Unfortunately, I’m unable to embed this YouTube video but the link is below.

YouTube link here.

More on the hypocrisy of the smug and sanctimonious EU below. – Natylie

Criminalization of Dissent in the “Free World”

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 7/9/26

It was good to hear a colleague, Christian Vukasovich, catalog evidence in our recent WMD podcast (episode 4) of growing intolerance among young Americans for the complicity of the US political and legal system in the abuses of AIPAC lobbying, Gaza genocide, the attacks on Palestinians and illegal seizure of land in the West Bank, and the Zionist “greater Israel” agenda that is being perpetrated without meaningful Western resistance across southern Lebanon, southern Syria and in the aforementioned Palestinian territories.

I shall be looking out for evidence that this change of sentiment led, first and foremost by the younger generations, including many younger candidates for political office in the November elections, will have a substantial effect on US policy any time soon.

For the moment, I suspect, we have seen only the opposite namely, the total unwillingness on the part of the US to withdraw US weapons and aid from Israel even though Israeli stubbornness is a major cause of the current breakdown of the MOU in the context of the Iranian crisis (and its potential to inflict significant harm on the global economy), along with the absence of good faith on the part of the West in acknowledging Iranian authority over the Strait of Hormuz. We should note in passing the full-throated applause in Ankara earlier this week for new US attacks on Iran from none other than the current Secretary General of NATO, Mark Utte, a former Dutch prime minister.

In Europe, the continuing crackdown on dissent against growing EU and European and NATO authoritarianism and aggression – a black stain that has been spreading for over a decade now – is every day more manifest.

The official narrative about political oppression in Europe, even as the European Parliament cries out loudly against what it claims are instances of oppressive human rights in other parts of the world – especially, of course, those countries that European neocons consider to be their enemies and competitors, would prefer that we look only at examples of “democratic backsliding.” This stance exposes an extraordinary level of hypocrisy and determined resistance to self-understanding.

European leaders profess to see “democratic backsliding” in instances such as Hungary under the government of former prime minister Viktor Orban which had used targeted tax audits, severe legal restrictions, and smear campaigns to marginalize “independent NGOs.” A great many of the latter are funded from Western sources such as the IS government-funded US National Endowment for Democracy, a primary instigator for pro-Washington regime change antics – as we have also seen in Georgia, and as we saw at the time of the coup d’etat on the Maidan in Kiev in 2014.

This reminds us that current European authoritarianism is rarely expressed as luxuriously as in its attempts to smear or disappear any elements in Europe that are critical of Europe’s war with Russia over the proxy Ukraine. Europe’s long-term ambition here is to restore European imperial privilege, even in the potential absence of a US protective umbrella, by breaking up and distributing among European members not so much the territories of today’s Russian Federation themselves (which would be very unfashionable), but the privileges of access for Western capital to the mineral and other sources of wealth of the pygmy polities that would be the product of this break-up – a policy helpfully outlined just the other day by Europe’s de facto foreign minister, Kaja Kallas, an Estonian.

More generally, across Europe, governments have increasingly deployed disproportionate force and restrictive legislation against activists. Notable examples include blanket bans and police crackdowns on pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Germany, criminalization of Palestine Action in the UK, and the forceful clearing of student encampments in Sweden. In nations like Germany and France, various legislative changes – including new citizenship laws and anti-separatism measures – have increasingly been utilized to criminalize and scapegoat specific refugee, immigrant, and minority communities.

In Germany and the UK, several pro-Palestinian organizations, Jewish peace groups, and individual activists have had their bank accounts abruptly closed or frozen by major financial institutions like Berliner Sparkasse and Barclays, often without clear explanations or recourse. State authorities in several Western European nations have used anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing laws to strip advocacy groups of their charitable status, effectively blocking their ability to process donations or maintain banking access. In the UK, climate and anti-war activists have received unprecedented, multi-year prison sentences under the Public Order Act for organizing peaceful disruptions and marches. Activists and public figures in Germany, France, and the UK face criminal prosecution, heavy fines, and potential prison time for using specific slogans, carrying signs, or organizing demonstrations that authorities classify as inciting hatred or supporting banned organizations. Police forces across Western Europe have increasingly utilized pre-emptive detention laws to arrest and hold key organizers before a planned protest can even take place.

Specific, documented legal cases from the UK and Germany illustrate the escalation of state prosecution and counter-terrorism legislation targeting pro-Palestinian and anti-war activists in Western Europe.

