Ending the West's tacit support for Russia: An Interview with Yurii Shulipa
Ending the West's tacit support for Russia
CLAIRE BERLINSKI 20. 09. 2023.
Claire—I’d like to introduce you today to Yurii Shulipa, a former employee of the Russian Presidential Administration, now the Honorary Consul of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in Ukraine. He has written extensively about the propensity of Western analysts and politicians to misunderstand Russia, with catastrophic consequences. I think you’ll find his thoughts stimulating.
Yurii Shulipa: In this interview, while talking about myself, I will also discuss key facts, apparently unknown to a broad circle of Western readers, that led not only to Moscow’s initiation of an aggressive terrorist war against Ukraine but to its hybrid war against the West. It is thanks to these facts that I became who I am now.
In 2005–2006, I was a staff member of the administration of the President of Russia. Two years working in this organization was enough time to understand what Russia’s highest political leadership represents.
Laws in Russia’s highest organs of power do not function as they do in Western civilizations. In Russia, authorities interpret the laws in their favor, as is convenient, and as they understand them. There is no true separation of powers into legislative, executive, and judicial branches. What’s more, we see in Russia a phenomenon that is perhaps absent in other countries: Key positions in state and municipal organs, as well as in state corporations and private commercial organizations, are filled by seconded employees from the FSB special services. Effectively, all organs of power and commercial organizations are permeated by FSB agents.
All high-ranking Russian officials, without exception, are corrupt. Corruption is part of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy. Power in Russia is inherited.
Revanchism
An overwhelming majority of representatives of Russia’s highest political leadership, as well as the Russian population, are revanchists and imperialists. During my time working in the presidential administration, I frequently heard from high-ranking employees in the president’s office for foreign policy and other structures that Russia needed geopolitical revenge against the West for the defeat of the former USSR.
These are cunning, hypocritical people. Privately, they vilified the United States and the West for defeating the USSR. But externally, for the West’s consumption, they portrayed Russia as a lawful and democratic state.
As early as 2005, the administration was marked by revanchist geopolitical sentiments. Nonetheless—at the same time—many employees of the administration had children, wives, mistresses, and relatives living in the West. Their cut-outs and proxies did business in the West. Their children studied at the best Western universities. The administration’s employees did not see their future in Russia: For them, Russia was an opportunity to make money.
Employees who openly expressed disagreement with Russian revanchism were fired or resigned of their own accord. Other employees who privately opposed Russia’s revanchist foreign policy continued to work there and demonstrate their loyalty.
Operation “Succession”
In 1998-2000, former KGB employees, working with the criminal underworld, carried out an operation to remove the ailing President Boris Yeltsin and replace him with Vladimir Putin, a Chekist with a criminal past. With the hymn of the former USSR restored, Moscow entered an active phase of planning, preparing, conducting, and unleashing a hybrid war against the West to exact revenge for the USSR’s defeat.
The first signal that Russia was not the lawful and democratic state it declared itself to be was its intervention in the internal affairs of Tatarstan. In March 1992, a free democratic referendum was held in the Republic of Tatarstan, in which almost 62 percent of the population voted for Tatarstan’s sovereignty and independence from Russia. Moscow responded by interfering in Tatarstan’s politics and effectively occupying it.
Unfortunately, the Clinton administration completely ignored this tragic event, which presaged two Russo-Chechen wars, the Russo-Georgian war, the Russo-Syrian war, and the Russo-Ukrainian wars. By ignoring these wars of aggression, the Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations each tacitly gave Moscow consent to unleash the next one.
After Vladimir Putin’s famous 2007 Munich speech, in which Putin claimed that NATO’s hostility justified Moscow’s war against the West, the military and political leadership of the United States and NATO countries should have asked themselves which country Putin planned to attack—in the very near future. But they did not. On August 8, 2008, Putin treacherously attacked Georgia, and the Russian-Georgian war began.
In September 2011, acting Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announced that he would cede the presidency to Putin, violating the Russian Constitutional Court’s determination that no one could be the president for more than two terms. Putin seized power in Russia for life, relying on the revanchist anti-Western sentiments of the majority of the Russian population, and their tacit complicity, to begin planning, preparing, initiating, and conducting an aggressive war against the West. The West’s experts and leaders failed to draw from this the appropriate conclusions.
At the time of the Medvedev-Putin swap, Russian state and pro-state television channels and Internet outlets began broadcasting anti-Western military propaganda, indicating that Moscow was preparing for a long, protracted war against the West. Western experts and governments failed to give this due attention. Shamefully, the West expressed “concern,” all while Moscow’s aggressive foreign policy required the West to take decisive action. Moscow consistently deceived the West, failing to comply with any agreement, and the West continued to behave as if nothing were happening.
