By Alexey Martynov, RT, 5/16/26

Russia and China are moving, slowly but unmistakably, toward a structural alliance that is reshaping the global balance of power. But the two sides are progressing through this transformation at different speeds. Moscow has largely accepted the logic of deep strategic interdependence. Beijing, by contrast, still behaves as though it can preserve a carefully managed partnership in which China remains the senior partner while minimizing its own obligations.

That model is reaching its limits. For years, the dominant narrative in Western policy circles has been that Russia has become the junior partner in an unequal relationship. Brussels think tanks, Washington analysts and even many Chinese commentators have repeated the same formula: Russia supplies raw materials and China supplies everything else.

Berlin-based MERICS has described the relationship as “fundamentally unbalanced” and Intereconomics called it “symbiotic but deeply asymmetrical.” Other researchers have portrayed the Russia-China-US triangle as one in which Washington still holds the decisive advantage.

Yet this interpretation misses something important. Even while Western analysts obsessively measured asymmetry, many Chinese scholars privately acknowledged that the relationship was being driven less by hierarchy than by geopolitical pressure.

Professor Feng Shaolei of East China Normal University has argued that external circumstances, rather than relative status, have always been the true engine of the partnership. NATO expansion pushed Moscow and Beijing closer together while US tariffs accelerated the process further. Sanctions pressure on Russia gave China discounted resources and gave Russia guaranteed markets as each side increasingly possessed what the other lacked.

The numbers tell the story clearly enough. By the end of 2024, Russia had become China’s largest oil supplier, delivering 108.5 million tonnes. But energy is only one dimension of the relationship. Between January and September 2025, Russian nickel exports to China doubled to $1 billion, copper exports surged 88% to $2 billion, while shipments of aluminum and metal ores jumped by around 50%.

Agriculture has become another strategic pillar as Russia, now the world’s leading wheat exporter, signed a long-term agreement in 2023 to supply China with 70 million tonnes of grain and oilseeds over a twelve-year period.

And unlike Middle Eastern energy routes, Russian pipelines don’t pass through vulnerable maritime chokepoints. That reality became far more important once the geopolitical environment deteriorated.

Washington’s strategy was straightforward: isolate Russia financially while frightening China into limiting cooperation through the threat of secondary sanctions. By late 2023 and early 2024, major Chinese financial institutions including Bank of China and CITIC had sharply reduced direct transactions with Russian entities after new US restrictions were announced.

The pressure had some effect. Chinese state energy companies cut purchases temporarily after sanctions against Rosneft and Lukoil in early 2025. Shandong Port Group banned sanctioned vessels from entering its terminals. Western analysts celebrated what they described as growing Chinese caution.

But the strategy contained a fundamental weakness. Secondary sanctions work only when alternatives exist and once instability threatened key global energy routes, particularly the Strait of Hormuz, Russia’s role changed dramatically. Roughly a third of global seaborne oil trade passes through Hormuz, while more than half of China’s imported oil comes from the Middle East. In those circumstances, Russian pipelines stopped being merely commercial infrastructure and became a strategic necessity.

Ironically, Washington’s simultaneous pressure on both Moscow and Beijing did more to deepen their cooperation than any summit declaration ever could.

As several Chinese analysts have noted, Russia and China may each be vulnerable separately, but together they possess the capacity to counterbalance American power. For most of the last three years, however, the relationship has remained stuck in a bargaining phase. Publicly, both sides speak of a “partnership without limits.” In practice, the relationship has often been slowed by caution and endless technical complications.

During Vladimir Putin’s visit to Beijing in September 2025, the two countries signed more than twenty agreements covering energy, aerospace, artificial intelligence, agriculture and industrial technology. The headline figures looked impressive. Analysts estimated the announced value of Russian-Chinese investment projects at more than $200 billion.

Yet many of these projects remain only partially implemented as Chinese businesses continue to calculate the costs of sanctions exposure carefully. Beijing has often preferred opportunistic gains over genuine strategic interdependence. Western researchers openly acknowledge this dynamic, arguing that China has benefited from the departure of Western competitors from Russia while avoiding commitments that would fully bind the two economies together.

The problem, however, is caution, not hostility, this has limits when geography and geopolitics are pushing both countries together.

In 2025, both sides entered a more sober phase. Bilateral trade declined by nearly 7% to $228 billion, the first major drop since the pandemic. The reasons were mostly economic rather than political. Falling oil prices sharply reduced the value of Russian exports despite relatively stable volumes.

Chinese media were unusually frank about the difficulties. Consumer demand in Russia weakened under high interest rates and Chinese car exports collapsed after an overheated boom period. Moscow’s growing import-substitution policies also began limiting opportunities for Chinese manufacturers.

This was the moment both sides stopped romanticizing the partnership and began viewing it more realistically. And realism points toward one unavoidable conclusion.

Russia and China share more than 4,200 kilometers of border. One side possesses enormous energy reserves, agricultural resources, metals, territory and pipeline infrastructure largely immune from naval disruption. The other possesses industrial scale, capital, technology and a market of 1.4 billion people.

Neither can fully achieve its strategic ambitions alone and that is why the relationship continues to deepen despite friction.

When Xi Jinping visited Moscow for Victory Day commemorations in 2025, the two countries signed a joint declaration that went beyond symbolism. The document emphasized expanded settlements in national currencies, deeper investment cooperation and the joint development of the Northern Sea Route and this matters enormously.

The Arctic corridor offers China a long-term alternative to vulnerable maritime routes such as Suez and Hormuz. In a world where each of those chokepoints faces growing instability, the Northern Sea Route is becoming strategic infrastructure rather than an experimental trade project.

Chinese analysts increasingly recognize this reality. Academic discussions inside China now openly acknowledge that rivalry with the United States makes close partnership with Russia less a matter of preference than necessity.

