How Biden Snatched Defeat from the Jaws of Victory and Decided to Prolong the War in Ukraine Indefinitely

Biden plans to continue to use hundreds of thousands more Ukrainians as cannon-fodder in NATO's proxy war to weaken Russia but may provoke it to destroy the US and NATO instead

President Joe Biden giving remarks at the White House articulating his plan to give Ukraine a blank check of virtually unlimited US financial and military assistance “as long as it takes” for Ukraine to reclaim its lost territories from Russia

This is the second article in a three-part series commemorating the two-year anniversary of the war in Ukraine.

For two years, the Biden administration and NATO leaders have continued to mislead the American people saying that Russia doesn’t want peace so there is no point in negotiating with them ignoring the fact that Russia only invaded Ukraine following fifteen years of failed attempts to negotiate a diplomatic solution to the US-created Ukraine NATO membership crisis to avert war. I have chronicled the diplomatic history of Russia’s many peace attempts with the West to avoid a military conflict over the manufactured crisis created by the US insistence on expanding Ukraine into NATO in my previous article which covered former Fox News Host Tucker Carlson’s extremely revealing interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, in which Putin reiterated his pleas for the US and Ukraine to agree to a negotiated peace to end the war.

For over two decades, I mistakenly believed that Putin was planning to re-unite the former Soviet Union in some fashion most likely with a modern-day Imperial Russian Confederation in which all the former Soviet republics except for the Baltic states would remain independent but would become loyal satellite Russian states much like the Warsaw Pact. However, Russia’s offers to withdraw all its troops from Ukraine except for the Donbass region in late February and early March 2022 in acceptance for its acceptance of reasonable peace terms followed by the unilateral Russian military withdrawal from three northern Ukrainian oblasts during the first week of April 2022 forced me to abandon my misconceptions and face reality.

The more research I did the more I realized that every one of Russia’s aggressive moves without exception had been reactive and inherently defensive from a Russian standpoint, in direct responses to Ukrainian or NATO provocations stretching back to the Bucharest Declaration of 2008. My research led me to conclude that the war in Ukraine was not fought by Russia to start the process of recovering its lost empire but rather to rollback America’s revisionist expansion of its liberal empire 1,100 miles eastward from its Cold War boundaries into Ukraine, potentially enabling the US to station nuclear bombers approximately 300 miles from Moscow. Russia’s objective is to restore the pre-February 2014 Maidan coup status quo in Ukraine and the pre-2016 Warsaw Summit status quo in Eastern Europe.

Russia has been accused as trying to revise the post-Cold War 1991 settlement but one look at the map below reveals it is not Russia but the US that has been aggressively and drastically revising the agreed post-Cold War settlement in which the US and other Western countries agreed to freeze NATO’s boundaries and not expand NATO by even one inch further than the Oder River which serves as Germany’s eastern frontier. Thus, it appears as if it is the US that has been the revanchist power in Europe whereas Russia has been fighting to preserve as much as it can of the shattered post-Cold War status quo which was quickly discarded by the West a quarter century ago with the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders in eastern Europe for the first time in history during which time it has doubled the number of its member states from 16 in 1991 to 32 with the addition of Sweden this past week.

Map showing NATO expansion during the first two decades following the end of the Cold War. NATO has since added Finland, Sweden, Montenegro and North Macedonia as members doubling the Atlantic Alliance’s European land mass over three decades. It’s not difficult to see why Russia would feel threatened by having a hostile alliance that includes three nuclear powers expand all along its western border.

US leaders need more strategic empathy for Russia. The US would have responded exactly the same way as Russia has done in Ukraine under similar circumstances. If Russia and China had allied with a secessionist Texas arming and training its army to fight the US with a couple thousand Russian and Chinese troops conducting joint military exercise against the US in Texas, how would the US have responded. The answer of course is that we would have invaded, bombed and annexed all of Texas and called it a defensive war. That’s exactly what Putin has done with regards to Ukraine becoming a de-facto NATO member except he has only annexed eighteen percent of Ukraine’s territory much of which is inhabited by ethnic Russians.