The military-political leadership of Russia is composed of liars and war criminals. They have committed hundreds of thousands of serious crimes and violated all existing laws, both Russian and of the countries under Russian occupation, as well as the norms of international law. Wherever there is Russian presence, a huge concentration camp is built.
But the US and Western leadership ignored for years the subversive activities carried out against their countries by Moscow. In my monograph “How Putin Kills Abroad,” I concluded that no country in the world conducted such large-scale, professional, and coordinated subversive activities against the sovereignty and territorial integrity of other countries as Russia did. Russian embassies, consulates, science and culture centers, Rosotrudnichestvo, etc.— organizations created by Moscow and its intelligence agencies—consist of professional staff of the SVR foreign intelligence service, the FSB’s political and security intelligence, and the GRU military intelligence operating under diplomatic cover. These are the main sources of the West’s destabilization and chaotic socio-political situation.
The West nonetheless continued to flirt with a blatantly fascistic, imperialistic, and authoritarian dictatorship, one that posed an existential threat to all of humanity, and primarily to the West itself.
My disagreement with the prevailing system forced me to resign from Putin’s administration. I then became actively engaged in public and legal activities, defending the rights of Russian citizens in court, lobbying for positive legislative initiatives, and even, in 2014, being put forward as a candidate for the Moscow State Duma.
Western blindness
The West has made incessant mistakes in its policy toward Moscow and continues stubbornly to make these mistakes.
In 1992, US President Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed the Camp David Declaration on New Relations. The US rashly entered this agreement without grasping Moscow’s geopolitical revanchism and its deep longing for revenge against the West for defeating it in the Cold War. Signing this agreement was a grave error: Such a document should only have been signed after the complete denuclearization of the post-Soviet space, trials against the former Communist Party and KGB, lustration of former Soviet officials and security service staff, and the establishment of a stable legal democratic regime.
Historically, Russia has always been a fascist, authoritarian empire characterized by constant territorial expansionism. This is why Russia will never be a democratic state. As soon as Putin physically leaves power, there will be a significant weakening of the regime. A Hobbesian internal war of all against all will commence. The native peoples subdued by Russia will ask themselves, “Why do we tolerate Moscow’s diktat, which is destroying us? Let’s restore our independence from Moscow and build our own state.”
The West and Russia are antagonists. The West represents civilization; Russia is its opposite—anti-civilization. Historically, the West and Russia are existential enemies and cannot coexist on the same world political map. The West’s mistake was failing to allow Russia to break apart into several independent states. Perhaps Muscovy, within its 16th-century historical borders, could become a lawful democratic state—but not Russia. The West has simply failed to recognize this.
The US government and other countries of the West, owing to their own shortsightedness, believed that with the collapse of the USSR, democratic legal regimes would independently establish themselves in the post-Soviet space. The US government began to flirt with so-called Moscow liberals, providing them with significant financial support from American taxpayers. Yet the Moscow liberals were absolutely powerless due to the usurpation of power by the siloviki, led by Putin. Putin and the siloviki used the Moscow liberals as a deceptive, decorative showcase, portraying Russia to the West as a democratic state.
Their goal was to ensure the West supplied its technologies to Russia and developed trade relations with it; to hook the West on oil and gas; to infiltrate Moscow liberals into the Western political community as agents of political influence and spies; and, ultimately, using all of these strategies, to prepare for a large-scale war against the West—all funded by the West itself.
I am a highly qualified lawyer and an ethnic Ukrainian. After Moscow’s attack on Ukraine, I came to a firm conclusion from which I have never deviated and which has been confirmed over time: Moscow’s war of aggression against Ukraine will only end when the International Criminal Court finds Putin and his organized criminal group guilty of planning, preparing, initiating, and waging a war of aggression against Ukraine. No other outcome is possible.
Therefore, at the end of October 2014, I moved to Ukraine to put my theoretical knowledge into practice by helping the Ukrainian leadership defeat Russia’s aggression and liberate the occupied Ukrainian territories.
When I lived in Moscow until the beginning of 2014, I was part of the structure related to the presidential administration. I wrote a dissertation on presidential control and studied analytical materials unavailable to the general reader. Because of the specialized knowledge of Russian politics and law I possessed, I came to the conclusion that Putin was preparing Russia for a large-scale war against Ukraine and the entire Collective West.
Putin intends to capture all of Ukraine, then the Baltic countries, and then the European countries that joined NATO after 1997. His strategic task in this war is to demoralize NATO through nuclear terror, sever Europe from the United States, occupy Europe, and ultimately establish geopolitical dominance over the entire world.