Even many Western observers are beginning to admit the same thing. Studies searching for fractures in the alliance increasingly conclude that the relationship is far more durable than earlier predictions suggested.

This is because the partnership is no longer built merely on diplomatic convenience or temporary economic gains. It is being driven by structural forces: geography, energy security, trade routes, sanctions pressure and the emergence of a more fragmented global order.

Russia and China are joining together because the strategic logic is becoming overwhelming, yet one major obstacle remains.

China still often behaves as though it can enjoy the benefits of strategic partnership without fully committing itself to the burdens that come with it. Moscow has already integrated Beijing deeply into critical sectors ranging from energy to logistics and food security. But many major Chinese investments and technology commitments continue to move cautiously or remain delayed.

At some point, Beijing will have to decide whether it truly views Russia as an equal strategic partner or merely as a useful resource base operating on China’s periphery.

That question now defines the future of the partnership and the answer will shape the architecture of Eurasia for decades to come.

By Matt Bivens, Substack, 6/2/26

Two weeks ago, a series of repeated Ukrainian drone attacks blasted apart a Russian vocational school’s dormitory and campus. The bombs killed 21 students and injured more than 60 others.

The attacks occurred before 4 a.m. on May 21, killing many students in their sleep. Russian media reported that the surviving students leapt from the windows or ran from the burning building in their pajamas.

The 21 students who died that morning were aged 14 to 18. They had been studying to become elementary school teachers. All but three were young women.

The 18 girls and 3 boys killed by Ukrainian drone strikes on their teachers college, as published across Russian media.

The attack happened in the village of Starobilsk (the Ukrainian spelling) or Starobelsk (the Russian spelling), which is in Luhansk, a Russia-controlled territory that both Ukraine and Russia claim.

The U.S. ‘Kill Chain’ in Russia

How deep was the U.S. involvement in the killing of these 21 Russian teenagers?

All this spring, Ukrainian drones have been attacking Moscow, St. Petersburg and other points deep inside Russia. It’s little reported in the news here, even though such strikes are often guided by the C.I.A. or other American-led security services, and even though the Kremlin has warned that such strikes could mean America and Russia are directly at war with each other. It’s sort of incredible no one cares about this.

Seven months ago, the Wall Street Journal, citing unnamed U.S. officials, reported that America “will provide Ukraine with intelligence for long-range missile strikes … deep inside Russian territory.”

“While the U.S. has long assisted Kyiv’s drone and missile attacks, the intelligence sharing means Ukraine will be better able to hit refineries, pipelines, power stations and other infrastructure far from its borders,” the Journal reported then.

Other infrastructure including Moscow apartment buildings and Donbas teachers colleges?

The report by the Journal followed an earlier investigation last year by The New York Times that asserted America “was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” The Times said American intelligence services “both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.”

The Times recounted how an unnamed European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.

The Russians had long been making such accusations. Nearly two years ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin asserted that threats to launch missile or drone attacks deep into Russia — back then, just 20 short months ago, that was still all just crazy talk — would be a sea change in the nature of the war. Putin said this would require the West not just to provide the weapons; and not just to guide them to their target via U.S. / NATO satellites; but to even have U.S. / NATO military personnel select and input the target in the first place.

“The Ukrainian army is not capable of using cutting-edge high-precision long-range systems supplied by the West. They cannot do that. These weapons are impossible to employ without intelligence data from satellites, which Ukraine does not have. This can only be done using the European Union’s satellites, or U.S. satellites — in general, NATO satellites,” Putin said then.

“The second point — perhaps the most important, the key point even — is that only NATO military personnel can assign flight missions to these missile systems. Ukrainian servicemen cannot do this.”

Putin went on to warn that such strikes against Russia — strikes conceived and guided to target in cooperation with American intelligence services — would mean the United States had opted for “direct involvement” in the war, and thus would be “at war with Russia.”

No one came out to contradict this, and of course we went ahead and did it anyway. Today, when the Russians are warning all Westerners to get out of Kyiv before they smash it, the implication is that they are telling U.S. or NATO intelligence officers — the ones presumably in Ukraine to program and guide weapons to their targets — to get out or be killed.

So, again: Were U.S. or NATO intelligence agents part of the “kill chain” last month that took the lives of 21 sleeping Russian teenagers?

We don’t know. It’s possible, even probable, that the teachers college at Starob*lsk was left click, right click, left click’ed into oblivion via some nightmarish Palantir-provided, AI-guided U.S. death tech. Just as likely happened to another school infamously destroyed by mindless U.S. war-making, Iran’s Minab elementary school, vaporized 4 months ago along with more than 100 little kids.

One assumes the teachers college was targeted accidentally. But it’s even possible it was targeted directly, out of some evil plot to rile up the Russians and to provoke them to smash Kyiv — as they have already begun to do, including overnight and into this morning.

Why would Ukraine +/- its C.I.A. handlers intentionally target a bunch of teenagers at a teaching college? Perhaps to breathe new life into a smoldering war in danger of petering out, and to summon American and European voters back into the fight. (Remember, this has never been about helping ordinary Ukrainian people, who have been sacrificed for more than a decade now to the war-making agendas of others.)

That might sound crazy.

But is it? Consider that the odious Ukrainian organization Mirotvorets (Peacemaker), which for years now has winkingly claimed to be affiliated with the C.I.A. and publishes what amount to kill lists, identifies nine top faculty of the Starob*lsk teachers college as traitors to be eliminated. For example, here is the site’s page devoted to Natalya Tsyganok, a “criminal” who is an assistant director of the college:

The text says (in part): “Traitor to the Homeland. Accomplice of the Russian-fascist invaders and terrorists. … [Guilty of] implementation of educational standards, including the chauvinistic ideologies of the aggressor state, at educational institutions in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Dissemination of Russian propaganda among minors. Psychological abuse, moral corruption, and the fascist indoctrination of Ukrainian children.”

