By Scott Ritter, Substack, 8/11/26

The German Journalist Michael Martens recently made headlines by asking Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky how Europe can help Ukraine kill more Russians soldiers. I caution Mr. Martens and anyone else in Germany and Europe who thinks such a quest is somehow virtuous and viable—be careful what you ask for.

Michael Martens was born in 1973, in the city of Hamburg, in what was then West Germany. Hamburg was one of the major cities of Nazi Germany, and paid the price for this status in the form of heavy allied bombing, including the infamous firebombing attack that transpired in late July-early August 1943 that killed an estimated 37,000 people. Today Hamburg is Germany’s second largest city, after Berlin. The devastation caused by the firebombing of Hamburg is commemorated in the form of the St. Nikolai Memorial, which serves as a haunting reminder of the destruction caused by the war. Hamburg also has maintained several bomb shelters from that time, likewise as a means of remembering the horrors of war.

Martens today serves as the Balkans correspondent for the German tabloid Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), and it was in this status that he attended a press conference this past Sunday convened for the visit of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to Serbia. There, Martens asked Zelensky the following question: “Can you tell us Europeans what specifically we can do to help you kill more Russians?” Martens then amended his question, noting “More Russian soldiers, of course,” as if the original intent was not clear enough.

Martens’ question invoked justifiable rage amongst people of conscience everywhere. His own editors at FAZ sought to distance themselves from Martens’ question, noting in a statement released following widespread demands for the newspaper to fire Martens that “the question was worded ambiguously, which we regret. It is not the editorial position of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that as many Russian soldiers as possible should be killed.” Instead, the editors at FAZ opined that the real issue was “how the Russian army could be placed under such pressure in terms of manpower that Russia would be compelled to enter peace negotiations.”

Martens himself expressed “surprise” over the public backlash to his question, noting that “Outside Barbieworld, this is how wars are fought,” and adding in an additional commentary of the controversy “Because killing Russians as many Russian soldiers as possible is what is important to end the war.”

Martens is a man possessing zero experience when it comes to the art of war, and the taking of life necessitated by such. The closest brush with anything resembling actual military death is the myth of Josef Schulz, a German soldier serving with the 714th Infantry Division who, according to legend, refused to participate in the execution of 16 partisans on July 20, 1941, in the town of Smederevska Palanka in Yugoslavia. For this act of moral clarity, Schultz was himself sentenced to die by the same firing squad. Martens helped promulgate this myth in his 2011 book In Search of Heroes. The Story of the Soldier Who Didn’t Want to Kill.

The story, however, was a lie; Schultz had been killed in fighting with the partisans the day prior to the execution. The manufacturing of a myth of noble sacrifice in the face of evil that grew around Schultz was promulgated by those who sought to create and sustain the corresponding mythology of the noble German soldier who was not programmed to kill but rather was confronted with the horrible choice of either obeying the horrific orders he was given or face the certainty of death.

The rehabilitative nature of such fiction has become ingrained in the German DNA, if for no other reason that the reality of collective guilt in the crimes of Nazi Germany on the part of those who participated in the war was manifested so clearly that Germany could not build itself back up unless done so in the image of a hero that simply did not exist, and could not have, in any case, existed, given the reality that virtually all of Germany was stained with the sin of the Nazi crimes—especially the Wehrmacht.

Martens himself has had to wrestle with such demons. He himself is the progeny of a grandfather, Hans-Hermann Martens, who was not only a member of the Nazi Party, whom he served as a prosecutor in the pre-war years, but also was an officer of the Wehrmacht Operations Staff during the war, where he served as a military judge who is said to have sentenced German soldiers to death for the crime of desertion. Hans-Hermann went on to serve as a lawyer and politician in post-war West Germany—another Nazi war criminal rehabilitated by a people subjected to voluntarily self-induced amnesia.

This amnesia carried over through successive generations, so much so that Germans like Michael Martens have “forgotten” the role their country played in not only committing mass murder against the Russian people, but also in reviving and sustaining the malignancy of Banderism—the odious western Ukrainian ideology so closely linked to the Nazi roots Germans have whitewashed and forgotten.

Unlike Martens, I know a few things about war and the concept of killing Russians. From 1984 through 1988, I spent nearly every waking moment training in the art of modern military conflict with a singular focus on the Soviet (i.e., Russian) threat. I had steeped myself in Russian history, culture, literature and language at the college level in preparation for this mission, which became all consuming. I was furthered in this regard by the propaganda being promulgated by the US Defense Department, which had begun publishing an annual threat review entitled “Soviet Military Power.” Not only was this publication considered mandatory reading, a select number of Myrmidon such as me were dispatched to the Defense Intelligence College for a week-long immersion program on—you guessed it—Soviet military power. Through lectures, briefings, tours and discussions, we were exposed to the doctrine, strategy, ideology, and actual weapons which, in the aggregate, comprised “Soviet Military Power.”

But these experiences fell into the category of “why we fight”, not “how we fight.” That only came with my assignment to the Fleet Marine Force and, more specifically, to the 5^th Battalion, 11^th Marines, a self-propelled field artillery unit which served as the direct fore support battalion for the 7^th Marine Amphibious Brigade—the Marine component of the Rapid Deployment Force.

When I arrived at the battalion, I was confronted with the fact that Marine Corps doctrine regarding artillery fire support at the time had not meaningfully progressed since the Vietnam War. If my immersion into the concepts that made up “Soviet Military Power” taught me anything, it was that the Soviets enjoyed massive superiority in artillery, meaning that if we sought to engage them in traditional linear fashion, we would lose the resulting war of attrition—decisively.