The Origins of the War in Ukraine

The immediate crisis of war between Russia and Ukraine began on March 23^rd, 2021 when Zelensky, likely encouraged by the election of the most anti-Russian US President in decades, proclaimed Ukraine would take back control of Crimea which had been annexed by Russia seven years earlier, announcing a military buildup to help it do so, and began accelerating Ukrainian offensive operations against the Russian-backed separatist republics in Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin responded to Ukraine’s heightened rhetoric and military actions by massing tens of thousands of troops on Ukraine’s borders on March 24th. The following month, Zelensky declared that Ukraine would take back Crimea by military force if necessary extentuating the crisis. At that time, the Biden administration responded constructively by requesting a direct summit between Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin in Geneva, Switzerland declaring that all issues were on the table, seeming to suggest that he might be willing to negotiate a comprehensive peace agreement with Russia much like Trump planned to do before President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Deep State US intelligence officials conspired to sabotage him from doing so with their fake Trump-Russia collusion hoax. Putin responded by ordering Russian troops to withdraw to their bases on April 22^nd. The meeting ended up achieving little of substance, but Russia responded favorably to this meaningful diplomatic gesture by withdrawing all of the Russian troops he had surged to Ukraine’s borders. 

Then, in response to joint NATO military exercises held in western Ukraine from September 20-October 1^st that included 2,000 US and NATO troops, Russia began massing 90,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders at the end of October as Russia warned it would not accept Ukraine becoming a de-facto member of the NATO alliance. US intelligence assessed that unlike the first Russian military deployment in March, this time Russian forces were deploying operationally for a potential invasion of Ukraine. Biden was so concerned about a potential Russian invasion of Ukraine he sent CIA Director William Burns to Moscow the day after this Russian troop concentration was reported in the media but instead of negotiating a diplomatic solution to the Ukraine in NATO crisis, Burns negotiated a set of conditions for how any ensuring war in Ukraine would proceed.

As I wrote last year, evidence has emerged that Biden not only made no sincere effort to avert the outbreak of the unnecessary war in Ukraine but he actually sent CIA Director William Burns to Moscow the day after the Russian troop buildup was publicly revealed in early November to set some ground rules for how the Russian invasion of Ukraine should proceed. Newsweek magazine published a very interesting article, written by William Arkin, detailing how Burns negotiated an agreement with Moscow to limit the scope of the future war between Russia and Ukraine to Ukrainian territory and to take measures to prevent a direct war involving the U.S. and NATO. “The United States would not fight directly nor seek regime change, the Biden administration pledged.” In return, “Russia would limit its assault to Ukraine.” The author continues by stating that the US agreed not to directly attack Russia and committed not to provide Ukraine with any weapons enabling them to attack Russia either in exchange for a Russian promise not to attack any NATO member states. What is most notable about this agreement is that it occurred over three months before Russian President Vladimir Putin reportedly green lighted the Russian invasion in mid-February mere days before it occurred in the hope that a diplomatic solution would be found to prevent the conflict.

This article appears to substantiate my assertions since January 2022 that Biden deliberately chose this war when he could have easily averted it but what I did not realize is that Biden wanted the outbreak of war in Ukraine all the way back in November 2021 rather than late January 2022 as I had previously ascertained. The biggest question that must be asked is what exactly did the Biden regime have to gain by provoking the Russian invasion of Ukraine when the conflict could have easily been averted diplomatically without the US giving up anything at all? All he had to do was issue a written pledge that Ukraine, in which the US has no national interest, would never join NATO, which was hardly a concession since France and Germany would continue to veto Ukrainian membership for fear of provoking an unnecessary war with Russia. There are several plausible explanations as to why Biden decided to deliberately provoke Russia to invade Ukraine but perhaps the most plausible was to reinvigorate NATO which had been facing increasing disunity without a clear purpose or enemy. The Biden administration, which is full of Atlanticists who mistakenly believe that the NATO alliance is the cornerstone of US security, wanted to invigorate it and further strengthen America’s dominance over Europe by uniting with them in opposition to a Russian invasion of Ukraine while simultaneously averting public attention to his failed economic policies which had produced a recession with record-high inflation.

Biden Rejects Putin’s Offer to Return Russian Troops to Their Bases

Instead of accommodating Russia’s legitimate security concerns, Biden moved ahead with plans to conclude the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership Agreement with Ukraine, which was signed on November 10th, which had the effect of pouring gasoline on the fire. In a call with President Biden held on December 7, 2021, Russian President Vladimir Putin offered to guarantee that Russian troops would not attack Ukraine in exchange for the US denying Ukraine’s bid to join NATO. There is every reason to believe that Putin would have ordered Russian troops to return to their bases had Biden done so just as Putin ended up doing in April 2022. However, in response to this very reasonable demand which could have been met at zero cost to US national security, or NATO security for that matter, the Biden administration rejected Russia’s redline for Ukrainian NATO membership. In response to this rejection, Russia offered the US a comprehensive peace agreement on December 15th, which the late Dr. Peter Pry, who served as Executive Director of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security for over a decade, remarked might be more in America’s interest to sign than Russia’s. But on January 25th, 2022, the Biden administration rejected Russia’s peace agreement in its entirety provoking Russia to invade Ukraine in February 2022. That is why I have called the war in Ukraine, “Biden’s War” because it was President Joe Biden who, quite deliberately, chose war over peace instead of revising NATO’s “Open Door Policy” to what I recommended at the time which I term a “Half-Open Door Policy” in which NATO membership would be offered to any European nation except for former Soviet republics.   Ultimately, the Biden-manufactured proxy war against Russia in Ukraine has proven in the words of General of the Army Omar Bradley, "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." 