A landmark case at Woolwich Crown Court marked the first time the UK government successfully applied counterterrorism sentencing parameters against direct-action political protesters. Four activists linked to the group Palestine Action – Charlotte Head, Leona Kamio, Fatema Rajwani, and Samuel Corner – were tried for a 2024 break-in at a Gloucestershire factory owned by Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest private weapons manufacturer. Although the jury convicted the defendants of criminal damage rather than explicit terrorism offenses, the prosecution argued that the action carried a “terrorism connection” designed to coerce the government. The judge agreed, issuing severe, unprecedented prison terms ranging between 5 and 8 years. Beyond the multi-year prison terms, the court placed the activists under 15 years of mandatory terrorist notification requirements upon release. Human rights groups have condemned the ruling as a dangerous escalation that functionally criminalizes political dissent.

In Germany, authorities have pivoted toward high-security trials and organized-crime frameworks to prosecute anti-war sabotage. In the “Ulm” case, five activists (Daniel Tatlow-Devally, Zo Hailu, Crow Tricks, Vi Kovarbasic, and Leandra Rollo) went on trial at the high-security Stammheim court in Stuttgart. They were arrested following a September 2025 raid on an Elbit Systems site in Ulm, which caused roughly €1 million in property damage. Rather than standard trespassing or property damage charges, the Federal Prosecutor invoked Section 129 of the German Penal Code, formally indicting the defendants for “membership in a criminal organization” (Palestine Action Germany). Section 129 is traditionally reserved for mafia syndicates or violent extremist networks. Defense attorneys and civil liberties observers point out that the use of a high-security tribunal, prolonged pre-trial detentions, and structural criminal organization charges represent a highly disproportionate effort to suppress political protests.

In the 2025 case of the Staatsräson Deportation Orders State suppression has also expanded into immigration law via the weaponization of Staatsräson – Germany’s political doctrine establishing the security of Israel as a fundamental pillar of the German state. Berlin authorities ordered the forcible deportation of four foreign residents (Cooper Longbottom, Kasia Wlaszczyk, Shane O’Brien, and Roberta Murray). [None of the individuals had prior criminal convictions. They were ordered to leave the country strictly for participating in peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrations, including a sit-in at Berlin’s central train station and a campus occupation at the Free University Berlin. The state explicitly cited Staatsräson to bypass standard criminal trial procedures, utilizing administrative deportation laws to expel foreign-born dissidents without a jury conviction.

The criminalization of anti-war dissent in the UK and Germany has structurally altered the legal landscape for political activists, moving from traditional civil policing to severe statutory bans, criminal-syndicate frameworks, and counter-terrorism measures.

The UK has systematically rewritten its protest laws through successive pieces of legislation—including the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022, the Public Order Act 2023, and the Crime and Policing Act 2026. Together, these acts have effectively criminalized non-violent, disruptive civil disobedience.

The Public Order Act of 2023 created broad criminal offenses for tactics historically central to peace movements. Being “locked on” (attaching oneself to an object, building, or person) or merely possessing materials intended for locking on now carries a prison sentence. Under Section 7 of the Act, interfering with “key national infrastructure” – which was expanded via regulations to explicitly shield the life sciences and defense sectors – carries a penalty of up to 12 months in prison. This statutory shield directly targets anti-war blockades at munitions factories. Section 11 of the 2023 Act allows police officers to carry out suspicion less stop-and-search operations within designated protest zones. This authority is paired with the Crime and Policing Act 2026 under which senior police commanders are legally required to consider the “cumulative impact” of recurring protests. This permits preemptive, blanket bans on ongoing anti-war vigils or weekly marches in the same locale, strictly on the grounds that they disrupt local commerce or community routines.

Unlike the UK’s focus on physical disruption, Germany has primarily weaponized speech laws (Volksverhetzung – incitement to hatred) and its domestic intelligence apparatus to suppress and criminalize anti-war and pro-Palestinian advocacy.

The political doctrine of Staatsräson (stating that Israel’s security is a foundational pillar of the German state) has been integrated into the legal code. The phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” has been formally classified by the Federal Ministry of the Interior as a symbol of banned organizations like Hamas or Samidoun. Publicly uttering or displaying it triggers immediate arrest, heavy fines, or prosecution for “approving criminal offenses” or “inciting hatred.”

The federal prosecutor has begun applying Section 129 of the German Penal Code – a statute historically reserved for organized crime rings, the mafia, or armed militant groups – against non-violent direct-action networks. This allows the state to deploy invasive surveillance, wiretapping, and high-security trials against anti-war groups.