How does a junior Second Lieutenant, with zero combat experience and virtually zero experience in the nuances of war, convince officers (and enlisted) possessing decades of experience in both that what they are doing not only is wrong, but will get them killed if we were actually to square off against the Soviet enemy. The Department of Defense had published an outstanding three-volume series of publications—FM 100-2—on the Soviet Army, its operations, tactics, doctrine, and equipment. These publications were the definitive source of unclassified information on Soviet ground forces and the Soviet model of combined arms warfare.

And yet while they were readily available to all Marines, they were rarely read and even more rarely acted upon.

The US Army had what it called the OPFOR—”opposing forces” organized, trained and equipped to fight as the Soviets did—who operated from the National Training Center (NTC) at Fort Irwin, just north of where I was stationed in 29 Palms, California. The US Army would rotate brigade-sized formations through the NTC, where they would be put through a series of force-on-force exercises where they would face off against two regiments of OPFOR. The exercises always ended with a massed armored attack by the OPFOR which almost always resulted in a decisive defeat of the US Army forces involved. The entire event was designed to be a giant wake-up call for the units involved—either adapt to confront and defeat the Soviet way of war—or die.

I contacted the OPFOR at Fort Irwin and arranged to have my battalion commander ride along with the OPFOR during their final assault on the US Army positions. The end result was everything I hoped would be—the OPFOR rolled through the Army like a hot knife through butter.

Killing Russians—even simulated ones—wasn’t an easy thing at all.

My battalion commander walked away knowing that if we went to war against the Soviet threat based upon the tactics and operational art we were currently trained to employ, we would be similarly destroyed.

I was given virtual carte blanche to re-do the battalion training plan, incorporating more realistic training which emphasized shooting, moving, and communicating faster—much faster—than our Soviet enemy. We were David fighting Goliath, and we had to remain nimble enough to avoid being caught in the destructive power of the enemy’s fire potential, and yet skilled enough to deliver our own fire at the right place and time so as to weaken the enemy and create opportunities for Marine maneuver units to locate and destroy through firepower and maneuver.

To help with the exercises, I created a battalion-level Tactical Training & Exercise Control Group (TTECG)—basically a war game system—where I was able to develop scenarios using enemy forces that employed doctrinally correct Soviet tactics and operations. Using this TEEGC system, I ran the battalion through the paces, using increasingly complex scenarios designed to stress the importance of maneuver and speed when fighting the Russians.

The TEECG was so successful that I was asked to support the training of other Marine units at 29 Palms, including the infantry and armor battalions.

5/11 was a nuclear-capable battalion and was tasked with being prepared with delivering nuclear artillery fires using its 155mm and 203mm self-propelled guns. This made us a prime target for any Soviet forces we may have gone up against. To better prepare for the reality of fighting the Russians, I created my own OPFOR unit, designed after Soviet special forces, or Spetznaz. When my battalion took to the field, I would insert my Spetznaz unit into their area of operation using helicopters and offroad vehicle infiltration and then hunt them down and kill them. We ambushed the batteries as they moved, we attacked them at night when they set in, and we harassed them throughout the operation. In short, we killed them far more than they killed us.

Killing Russians—even simulated ones—was no simple thing.

When the Marines held a major division-sized exercise in 29 Palms, I was tasked with working with a US Army battalion from the 7^th Light Infantry Division to prepare a Soviet-style defense that the Marines would then attack.

Using Soviet defense tactics and doctrine, this battalion stopped the Marines in their tracks before they even reached the forward defensive positions.

On three separate occasions, the exercise controllers stopped the exercise and brought all the dead Marines back to life so they could restart the scenario. Each time the results were the same: the Marine attack was defeated before it even had a chance to begin.

The attack was supposed to represent the first phase of a three-phase scenario that saw the Marines breakthrough the defense and maneuver to surround the Soviet defenders.

Finally, the commanding general stopped the exercise and assembled his staff and the commanders and staff of the subordinated units, chastising them on their inability to defeat a Soviet-style threat. Everyone was sent back to the drawing board to rethink their approach toward training.

The commanders of the tank and infantry unit that had used the OPFOR TEECG in their training had repeatedly tried to persuade the regimental and division staff that the plans they proposed would not succeed. Each time they were overruled and rode out to their death.

It turned out Russians—even simulated ones—were pretty good at killing Marines.

But the biggest wake up call came during a separate division exercise where we were tasked with opposing a simulated Soviet incursion into Iran. In the end, the superior Soviet forces broke through the blocking positions that had been set up by the Marines, and 5/11 was tasked with firing a nuclear artillery round to halt the Soviet advance. We did so, and then suddenly the exercise came to an end—the Soviets, upon having a nuclear weapon used against them, responded with overwhelming nuclear retaliation, killing everyone.

The Russians—even simulated ones—were better at mass death than we were.

I was fortunate that I never had the opportunity to test my anti-Soviet military acumen in the real world. Instead, I was dispatched to the Soviet Union as part of an arms control team tasked with eliminating the very weapons that had killed us in the Iranian exercise—the SS-20 intermediate range missile.

In the end, learning to live in peace with the Russians proved far more conducive to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that training to kill them.

This should have been a universal lesson of the ages, one that would motivate future generations to avoid the pitfalls associated with war—especially war with Russia.

Michael Martens did not heed this lesson, even after four years of conflict between Russia and Ukraine proved the futility of trying to kill Russians on the field of battle.