I learned that from reading Russia’s top business newspaper, Vedomosti, a newspaper I long ago helped launch (as a three-way joint venture between the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and The Moscow Times, which I then edited).

The banner atop the Mirotvorets webpage lists itself as headquartered in Langley, Virginia, a barely-veiled claim that it is C.I.A.-endorsed.

C.I.A. has never disavowed Mirotvorets — even though this weird organization has published lists of enemies to be eliminated that included American journalists and scholars, and then has gleefully crossed off in red those critics who end up “liquidated” (murdered).

So, in a world spinning out of control, we have a self-proclaimed Ukrainian-C.I.A. joint venture that publishes kill lists highlight the faculty of an obscure teachers college — which then gets blown to hell, so that 14- and 15-year-old girls die in terror in their beds — which then becomes the official (yet rarely mentioned here) justification for angry Russians to escalate dramatically this morning and to rain death down on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities, smashing apartment blocks, killing 13 so far, burying innocents (including some children) in the rubble …

To be continued, unfortunately.

By Kit Klarenberg, Substack, 5/17/26

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On April 15th, Declassified UK published a bombshell investigation exposing how in the mid-1990s, senior British political and military officials were well-aware NATO expansion into Central and Eastern Europe “would provoke [the] Russians,” and likely trigger all-out war. Hitherto unreported Ministry of Defence files reveal London knew Moscow’s “sensitivities” over a “hostile military alliance” enlarging up to its borders were profound, and based on very “real” concerns. Yet, NATO’s dangerous crusade to absorb Central and Eastern Europe continued apace, ultimately producing the Ukraine proxy conflict.

Since the so-called Special Military Operation’s February 2022 eruption, British officials have relentlessly reiterated the mantra the proxy war was “unprovoked”. However, a declassified March 1995 Foreign Office memo noted “there was a widespread psychological and intellectual perception in Moscow that NATO was a real threat.” In May that year, then-Prime Minister John Major succinctly articulated Russian anxieties to his Irish counterpart John Bruton, as a “fundamental fear…of encirclement.” Concerns about EU membership were comparatively muted:

“For the Russians, NATO had a much more threatening symbolism and political resonance…The Baltics were particularly difficult, with extreme sensitivity for Russia. It would be very hard to have a NATO border directly against Russia.”

Still, in 1997 NATO invited Czechia, Hungary, and Poland to join, which they did two years later. In 2004, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania simultaneously joined the military alliance. So too did ex-Warsaw Pact members Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, and former Yugoslav republic Slovenia. Declassified UK shows how back in August 1996, British Defence Intelligence prepared a NATO enlargement study specifically forecasting that these countries joining could trigger war, and an alliance military operation launched via Article 5 of the NATO treaty in response.

This refers to collective self-defence, under which NATO members are obligated to come to each other’s defence if attacked. In the scenario, Defence Intelligence assumed “Russia has vehemently opposed NATO membership for the Baltic states and has threatened retaliation to preserve her own security against a perceived hostile military alliance on her borders.” In the real world, Boris Yeltsin made at-times irate public statements about NATO enlargement into the Baltics at the time, while lobbying US President Bill Clinton on the issue behind closed doors.

NATO expansion continued regardless. In December 1996, Declassified UK reports then-Russian premier Viktor Chernomyrdin privately warned Major: “Russia could not stop NATO enlarging, but this would create a fragile situation which could explode.” Other declassified files from this time show senior apparatchiks in London were acutely aware of Moscow’s “concern,” “fears,” “hostility,” “negative attitudes,” and “resentment” over alliance enlargement. Both Major and his successor Tony Blair explicitly pledged in person to Kremlin officials that NATO wouldn’t “move up to Russia’s borders.”

However, a secret September 1996 policy paper made clear Britain was committed “to enlarge NATO to the East,” even if “Russian acquiescence is not possible.” In February 1997, Russia’s deputy foreign minister Nikolai Afanasievsky angrily branded public discussions in Western capitals of admitting former Soviet republics to the alliance a “blatant provocation” in a meeting with Jeremy Greenstock, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow. Greenstock reassured his Russian opposite number NATO had “no intention” of admitting former Soviet states “at this stage” – which, technically, was true.

‘Russian Problem’

A March 1997 Foreign Office memo forecast rapid NATO enlargement would “antagonise,” and ultimately “provoke,” Russia into a belligerent counter-response. Yeltsin’s “anxiety” about the “possible accession of Ukraine, the Baltic states and other states of the former Soviet Union” was considered the “most difficult issue” affecting Western relations with Moscow. A more staggered approach was thus required. That month, John Major met with NATO secretary general Javier Solana, who spoke of “Russians fears about NATO troops and equipment moving eastwards.”

Reflecting the deep unpopularity and distrust of NATO expansion among many sections of the Russian public and political class, Solana relayed to Major how Moscow’s foreign minister Yegeny Primakov “had more or less begged him for help in giving the Russians reassurance about NATO forces not moving eastwards.” A month later, Yeltsin dispatched a strongly worded private letter to John Major:

“Our negative attitude to NATO expansion plans remains unchanged. Implementation of those plans would be the biggest mistake of the West in all the post-war period.”

Hitherto unreported declassified CIA files amply demonstrate Washington’s cognisance of vehement public and state-level Russian opposition to NATO military action and enlargement not only in the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union, but the former Yugoslavia, dates back even further. A January 1993 CIA memo discussed “Serbia and the Russian Problem”. The Agency perceived it necessary – but potentially difficult – to secure Moscow’s acquiescence to US and UN actions being taken against the Serbs over the Bosnian civil war.