Scholarly activities
Over the past eight years of living in Ukraine, I have written a series of scholarly works, including The Budapest Memorandum: Guarantees and Opportunities for Ukraine (co-authored); a monograph, The Future of Donbass According to the Steinmeier Formula (in which I argued that the so-called Minsk agreements, the Normandy format, and the Steinmeier formula were imposed upon Ukraine to disguise Moscow’s preparation for a large-scale, conventional, war on Ukraine and its occupation); and a monograph, “How Putin Kills Abroad.”
In April of 2021, I published Putin’s Military Plans Against Ukraine for 2021. I forecast Putin’s forthcoming full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
By the mid-2000s, it became clear to me that political experts from the US and the West had not studied Moscow’s internal and external policies in detail. This was evident from the terminology that Western political experts borrowed from Russian propaganda, as opposed to independently understanding Russian realities and devising their own, more appropriate terminology.
This is why, with like-minded individuals, I founded two organizations in Kyiv: the Institute for the Study of Russian Aggression and the International Association Institute of National Policy. The West lacks expertise about the post-Soviet space. My activity in Ukraine has been an effort to fill these gaps.
Russian-Chechen wars
The Chechen Republic has never legally been a part of Russia. In the era of the former USSR, Chechnya was the Chechen-Ingush Autonomous Republic. The Constitution of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria was adopted by the Chechen parliament on March 2, 1992. Russia’s Constitution was adopted on December 12, 1993, three years after the collapse of the former USSR and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria’s declaration of independence.
The authors of Russia’s 1993 Constitution deliberately laid claim to the Chechen Republic to justify subsequently attacking and capturing it. Chechnya, however, has proven to be the most indigestible republic of the North Caucasus. Moscow has been trying to subdue it throughout 400 years of bloody, imperialist, and expansionist wars. In the most recent wars—1994 to 1997 and 1999 to the present—they have killed more than 300,000 civilians. To escape Russian occupation, more than half the population has fled, forced into exile. Moscow has endeavored to replace these murdered and exiled Chechens with other ethnic populations. Genocide and large-scale population transfers are the hallmarks of occupation by Moscow, carried out whenever and wherever it seizes territory.
On October 18, 2022, the Supreme Council of Ukraine recognized Russia’s temporary occupation of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and condemned the genocide of the Chechen people during all of the Russian-Chechen wars. This decision allowed the legitimate government of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria to carry out its functions on Ukrainian territory. Under the command of Ahmed Zakayev, the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces and the Head of the Cabinet of Ministers of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria, five Chechen battalions have joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the fight against Moscow.
The Chechen Republic of Ichkeria and Ukraine, now military allies, share in Russia a common existential enemy. By helping Ukrainians in their war against Russia, Chechens are also participating in liberating their own country. Ukraine, Ichkeria, Belarus, Georgia, and other countries bordering Russia have all suffered for centuries under the yoke of Russian imperialism.
In addition to Chechen volunteer forces, Belarusian, Ingush, Bashkir, Tatar, Ingrian, Russian, and other volunteer armed formations are fighting on the side of Ukraine against Moscow. They are not just pro-Ukrainian Chechens: They are pro-Chechen Chechens.
In May 2022, Ahmed Zakayev asked me to take on the role of Honorary Consul in Ukraine. I agreed. For me, primarily, this role is an opportunity to bring Ukraine and the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria closer to victory over their common aggressor.
Why do both Western and Russian researchers make such severe errors in assessing Russian foreign and domestic policy? Why do they so often make erroneous forecasts that don’t come true?
In my opinion, there are three categories of Russian researchers.
1. The first category: Russian official researchers working in state organizations serving Putin’s regime. These researchers mainly produce disinformation to the effect that the US and the West are strategic enemies of Russia. They are the advocates of Putin’s policies. They willfully justify any crimes of the Russian regime on grounds of raison d’état and politically expedience. They repeat catchphrases of Russian military propaganda. They themselves are part of Russian military propaganda, engaged in ideological-political and scientific support of Russia’s war against the United States and the West.
However, by reading some of the “works” of these researchers in reverse, you can discern the Russian military-political leadership’s plans for military provocations or new wars against other countries. Some of these researchers are used by the FSB as a channel to conduct active measures. Sources in the Kremlin close to the Security Council “leak” information about Putin’s military plans to researchers who work for the FSB, the Ministry of Defense and the Security Council. Paid by these structures, they manufacture ideological, political, and scientific justifications for Moscow’s war against Ukraine and the West. But to distinguish real information from disinformation, you must be deeply versed in Russian system of power, its logic, regularities and paradoxes.
2. The second category: Russian citizens who used to work for the state authorities and in research institutions. However, due to a de facto ban on their profession owing to severe censorship and persecution by the Russian security services, they are forced to go to the West and work there. For the most part, these researchers, like their predecessors in emigration 100 years ago, make the same kind of error. They mislead the West with the following thesis: “Russia itself is a legal and democratic state. It is the criminal Putin’s regime that usurped and seized power and unleashed foreign wars to keep his regime in power. As soon as Putin is removed from power, the wars waged by Russia will immediately stop and Russia will be free.”