Lessons the Mongols, Swedes, French and Germans had learned previously.

A lesson the Marines learned in simulated fashion back in the 1980’s.

According to Martens, “There is nothing ‘scandalous’ about the question of how Europe can help Ukraine kill more Russians. That’s exactly what we need.”

Martens has been preparing for this moment for months now, having invested considerable time and effort in drafting an essay titled “Killing Russians: What Europe Must Do.”

Martens’ muse for this project was Sir Fitzroy Hew Royle Maclean, 1st Baronet, whose memoirs, Eastern Approaches, in which he details his time working with Tito’s partisans in Yugoslavia, inspired Martens so—the title of Martens’ essay is drawn from a conversation Winston Churchill had with Maclean notifying him that his job was “simply to find out who was killing the most Germans and suggest means by which we could help them to kill more.”

This is where Martens lost himself in his self-induced blood lust.

The target of Maclean’s mission was German Nazis, and the tool he was seeking to employ consisted of partisans drawn from the ranks of a civilian population that had been terrorized by these same Nazis.

Motivation means everything.

Especially when it comes to the people being asked to do the killing.

Martens would have benefitted from perusing David Grossman’s classic work, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, which described the inherent resistance on the part of most soldiers during World War 2 to killing—most soldiers did not fire their weapons, and those that did, often did so without aiming.

Killing a man is no easy thing, a fact Martens—who has never served in the military—would do well to reflect on.

Even when improved training techniques designed to break through the psychological barrier that exists in most humans to taking life succeeds, there is a huge cost that is paid for this “success”—the psychological ruination of a man who has done what no man should ever be asked to do—kill his fellow man.

There is nothing glorious about war, since war in its most basic form is simply about mankind killing itself.

Sometimes, however, the cause is such that a society embraces war as the only means of collective survival.

Tito’s Yugoslavian partisans were engaged in such a conflict.

So, too, were the Russians and other nationalities of the Soviet Union.

Their collective enemy were the German Nazis and their allies, who were killed in great numbers.

And each year the Russians of today celebrate their victory of Nazi Germany, not to glorify killing, but to honor the dead.

27 million of them.

Martens would benefit from a course in Russian history of that time.

Or perhaps he could turn to Soviet cinema. I would recommend he watch four movies: Ballad of a Soldier, The Cranes are Flying, Fate of a Man, and Come and See.

Killing is the easy part of war.

Dealing with the consequences of killing is the hard part.

A nation collectively pays this price, and it is a cost that carries over generations.

Killing should never be so glibly embraced, as Martens has done.

But the most damning part of Martens’ ignorance-laced effort to recast himself as some sort of modern-day Fitzroy Maclean is the side Martens has opted to align himself with while glibly espousing the death of others.

The cause of Zelensky’s Ukraine, a literal modern-day manifestation of the German Nazis Maclean was tasked with killing.

The same Nazis the ancestors of the Russian soldiers fighting today sacrificed their lives in defeating.

Martens should ask himself if he truly has what it takes to kill Russians.

Of course, he won’t—cowards never do the actual killing themselves but stand on the sidelines while others engage in this blood sport on their behalf.

The Marines I served with were not cowards—they were prepared to engage the Soviet “threat” in mortal combat, even when empowered with the knowledge that to do so would invite almost certain death.

Martens lacks such moral fiber.

But, more importantly in this regard, so, too, his fellow Europeans.

Let’s take Martens’ own Germany, which is currently leading the way in pounding the drums of war when it comes to Russia.

Skip over the part where the German economy cannot bear the costs associated with building a military machine worthy of a Fourth Reich.

Let’s talk about the mettle of the German men who would be called upon to kill Russians in such a war.

It is a short conversation—there simply isn’t a will to fight.

After embarking on a massive propaganda campaign designed to motivate hundreds of thousands of German men to rally to the cause of the Fourth Reich, German manhood produced only 530 such souls.

There is no will to fight the war Martens and his ilk so gleefully embrace.

And if the German government were so foolhardy as to implement forced conscription, it would collapse in the face of massive public protest.

All of Europe is infected with this lack of desire to serve a cause that no one believes is worth dying for—the European political and economic elite may want to kill Russians, but the populations of the constituent nations of Europe do not.

Which means when erstwhile heroes like Martens speak of killing Russians, he speaks of Ukrainians doing the killing.

Let me remind Martens of two harsh realities in this regard: every month, tens of thousands of Russian men volunteer to sign contracts with the Russian Ministry of Defense so they can fight in the Special Military Operation, the term used by the Russian government to describe its ongoing conflict with the collective west.

And every month, gangs of Ukrainian “recruiters” forcefully kidnap Ukrainian men by the thousands to serve in the Ukrainian military.

There is no comparison.

Martens’ call for “killing Russians” exposes everything that is wrong about Europe today. This ugly reality has been operating in the open for some time. In 1993 it was given voice by George Soros, who postulated a new US-European “partnership” where “the combination of manpower from Eastern Europe with the technical capabilities of NATO would greatly enhance the military potential of the Partnership because it would reduce the risk of body bags for NATO countries, which is the main constraint on their willingness to act.”

Let others die for the causes you espouse—this is the mantra of Martens and his ilk.

And what cause does Martens espouse? Here we need only delve back into the Nazi roots of his family tree.

Generalplan Ost was Nazi Germany’s vision for the creation of Germanized Lebensraum carved from captured territory in Eastern Europe involving the large-scale ethnic cleansing of Slavs, including Russians and Ukrainians.