At the time, the newly-inaugurated Clinton White House was openly mulling direct intervention in the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis, up to and including all-out invasion. A year prior, Washington had imposed crippling sanctions on what remained of Yugoslavia over the bloodshed. The CIA felt it urgent to “sensitize [Clinton’s] new policy-making team to the growing danger of Russian alienation” from “Western policy toward Serbia.” The Agency feared “historical relations” between Belgrade and Moscow could “work against an effective international response” – in other words, overt US involvement.

“While the US cannot mortgage its Yugoslav policy to Russia, Washington should probably work harder at consulting Moscow before new policies are established,” the CIA memo cautioned. The Agency sought to explain “why Russian unease over Western policy toward Serbia may well lead to a veto of [UN Security Council] resolutions on the use of force.” The CIA reported how the Russian government had “grown increasingly concerned about the possible use of force against Serbia,” before outlining “five driving forces behind the concern.”

Among them was “Pseudo-Geopolitics”. Problematically for Yeltsin, and in turn the CIA, Pentagon and White House, “some Russians” were asking “why the West and the US in particular should inject itself in an area that Russia always regarded as its traditional sphere of influence.” While the CIA scornfully declared “the West should not take this argument very seriously in today’s world,” the agency warned that argument was “being made” at a public and political level in Russia, and the Kremlin “must deal with it.”

Another “concern” was “Slav Brotherhood”. The CIA observed how “romantic nationalists” in the country were replacing the Marxist slogan “workers, unite”, with “Slavs, unite.” Resultantly, Russian “ultranationalists” considered Moscow to be “duty bound to come to the aid of Serbs.” Without outlining why, the CIA believed that “for some of the same reasons cited above, we should not take this too seriously, but it cannot be dismissed if other players aid their racial or religious brothers.”

‘Dangerous Precedent’

The Balkans are of enormous cultural, economic, historic, military, political, and strategic importance to Russia. Yugoslavia had in the immediate aftermath of World War II been directly aligned with the Soviet Union, before the pair split in 1948. Thereafter, Belgrade and Moscow enjoyed harmonious albeit intermittently tense relations. It was entirely understandable why Russia and Russians would be anxious about destructive US-led actions against collapsing Yugoslavia, which was being forcibly broken up into easily exploitable Western puppet states, and future NATO members.

However, the CIA – and White House, and NATO – took for granted that in a unipolar world of unchallenged and unchallengeable US global hegemony, the notion Russia had any sphere of influence in the world, and interests outside her own borders, should not be taken “very seriously” in policy planning considerations – if at all. The West’s casual disregard for Moscow’s clearly-stated red-lines and obvious concerns became significantly ingrained, and turbocharged, with the March – June 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia.

Chinese and Russian aversion to the campaign was forecast throughout Western capitals. Hence, NATO avoided Beijing and Moscow’s inevitable UNSC vetoes on unilateral military action by invoking the UN Charter’s self defence clause, to bomb Yugoslavia without a Security Council vote. An eerily prescient April 1999 New Statesman article warned NATO’s unauthorised, illegal bombing was no “one off”, but “just the beginning” of a “brave new world”, in which the military alliance acted as a worldwide “riot squad.”

When the campaign erupted, by then prime minister Yevgeny Primakov was literally mid-air, en route to the US for an official meeting. He immediately ordered the pilot to return to Russia. Despite Primakov’s protests, the Yeltsin administration did not come to Belgrade’s rescue, instead encouraging Serb leader Slobodan Milosevic to surrender to NATO. Nonetheless, as a declassified June 1999 cable from Britain’s Moscow embassy dispatched to all London’s top overseas diplomatic missions reported, the alliance’s bombing of Yugoslavia had “left Russia bruised and bewildered.”

There was shock in the country, from the streets to its highest levels, that “NATO resorted to military action in the face of direct Russian opposition.” The campaign was widely regarded as “setting a dangerous precedent for military action without UNSC authority,” therefore “reducing the weight of the Russian veto.” This was not only perceived as a “blow” to the UNSC, but outright “threat to Russian interests…setting an unacceptable precedent for action out of area, circumventing the Security Council if necessary”:

“[Moscow’s Ministry of Defense] has used NATO’s resort to force to argue Russia’s new military doctrine should take more serious account of a potential threat from NATO, with all that that means in terms of force levels, procurement and the future of arms control…The UK’s forward position on the use of force has not gone unnoticed…The Kosovo campaign has reinforced the perception here of an expanding NATO as a powerful tool for the imposition of US will in Europe.”

‘Intervention Elsewhere’

As a result of NATO’s illegal 78-day-long bombing of Yugoslavia, which killed thousands – including children – and violently disrupted daily life for millions, Russia suspended formal dialogue with NATO. The high-level Moscow station cable noted, “there are signs that Russia may be interested in resuscitating” the dialogue, “but an early return to the status quo ante is politically impossible.” It added:

“Strong and emotional opposition to NATO military action, like opposition to NATO enlargement, has been a continuing feature of Russia politics right across the spectrum.”

However, the Russian military was said to have “stood out for their vociferous rhetoric and active promotion of what they perceive to be Russia’s interests as a great power.” Moscow-based foreign policy analysts had “focussed in response” to the bombing “on the possibility of aligning Russian policies” with China and India, “but so far without much conviction as to whether this will prove practicable.” Nonetheless, the option was being widely discussed by influential political thinkers, “confidence” in the West locally having been grievously “undermined”.

The cable forecast that “rebuilding mutual trust” between NATO, its member states and Moscow following the alliance bombing of Yugoslavia was “likely to be a slow process.” It was believed an impending European Council meeting on creating a European Security and Defence Policy in Cologne, Germany would “be an important first opportunity to show Moscow that we continue to attach importance to working with Russia”:

“It would help to mitigate Russian concerns on the potential wider impact of NATO military action if [Tony Blair] were able to make the point to Yeltsin…that [the bombing of Yugoslavia] does not constitute a precedent for intervention elsewhere.”

