project many years in the making.
And no one was more passionate about provoking war with Russia than Joe Biden.
Now that we’ve got the virulently anti-Russian prime minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, telling his parliament that Ukrainian casualties are currently 27,000 a month, it’s not time to let up on old Joe and the rancid ghost of Democratic administrations past.
In part 1 of this mini-series within a series (the prequel covered COVID, we’ll wrap with Gaza), I covered the post-Cold War years when Joe Biden ran point in the US Senate under the Clinton and Bush 2 administrations.
In part 2, I covered Joe’s misleadership role as Vice President up to the success of the Maidan Coup in 2014.
And this bad boy is going to finish out Biden’s term as VP, during which his portfolio included a nearly free hand in Ukraine because Obama was busy hanging out with Jay Z or some shit.
It’s too bad, because Obama seems to have been one of the few decision-makers in his administration with anything approaching a clear-eyed view of the situation.
I covered the Iran War update at Naked Capitalism today. Read it here.
Obama Said No to Arming Ukraine
In early 2016, Obama was quoted by The Atlantic Monthly’s Jeffrey Goldberg in a piece entitled “The Obama Doctrine”:
Obama’s theory here is simple: Ukraine is a core Russian interest but not an American one, so Russia will always be able to maintain escalatory dominance there.
“The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-nato country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do,” (Obama) said.
I asked Obama whether his position on Ukraine was realistic or fatalistic.
“It’s realistic,” he said. “But this is an example of where we have to be very clear about what our core interests are and what we are willing to go to war for. And at the end of the day, there’s always going to be some ambiguity.”
…
“There is no evidence in modern American foreign policy that that’s how people respond. People respond based on what their imperatives are, and if it’s really important to somebody, and it’s not that important to us, they know that, and we know that,” (Obama) said. “There are ways to deter, but it requires you to be very clear ahead of time about what is worth going to war for and what is not. Now, if there is somebody in this town that would claim that we would consider going to war with Russia over Crimea and eastern Ukraine, they should speak up and be very clear about it. The idea that talking tough or engaging in some military action that is tangential to that particular area is somehow going to influence the decision making of Russia or China is contrary to all the evidence we have seen over the last 50 years.”
Obama said this having said no to a joint Brookings, Atlantic Council, and Chicago Council demand that the US arm Ukraine to the tune of $1bn a year for three years.
I realize that’s chicken feed compared to the vast sums Biden would pour into the Ukrainian black hole, but it was big money in its day. Back before RussiaGate when most Americans agreed with Obama’s 2012 remark that “the 1980s called, they want their foreign policy back” in response to Mitt Romney declaring Russia “our #1 foreign policy challenge”
Despite presiding over the beginning of the Ukrainian Civil War from 2014 on, Obama’s term was seen as time wasted by true freedom-loving patriots like The Atlantic Council’s Adrian Karatnycky, who wrote the following for Foreign Policy in 2023:
Obama’s Russia policy, including his embrace of the doctrine of Kremlin escalation dominance, has continued to shape U.S. policy during the Trump and Biden administrations. Although Donald Trump behaved badly toward Ukraine by trying to enlist Kyiv in his efforts to weaken presidential rival Joe Biden, he greenlighted the shipment of Javelin anti-tank weapons in 2017 and 2019. Nonetheless, years of fierce debate merely over sending Javelins stifled discussion of other weapons needed by Ukraine, including air and missile defense, battle tanks, fighter jets, and long-range missiles. These could have made Ukraine more secure before 2022, and some of them are still not in Ukraine’s arsenal today.
To his credit, Biden advocated arming Ukraine with defensive weapons when he was vice president under Obama. But when he became president himself, Biden brought many of the architects of Obama’s timid approach to Russia back into the government. As a result of their influence, from the moment in the fall of 2021 when the U.S. government knew Putin was planning to invade to the start of the invasion on Feb. 24, 2022, the United States lost a crucial window in which to provide Ukraine significant new weapons and the training to use them. Instead of much-needed howitzers, tanks, multiple-launch rocket systems (such as HIMARS), and heavy ordnance, Washington doled out modest assistance enabling not much more than partisan resistance.