German lawyers like Hans-Hermann Martens, Michael Martens’ Nazi grandfather, were responsible for envisioning and implementing this plan.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, it seems.

Martens pretends to support the Ukrainians, and claims all he wants to do is “kill Russians.”

But the war he supports is, by design, intended to send Ukrainian troops to the slaughterhouse as well.

To transform Ukraine into a Kamikaze nation hell bent on suicide.

By pitting Slav against Slav, Martens and all those erstwhile “friends” of Ukraine have exposed themselves as nothing more than the modern-day versions of the Nazi scourge the world defeated back in 1945.

But the Nazis were never eradicated, as the fate of Martens’ grandfather proves.

Instead, they were rehabilitated and honored, their horrific crimes whitewashed and put in an intellectual limbo until which time the ideology of hatred that facilitated the commission of those crimes took root in a new generation of German Nazis who dream of the fulfilment of their sick fantasies of “Lebensraum” predicated on the extermination of the Slavic people.

One day this war will end, and when it does people like Michael Martens need to be held accountable for the role they played in seeking the modern-day genocide of the Slavic peoples of Europe.

Until then, anyone possessing a moral compass must call out Martens and those like him who advocate “killing Russians.”

Because what they really mean is the genocide of Slavs, and the promotion of a European master race (one only need recall Josep Borrell, the European Union’s former foreign policy chief, who likened Europe to a “garden” and the rest of the world a “jungle”).

“Killing Russians” is a sick metaphor for all that is wrong with Europe and the collective West today—a perverse vision of cultural supremacy that can only exist from the sacrifice of the Slavic people.

Martens and his fellow caste of European (and American) “gardeners” should take heed of history, however: beware what you ask for.

History has shown that those who promote the “killing of Russians” quickly find out that not only are Russians hard to kill, but they are also adept at killing those who present an existential threat to their survival as a people and culture.

By Kautilya The Contemplator, Substack, 8/28/26

When CIA Director John Ratcliffe recently made an unannounced visit to Moscow, there was much speculation across the media on what he intended to discuss with his Russian counterparts. However, the more pertinent question is why Ratcliffe had to go at all? Washington and Moscow already possess diplomatic, military and intelligence channels designed to function even when relations are at their worst. Furthermore, sending an intelligence chief into the adversary’s territory historically carried significant risk. When former CIA Director Richard Helms visited the Soviet Union in 1987, Time described the Agency’s longstanding inhibition:

“The unwritten but iron rule of the CIA was that no man who holds the secrets puts himself into a hostile environment.”1

Despite this, Ratcliffe boarded a US military aircraft and spent approximately eight hours in Moscow. The Wall Street Journal reported that Ratcliffe carried a warning against Russia testing NATO while other reports suggest Iran was also discussed. President Donald Trump called the visit “semi-routine.”

The significance of Ratcliffe’s journey may lie less in what was discussed than in what US intelligence actually saw that made Washington decide that its foreign intelligence chief had to travel to Moscow in person.

Why the CIA Director?

The choice of emissary provides the first clue to this visit. If Washington wanted conventional negotiations with Moscow, it would have continued with Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner (across past administrations this channel is usually maintained by the Secretary of State). If the immediate concern was military deconfliction, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) could communicate directly with Russia’s General Staff. If the objective were a broader political understanding negotiated discreetly on the President’s behalf, the National Security Advisor would have historical precedent behind him. The fact that Washington dispatched its intelligence chief suggests it faces a narrower problem to which it seeks answers. This could entail determining what the adversary might be actually preparing to do based on an assessment of specific intelligence.

President Trump has increasingly used his CIA Director as a personal intelligence emissary in highly sensitive situations when intelligence and coercive signaling converge. Earlier this year, Ratcliffe traveled to Venezuela following the removal of Nicolas Maduro from power. He was also dispatched to Cuba carrying a direct presidential message demanding changes in Havana’s behavior while reportedly warning Cuban officials against hostile military action.

There is another important variable that distinguishes intelligence diplomacy from conventional diplomatic practice: urgency. Presidential envoys can spend weeks exploring compromises. In this sense, intelligence operates on the frontline of national power. It compresses the distance between uncertainty and decision, revealing intentions that conventional diplomacy may uncover too slowly or never at all. Burns went to Moscow as the Biden administration tried to determine whether Russian military preparations would lead to war. Ratcliffe’s journey may reflect a similar need to clarify a consequential intelligence assessment quickly.

As such, reporting by mainstream media of this episode remains incomplete. Warning Moscow against attacking NATO hardly requires an eight-hour visit by the intelligence chief. Russian military planners have studied NATO and escalation doctrine for decades. The more interesting possibility is that Washington needed an answer to a specific and time-sensitive intelligence question. What that was remains unknown.

The CIA Director can also disclose intelligence in a controlled manner to gauge reactions that might otherwise not be discernible through established channels. He may reveal enough to demonstrate American visibility into Russian thinking without exposing the sources behind it. Intelligence thereby becomes not merely a source of knowledge, but an instrument for shaping the adversary’s calculations.

Understanding why such a question might require the CIA Director to personally appear in Moscow requires looking beyond this journey. Intelligence services have long communicated with adversaries while deliberately avoiding this kind of encounter. The history of these channels might help explain why Ratcliffe’s journey was anything but routine.