The same unambiguous pledge had been “made separately” to the similarly outraged and disquieted Chinese, by Blair and senior diplomats. However, the bombing of Yugoslavia rapidly did become a precedent for further unilateral Western military action “out of area”, whether conducted under NATO’s auspices or not. Along the way, independent states like Libya were reduced to open-air slave markets. Meanwhile, the remnants of countries shattered by NATO imperialism were hoovered up by the alliance, one by one, with ever-rapacious speed.

Again, the British well-knew Western actions in the former Yugoslavia gravely enhanced Russian concerns about NATO-enforced unipolarity, and the alliance’s inexorable expansion ever-closer towards Moscow’s borders. In September 1999, then-foreign secretary Robin Cook’s private secretary wrote to Blair, warning how the Russians had found recent unilateral Anglo-American economic and kinetic warfare waged against Iraq and Yugoslavia “particularly hard to swallow”:

“The underlying reason for this disquiet (which is genuine) is a feeling that the United States and NATO are a law unto themselves. The idea…the West takes little account of Russian interests and…the process of NATO enlargement is intended to constrain Russia still further.”

‘Strong Divisions’

A February 2000 Foreign Office brief for a meeting between Blair and NATO secretary general George Robertson noted, “Russian opposition to NATO expansion has become even more hardline as a result” of Yugoslavia’s bombing. Undeterred, the alliance continued getting bigger, with British military and intelligence figures at the forefront of this push. Chief among them was Chris Donnelly, a longtime Ministry of Defence apparatchik elevated to NATO in 1989, just in time for the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and Yugoslavia.

As a scathing academic review of his 2004 work Reforming For Wars Of The Future noted, “if any one man has played a central role in the process of NATO enlargement and in providing constructive support for military reform in the newly liberated countries of East-Central Europe, it has been Chris Donnelly.” In many cases, states became ensconced in NATO despite significant public and political opposition. Strikingly, Donnelly himself admitted in January 2002 NATO was fundamentally not a defensive military alliance.

“Small armies from small countries cannot do much,” he explained, so “NATO runs better as a political alliance.” Donnelly left NATO in 2003. His thinking on NATO enlargement remained hugely influential thereafter. In early 2004, the alliance’s in-house magazine NATO Review published an essay he wrote on constructing a NATO “for the Greater Middle East.” An October 2006 US Army War College paper discussing how to embroil Ukraine in the War on Terror cited Donnelly’s 1997 thesis on “defence transformation in the new democracies.”

Ukraine was tentatively put on the NATO path at the alliance’s April 2008 summit. In February that year, then-US ambassador to Moscow Bill Burns – CIA chief under Joe Biden’s presidency – cabled Washington that Moscow was “particularly worried” about how “strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership.” “Much” of the country’s “ethnic-Russian community” opposed joining, and it “could lead to a major split, involving violence or at worst, civil war.” This would force Russia to “decide whether to intervene; a decision Russia does not want to have to face.”

NATO’s own polling from 2011 suggested less than 20% of Ukrainians supported joining. Yugoslavia’s bombing was “particularly unpopular” locally – “for many…the image of NATO still evokes a sense of fear.” A week later, Burns outlined Moscow’s likely responses to Georgia and Ukraine being offered NATO membership to the White House. In respect of Georgia, “the prospects of subsequent…armed conflict would be high” – indeed, Russo-Georgian war came to pass in August 2008. Meanwhile, Burns’ observations about Ukraine reverberate today as a prophet’s curse wretchedly validated:

“Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red-lines for the Russian elite (not just Putin). In my more than two and a half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in NATO as anything other than a direct challenge to Russian interests…a [membership] offer would be seen…as throwing down the strategic gauntlet…Russia will respond.”

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By Marta Havryshko, Responsible Statecraft, 6/2/26

When Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he claimed one of his goals was the country’s “denazification.” The Kremlin still uses this narrative as a cornerstone of its war propaganda.

Both Ukraine and the West reacted by dismissing the claim outright as a cynical abuse of Holocaust history. Politicians, media outlets, academics, and educational institutions rushed to prove that Putin’s argument was fraudulent.

But in their zeal to deconstruct Russian propaganda, Western elites created a propaganda myth of their own: there are no Nazis in Ukraine. Or, if there are, they are supposedly isolated cranks with no influence.

This fiction required the whitewashing of Azov, a unit founded in 2014 by the neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine under the leadership of Andriy Biletsky. Azov became notorious for extremist ideology, Nazi symbolism, and allegations of war crimes in the Donbas. In 2018, the U.S. Congress banned the group from receiving American weapons, funding, or training.

After Russia’s full-scale invasion, that stigma vanished almost overnight. Kyiv repackaged Azov, separating the most radical elements into a new formation, the 3rd Assault Brigade. Western media rebranded and whitewashed it. The language of “de-radicalization” and “depoliticization” became mainstream. Questioning this narrative became taboo and labeled as “Russian propaganda.” The result is a culture of deliberate silence.

Neo-Nazi networks are deeply embedded in parts of Ukraine’s military structure. Their presence is visible in units such as Azov, the Third Assault Brigade, the Russian Volunteer Corps, Bratstvo, the German Volunteer Corps, Karpatska Sich, and others. Yet Ukraine’s Western backers continue to arm, fund, and train these units without meaningful scrutiny.

Even more striking is the normalization of Nazi imagery itself. Official Ukrainian military channels and mainstream media regularly publish images of soldiers wearing swastikas, Waffen-SS insignia, and patches linked to neo-Nazi groups like Combat 18 and Misanthropic Division. This is no longer treated as scandalous. It has been normalized.

Most disturbing of all, some Ukrainian military units have incorporated Nazi-linked symbols into their official insignia.