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) issued an official dossier labeling the broader Palestine solidarity movement as “extremist.” This administrative designation gives police and prosecutors the power to treat mainstream anti-war expressions as national security threats. The BfV dossier formally classified common cultural icons as extremist markers. The agency designated the classic cartoon character Handala (a universal symbol of Palestinian refugee status) and visual depictions of a sliced watermelon matching the geographic outline of the region as extremist symbols that supposedly deny Israel’s right to exist. Local authorities, particularly in Berlin, have instituted operational protest rules that ban speech in specific languages. Police have repeatedly shut down demonstrations and arrested activists for delivering speeches or chanting slogans in Arabic, enforcing ad-hoc mandates that restrict all public assembly speech exclusively to German or English.

The Dissenter, 6/30/26

When former CIA officer John Stockwell came forward, he maintained that he was the highest ranking officer to go public and tell the truth about the agency.

He authored a memoir, “In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story,” that further exposed the cult of intelligence in the United States. The CIA retaliated by suing Stockwell for violating his “secrecy agreement” and secured a settlement, where all book royalties would be paid to the United States government. 

Stockwell worked for the CIA for 12 years. During part of that time, he was the station chief for the CIA’s covert operations in Angola. He recalled, “Under the leadership of the CIA director we lied to Congress and to the 40 Committee, which supervised the CIA’s Angola program. We entered into joint activities with South Africa.” (South Africa was an apartheid state.)

“And we actively propagandized the American public, with cruel results—Americans, misguided by our agents’ propaganda, went to fight in Angola in suicidal circumstances. One died, leaving a widow and four children behind,” Stockwell added. “Our secrecy was designed to keep the American public and press from knowing what we were doing—we fully expected an outcry should they find us out.”

On June 14, Stockwell died at the age of 88. He went missing, and police later found his body in a “wooded area” not far from his home in Austin, Texas.  

The New York Times’ obituary mentioned that Stockwell’s family moved to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1940s after his father was “contracted to build a hydroelectric plant for a Presbyterian mission. At a boarding school that his mother supervised, his classmates were from the country, and when revelations about the CIA’s plot to poison Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba became public, it deeply affected him.

“First, men I had worked with had been involved,” Stockwell shared. “Beyond that, Lumumba had been baptized into the Methodist Church in 1937, the same year I was baptized a Presbyterian.” Lumumba and Stockwell were part of overlapping church communities, and the future prime minister was a “member of the missionary community” where he grew up.

A resignation letter to CIA Director Stansfield Turner, published by the Washington Post in 1977, specifically described how he became disillusioned with the CIA while stationed in Angola.

“From a chess player’s point of view the intervention was a blunder. In July 1975, the MPLA was clearly winning, already controlling 12 of the 15 provinces, and was thought by several responsible American officials and senators to be the best-qualified to run Angola; nor was it hostile to the United States,” according to Stockwell. “The CIA committed $31 million to opposing the MPLA victory, but six months later, the MPLA had nevertheless decisively won.”

“[T]he United States was solidly discredited, having been exposed for covert military intervention in African affairs, having allied itself with South Africa, and having lost.” 

Stockwell additionally contended that when he was recruited in 1964 it was emphasized that the CIA was “high-minded and scrupulously kept itself clean of truly dirty skullduggery such as killings and coups, etc.” Yet the CIA was involved in assassinations of Latin American politicians and engaged in a coverup of the agency’s involvement in the assassination of Lumumba. 

Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, including when President Ronald Reagan’s administration was embroiled in the Iran-Contra scandal, Stockwell gave numerous interviews and delivered many lectures. (Here is a video of Stockwell at American University in 1989, when he talked for nearly three hours about the “secret wars of the CIA.”) 

Stockwell said in a 1985 interview that he went into the CIA thinking that he was doing the “best thing” that he could do with his life, “the contradiction being that I was a humanist at heart. But, of course, their propaganda line is that you’re serving humanity by struggling to keep the world free from communism. It just took a lot of years making my way up the chain of command until I became convinced just the opposite was true.”

From his time on a National Security Council subcommittee that managed covert action in Angola, he insisted that in “meeting after meeting, 170 meetings,” all he heard were discussions about “what lies to tell the American people, what lies to tell the Congress, what lies to tell each other, and never, ever any conception of telling the truth.”

By his estimation, during the time that he was in the CIA, anywhere from three to six million people died as a result of covert operations and the agency’s role in wars in Vietnam and Cambodia. 

Stockwell mentioned in his memoir that he “testified for five days to Senate committees,” giving them full details about agency activities before writing “In Search of Enemies.” 