The Secret Rules of Intelligence Diplomacy

The CIA was not alone in treating such journeys with extraordinary caution. In 1966, Mossad Director Meir Amit considered secretly traveling to Cairo for talks with Egyptian officials prior to the outbreak of war in 1967. Former Mossad chief Isser Harel opposed the mission for fear Amit might be detained and interrogated. Israel prohibited the journey. Contacts continued outside Egypt. The rationale was that intelligence services needed to communicate with adversaries. There was no need to place their chiefs inside enemy capitals to do so.2

During the Cold War, the CIA and the KGB developed the Gavrilov channel, comprising a secure telephone connection between Langley and Moscow.3 This enabled the agencies to manage sensitive disputes through confidential meetings on neutral territory like Vienna. It also provided an emergency mechanism for diffusing any potential miscalculations.

While a secure channel could transmit information, it could not necessarily resolve uncertainty about the adversary’s intentions. That distinction between communication and assessment helps explain why intelligence officials sometimes still met face-to-face. A December 1987 declassified memorandum helps explain why such encounters matter. During Gorbachev’s Washington summit, Deputy CIA Director Robert Gates met privately with Vladimir Kryuchkov, then Deputy Chairman of the KGB and head of its powerful First Chief Directorate. Gates argued that intelligence services had a special responsibility to ensure that relations between nuclear adversaries rested on realistic assessments of each other’s intentions. Intelligence could reduce the danger of “miscalculation out of ignorance.”4

The same principle survived the Cold War. On October 18, 2022, amid mounting concern over escalation in Ukraine, British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace abruptly cancelled a parliamentary appearance and flew to Washington for talks with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and White House officials. A British defense source later explained that the circumstances made it “important to meet face to face.”5 Days later, on October 23, 2022, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu telephoned his American, British and French counterparts alleging that Ukraine was preparing a radiological “dirty bomb.” The sequence illustrates that while urgent information can be transmitted remotely, governments may sometimes decide that in light of substantial uncertainty, senior officials are required to meet in person.

These precedents provide one clue to Ratcliffe’s journey. Backchannels can transmit information, but personal encounters can help resolve uncertainty by testing how the adversary responds. What circumstances have previously been serious enough for Washington to send the CIA Director himself?

When the Director Travels, the Message Changes

When President Joe Biden dispatched CIA Director William Burns to Moscow in November 2021, the purpose was twofold. First, Burns delivered a warning to his counterparts that the United States had detected Russian preparations for a major military operation against Ukraine. Second, he collected a response. Burns would later admit that even though US intelligence had provided an “early and accurate warning of the war that was coming”, he found Putin and his senior advisers “unmoved by the clarity of our understanding of what he was planning.”6 He returned to Washington believing the danger had increased and subsequently told Biden that Putin was likely to proceed.

An intelligence chief can demonstrate how much his government knows, communicate consequences and evaluate the reaction. The more pressing question is whether the adversary denies the intelligence, challenges its interpretation, offers reassurance or reveals a red line.

What Requires the CIA Director in the Room?

The historical pattern demonstrates that CIA Directors meet their counterparts to assess intentions based on specific intelligence that otherwise cannot be determined through other backchannels. Burns went to Moscow in 2021 when Washington possessed specific intelligence about Russian preparations for war. He again met with Naryshkin in Ankara in 2022 amid public reports that Russia might escalate with nuclear weapons. Whether accurate or not, in both cases the intelligence problem was specific, consequential and time-sensitive. Ratcliffe’s journey thus raises the possibility that Washington again may have confronted an intelligence question that could not wait for the natural rhythms of diplomacy.

The Washington Post reported that Ratcliffe’s mission was preceded by fresh intelligence suggesting that Moscow regarded the United States as depleted by the Iran war and saw an opportunity to escalate against American interests in Europe. The Wall Street Journal separately reported concern over possible Russian action intended to test NATO. This suggests that Washington’s concern extended beyond a generic warning about NATO, toward a more immediate question about Russian intentions.

Ratcliffe’s visit may ultimately tell us more about the nature of Washington’s uncertainty than about the message he carried. The enduring mystery of those eight hours in Moscow may not be what Ratcliffe told Naryshkin. It might be what Trump needed Ratcliffe to find out.

By Gordon Hahn, Substack, 8/20/26

The NATO-Russia Ukrainian War is coming to its endgame in Russia’s favor, sharply raising the temperature of domestic Ukrainian politics. To add catastrophe to disaster, the Ukrainian Maidan regime, state, and army are riven with schisms threatening the existence of them all. Thus, on the ‘left’ and on the right, particularly the far right neofascist wing of Ukrainian politics, pressure on the Volodomyr Zelenskiy iteration of the Maidan oligarchic-neofascist regime is being intensified. On the right, the 3rd Army Corps ‘Azov’, based on the Azov neofascist political movement, has been put in charge of the defense of what remains (approximately 15 percent) of Ukraine’s hold on Russian-claimed Donetsk Oblast. There, in western Donetsk, Russian forces have entered Dobropiliya and are in the process of encircling the Slovansk and Kramatorsk strongholds. To the west of these three towns lies nothing but undefendable open fields leading to the middle of the Dnepr River. To this must be added the increasingly dire situation in Ukraine’s northern oblasts of Kharkiv and Sumy, with their provincial capitols under threat of siege and encirclement. Russian victories in the north would revive the threat to Kiev long dormant since the war’s first months. In the southern oblast of Zaporozhe, the road to its provincial capitol of the same name is about to open with the imminent fall of Orekhov.