The far right and Ukraine’s military culture

Many Ukrainian military units using Nazi symbols are led by men shaped by Azov and the far-right milieu around it. For example, there is Oleksandr Kravtsov, the well-known commander of the Vedmedi unit, which was part of Azov. His body is covered in Nazi imagery, including 1488 — references to the white supremacist “14 Words” slogan coined by David Lane and the coded salute “Heil Hitler.” (“H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.) Tattooed across his chest is the SS motto: “My Honor Is Loyalty.” He turned that slogan into the motto of his own unit. SS lightning bolts became part of its official insignia.

After returning from Russian captivity, Kravtsov’s unit was folded into the Ukrainian military structure — first the 36th Brigade, then the 39th Coastal Defense Brigade. Nothing changed. The SS symbols and motto remained.

Many commanders in the 3rd Assault Brigade also came out of Azov and still hold extremist views. Unsurprisingly, they openly embrace the corresponding symbolism. A subunit of the 3rd Assault Brigade adopted a modified insignia (replacing two grenades with three) of the Dirlewanger SS Brigade — one of the most notorious Nazi formations of World War II. In 2025, the brigade unveiled the emblem publicly at a memorial in Kyiv. No scandal followed.

Azov also normalized the Black Sun — a symbol born in Himmler’s SS cult headquarters at Wewelsburg Castle and now used globally by neo-Nazis and white supremacist terrorists, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque terrorist in New Zealand and the recent San Diego Islamic Center shooter.

After 2022, Black Sun spread rapidly through Ukrainian military culture. It appeared in Azov-linked units such as the Decepticons platoon and the Mortars unit of the 3rd Assault Brigade. Soon it migrated further — into units with no openly ideological profile at all — and became part of the insignia of the 156th Zvaha Battalion and the Unmanned Systems Battalion of the 110th Brigade named after Marko Bezruchko.

Azov mainstreamed another Nazi-linked emblem as well: the Wolfsangel, used historically by several Waffen-SS divisions. Rebranded as the “Idea of the Nation,” it became one of the most recognizable symbols in Ukraine’s wartime military culture. The symbol now appears far beyond Azov itself. The newly created Nachtigall Battalion — named after the Nachtigall Battalion formed by German military intelligence in 1941 — uses the same Wolfsangel-inspired insignia.

Some units within Ukraine’s military do not hide their fascination with the Third Reich’s military culture. For example, the 422nd Regiment of Unmanned Systems calls itself “Luftwaffe” and uses virtually the same eagle as Hitler’s air force. Its commander, Mykola Kolesnyk, regularly appears with the symbol on patches and clothing. The unit even sells merchandise featuring the Nazi eagle — hoodies, mugs, T-shirts, caps, keychains — to fundraise for the war.

Not just aesthetic choices

The use of Nazi symbols in Ukraine’s military is not merely an aesthetic problem. It is moral, political, historical, and legal.

First, it represents a form of historical revisionism and the gradual rehabilitation of Nazism itself — a direct challenge to the postwar Western consensus built on the memory of World War II. Within far-right military culture, Nazi imagery is often wrapped in romanticized narratives about anti-Soviet struggle. In practice this trivializes the sacrifice of the seven million Ukrainians who fought Nazism in the ranks of the Red Army alongside the Western allies (in contrast to the 300,000 who served in various military formations and police units on the side of Nazi Germany).

It also desecrates the memory of Nazism’s victims in Ukraine: 1.5 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust, along with millions of Slavs, prisoners of war, Roma, the mentally ill, forced laborers, and countless others consumed by the machinery of racial extermination and exploitation.

Second, the problem is not only historical. It is profoundly contemporary. Every SS rune, Black Sun, or Wolfsangel displayed by Ukrainian soldiers hands the Kremlin another propaganda victory. Russian propagandists do not need to invent imaginary Nazis in Kyiv. They simply point to the insignia openly worn by some of Ukraine’s most celebrated military units — including formations branded as “elite,” such as the 3rd Assault Brigade.

Third, there is also a glaring legal contradiction. By openly using Nazi imagery, these units violate Ukraine’s own 2015 memory laws, which explicitly ban the propaganda of the Nazi regime and the public use of its symbols. The law describes such acts as an insult to the memory of millions of victims and have penalties of up to five years in prison.

Yet no one is prosecuted.

Why?

Because the Zelensky government — and President Volodymyr Zelensky himself as commander-in-chief — have made a political bargain with the far right. Since 2022, far-right activists and networks have flooded into the security and defense sector. In conditions of total war and chronic manpower shortages, this alliance became politically convenient, perhaps even inevitable. Now it is becoming entrenched.

The state depends on radicalized military formations for manpower and battlefield effectiveness. The far right, in turn, receives legitimacy, weapons, influence, and institutional protection. What emerged from wartime necessity is evolving into mutual dependence.

Ukraine’s Western partners have made their own bargain. They, too, depend on Ukrainian manpower to weaken Russia. And so they tolerate extremists inside Ukraine’s armed forces as long as those extremists continue fighting. More than that, they remain largely silent about the ideology and symbols involved, because acknowledging them would mean admitting an uncomfortable truth — that the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine is not simply a Kremlin invention.

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Nazi-era specter haunts Kyiv: Poland and Israel turning against Zelensky

By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 6/4/26

A new controversy has once again exposed the fragile foundations of the Polish-Ukrainian partnership and the unresolved historical issues plaguing Kyiv’s post-Maidan regime. Polish President Karol Nawrocki has signaled support for stripping Volodymyr Zelensky (his Ukrainian counterpart) of Poland’s highest state distinction – the Order of the White Eagle, awarded by former President Andrzej Duda.

The immediate trigger was Ukraine’s decision to rebury Andriy Melnyk (the infamous leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists – OUN), with state honors and in the presence of Ukraine’s top leadership, including Zelensky himself. Poland’s Nawrocki has thus argued that Ukraine is “not ready to become part of the European family” while it continues glorifying figures associated with Nazi collaborationism and anti-Polish (plus anti-Jewish) atrocities.