Up until February 21^st, Putin was continuing to insist that any peaceful resolution to the Ukraine issue “must be on the basis of the Minsk Accords” in which the disputed Donbass region would be restored to Ukrainian control in exchange for the withdrawal of Ukrainian troops and Ukraine changing its constitution to move from a unitary state to a federal republic granting the Donbass autonomy. For eight years he refused to recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics in the hopes that Ukraine would finally agree to implement the Minsk II agreement which was more favorable to Ukraine than Russia while Russia complained that Ukraine continued to shell ethnic Russian cities in the Donbass region with Ukrainian forces killing two-thirds to three-fourths of the civilians that died in its civil war in the Donbass from 2014-2022 according to the OSCE.

However, later the same day, in response to reports of an imminent Ukrainian offensive in the Donbass accompanied by a 3,400 percent increase in Ukrainian artillery bombardments against the Russian-backed separatist republics, he authorized the invasion starting with the entry of Russian forces into the Russian-backed separatist republics in the Donbass region on February 22nd. The Russian offensive was symbolically timed to occur on the 8^th anniversary of the CIA-backed Maidan coup and overthrow of Ukrainian President Yanukovych which provoked the Ukrainian Civil War and the Russian annexation of Crimea. This was followed by a Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24^th with a small, seemingly ad-hoc force of 190,000 active-duty troops, less than the number of troops in Ukraine’s active-duty armed forces. Any half-decent military expert recognized that invading Ukraine with such a comparatively meager force demonstrated that Putin had limited objectives and did not seek to conquer and occupy most or all of Ukraine.

If Putin had wanted to conquer Ukraine, he would have mobilized hundreds of thousands of Russian reservists and invaded with a force of half a million men. However, instead of allowing Russian troops to fight as they had trained to fight against NATO in all-out, no holds barred, total warfare, Putin ordered the Russian military to fight a limited Vietnam-style war with one hand tied behind its back forbidding the Russian Aerospace Forces from targeting Ukrainian political and military leadership in Kyiv or using Russia’s formidable force of unconventional nuclear, super-EMP weapons which he might have used to force Ukraine to capitulate within a week. Even a massive Russian cyber and/or counterspace warfare attack likely would have forced Ukraine into a conditional surrender within a few weeks as US leaders anticipated.

The usual neoliberal Democrat suspects including then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and former House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) virtue signaling by doing a photo-op with Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv. This should have been a signal to all conservative Republicans that the Ukraine war was manufactured by the Democrats and that they should unite in opposing the war.

After Russia invaded Ukraine, the Biden administration was joined by every Democrat member and every neoconservative Republican of Congress in calling for massive US aid to Ukraine. Almost overnight as if on signal, the war in Ukraine became the new leftist cause célèbre with liberals in both parties replacing their Black Lives Matter logos with the Ukrainian flag. That is how the liberal hive mind works in America these days with zero ability to engage in critical thinking as to whether rushing headlong into a proxy war with Russia was actually a good idea or not seemingly oblivious to the costs and consequences to Ukraine and America of such a protracted conflict. When I was growing up, I admired Democrats for being strong supporters of the First Amendment and civil rights while staunchly opposing US involvement in unnecessary no-win wars that historically have served to make the world worse off and create new more powerful enemies for America than the ones we vanquish. Today, Democrats support none of those things. Instead, it is America First conservatives who now champion these important principles.   

At the onset of the invasion, every retired three-star and four-star general appearing on Fox News as well as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff briefed Congress on US intelligence estimates that Russia could likely capture Kyiv within three days of fighting at a cost of only 4,000 Russian soldiers killed in action, that massive Russian cyberattacks would effectively prevent Ukrainian forces from being able to coordinate above the company level and that Ukraine would likely surrender within three weeks. While the exact date for the invasion of Ukraine was likely set a couple months in advance in the event that Russian diplomacy failed to obtain a diplomatic resolution of the Ukraine in NATO issue, Putin appears not to have given his authorization for the Russian invasion of Ukraine until a few days before the invasion occurred. Russia invaded Ukraine with a meager force of 190,000 troops which all military analysts recognized as being far too few to conquer Ukraine conclusively demonstrating that occupying or annexing most of Ukraine was never one of Putin’s military objectives as the Biden administration and neoconservative Republicans continue to allege.