Alongside this imminent military catastrophe for the recruit- and equipment-starved Ukrainian army has an equally catastrophic political dynamic. The appointment of Azov to defend the last of Donetsk can have several political consequences. If the defense is successful or at least if defeat is drawn out and can be framed as a victory, Azov and its commander, Brig. Gen. Andriy Biletskiy, will receive yet another boon to his reputation. Previous boosts have come from past military efforts and the endorsement of the Azov 3rd Army Corps by President Zelenskiy by way of military promotions, medals, and the expansion of the Azov Brigade to an army corps of some 50,000 personnel. Another heroic battle or two will further promote Biletskiy eventually, leading to a general staff position or to the post of commander of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, replacing Gen. Mihkaylo Drapatiy or a successor. Azov, with its neofascist ideology, will see another rise of its status within the military and society, putting its 3rd Army Corps in a position to seize power during a regime or state crisis.

Recently, Azov and Biletskiy himself were placed front and center when two former leaders of the World War II era, Nazi-allied Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA) were reburied on Zelenskiy’s orders from abroad to Ukraine, with elaborate ceremonies replete with Nazi symbolism and pomp were led by Biletskiy. It cannot be excluded out of hand that Zelenskiy sought or at least sees the side benefit of the Azov armed element’s weakening as a result of its pitch battles with the more powerful Russian forces. Suspicions on this score could come to the fore within Azov when the body bags come home as the battles are lost. This would enflame a mood within Azov that could facilitate a coup attempt or some other oppositionist machination.

Azov could also be prompted to political action by the ‘leftist-liberal’ protest movement sparked by Zelenskiy’s firing of Mikhaylo Fedorov as defense minister. The Western globalist backers of the Maidan regime and Zelenskiy are behind Fedorov and the protests against Zelenskiy’s firing of Fedorov. The strength of the liberal globalist threat was enough to prompt Zelenskiy to fire commander of the armed forces, Gen. Oleksandr Syrskiy, bringing the more neofascist-friendly Drapatiy to head the army. The foreign-backed globalist demonstrations against Zelenskiy, who has facilitated the rise in the authority and power of neofascism in general and Azov in particular during the war, and their fomenting in war time cannot but raise the ire of Azov types, who are not foreign-, globalist-, Western-, democracy-, or particularly Zelenskiy-friendly by nature. A major confrontation in Kiev could force Azov to play coup poker or outright execute a coup itself in order to ‘save the nation’ and ‘restore order.’

The events of recent days can hardly suggest stability in Kiev. Demonstrations for the return of Fedorov to the Defense Minister’s position, which often include calls for Zelenskiy to hold presidential elections or even resign, Fedorov’s own call for holding presidential elections, and anti-corruption agencies’ raiding of the offices and apartment of deputy head of the Office of the President Irina Mudraya and a series of Rada deputies on the eve of the vote on the nomination of a former SBU official Yevgenii Kharma as defense minister, forced Zelenskiy to fire Mudraya. Although Khmara’s nomination was approved in the Rada vote, the tapes released by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) showing Mudraya talking about taking over money flows, political cliques, and most infamously quoting another, unnamed top official (Zelenskiy?): “He says: ‘Corruption must be systematized and controlled, not struggled against’” (https://strana.news/news/510857-nabu-opublikovalo-audiozapisi-po-delu-forrest-hamp.html).

In addition, the tapes show Murray saying she needs to launder hundreds of millions of hryvna on “the instructions of her boss” 

But Mudraya was not an appointed to the OP under new OP chief Kyryllo Budanov, former HRU director. Rather, she is a creature of Zelenskiy and his recently fired OP chief Andriy Yermak for his ties to the Mindichgate and other corruption cases; she was hired in 2024 before Budanov became OP chief earlier this year. So the target of the new investigation and tape releases is likely Zelenskiy, not Budanov.

Budanov came to the OP leadership position with numerous former Yermak appointees retaining their position and evidence that they and Yermak himself were controlling the Office. So it is possible that Budanov has made an alliance of convenience with the globalists at NABU and SAPO in order to gain full control of the OP and even weaken Zelenskiy, whom he could challenge. So is this anti-corruption case yet another in a series of such cases undertaken by anti-corruption authorities loyal and captive to the West to undermine Zelenskiy or at least to remind him who is his master or is there another more complex configuration at least in this year.

The Fedorov demonstrations continue after the Rada confirmation vote and corruption scandal and are likely to do so for a while. Meanwhile, the Zelenskiy clique has undergone another humiliating discrediting. Its corruption is abhorred by the neofascists and to a lesser extent by the far fewer republicans as well.

Finally, there is even the potential for the neofascists to cut a deal with the liberal-republican globalists, joining them in a temporary united front against Zelenskiy as a step towards seizing power for themselves. Budanov at the HRU supported Azov and other neofascist initiatives. Another leading neofascist figure has endorsed Fedorov’s protest movement. Azov’s Serhii Sternenko announced his support for demonstrations to back the Fedorov movement (https://strana.news/news/510831-vozle-verkhovnoj-rady-projdet-aktsija-v-podderzhku-fedorova.html). Sternenko has not just a neofascist pedigree but a criminal past as well (https://gordonhahn.substack.com/p/is-the-uk-readying-a-coup-option?utm_source=publication-search; https://gordonhahn.substack.com/p/the-dead-end-of-zelenskiys-great?utm_source=publication-search; and https://gordonhahn.substack.com/p/zelenskiy-weakened-siloviki-strengthened?utm_source=publication-search).

As Kiev destabilizes, the defense front crumbles, the economy collapses under the Black Sea blockade, and Azov personnel are put through the Russian meat grinder, why wouldn’t Biletskiy or other Azov and neofascist elements consider a coup?