“Unfortunately,” as he observed, the “intelligence committees in Washington are unable to dominate and discipline the agency. Some senators even seem dedicated to covering up its abuses.” He concluded that “only an American public can bring effective pressure to bear on the CIA.”

Part of Stockwell’s resignation letter to Turner took a stand for freedom of expression amidst the CIA director’s push to criminalize any disclosure of information. He argued that if this happened then “Americans who work for the CIA could not, when they find themselves embroiled in criminal and immoral activity which is commonplace in the Agency, expose that activity without risking jail or poverty as punishment for speaking out.” 

“Cynical men, such as those who gravitate to the top of the CIA, could then by classifying a document or two protect and cover up illegal actions with relative impunity,” Stockwell declared.

Sadly, in the past twenty years, this is the status quo that developed at the CIA, and more broadly, the national security state. Former CIA officers like John Kiriakou and Jeffrey Sterling came forward to criticize the CIA. They were then prosecuted under the Espionage Act and sentenced to prison after the Justice Department secured convictions. 

The CIA did not have to prosecute Stockwell. There was no internet, and precedents in two cases were effective enough in establishing a prepublication review system that empowered the agency to suppress books detailing corrupt, criminal, or shameful acts.

Former CIA employee Victor Marchetti co-authored a 1974 book, “The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence,” that described the CIA as a “secret fraternity of the American political aristocracy.” The agency went to court and secured a decision that allowed the government to enforce secrecy agreements against intelligence employees. The book was published with text that indicated where lines were exactly deleted. 

After former CIA officer Frank Snepp authored “Decent Interval” in 1977 about the CIA’s role in the fall of Saigon, the CIA sued Snepp. The American Civil Liberties Union, the National Lawyers Guild, and other groups argued that the precedent was an “intolerable restraint on the First Amendment right to freedom of speech.” The Supreme Court later ruled that the agency not only had the authority to censor Snepp but they could also collect the royalties from Snepp’s book, too. 

Stockwell grew disillusioned with the CIA during a time that the agency had hundreds of journalists on the payroll. He recognized that it was unusual for the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Mike Wallace and “60 Minutes” to be interested in his story. 

“Three Days of the Condor” (1975) had Robert Redford walk into the New York Times with his story. That’s the way the movie ended, but of course, by and large if you walk into the New York Times with a story like that, they’ll throw you out,” Stockwell contended. “[T]he simple truth, the unending and continuing horror of what the CIA is doing, they don’t publish it.”

Stockwell saw his book as a way to reclaim his First Amendment right to freedom of speech, which did not exclude Americans who “signed CIA oaths.” And as he eloquently declared in his resignation letter to the CIA director, “I predict that the American people will never surrender to you the right of any individual to stand in public and say whatever is in his heart and mind.”

“That right is our last line of defense against the tyrannies and invasions of privacy which events of recent years have demonstrated are more than paranoiac fantasies.”

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 7/5/26

Lithuania intends to lift its ban on the deployment of nuclear weapons, the country’s president has said, as more NATO countries seek to host US nuclear bombs amid soaring tensions with Russia over the war in Ukraine.

“We would like to be the integral part of this nuclear deterrence,” said Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda, according to AFP. “A few days ago, I initiated a constitutional amendment to remove the existing restriction on the possible deployment of nuclear weapons in Lithuania.”

The amendment needs to be approved by Lithuania’s parliament, which Nauseda expects, as he said there is “practically unanimous” support among lawmakers for repealing the ban outlined in Article 137 of Lithuania’s Constitution.

“Almost all parliamentary faction leaders expressed the view that Article 137 has become obsolete and should not merely be amended but removed,” Nauseda said.

The announcement came a few weeks after Finland, NATO’s newest member, repealed its ban on hosting nuclear weapons. Finland’s move and Lithuania’s potential repeal will open the countries up to potentially hosting US nuclear weapons as part of NATO’s nuclear sharing program, under which the US has nukes deployed in Germany, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Turkey.

Russia’s Foreign Ministry has said Finland’s move requires a response, and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, known for his hawkish rhetoric, said Finland, which shares a more than 800-mile border with Russia, is now on Russia’s “nuclear target list.”

Lithuania shares a border with Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad and Belarus, where Russia deployed nuclear weapons in 2023. When announcing his decision to place nukes in Belarus, Russian President Vladimir Putin referenced NATO’s nuclear sharing program.