The affair exemplifies some of the deepest historical wounds separating Warsaw and Kyiv, not to mention aspects of Ukraine’s regime that are often whitewashed. It also illustrates how Ukraine’s ultranationalism (since at least 2014) has been a source of ethnopolitical tensions with neighbors in general, including Hungary, plus Romania and also Greece; and not just with Russia.

Melnyk was more than a patriotic activist: by the 1930s, the OUN had embraced increasingly radical and antisemitic positions. Many of its leaders collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II. Historian Grzegorz Motyka, among others, has documented how the OUN cooperated with German intelligence and prepared subversive operations against Poland in 1939 with Abwehr support.

The legacy of the OUN and its military wing, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), remains deeply explosive due to the Volhynia massacres: Ukrainian nationalists killed approximately 100,000 Polish civilians between 1943 and 1945, including coordinated attacks on Polish communities and churches during Bloody Sunday in July 1943.

For the last few years since 2022, Polish leaders have thus attempted to separate support for Kyiv’s war effort from these grievances. Yet that balancing act is becoming harder.

Even Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, hardly known for nationalist rhetoric, publicly criticized the tribute to Melnyk in Kyiv.

Poland is not a lone voice: Israel’s Foreign Ministry condemned the ceremony, declaring that “there is no place for ignoring historical truth,” Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial center warned that honoring leaders who collaborated with the Third Reich and genocide undermines Holocaust remembrance.

The controversy is a part of a wider issue. Shortly afterward, Zelensky also renamed an elite military formation with the honorary title “Heroes of the UPA,” thereby further inflaming Polish public opinion.

As I’ve argued, the politics of historical memory has long been the Achilles’ heel of Polish-Ukrainian relations. Back in 2021, I noted that Warsaw supported Ukrainian independence, NATO integration, and EU aspirations largely for geopolitical reasons, while remaining deeply uncomfortable with Kyiv’s glorification of Stepan Bandera, the OUN, and the UPA. These competing historical narratives have never been reconciled.

The irony is striking enough: in 2022, amid the escalation of the Russia-Ukraine war, Polish and Ukrainian leaders openly discussed unprecedented levels of integration. Zelensky even spoke of a future without borders between the two countries (which would be a de facto confederacy), while Duda declared that the Polish-Ukrainian border should unite rather than divide.

Bilateral tensions however never disappeared. In 2023, for instance, agricultural disputes led Warsaw to halt weapons deliveries temporarily, while then President Duda famously compared Ukraine to a drowning man capable of dragging down his rescuer. By 2024, disputes over the exhumation of Volhynia victims and disagreements regarding the issue of Crimea were already straining relations.

The current dispute also highlights that broader issue which Western media typically prefer to downplay: the role of neo-Fascism in post-Maidan Ukraine.

Critics often cite Zelensky’s Jewish background to dismiss concerns about extremism in Ukraine. Yet this does not negate the neo-Nazi influence – if anything, it makes the situation more embarrassing. A Russian-speaking secular Jew from Kryvyi Rih, Zelensky was not known for emphasizing his Jewish roots throughout his career as a comedian (quite on the contrary).

As President, he has frequently used Christian themes and given Easter addresses in speeches to Ukrainian soldiers, which of course does not align very well with a Jewish persona, even giving rise to speculations about a Christian conversation (that never happened).

Moreover, Zelensky was born a Russian-speaker in a very bilingual country such as his – he is fluent in Ukrainian but needed to improve his mastery of the language further as President – and actually counted on the votes of Russian speaking Ukrainians like himself; only to then reinvent himself as a Ukrainian nationalist. The point is that this is a flexible character, who acts according to circumstances. Like many Ukrainian leaders, Zelensky operates amid oligarchic ties and real pressure from far-right military and paramilitary figures, who have even publicly threatened his life if he deviates too much from their line. And, as I’ve noted before, these ideological forces continue to shape the state well beyond their electoral weight.

Be as it may, Poland is unlikely to abandon Ukraine overnight: Warsaw remains one of Kyiv’s most important partners. Yet nationalism is experiencing a revival on both sides of the border. Geopolitics can postpone disputes over memory and identity, but it cannot erase them. And the post-Soviet Ukrainian Question – particularly Kyiv’s far-right problem – remains a latent challenge for the entire continent.

By Paul Grenier, Landmarks Journal, 5/15/26

Deciding whether or not to align one’s country with the United States is as fateful as it is difficult. That, at any rate, is what history tells us. For those still pondering that question today, the following essay/detective story (which originally appeared, Feb. 22, 2026, in The Duran) undoubtedly supplies some useful food for thought. —The Editors

It is perhaps only natural that the tiny Republic of Georgia should have fallen out of the news cycle in the U.S. at this point in 2026. The flashy protests in downtown Tbilisi have long since petered out. The Georgian Dream government – the very government against whom the NGO-organized crowds had been protesting — remains stably in power. Meanwhile, there has been one crisis after another, from Venezuela to Greenland to Iran.

And let’s be honest: to most Americans, tiny Georgia just doesn’t matter very much. As so often happens, though, the United States very much matters to Georgia.

Case in point: as punishment for the country continuing to do business with Russia and China, the U.S. Congress, by means of the so-called Megobari Act (the word ‘megobari’ in Georgian means ‘friend’) is likely to soon place the Georgian government under sanctions.

The threat of such sanctions, or rather, the threat of getting on ‘the sanctions escalator’ as the foreign affairs analyst Alexander Mercouris likes to put it, could easily intimidate a small country like Georgia and cause it to change course. And yet, for now at least, Georgians are doing the opposite. They are insisting that it is they who have been ill-used, and they are gradually distancing themselves from Washington as a result.