These researchers’ analytic failing is their ignorance of the real essence of Russian history. They cannot see or accept that Russia has been held together by bloody bayonets and terror for at least the past 400 years and through terror, ethnocide, and genocide, has turned conquered people into slaves. These researchers have generally never been to the Russian regions. They do not realize how deep this mentality goes. And in fact, these very people support the criminal Putin’s regime: Putin represents the arithmetic sum of the Russian population. Therefore, Russia can be free only after the disintegration of Russia itself.
During the White emigration a century ago, exiled Russian professors complained similarly about the Bolsheviks. They misled the West by telling it that once the Bolshevik regime fell, Russia would once again become a normal state. Seventy years after it emerged, the Bolshevik regime fell, the USSR collapsed, and a rump state emerged, the so-called New Russia. In its essence, it has turned out to be even worse—an even more aggressive, hateful version of the former USSR, more dangerous for the whole world. Therefore, we must fight the misinformation of the “good Russians” who have fled Russia.
3. The third category: Researchers from the US and the West. Yes, they are usually highly qualified specialists with the best academic education in the world in political science and international relations. But classical political science does not work in Russia Studies. Another science works instead: criminology. Putin and his circle need to be investigated as an organized crime community.
The US intelligence services are some of the best in the world. However, because American researchers do not understand the logic of the political decisions of Putin and his entourage, their predictions are often completely wrong, despite the accuracy of the intelligence they have gathered. This is especially true when they endeavor to make long-term strategic forecasts.
A researcher who has lived for many years both in Moscow and in the Russian regions, who has received a higher legal education in Moscow, who has had exposure to all major social groups in Russia—criminal organizations, law enforcement agencies, special services, higher state authorities, scientific circles—and who has been acquainted with the most prominent people in Russia and who has been engaged in public, legal and opposition activities in Russia can forge a relatively accurate forecast and offer the West appropriate recommendations about Russia. But for the sake of objectivity, such a researcher should not feel himself a Russian, psychologically.
I consider myself such a researcher, particularly because I am an ethnic Ukrainian. It so happened that my grandfathers, natives of Ukraine in the Soviet era (when Russia and Ukraine were in one state!) were big military chiefs. The state gave them apartments in Moscow. Nine years ago, I returned to Ukraine to defend my country from Russian aggression.
Maintaining pro-Russianism
Here, I will try to prove to the reader that the essence of the foreign policy of the current US administration in the post-Soviet space is to “maintain pro-Russianism.” The importance of this exercise lies in the fact that to the extent we can adequately assess the situation, we can then make decisions for ourselves: find our place in this reality; perhaps change our plans, or, to the contrary, actively participate in changing the situation for the better. I provide a detailed explanation of the essence of the foreign policy of individual US representatives towards Moscow and Ukraine and a set of arguments for refuting opponents’ arguments about the need to preserve Russia as a state. I answer the question: How should the West deal with the Russians?
The Military-Political Situation
Some of my colleagues in the legal profession have a firm belief that over the past 30 years, US administrations, following the defeat of the USSR and its collapse, have implemented a foreign policy of strategic uncertainty in the post-Soviet space.
This point of view is refuted by the following arguments. Foreign policy always, to one extent or another, faces resistance from those subjects toward whom it is implemented and who oppose it. In foreign policy, as well as in any other sphere of human activity, there is no institutional vacuum. Therefore, the US foreign policy activities in the post-Soviet space that my colleagues present as strategically uncertain are in fact determined by the capabilities of the aggressor country, the Russian Federation, to define them within the framework of achieving their criminal, unlawful goals.
We may firmly conclude that Moscow’s war against Ukraine has not reached a so-called “strategic deadlock.” This is an artificial situation created by the US administration within the framework of “maintaining pro-Russianism.”
Throughout the history of the so-called independent, or new Russia, no US administration has adequately taken into account Moscow’s revanchism and expansionism. This is a reaction to the defeat of the former USSR. It first manifested itself in March 1992, after 61.4 percent of the residents of Tatarstan voted for independence. Moscow forcibly blocked its path to liberation, then initiated two Russian-Chechen wars against the independent, sovereign state of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria—with the effective support of the Clinton administration.
In February 2014, beginning with the occupation of Crimea, Moscow began a hybrid war against the West as an act of geopolitical revenge. Representatives of the US administration and administrations of other Western countries failed to explain this to millions of their fellow citizens. US citizens have unequivocally been left uninformed about their main strategic enemy.