***

Russia Matters: Russia Gains 31 Square Miles in Past 4 Weeks, Ukraine Lacks Anti-Ballistic Means

Russia Matters, 7/10/26

1. Russian forces made a net gain of 31 square miles of Ukrainian territory (slightly larger than the size of Manhattan Island) in the past four weeks (June 9–July 7), according to the latest issue of RM’s Russia-Ukraine War Report Card (based on data from Ukraine’s DeepState OSINT group). In comparison, during the previous four-week period (May 12–June 9, 2026), Russia lost a net of 1 square mile, according to DeepState’s data. In contrast, ISW data indicates that in the past four weeks (June 9–July 7, 2026), Russian forces saw a net gain of 6 square miles of Ukrainian territory, according to the July 8, 2026, issue of the war card.
2. Volodymyr Zelenskyy told FT the war’s decisive phase has shifted to “the sky.” But Ukraine’s greatest vulnerability is a critical shortage of antiballistic air defenses, especially Patriot interceptors capable of intercepting ballistic missiles. In a July 6 Russian strike involving 29 ballistic missiles and hundreds of drones, Ukraine failed to shoot down a single ballistic missile, according to FT. While Ukraine has intercepted about 90% of Russian long-range drones and 80% of 722 cruise missiles fired in 2026—70% of 522 ballistic missiles have gotten through, according to WSJ. Ukraine’s Patriot/PAC3 stocks are so low since the beginning of the Iran war, that launchers “sometimes sit half empty,” according to NYT. It is well understood that Ukraine effectively lacks a robust ballistic missile-defense shield, but hopes for large numbers of Patriot PAC3 interceptors are fanciful since the U.S. is currently manufacturing roughly 620 PAC3s per year, and several higher priority claimants—starting with U.S. forces in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific—are already in the queue before any substantial number will reach Kyiv. While announcements at the NATO summit about the U.S. giving Ukraine a license provided a bright shinny object to distract from the brute facts, in the real world, it will take years before Ukraine produces the first Patriot. There’s also the IRIS-T system, which Germany makes. It has some capability to shoot down ballistic missiles, but it is inferior to the Patriot’s. Some 20 units of IRIS-T have been delivered to Ukraine so far, according to a June 2026 report by Reuters.*
3. WSJ’s Gerard Baker writes that senior European military and intelligence officials increasingly fear Vladimir Putin may test NATO with limited “probe” operations rather than a full-scale invasion along NATO’s eastern border—seizing small Baltic islands, staging an “assistance” incursion to protect Russian speakers in Estonia or similar moves that Moscow could frame as retaliation or humanitarian intervention. Any such step would force NATO to decide whether to respond with force; if the U.S. hesitated and the alliance failed to act, Baker argues, it would fatally undermine Article 5 and effectively destroy NATO’s credibility. Baker’s argument that Vladimir Putin could seek to exploit a perceived window of Western vulnerability in Europe deserves serious consideration. The most plausible scenarios are not a large-scale invasion, but a limited provocation against a vulnerable NATO member. Baker warns that Russia could seize Baltic islands or stage an intervention purportedly to protect Russian-speaking minorities in Estonia. His warning closely resembles long-discussed concerns about Russian exploitation of ethnic minority issues in the Baltic states. Russia has no widely recognized competing sovereignty claims over NATO-held islands, making such an operation more likely a fait accompli rather than the assertion of an existing legal dispute.
4. Threats to Starlink: Leaked Chinese and Russian military documents depict Starlink as a frontline threat and primary target, not just a commercial satellite network, Sinocism reports, citing a joint investigation by The Insider, Der Spiegel and Le Monde. At a secret 2023 China–Russia military-technical forum in Guangzhou, senior engineers from the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation outlined an “antiStarlink alliance” built around a three-stage escalation ladder: jamming Starlink signals, hacking the network and ultimately physically destroying satellites in orbit, according to the July 9, 2026, Sinocism report.
5. Czech President Petr Pavel warned Ukraine has roughly two months to make decisive progress toward ending the war before Russia’s Sept. 20 parliamentary elections. Afterward, he believes Putin may launch a highly unpopular general mobilization, according to RBC.ua. Pavel urged Ukraine’s allies to exert pressure on Russia to secure peace talks in the coming weeks. “Russia currently faces many internal problems and challenges. The Russian public is increasingly opposed to the war. It will be difficult for Putin to maintain calm at home,” the Czech president claimed. While Pavel pointed to Russia’s problems in his comments, the comments can also be interpreted as a warning that it is Ukraine that may be running out of time when it comes to holding peace talks.