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 8/21/26

A fresh corruption scandal broke out in Ukraine – this time, it was racketeering by relative junior members of the Zelenskiy administration. Corruption is not a problem of the system in Ukraine; corruption is the system.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s deputy head of staff, Iryna Mudra, has been arrested and found to have assets of just over $6mn and together with a dozen other high officials, connected to Bankova, to have been running mafia-like racketeering schemes. Before I go on, I should point out that the fact they have been caught, arrested and charged is something of a revolution in Ukraine, but nevertheless, it also highlights how fundamentally corrupt the government of Ukraine is.

Russia is famously corrupt, but I don’t think people realise just how much worse it is in Ukraine. When the war started, the foreign ministries called their embassies for advice and were warned by those that actually lived and worked in Kyiv to be very careful. There is a reason why Ukraine, which has significant resources – agricultural, metals, manufacturing, excellent human capital, etc, and is one of the biggest retail markets in Europe – has been the poorest or second poorest (after Moldova), country in Europe for all of the last three decades. Any money available gets stolen.

Superficially it looks much better than Russia as, unlike Russia, it has a vibrant civil society thanks to two coloured revolutions. And the elections are more or less real. But on the economic front Ukraine is still in the stone ages and even the heroes of Orange Revolution were rotten to the core (with the big exception of Viktor Yushchenko, who they tried to kill).

The way it works is Ukraine’s the lack of progress in setting up institutions and the dysfunctional courts drives corruption. Leaders give deputies lucrative posts that control cashflows and they are expected to help themselves. The hold of the leader becomes his ability to take that job away, which ensures loyalty. The weakness of the legal system and the irrelevance of elections allows deputies to steal with impunity and they are not accountable to public opinion.

Ex-Orange Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was an early media star with her trademark hair braid and seen as a “firebrand” democratic leader. In Ukraine she is more widely known as the “gas princess” as she is believed to have stolen some $350mn while she was minister of gas. After the Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity was over and she was let out to jail, where President Viktor Yanukovych put her, the crowds were happy to see her released but had no interest in seeing her back in power. To highlight the point she has also recently been fingered by NABU in its latest vote buying investigations. She was caught on camera with huge bundles of dollars that she uses to get votes through the Rada.

Yanukovych is even more old school and stripped-mined the country while he was president. He is accused of nicking a third of the country’s hard currency reserves – some $35bn – that has never been recovered. His Mezhyhirya Residence is famously a palace where amongst the many trappings of wealth was a loaf of bread made out of solid gold – and even that has been stolen in the meantime; no one knows where it is.

I had personal experience of this. While in Odesa, Yanukovych had dinner at a very famous restaurant there and liked it so much he decided to take the restaurant over. The owner was a friend of a friend in Kyiv who told me he came to lobby Bankova to back off. He was offered half the value of the restaurant and took it. “Getting half of its value was a pretty good deal under Yanukovych as usually he just takes what he wants and pays nothing.”

Ukraine became a true mafia state under Yanukovych – a label usually reserved for Russia.

He was ousted and replaced by former President Petro Poroshenko who was a bit better, but even Poroshenko remains an oligarch, having earned billions from his Roshen chocolate empire. He was supposed to put all his assets into trust after taking office and never did it – maintain business and sales in Russia even after the 2014 annexation of the Crimea and eventually ended up in the Panama Papers leak.

He wasn’t as bad as Yanukovych – I’d say the only leader worse than Yanukovych in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) in the last 30 years was probably Turkmenbashi, the late leader of Turkmenistan – but while he did make some reforms, the old system was alive and well.

One of the good things he did was appoint Lithuanian born ex-investment banker Aivaras Abromavičius, who worked for Sweden’s East Capital and married a local and was appointed Economics Minister. Abromavičius, who I know personally, was the real McCoy and one of the few high ups with real international investment banking experience and could actually spell “corporate governance.”

Abromavičius made a real stab at cleaning things up and, for example, closed down a scheme where uber-oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky, and Zelenskiy’s business partner and election sponsor, had injected a “trading company” between the state oil company Ukrnafta and state procurement that was charging 15% for any deal, but did nothing else. That deal was worth tens of millions of dollars a year.

However, eventually Abromavičius gave up and quit in spectacular fashion with a public press conference on February 3, 2016 where he accused the Poroshenko regime of endemic corruption.

“My team and I have no wish to be a cover for open corruption or puppets under the control of those who want to establish control over state money in the style of the old authorities,” he said at the presser. “I don’t want to be part of this free-for-all… but we have to wake up from lethargic sleep. I don’t think things will change quickly.”

The problem he explained to me was Poroshenko tried to appoint a deputy to the head of a ministry department making procurements and control its cashflow; as minister, Abromavičius was supposed to be in charge of all appointments in his own ministry and was trying to oust these placemen as a key part of his anti-corruption efforts. His press conference caused a major political crisis as it completely undermined Poroshenko’s efforts to get the EU and US on board in his escalating war with Russia, which was in the process of splitting the Donbas off from the government’s control.

Some progress

Still, despite all this, some real progress has been made in selected directions. First of all, to note that the creation of the triumvirate of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO) and the Anti-Corruption Court (ACC) – forced on Ukraine by its western partners – is a revolution. Nothing like this exists in any of the other FSU states.