Rather, Putin’s primary objective was to compel Ukraine to return to its previous neutral buffer state status it had enjoyed prior to the February 2014 Euromaidan coup, authorized by then Vice President Joe Biden, which overthrew Ukrainian President Yanukovych. It goes without saying that Ukraine would be whole and free today if Biden hadn't given Victoria Nuland the go-ahead to proceed with the coup a decade ago. It turns out that Biden is the common denominator in facilitating the destruction of Ukraine and the loss of nearly one-fifth of its territory as his actions provoked both the 2014 and 2022 Russian invasions of Ukraine. If a return to Ukrainian neutrality could not be achieved his aim was to wreck Ukraine, destroy its air bases and turn it into a partially occupied failed state so that it would never meet the requirements to join NATO and could not host US nuclear bombers or missiles located only 300 miles from Moscow. Putin’s hope was to send Russian forces to quickly occupy Kyiv, overthrow Zelensky and replace him with a pro-Russian leader after which Russian troops would be withdrawn from Ukrainian territory apart from the Donbass region. Captured Russian plans indicated they believed they could capture Kyiv and negotiate peace with Ukraine within as little as fifteen days. However, Putin’s decision not to mobilize any Russian reserve troops before the invasion which was in many ways poorly planned and ad-hoc given Putin’s belief that it would prove unnecessary doomed the Russian plan of a quick victory. 

Russia Offers to Withdraw its Troops from all of Ukraine’s Prewar Territory Shortly After Invading in Exchange for Ukrainian Neutrality

Russia state media first broadcast its peace terms on February 25^th which was the day after it invaded Ukraine in which they called for “denazification” and “demilitarization” and permanent neutrality for Ukraine outside of NATO which if Ukraine agreed to Russian troops would be withdrawn. Zelensky accepted Russia’s offer of peace negotiations the following day on February 26^th. After initially calling for Zelensky’s ouster by March 8^th, Russia began offering reasonable peace terms to Ukraine dropping its previous demands for regime change and allowing Zelensky to remain in power. On March 11^th, I reported on these Russian peace proposals in an article I published in the National Interest.

Russian and Ukrainian peace negotiators in Istanbul in March 2022. They met from February-April 2022 nearly finalizing a peace agreement that would have been constituted a substantial victory for Ukraine and saved hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives if Biden had not vetoed it

Former Acting National Security Advisor LTG Keith Kellogg stated on Fox News in late March 2022 that his sources had informed him that Biden was supportive of Ukrainian peace negotiations with Russia through mid-March. On March 31, 2022, Ukrainian negotiators were popping champagne bottles having succeeded in negotiating a favorable peace deal ending the war with Russia only five weeks after it had begun, following weeks of negotiations with Russia in Istanbul according to Davyd Arakhamia, who served as the leader of the Ukrainian delegation while also serving as chairman of Ukraine’s ruling “Servant of the People” party. The agreed-upon terms amounted to a stunning victory for Ukraine by all accounts. After nearly capturing the Ukrainian capital of Kyiv at the onset of the war, Russia had agreed to withdraw its troops from all prewar Ukrainian-controlled territory in exchange for perpetual Ukrainian neutrality outside of NATO to include modifying the Ukrainian constitution back to its original neutral mandate, removing all NATO troops and CIA bases from Ukraine and permanent non-nuclear status. The agreement also included Ukrainian recognition of the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics along their prewar borders, a modest reduction in the size and armaments of the Ukrainian armed forces and a ban on far-right ultra-nationalist parties from serving in the government. Russia agreed to let Ukraine remain independent and for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to remain in power with Ukraine being able to join the European Union and receiving security guarantees from the Western powers against potential future Russian aggression.

The terms of this peace deal have been verified by Ukraine war enthusiast, Fiona Hill, in her Foreign Affairs article, entitled “The World Putin Wants” published in August 2022. According to Hill, Russia agreed to withdraw its troops to its pre-war borders in exchange for Ukraine agreeing to remain neutral outside of NATO, terms which have since been confirmed by multiple sources. Russia’s peace terms to end the war prove conclusively that Putin did not invade Ukraine to acquire new territory but rather to return Ukraine to its pre-February 2014 Maidan coup neutral status it enjoyed from 1991-2014 during which Ukraine was whole and free as well as to defend the Russian backed separatist Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics from a planned Ukraine military offensive. The very existence of this draft peace agreement proves that Western claims that Putin seeks nothing less but the destruction or annexation of most or all of Ukraine or else minimally the transformation of Ukraine into a Russian satellite state and that Ukraine is therefore fighting a war for its very existence as an independent nation have no basis in reality.