Because the current US administration has not named Moscow’s Hybrid World War being against the US and the West as such, the general population suffers a vacuum of understanding of the real military-political situation. This vacuum allows various political fraudsters, swindlers, and US marginals, with the help of information resources and often with Moscow’s support, to manipulate public opinion in the US.
This failure is either conscious, in exchange for the aggressor’s money, or due to mental inadequacy that favors the Moscow aggressor. It gives rise to blatantly manipulative and amateurish points of view among certain US politicians, often at the instigation of Moscow—for example, views about reducing the volume of military aid to Ukraine; that Ukraine should be helped less in general; that Ukraine will never defeat the Russians, etc.
Supporters of the point of view expressed by the chief of staff of the NATO Secretary General, Stian Jensen, are now raising their heads in the West: “Ukraine can receive NATO membership in exchange for recognizing part of its territories as Russian.”
There is no doubt that Moscow will continue to exert military pressure on Ukraine and the West in any Ukrainian territory occupied by Moscow, using it to carry out subversive activities against Ukraine and the West. Violating Articles 49 and 51 of the Geneva Convention on the protection of civilians in times of war, Moscow will continue the criminal deportation of the occupied Ukrainian population, the kidnapping of Ukrainian children, and the cynical forcible recruitment of the occupied Ukrainian population to fight against Ukraine. All of this means that the war will be continued. Evidence of this is Moscow’s ultimatum to NATO: pack up and roll back to the 1997 borders. With this ultimatum, Putin delineated the future theater of military operations in Europe.
Therefore, the conditions for ensuring the security of the United States, their allies, and partners must be based solely on the restoration of the supremacy of international law in Europe within the post-Soviet space. Otherwise, both the US and the entire Collective West will be deceived again by Moscow’s well-worn dishonest templates. Russia requires the temporarily occupied territories as a means and method of waging war against Ukraine and the Collective West. For Russia, war is primary, not the territories it has captured.
By its inaction in failing to disseminate objective information about Moscow’s war against the West to millions of people, the US administration is creating the conditions for achieving the aggressor’s information-subversive goals, causing chaos in American society.
Moscow is destabilizing the US presidential elections
Now, at the beginning of the electoral campaign in the US, Moscow's information-psychological war against the West is taking on extreme forms, becoming a sphere of combat actions aimed at dividing all of American society to deprive it of the collective will to resist the aggressor’s intentions. Moscow is actively trying to plunge the US into chaos to impose its criminal will on the defeated state.
It’s worth noting that the civilized world will continue inadequately to assess the threats against it emanating from Moscow. This is connected with the fact that the countries of the far West—US, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Canada—do not fully feel the real threat from Moscow.
The overwhelming majority of residents of Western Civilization have never felt Russian tyranny, with the exception of political émigrés from the Russian Federation. They have not been subjected to its repressions, tortures, and restrictions; they have not been subjected to torture in concentration camps. Their homes have not been bombed with aerial bombs and missiles.
The situation is further complicated because there are practically no qualified specialists in foreign and military policy in the post-Soviet space in the United States. Contrary to international law and the national interests of the United States, so-called American “specialists” on Russia are broadcasting Putin’s narratives; they regularly attended his Valdai conference and conduct secret negotiations with the aggressor in the service of his criminal interests. From here, the conclusion is obvious: In the United States, and also in European countries, there are so-called experts on Russia who are in reality Moscow-bought swindlers and fraudsters, or mentally challenged individuals. It is not possible to give them any other label.
Influential Moscow agents in the US act against the American national interest of under the cover of the CIA. One of the most influential agents of Russian intelligence services in the United States, Thomas Graham, in secret negotiations with representatives of the Kremlin, plays the role of an advocate for the so-called Russian elite, as the Moscow Times reported: Former US Official Shares Details of Secret Diplomacy ‘Track 1.5’ with Moscow:
But now they are at war—suffering a humiliating defeat is not an option for these guys. It is here that we made it clear that the United States is ready to work constructively with Russia’s national security interests. The United States needs a strong Russia that ensures stability along its entire periphery. We understand that complete victory over Russia in Europe would weaken our positions in other regions of the world. Russian power is not necessarily such a bad thing.
Does the US need a strong aggressor-enemy waging war against it? Thomas Graham’s position, along with his negotiations with representatives of the aggressor, indicate that he is working for Moscow against the US in the criminal interests of the strategic enemy of his country, or hates his country to such an extent that he makes efforts for its defeat.
It is worth noting that these secret negotiations took place with the knowledge of the US administration and under the intelligence support of the CIA from the US side, and the SVR from the Russian side. US National Security Assistant Jake Sullivan and CIA Director William Burns not only knew about the existence of these negotiations, they also know what exactly was discussed in these negotiations.