By Brian McDonald, Substack, 6/23/26

I went back to former US Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul’s 2018 book From Cold War to Hot Peace after an exchange on X, last week, with the French philosopher Philippe Lemoine about Russia’s 1996 presidential election, which hits the big three-oh anniversary this week. Lemoine’s point was simple enough: that the election that Western officials hailed as a victory for Russian democracy was, in fact, a grubby, over-funded, heavily manipulated, and essentially unfair, rescue operation for Boris Yeltsin.

Yeltsin broke campaign spending limits by a distance visible from space while public money was used to settle wage arrears and hand out electoral sweeteners. The IMF, under pressure from Washington, loosened the tap at just the moment when the Yeltsin campaign needed the state to look solvent again and the media landscape, already falling under the shadow of the new oligarchs, was turned into a great anti-communist siren. Meanwhile, when Yeltsin, ill and exhausted, was dragged across the line, the whole thing was presented in the West as the salvation of democracy.

McFaul called it a “tremendous victory for democracy” and that phrase alone is worth keeping in a glass case, like one of those Soviet medals that tells you more about the system that awarded it than the heroism it claims to commemorate.

I had reviewed McFaul’s Moscow memoir years ago and remembered it as 483 pages of a former US ambassador venting his agitation over unfulfilled potential, but re-reading it now, with 1996 in mind, makes the book more interesting and more revealing. Not better, exactly, but more useful, because it’s less a personal account of diplomacy than a confession of a certain American faith that democracy is holy, provided it advances the right side.

McFaul is a professional scholar, so it’s highly likely that he’s familiar with George Berkeley. The philosopher from Kilkenny gave us subjective idealism and the famous formula esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). McFaul, whether he knows it or not, has spent much of his career practising a geopolitical version of the same creed in which what’s important isn’t democracy as lived by a country, in all its history, mess, fear, habit and contradiction, but how democracy is perceived from Washington.

In that vision, Russia was democratic when it was weak, pro-Western, dependent, ashamed of itself, and governed by men who understood the correct hierarchy of the post-Cold War world, but it began to become “authoritarian” in earnest when it stopped moving in that direction.

This is the selective idealism running through McFaul’s book. He’s not interested in democracy in the broad sense, the rule of voters, parties, institutions, mandates and national preferences. Instead, he’s interested in a particular species of democracy that’s liberal, pro-American, elite-approved, NGO-friendly, and geopolitically obedient. If a country votes the right way, its imperfections are growing pains, but if it votes the wrong way, its politics become pathology.

That’s why the silences in the book are as significant as the arguments. McFaul has a great deal to say about Putin’s Russia, and some of it is valuable and his insider accounts of Obama-Putin meetings are worth reading. His recollection that Putin insisted Dmitry Medvedev was in charge of foreign policy during his 2008-2012 presidency is interesting, especially given the later fury in Moscow over Libya, and the observation that Putin declined a White House visit in 2012 also matters because it suggests the break with the West had happened in Putin’s head before the West fully understood it had lost him.

But when the story turns to Russia’s 1990s, McFaul’s moral intensity becomes oddly selective.

Take 1993, when Yeltsin shelled his own parliament with tanks, which meant the post-Soviet constitutional order was born in blood and executive violence, the result of which was the hyper-presidential system that later made Putin so powerful. A serious account of Russia’s democratic failure would have to linger there, in the rubble of the Moscow White House, asking what kind of republic was being built when the elected president could fire on the elected legislature and still be declared the man on the “right side of history.” But McFaul, surprise, surprise, doesn’t linger and quickly moves on.

Then comes 1996, which is the great wound under the plaster because this was the election Western liberals had to believe in, given the alternative was too inconvenient. Indeed, the famous July 1996 Time cover, “Yanks to the Rescue,” which openly celebrated the role of American political consultants in helping Yeltsin secure re-election, looks extraordinary three decades later in its total lack of self-awareness. Not to mention downright hypocritical when you remember that McFaul later became one of the loudest American voices condemning the far, far lighter and less effective Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Yet the 1996 Russian vote, with American advisers assisting Yeltsin, Western institutions helping steady the Russian state and Washington openly invested in the outcome, rarely inspires the same moral outrage. The asymmetry is revealing.

And that’s why his ambassadorship in Moscow was doomed from the first week. He arrived in January 2012, just as liberal protests were convulsing Moscow and shortly after Hillary Clinton had appeared to encourage the demonstrators from afar, and it so happened that his first public meeting as ambassador was with opposition figures. He says this wasn’t his preferred idea and perhaps he’s being truthful, but politics is made of optics as much as intentions, and in Moscow the optics were spectacularly bad. A man who had written on promoting regime change in the Soviet Union and Russia arrived in the Russian capital and immediately met the opposition during anti-government protests and you didn’t need to be a Kremlin paranoiac to notice the red rag.

