The Washington foreign policy establishment says the hundreds of thousands of Russian troops on Ukraine’s border threaten NATO and European security. Maybe so, but it’s also possible the Russian forces deployed shortly after Joe Biden took office represent Moscow’s defensive posture.
For all the theories the media and Beltway experts have advanced to explain the perhaps imminent Eastern European conflict, they’ve hidden one big piece of the puzzle—the political faction that Biden leads sees Ukraine as an instrument to advance its narrow partisan interests, foreign and domestic.
In 2013, the Obama administration saw a Ukrainian protest movement as an opportunity to topple a Kyiv government aligned with Moscow. A few short years later, Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign used Ukrainian officials and activists to push an intelligence operation targeting her rival, Donald Trump. And in 2019, pro-Ukrainian U.S. policymakers conspired to impeach Trump in order to provide cover for Biden after he had publicly boasted of interfering in Ukraine’s political and judicial system for alleged personal gain.
This is essential context for understanding Russian President Vladimir Putin’s demands for security guarantees that NATO won’t move eastward—that is, won’t enlist Ukraine. From Moscow’s perspective, no matter how weak Biden appears, he’s head of a reckless and dangerous political bloc. The Democrats used Ukraine to destabilize the U.S. government, and it’s possible they will try again to use it to destabilize Russia.
As violence erupted in the Ukrainian capital, senior Obama administration officials seized the opportunity to remold the government to their own liking. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt were famously caught on tape discussing the prime minister they were planning to install. The tape was allegedly leaked by the Russians to show how the United States was interfering in the internal political dynamics of a foreign country.
In February 2014, Yanukovych fled Kyiv for Moscow, and a handful of top Obama officials visited Ukraine for what seemed to many observers like a victory lap. CIA Director John Brennan’s April visit fueled speculation that America’s clandestine service had engineered the coup.
The salacious bits may be the most notorious parts of the dossier, but the overarching collusion narrative hinges on allegations of a quid pro quo regarding Ukraine. In exchange for Putin’s help winning the 2016 race, the dossier alleges, Trump would remove sanctions that Barack Obama had imposed on Russia for its 2014 incursion into Ukraine and annexation of Crimea.
Just weeks before the Obama-Biden administration finished its term in January 2017, Biden told the Department of Justice that Trump’s national security adviser Michael Flynn should be prosecuted for discussing sanctions with the Russian ambassador to Washington. With the help of the press, the Obama-Biden team forced Flynn from the White House, the first move in a more than two-year operation combining the Democratic Party, U.S. spy services, and the media to topple the Trump administration.
When Russiagate did eventually wind down in the summer of 2019, another anti-Trump operation was already in motion. This one, too, turned on Ukraine.
On July 24, Robert Mueller appeared on Capitol Hill to say that his special counsel investigation found no evidence of any quid pro quo or collusion. The next day, Trump spoke on the phone with the new Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and asked for Kyiv’s help in getting to the bottom of Ukraine’s role in Russiagate. He also asked Zelensky for information regarding the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine.
And so, based on Vindman’s account, it was alleged that Trump threatened to withhold lethal defensive aid from Ukraine unless Kyiv helped find dirt on the Bidens. In reality, Biden’s quid pro quo was simply hung on Trump—it was Biden, after all, who’d used U.S. taxpayer money as leverage to allegedly benefit his family. As commander-in-chief, Trump had an obligation to find out whether the Bidens’ activities in Ukraine had compromised U.S. national security.
Nonetheless, the media, Democratic Party operatives, and U.S. officials who’d worked on the Ukraine file, such as Ciaramella and Vindman, White House aide Fiona Hill, and former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch, partnered to impeach Trump. They destabilized the American government to protect Joe Biden.
Americans know how the four-year anti-Trump campaign tore at our domestic political fabric. But it was destined to affect our standing abroad as well. After all, the entire world was watching, including the foreign leader the Democrats made the bogeyman in order to destroy a U.S. president—Putin.
The truth of the Biden faction’s Ukraine-related activities has been obscured by the U.S. media or described falsely as “Russian disinformation.” But with a clear view of the facts, it isn’t hard to see the current situation through Russian eyes: America is now governed by corrupt officials who squandered their prestige and forfeited the national interest for the purpose of undermining their own political system. Because Ukraine was their instrument, a Biden administration is dangerous to Russia on Russia’s border.
Thus, there are real-world consequences to the machinations of the Democratic Party over the past decade. For the Ukrainians, it’s a lesson that smaller powers should never allow themselves to be dragged into the internal conflicts of a great power.
For Americans, there’s the long work of sorting through the wreckage caused by a political faction that sees foreign policy as a tool to advance its domestic agenda. And so there’s the very real possibility, however slight, that Biden will drag America into a conflict that he and his party have used over the last 10 years for personal and political gain.
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