The views of Kremlin agent Graham coincide with the views of Sullivan and Burns, who are desperately stalling the supply of various types of weapons to Ukraine necessary for its decisive victory over its mortal enemy. By describing the non-defeat of Ukraine, they in fact mean “the non-defeat of Russia.” For them, the main goal of the United States in this war is “non-defeat of Russia.”
“Russia’s non-defeat” is associated with the creation of conditions under which the current Putin regime can exist so long as Putin is physically alive. In other words, in the context of US foreign policy, “Do not defeat Russia” means “Maintain pro-Russianness.”
Clearly, behind all the pro-Ukrainian and pro-Western slogans, the core Realpolitik of the Biden administration is “sustain a pro-Russian stance” throughout Moscow’s hybrid war against the West. This involves prolonging the agony of this aggressive war with severe, unpredictable consequences for all of humanity. It means supporting the suffering of the Ukrainian people, increasing the number of Ukrainian refugees to EU countries, slowly destroying the global architecture of international security, and de facto participating in countless crimes against humanity.
It means supporting and exacerbating all the negative trends that already exist. The so-called “Russian elite” will hope to receive concessions on Ukraine and then NATO and will thus continue to wage aggressive war against Ukraine.
You don’t negotiate with terrorists, you destroy them
The Russian state and the Russian regime are recognized by resolutions in PACE, NATO, the European Parliament, and the OSCE and by the parliaments of Ukraine, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands as terrorists and sponsors of terrorism. Despite the evidence of Moscow’s terrorist activities in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, the US State Department refuses to recognize Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism. This too indicates the presence of a stable US political policy of pro-Russianism. For this reason, the United States refused to impose double sanctions against Russia, which should have been done a long time ago.
Agreements are never made with terrorists and murderers. They are forced to renounce their crimes, and otherwise they are destroyed.
Vladimir Putin, the person acting in the official capacity of Russian President, has since March 17, 2023 been under international criminal prosecution by the International Criminal Court, on charges of committing war crimes, for the abduction and deportation of Ukrainian children from temporarily occupied territories.
It is well known that in the sphere of foreign, military and international politics, Putin makes decisions unilaterally. For these reasons, only representatives of the intelligence services, the prosecutor and judges of the international criminal court should negotiate with Putin within the framework of the charges brought against him.
The United States should have eliminated Putin long ago. He poses a greater threat to all humanity than the world’s most inveterate international terrorist.
To prevent a global nuclear war, the United States developed the military-strategic concept of “Prompt Global Strike,” which consists of delivering a preventive rapid global strike on nuclear warhead carriers with various types of missiles, both conventional and nuclear, to prevent a global nuclear war. war. The United States has in its arsenal B-2 strategic aircraft, which carry B-61 guided bombs with ultra-low yields of up to 0.4 kilotons. The United States also has orbital military spacecraft that carry these bombs.
As part of the first Prompt Global Strike, all of Putin’s bunkers and residences should be destroyed along with the centers of national defense of the Russian Federation. So should Putin’s body doubles, Medvedev, Patrushev, Shoigu, and Gerasimov.
There will be no retaliatory nuclear strike from Moscow. No one whose superiors have been liquidated will take responsibility for initiating a nuclear war.
What prevents the US leadership from making the decision to eliminate Putin is its pro-Russianism.
What is pro-Russianism?
Pro-Russianism in its essence is a crime, which, as is known from jurisprudence, consists in the form of action, decision and (or) inaction. Pro-Russianism is not Russianness—the latter is support for the actions of the aggressor and occupier, or complicity on his side.
It is important to understand that even without the intention of causing harm to Ukraine or another country or in any way improving the position of the aggressor, erroneously, without malicious intent, military-political decisions taken that lead to harmful consequences for Ukraine and the West should be considered pro-Russian. Yes, this definition is harsh and strict, but at the same time it is fair. And if you don’t call a spade a spade, then it is impossible to defeat the aggressor.
Why does maintaining pro-Russianism pose an existential threat to humanity?
On August 19, 2023, in his Telegram channel, ex-President of the Russian Federation and now Deputy Chairman of the Security Council Dmitry Medvedev reiterated the logic of the World Hybrid War of Moscow against the West, formulated by his spiritual mentor Sergei Karaganov on September 17, 2014. “Russia will not retreat. For our country, this has become a matter of life and death. This is an existential conflict. War for self-preservation. It’s either them or us.”
This position means that the Russians have made their war against the West, and the destruction of Ukraine in this war, an integral part of Russia’s existence. In other words, the Russians are ready to fight against the West and Ukraine so long as Russia exists. After 9.5 years of the World Hybrid War, we can conclude this is indeed the aggressor’s position.
These are the conclusions!