Russian television then did what Russian television does, it mauled him, crudely and often dishonestly. McFaul complained of anti-American hysteria, not without reason, but his later comfort on American cable television, where anti-Russian hysteria is also manufactured with a straight face and a lavish studio budget, makes the complaint look rather hypocritical.

The deeper problem is that McFaul never seemed especially interested in Russia as Russians actually live it because his Russians are the Russians of a narrow Moscow circle, dissidents, liberals, refuseniks, black-market types, the disappointed children of the Soviet elite, and the people who speak the language of Western seminars and embassy receptions. These people can’t be totally dismissed, of course, because they’re real and some are brave and some are even admirable, but they’re definitely not Russia entire, or even usefully indicative of it. Meanwhile, the provinces, the conservative middle, the industrial towns, the military families, the voters who didn’t see the 1990s as liberation but as humiliation, remain distant shapes in the snow. But the problem is that those people elect Russian leaders too, and there’s simply far more of them than there are of the well-heeled internationalists who are more comfortable in the cosmopolitanism of London or Paris than the grind of Volgograd or Irkutsk.

This is where McFaul’s Berkeleyan problem returns in that the Russia that counted was the Russia visible to Washington, urban, liberal, English-speaking, Western-facing, and morally legible. At the same time, the bigger Russia beyond that niche was a problem to be either modernised or overcome, and wasn’t assigned any agency as a political subject.

Re-reading From Cold War to Hot Peace now, it’s easier to see why McFaul was so poorly received in Moscow but it’s important to concede that not every Russian attack on him was fair, and many were not, and also that it wasn’t because the Kremlin’s suspicions were pure, because they weren’t. It’s really because he embodied, almost too perfectly, the American assumption that Russia’s proper destiny was to become a lesser version of America’s idea of itself.

Putin ended that project, whether we like it or not, and that’s long been McFaul’s real grievance because his gripe isn’t merely that Russia became authoritarian, though that is his stated case, but that Russia stopped travelling toward the destination he believed history had assigned it. There’s very little doubt that he’d have been happy enough with a pro-American Pinochet, which, incidentally, is what Western elites appeared to think they were getting when Putin was chosen as Yeltsin’s successor in December 1999.

The book is therefore valuable, but not always in the way its author intended. It tells us something about Obama, Putin, Medvedev, Libya, the failed reset and the psychological weather of US-Russia relations, but above all, it tells us how American democracy promotion looks from inside its own church, which is sincere, learned, energetic, blind, and astonishingly forgiving of its own side.

After Lemoine’s nudging about 1996, McFaul’s old phrase, a “tremendous victory for democracy,” rings differently. Was it really, or rather instead was it the moment Russian democracy was saved from the voters by money, fear, oligarchic scheming, media discipline, failure to recognize Yeltsin as a train wreck, and foreign approval of that myopia?

That’s the question McFaul’s book never really answers and it may be the question it was written to avoid.

---

By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 6/30/26

Alexei Mukhin says he was vacationing at a Black Sea resort near Sochi in late June when an incoming Ukrainian drone was shot down by Russian air defenses, with a loud explosion, in full sight of a beach crowded with people.

“The thing is, no one looked particularly surprised. Many people didn’t even seem to notice,” says Mr. Mukhin, head of the Center for Political Information, a Moscow-based independent consultancy. “It’s a near-daily occurrence around there, and people are getting used to it. I felt like the most nervous person on that beach.”

Ukrainian drone strikes deep into Russia’s heartland – including a wave on Monday night – are causing fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations, even in Moscow. The attacks are dampening the mood of average Russians more visibly than at any time since the war in Ukraine began 4 1/2 years ago.

For many Russians, particularly in the capital, it’s the first time the war has struck so close to home. People have been irritated by internet and cellphone disruptions that authorities say are war-related, and small businesses have been hit with tax increases due to the rising costs of the war, but spending hours trying to fill the gas tank is a new level of inconvenience.

“The increase in drone attacks is putting pressure on the economy, civil infrastructure, and it’s certainly affecting the public mood,” says Sergei Strokan, an independent political analyst. “Social tension is rising. People are worried. Things are obviously not going on as before.”

But experts such as Mr. Strokan and Mr. Mukhin say the idea that Russians are likely to panic, even as the pressure ramps up, is misguided. Though public exhaustion with the war is growing, and the number of people who favor peace talks is high, experts say the voices calling for tougher prosecution of the war against Ukraine are also becoming louder and more persuasive.