Tellingly, Poroshenko couldn’t stop the creations of NABU and SAPO, but successfully blocked the creation of the ACC for years. And NABU has itself been stymied by the powers that be for years; when it arrested its first big fish, Poroshenko’s right-hand man Roman Nasirov in 2017, and charged him with embezzling millions of dollars he spent a weekend in jail. However, before the judge arrived to arraign him on Monday morning, a delegation of Rada deputies showed up along with Nasirov’s wife who brought a bag containing a million dollars to pay his bail – scenes that have been repeated in the last month with high officials close to Zelenskiy coming up with millions of dollars for bail in the Energoatom corruption scandal. Not only did NABU never get Nasirov in front of the bench, he went on to run against Zelenskiy in the 2019 elections.

But the triumvirate is real and has real powers. In what is now widely taken as a sign that Zelenskiy administration is little different from all the others, he tried to close them down last year with Law 21414 in an obvious authoritarian style: the Rada deputies were ordered back from summer holiday at the weekend and the three votes were rammed through in one sitting that would have put the two agencies under direct presidential control. It was a move worthy of Putin, but thanks to Ukraine’s vibrant civil society, demonstrations immediately broke out and Zelenskiy was forced to back down and cancel the law. NABU is now on a roll and actually arresting people from the very top of the tree.

Maybe the most significant change is Kolomoisky has been arrested and is in jail. One of IntelliNews claims to fame is our cover story “Privat Investigations” that uncovered the rampant stealing at Ukraine’s largest commercial bank, caused it to be nationalised in December 2016.

The banking sector has been comprehensively cleaned up by former NBU governor Valeria Gontareva, but she decided to leave the country after Kolomoisky threatened her life and had a coffin with her effigy delivered to the doors of the NBU. She was later hospitalised in London after being hit by a car in what UK police have called “suspicious circumstances.” Oh, and her house in Kyiv was burnt to the ground by “unknown” arsonists.

But maybe the biggest success has been the reforms at Naftogaz, the state-owned gas company. Corruption in the gas business in the 1990s was insane. Ukraine was transiting huge amounts of gas from Russia to Europe and earning $3bn a year in transit fees, not counting the money that could be made from stealing Russian gas from the pipes. Everyone had a hand in this – Russian government officials, Ukrainian government officials, the board members of Gazprom and Naftogaz. It was the major gravy train at time, organised via another set of “trading” companies that did nothing.

And it was so blatant. I once sent our Romanian correspondent to the “office” of Eural Trans Gas, one of the main traders doing several billion dollars of business a year. The office turned out to be an empty apartment in a rundown block in Transylvania where neighbours said no one lives. I also interviewed the CEO of Itera, Igor Makarov, the Russian gas trading company in this partnership, who plays gold in his office with a solid golf putter, which he showed me. One of the reasons Ukraine is so poor is that this gas business, which should have funded investment, was bled dry by Ukraine’s own elite and the Russian executives.

That has stopped now. Naftogaz is a well-run business and where it used to be a black hole supported by massive budget grants, it is now the biggest taxpayer in the country. The fact that Zelenskiy appointed Serhii Koretskyi the new Prime Minister is really good news. He is not a politician, but an oil and gas man and comes to his new job from running Naftogaz. He is as close as you can get in Ukraine to a clean and professional pair of hands in charge of one of the country’s biggest sources of cash.

So, there is hope. But there is so much work left to do. The judiciary remains rotten to the core. Brussels downgraded Ukraine to a “B” in its last EU accession bid assessment report precisely because of the lack of progress in the anti-corruption fight and judicial reforms in the so-called “Fundamental” cluster.

Zelenskiy was elected in 2019 on an anti-corruption platform, and compared to oligarch Poroshenko, he was clearly a cleaner pair of hands. And he has taken that pledge seriously, at least until the war started three years in. He broke ties with Kolomoisky and even put him in jail. He forced through the anti-Kolomoisky law in May 2020 that made it impossible for the former owner of a bank that has been nationalised to retake control of it – aka PrivatBank. Hethen followed up with an anti-oligarch speech in March 2021 and anti-oligarch law in September 2021 which has redrawn the map.

But he made almost no progress on reforming the judiciary or beefing up property rights, without which Ukraine has no hope of attracting the circa $600bn of private capital it needs to rebuild. To be fair he has been distracted by fighting a major war against Russia, but he can also be accused of turning a blind eye to the blatant racketeering by deputies who he shares an office with.

Personally, I think it’s because everyone in Ukraine is so inured to corruption they don’t see it as a major problem. A common attitude I have heard in Kyiv is: “If you can, of course you steal. Why not? I would.”

Russia Matters, 8/7/26

Russian confidence in the Ukraine war’s success drops to 50%: The share of Russians who believe their country’s war against Ukraine is “proceeding successfully” has declined by 19 percentage points in the past year, totaling 50%, according to a poll conducted by the {western backed]  Levada Center in 50 regions of Russia in July. As many as 62% of Russians believed in July that it was time to initiate peace negotiations (which is two percentage points less than in June), while some 38% said Russia should continue “military actions,” according to the poll. Some 59% of the poll’s respondents believe that if “peace cannot be achieved for now,” then Russia should “escalate strikes on Ukraine, including with use of new types of weapons.” Only 21% believe Russia should make “additional concessions” to Ukraine and the West in such a scenario. Meanwhile, a July-August poll by KIIS has found that 60% of Ukrainians categorically oppose handing all of Donbas to Russia in exchange for security guarantees, but 59% say they could accept a “freeze” of the war along the current front line. Separately, 45% of Ukrainians now expect the war to last until at least the second half of 2027 or longer, according to Ukrainska Pravda’s analysis of the KIIS poll.