1. The aggressor’s desire for revenge will be the constant motive of this war until his complete defeat.
2. While the US administration maintains its pro-Russian attitude, the occupation forces of the aggressor continue to kill Ukrainian civilians every day with impunity and destroy Ukrainian cities, blackmail the world with nuclear weapons, and prepare for wars against other countries.
How should the West deal with the Russians?
Since the Russians have made their war against the West and Ukraine existential for Russia, the West and the world community must do everything possible to ensure that the Russians lose this war. Russia—as a criminal, terrorist and illegitimate state entity—must cease to exist. There is no other option.
The Russians must lose the Fourth World Hybrid War against the West, first of all, by suffering an annihilating military and strategic defeat in Ukraine. Then the Russians themselves will, by default, announce the end of the imperial project, and Russia will disintegrate into many states.
The Russian question will be resolved finally, once and for all. The existential threat to the West from the East will at last come to an end, in much the same way as, following the defeat of the collapsed USSR, the Soviet question was resolved.
Arguments for the cessation of Russia’s existence
As in any discussion, opponents’ arguments about the need for the existence of a beautiful Russia of the future (BRF), both with Putin and without him, must be refuted conclusively by appealing to international law, international security and fact. Other arguments must be rejected as legal null. The political establishment of the United States, the countries of the West, and other countries around the world need to constantly, convincingly, intelligibly, and reasonably explain that Russia does not have the right to exist as a state.
The arguments presented here show that the US administration’s pro-Russian stance is aimed, first of all, at maintaining the Putin regime in power. This course means that for as long as the Putin regime continues, tens of thousands of political prisoners will languish in Russia, including Alexei Navalny, and various minorities will be persecuted. Russia will continue its militarization and aggressive war, and will continue to be the main source of instability throughout the world.
Putin is a usurper and wrangler of power and his regime is supported, by default, by the US administration.
Almost 400 years of history shows that Russia is always an aggressive empire. The essence of its existence is constant territorial expansion. If an empire does not conquer foreign territories, it collapses and agonizes, because it loses the meaning of its existence.
Not one single people whose state is still part of the Russian Federation ever voluntarily, through a popular expression of will, entered Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the USSR, or today’s Russia. There is simply no precedents for the voluntary entry of peoples into Moscow’s empire. Let’s summarize: if it was not voluntarily, then it was by force. This means that all the peoples living on the territory of the Russian Federation were, at different historical periods, occupied by force, impressed into slavery and remade (in other words, reworked!) by the occupiers, their accomplices, and collaborators into so-called Russians.
The existence of Russia means maintaining a concentration camp for millions of its citizens who would like to live in their own independent states in the post-Russian space.
At time of the collapse of the former USSR, residents of the former Soviet Union were not given the opportunity to express their will and take part in a referendum on the creation of a Russian state or the refusal to create it.
The existence of Russia is associated with a violation of international law regarding the right of indigenous peoples to self-determination, regulating the fight against genocide, terrorism, war and other international crimes.
Russia either engages in incessant imperialist wars to conquer new territories, both military and non-military, or it falls apart from defeats in the imperialist wars it has started. This is a precise description of the vicious Russian historical circle. There has never been a different Russia in the past and cannot be in the future.
Between the temporary expansion of Russia due to its imperialist wars and the defeat of Russia in the same wars, centuries have passed (the former Russian empire and its collapse), then decades (the former USSR and its collapse), now modern Russia. Historical experience shows that this intermediate Russian stage, between conquests and defeats, can last for years. It is precisely this intermediate stage that represents a long bleeding wound and a danger not only for its neighbors—Ichkeria, Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and individual African countries—but for all humanity. If there is no Russia, there is no source of Russian fascism and imperialism. There is Russia—there is war. No Russia—no war. These facts require a decisive struggle against Russia and its external and internal fascism.
In the current military-political situation, this wound can only be healed by significantly increasing the supply of various types of offensive and defensive weapons to Ukraine. There is no other option.
This is the message that the leadership of Ukraine and every other entity interested in Ukraine’s victory over Moscow should convey to the leadership of foreign states as arguments for a significant increase in the supply of weapons to Ukraine.
What is the Russian way? This is the endless path of great malice, a continuation of the path of the Horde. Russia is great malice: the de facto successor to the eastern barbarians and tyrants.
Historically, Russia has always fulfilled its international obligations only to the extent that it benefits it to fulfill them. Therefore, outwardly presenting itself as a legal and democratic state, but in reality a fascist, revanchist, imperialist dictatorship, Russia is more dangerous than the formula of the German state figure Otto Von Bismarck—“No treaty with Russia is worth the paper on which it is signed”—but more consistent with his other formula: “Never trust the Russians, for the Russians do not even trust themselves.”