But that’s enough about what Biden couldn’t do as Obama’s VP; let’s look at what he and the policies he backed did do to land Ukraine and the EU in deep doo-doo.
If It’s 2014, That Must Be Crimea Seceding
There’s no way to discuss the events of 2014 without taking a bracing dip into the Black Sea waters surrounding that most strategic of peninsulas, Crimea.
Yeah, yeah, the official Western narrative is that Crimea voted to secede from Ukraine under military pressure from Putin in a patently rigged vote.
And it does seem to be true that the Crimean parliament voted 61-3 to hold the referendum after the building was taken over by unmarked troops.
But I’ve got to point out that Maidan company commander Volodymyr Parasuk bragged after the 328-0 vote in the Rada to remove Yanukovych and install the Maidan government that “our people simply came up to the Verkhovna Rada and detained the deputies, so that they would sit and work and not run off anywhere”.
This followed Parasuk’s threats from the main stage of Maidan of an armed assault on the presidential administration and the Rada that preceded Yanukovych fleeing Kyiv the night before the vote.
I’ll also quote Canadian-Ukrainian scholar Ivan Katchanovski (remember him from last time when a 2025 Ukrainian court confirmed his version of who shot who in the Maidan) who wrote about that 328-0 Rada vote (he also claims that videos of the session show about 262 deputies present for the vote):
“Many others voted under threat of violence by the far-right group of Maidan snipers, the Maidan Self-Defense, and a mob which surrounded the parliament. The commander of the far-right-linked Maidan company of snipers admitted that his group impelled, by force, deputies from the Yanukovych Party of Regions to vote for his removal.”
Anywho, I’m not going to argue about whether or not shenanigans happened in the Crimean vote that followed, but I will point out that Crimea was the only autonomous republic in Ukraine with its own parliament, its own Council of Ministers, and its own constitution, adopted 21 October 1998 and approved by the Rada. It even had its own president until 1995, when Kyiv abolished both the presidency and the Crimean constitution.
I’ll also point out that as of 2001, the last census of Crimea taken, the population was 58.3% ethnic Russian, 24.3% Ukrainian, 12% Crimean Tatar — and 77% Russian-speaking (that’s not including the port city of Sevastopol, which was 71.6% Russian, 22.4% Ukrainian in that same census).
How do you think that overwhelming Russian-speaking majority felt about the new Maidan government’s immediate revocation of the use of Russian as an official language?
The last polling I’ve been able to find of Crimeans shows that in May 2013 — 9 months before the events of February 2014 — 53% of them wanted autonomy and 29% wanted to join Russia.
Do you think those numbers held following the violence in Maidan and the fall of Yanukovych, the President backed most strongly by Russian speakers in Eastern Ukraine?
But, the main point to make about Crimea is that the Russian Black Sea Fleet was already there and had been since 1783.
No Russian leader, even drunk Yeltsin, would have voluntarily surrendered the country’s only warm-water port.
That’s like asking Team America to give up the naval base at Guantanamo Bay.
Enough about that; let’s get to the fun part: Hunter Biden and Burisma, laptop included!
Hunter in Kyiv: A Four-Year Fappening
https://www.instagram.com/p/C9GKlTIyCwR/
The fun mostly happened at a Ukrainian gas company called Burisma, founded under noble circumstances when Yanukovych’s ecology minister, Mykola Zlochevsky, granted gas licenses to companies he owned.
I am not a linguist, but I suspect Ukrainian has more words for “self-dealing” than Inuit has for “snow.”
Whatever you may have to say about Zlochevsky’s ethics, he’s a nimble and flexible politician, and he promptly gave two Burisma board seats to two principles of the storied American natural gas powerhouse….Rosemont Seneca Partners.
Starbucks sells expensive sugared drinks, and some of them have coffee in them. It’s been very profitable and despite some declines, remains so. The CEO was paid about $96 million last year. He was brought in to “turn Starbucks around”, and his main moves have been towards returning Starbucks to its roots as a “third place”, which is to say, somewhere other than work or home where people spend time.