“Public opinion is changing,” says Mr. Strokan, “but not necessarily in the direction that people in the West seem to expect.”

Creating problems, but not critical?

Russian President Vladimir Putin made a rare admission of the difficulties during an interview with state TV journalist Pavel Zarubin on Sunday, conceding that stepped-up Ukrainian attacks against bridges, oil refineries, and fuel trucks are creating “problems … [and] certain shortages.” According to Russian media, those include restrictions on gasoline sales in at least 20 Russian regions, and price hikes and supply disruptions in several more.

The hardest-hit region is the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, where strikes against bridges and other infrastructure have severely reduced fuel supplies, ruined the summer tourist season, and led authorities to declare a state of emergency.

A mid-June attack badly damaged the Kapotnya oil refinery, which supplies about 40% of the gasoline for the Moscow region, leading to the first serious shortages in the capital in many years. A taxi driver, who declined to be named, said several gas stations near his home in northwestern Moscow were closed Monday, and he waited for almost two hours at another before filling his tank – albeit at the regular price of 74 rubles per liter (about $3.60 per gallon).

During his interview, Mr. Putin insisted the problems were “not critical,” the damage would be quickly repaired, and that Russian air-defense forces were developing new weaponry and tactics to counter the Ukrainian assault.

Viktor Litovkin, a military expert with the official RIA news agency, says Russian air defenses are mostly coping with the surge in Ukrainian attacks, and only a few incoming drones actually get through – especially around big cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.

“The attacks are becoming more intensive. The drones fly in swarms, which is technically difficult to deal with,” Mr. Litovkin says. But war always involves a steep learning curve, he adds. “On the whole, our defense forces are well-equipped, well-trained, and are operating effectively. Our air defenses are getting better at it every day, and I’m pretty sure they’ll handle whatever the Ukrainians are going to throw at them.”

Speaking to state TV, Mr. Putin said the Ukrainian tactic of launching strikes deep into Russia, increasingly hitting civilian targets, has largely psychological aims. “Its purpose is to undermine our confidence in ourselves and our capabilities and, ideally, to create divisions within Russian society, force Russia to suspend, even temporarily, the advance of our forces along the line of contact, and create conditions for launching negotiations on terms favorable to our adversary,” he said.

Not the response Ukraine was looking for?

Lev Gudkov, scientific director of Russia’s only independent [western backed] polling agency, the Levada Center, says anxieties are indeed spiking, with more than half of Russians indicating that they pay close attention to war news. While 74% of Russians say they support their troops in Ukraine, more than 60% favor peace talks. Only about one-third say they want the war to continue, though Mr. Gudkov says that percentage has been rising over the past three months.

“The threat of drone attacks has been coming to the fore in public opinion lately, pushing aside other developments in the war zone,” he says. “The general tendency is for people to mentally separate the attacks on us from what’s going on in Ukraine. The number of people who support talks with Ukraine is decreasing, while there are more and more people who feel that Russia should take decisive actions to destroy Ukraine.”

From the other side, Volodymyr Paniotto, director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, reached via Facebook, says Ukrainians are generally pleased with their forces’ improved ability to strike deeper and harder into Russia’s heartland.

“Ukrainians perceive such actions not as escalation, but as part of defense and as a way to make the aggressor feel the price of war,” he says. “In addition, at a time when Russia is systematically attacking Ukrainian cities and energy, most Ukrainians consider it unfair that Russian society can live as if the war does not concern it.”

But some Russian analysts warn that hard-liners who advocate strikes against European targets involved in producing and supplying weapons to Ukraine, perhaps even staging a nuclear explosion to demonstrate Russia’s resolve, are growing in influence. The idea of a nuclear strike to warn Europeans to stop helping Ukraine was first put forward by senior Russian foreign policy veteran Sergey Karaganov, who voiced it directly to Mr. Putin at a conference three years ago. Mr. Putin firmly rejected it at the time.

The idea is gaining fresh currency amid Ukraine’s stepped-up drone assault, says Igor Korotchenko, editor of the Moscow-based National Defense magazine.

“The Russian expert community is actively considering a scenario involving possible tactical nuclear weapon strikes against key points on Ukrainian territory, along the borders with Romania and Poland, to interdict the supplies of weaponry to Ukraine,” he says. “This is needed to definitively choke NATO arms supplies to Ukraine, and it might compel the Zelenskyy regime to sit down and negotiate on Russia’s terms.”