The existence of Russia is the primary threat to the loss of control over nuclear weapons and the rise of China
Along with its reluctance to dismantle the Putin regime, the Biden administration does not want Russia’s collapse. Perhaps, although not on a scientific level, but certainly on a subconscious level, the Biden administration understands that Moscow’s defeat in the World Hybrid War will lead to the collapse of Russia and internal wars on the territory of the former Russian Federation. That is why, so manically and frankly unscrupulously, it strives to preserve this reserve of crystalline fascism and threat to all humanity.
At the same time, all sorts of fables are being invented, such as, “If the Russian Federation loses brutally, then it will ‘fall under China.’” And now under whom does the Russian Federation “lie”? Isn’t it under China? In any case, China is strengthening its economy by controlling a number of sectors of the Russian economy.
Loss of control over the proliferation of nuclear weapons? Does the US now control the proliferation of nuclear weapons? Of course not, as demonstrated by Moscow’s deployment of nuclear weapons in Belarus in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. And Moscow’s threats to use nuclear weapons are acts of nuclear terror. In general, all these fables are meant to distract from reality.
We must introduce a norm into the criminal codes of the countries of the West sanctioning, with criminal liability, attempts to preserve the Russian Federation as complicity in crimes against humanity.
The Biden administration’s position is for Ukraine to win its war with Moscow, but somehow, miraculously, preserve the Evil Empire for future wars in Europe. This contradicts the axioms of geopolitics. Therefore, soon, the Biden administration will slip in its attempt to remain pro-Russian.
End pro-Russianism!
The time is long past to end pro-Russianism. To do this, we must seize the strategic initiative from the aggressor and the pro-Russian wing of the US administration and raise a discussion about the insufficiency of weapons for Ukraine at the level of the US Congress and think tanks serving the US administration.
Sensible anti-Russian forces around the world should almost daily hold protests at foreign governments demanding an increase in arms supplies to Ukraine.
Consider Newsweek’s article: Exclusive: The CIA’s Blind Spot about the Ukraine War. According to Newsweek, CIA Director Burns guaranteed Putin that Ukraine would not strike at the territory of the Russian Federation, and Putin guaranteed Burns that he would act in accordance with the unspoken, but well-understood principles of conducting secret operations and would limit himself only to the seizure of Ukraine. In Burns’ actions are signs of a particularly serious crime: treason, in the criminal interests of the aggressor, with very aggravating circumstances that entailed full-scale war in Europe.
In the coming political season, representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties should, at a minimum, initiate investigations into this information.
The inquiry should ask the following questions:
- Is there an agreement between the leadership of the United States and the Russian Federation on “red lines” in the Russian-Ukrainian war?
- If it exists, then why has it not been known to the public and the US Congress until now?
- If not, on what basis is CIA Director Burns aggressively imposing fictitious “red lines” on Ukraine?
- Are there any signs of treason in Burns’ action, and perhaps those of other senior US officials, in the criminal interests of the aggressor?
This investigation is important for the purification of the US government itself.
Since one of the election strategies of the US Republican Party is to criticize the Biden administration for insufficiently supplying weapons to Ukraine, the Republicans have the right and, in my opinion, should raise the question of conducting an investigation into why such small quantities of weapons have been supplied to Ukraine.
The main message for US citizens who are worried about excessive spending on military assistance to Ukraine: “Supporting Ukraine insufficiently is an ineffective use US taxpayer money, since it prolongs the bloody war indefinitely.”
Sufficient support for Ukraine is an effective use of the US budget, since it will mark the horizon for the end of this war and lead to Ukraine’s victory over the aggressor, therefore entailing less spending from the US defense budget.
At a minimum, the entire number of offensive and defensive weapons that Ukraine has in service as of the day of this interview must be multiplied by three. In addition, Ukraine needs long-range ATACMS missiles; tactical (F-16) and strategic (F-35) aircraft; attack drones; shorter and medium range missiles of the Pershing and Tomahawk class with a range of destruction from 1000 to 5500 km; short-range frontline air defenses; special equipment for clearing minefields and overcoming artificial obstacles; and THAAD missile defense systems.
Yes, Ukraine needs not only ATACMS, but missiles with a range of up to 5,500 kilometers to destroy the aggressor’s military-industrial complex factories, its tactical and strategic aviation airfields, manpower, and weapons.
With Moscow beginning to turn the socio-political situation in the United States to chaos on the eve of the elections, and given the lack of appropriate opposition to this from the US administration, we must take the initiative into our own hand. We must help Ukraine and its armed forces more in the fight against the mortal enemy.
Pro-russianness is an abscess that needs to be lanced, calling a spade a spade. The 2024 election campaign in the US is a matchless opportunity to liquidate this abscess forever.
Yurii Shulipa is the Honorary Consul of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in Ukraine, professor and director of the International Union Institute of National Politics, jurist, and political analyst.