How has Georgia been ill-used? Georgian officials and experts claim that after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in November 2022, the U.S. pressured their tiny Caucasus nation of 3.8 million to confront Russia militarily. These officials have stated that they were urged to open a second front against Russia from the south, and pressured to transfer vital weapons systems to Ukraine. All this amounted, from the Georgian perspective, to their being asked to commit suicide.

These claims have been roundly dismissed as ridiculous by the U.S. officials involved, as well as by such outlets as The New York Times. And yet the evidence for the Georgia version of the story is well worth taking seriously, all the more so as, in recent months, credible Georgian voices have provided important additional detail.

*

The notion that Washington, in the wake of the Russian invasion of 2022, urged Georgia to confront Russia militarily has been denied by the U.S. ambassador at the time the Ukraine war broke out, Kelly Degnan. It has also been denied by the Hudson Institute’s Luke Coffey during Congressional testimony. And it has been subjected to ridicule by The New York Times.

Indeed, in his lengthy New York Times essay, author Scott Anderson wrote sarcastically about talk in Georgia about some sort of Western ‘global war party’ urging Georgia to open up a second front against Russia “and in that way to seal its own doom.” Significantly, Anderson questioned the plausibility of claims made by Georgian Prime Minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, that it was indeed true Western officials had urged such a course, but out of national security considerations he couldn’t say who it was. Today those considerations, apparently, no longer apply. Georgians are naming names. Among them: Kelly Degnan.

The first instance of pressure on Georgia – and, specifically, on the king-maker Georgian billionaire, Bidzina Ivanishvili — concerned BUK anti-aircraft missiles. I learned of the US ambassador’s pressure on Ivanishvili from a highly credible source: Petre Mamradze.

Mamradze, a doctor of theoretical physics and mathematics, served, among other high government posts, as head of the Georgian State Chancelry across several administrations, from 2003 – 2012. (It was also Mamradze who, after the collapse of the USSR, helped secure uranium supplies and worked with the U.S. to get them out of the country to a secure location.)

That the US would be interested in sending Soviet-era BUK anti-aircraft missiles to Kyiv is easy to understand. They are effective, and already familiar to the Ukrainian military.

According to Mamradze’s account, a few days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Ivanishvili discovered that, without any explanation or any charges having been brought against him, his considerable financial assets held in Western financial institutions had been frozen. Mamradze further states that, almost simultaneously with this discovery, Amb. Degnan requested a meeting with Ivanishvili, and they then met on March 21, 2022. At that meeting, Ambassador Degnan told Ivanishvili to see to it that Georgia’s BUK air defense missiles and Javelin anti-tank weapons were transferred to Ukraine.

Ivanishvili responded that he considered this request to be, at the very least, dishonorable, especially given that the West had just frozen his financial assets. Ivanishvili reportedly described the request as tantamount to blackmail, aside from being insane: it would leave Georgia defenseless and “naked” against Russia, whose tanks are located about two hours’ drive from Tbilisi. In the early days of the Ukraine war, however, Ivanishvili did not publicly come forward about this incident — at least, not in public.

Anatol Lieven, in a published account of his Sept. 30, 2025, conversation with Georgian president Kavelashvili, points out that Georgia went to considerable lengths to prevent Georgian volunteers from going to Ukraine to fight and had also rejected Western pressure to send Kyiv military aid. What is more, and to Western chagrin, the Georgian government rejected Western efforts to force Georgia to impose the full range of EU sanctions on Russia. All the above led, Lieven observed, to accusations against Georgian Dream leaders that they were “pro-Russian.”

In his heated response to this charge, Kavelashvili told Lieven:

…The West demanded that we get involved in war with Russia against our vital national interests…just like in 2008, when the then government’s unreasonable actions on the basis of trust in NATO led Georgia to disaster … but today, Georgia has a government that represents the interests of our people…the same media outlets that accuse us of being under Russian influence tell the same lie about President Trump.

Since this September 2025 conversation, circumstances in Georgia have changed in such a way as to make possible greater public openness about who it was that was pushing the country into a confrontation with Russia, even to the point of opening up a second front. Back in spring 2022, Georgian Dream considered the U.S. its ‘strategic partner.’ The public revelations about how Georgia has been treated, however, have put that relationship in doubt.

Thus, to the account provided earlier by Bidzina Ivanishvili about Western pressure to open a second front, we can now add a December 2025 press conference during which Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze stated that he was present at two meeting in February, 2022 — one in early February, the other on February 27 or 28 — at which US Ambassador Degnan was present. At these meetings, says Kobakhidze, the Georgian government was pressured to not only implement anti-Russian sanctions, but to also open up a second front. When the Americans were asked about what would happen if, or rather, when, Russian troops occupied the country, the Georgians were told that they could start a guerilla war of resistance in the forests, and that the Americans would support them. During this interview, Kobakhidze said he did not wish to say specifically which of the Americans present at the meeting had told them to do these things, but he did insist that the US ambassador was present.

*

Is the above account complete and accurate? It is difficult to say with complete certainty. As we have noted, it has, after all, been contradicted by mainstream sources in the West. And yet the credibility of those Western sources has itself been seriously undermined by accounts such as those of former State Department official Michael Benz. Western reporting – exactly as illustrated by the above-referenced New York Times article – often consists of a kind of circular reasoning whereby Western-financed NGOs on the ground, whether in Georgia or in some other foreign country, repeat back to American reporters more or less exactly what the Western governments that pay their NGO salaries want them to say. Not the most scientific methodology for arriving at the truth of anything.

And so, whether definitively proven or not, the Georgian account detailed above remains highly credible. Indeed, it fits a long-standing pattern. Consider Ukraine. Can anyone doubt that Ukraine would be far better off if, in 2008, the U.S. had not started its obsessive drive to bring that unfortunate land into a military alliance hostile to Russia? By insisting on that policy for so many years, Washington has demonstrated remarkable indifference to the welfare of Ukrainians.

Why should Georgians expect any better?