Putin has been denounced as a modern-day Hitler by Ukrainian and various Western leaders such as former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who previously admitted he voted for a Soviet-backed Communist for President in 1976. The comparison seems ridiculous but there may be one area where the comparison is apt. Putin’s surprisingly generous offer to withdraw Russian forces shortly after they invaded Ukraine was the equivalent of Hitler invading Poland and then offering to withdraw his troops from all but a comparatively tiny sliver of its territory mere days or weeks later. Of course, Hitler actually did offer to withdraw from all but four percent of Polish territory—namely the Polish Corridor--the day after he invaded, acquiescing in continued Polish control of nearly two-thirds of Germany’s lost territories. However, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, demonstrating the same absolutist streak we have seen from Joe Biden, foolishly rejected Hitler’s peace offer and chose an unnecessary world war that ended up costing the lives of seventy million people instead. One wonders how many millions may end up dying due to Biden’s refusal to accept Putin’s peace offers. If the war ends up escalating to the nuclear level, the final death toll could reach as high as a billion people.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and the head of Ukraine’s “Servant of the People” ruling party, Davyd Arakamia, both confirmed Putin’s assertion last year that the draft agreement was partially signed and ninety percent finalized according to multiple reports and it only remained to arrange a few details before Putin and Zelensky met to sign the agreement ending the war in Ukraine only weeks after it began. Arakamia, who served as the lead Ukrainian government negotiator said that the Ukrainian delegation concluded that the terms of the agreement were a victory for Ukraine and represented the best terms possible and that the only thing that remained before Putin and Zelensky met to sign it was to finish negotiating limits on how many tanks, aircraft, and rocket launchers Ukraine would be permitted to retain after the war ended. Articles published later that year show the two sides were not that far apart in terms of weapon systems either.

As confirmed in his interview with Tucker Carlson, Putin, satisfied that the objectives of Russia’s so-called ‘Special Military Operation’ had been largely achieved, agreed to the request of European leaders to prove his sincere support for peace by implementing the terms of the agreement by beginning a pre-announced, unilaterally Russian military withdrawal from nearly half of Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine the day after the draft agreement had been signed. This ended the threat that Russia would attempt to conquer Kyiv, overthrow Zelensky and install a puppet government in Ukraine in what seemed to be a stunning victory for NATO and its Ukrainian proxy. We now know that Russia withdrew its troops from northern Ukraine too early as their unilateral military withdrawal removed the biggest incentive for Ukraine to honor its peace agreement with Russia.

To reiterate, the objective of Russia’s Special Military Operation was not to capture Kyiv per se or even to annex any Ukrainian territory outside of the separatist republics which controlled only one-third of the Donbass region, but rather to partially surround Kyiv to force Ukraine to revert to its pre-Feb 2014 CIA-backed coup neutral buffer state status expelling all NATO troops and bases and ending its security relationship with NATO. Zelensky committed to doing that in a draft peace agreement that Ukraine had written, as a counteroffer to Russia’s 15 point peace plan, that was signed by Russia as written without any revisions on March 31, 2022. However, both Biden and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson refused to provide Zelensky with the security assurances he said he needed in order to finalize the agreement so he ended up repudiating it by mid to late April.

March 31st Ukraine War situation map showing how close Russia came to encircling Kyiv before Putin decided to unilaterally withdraw Russian troops from Kyiv and the rest of northern Ukraine in the belief that was all that was needed to finalize the draft peace agreement with Ukraine.

Contrary to the claims of Biden Democrats and neoconservative Republicans, there is no evidence that Putin wants to re-establish the Russian empire or reunite the Soviet Union let alone invade Eastern Europe. Putin’s withdrawal of Russian troops from nearly half of Russian occupied territory five weeks after invading Ukraine at a time when Kyiv was his for the taking when Ukrainian capitulation was imminent disproved their hypothesis conclusively. After over two years of war, Putin hasn't even bothered to conquer Ukraine’s second largest city of Kharkiv which is located only fifty miles from the Russian border. Nor has he made any attempt to reconquer and annex Kazakhstan during the past near quarter century he has been in power which would have given Russia back over half of the territory that Russia lost after the fall of the Soviet Union even though there's nothing the US could do to slow or stop him from doing so.

Much has been made of the 40-mile-long convoy of tanks and armored vehicles that Putin ordered halted on the road to Kyiv for an entire month beginning on March 1st. Western experts claimed they must have run out of fuel or broken down and pointed to this as a sign of impotency for the Russian army despite the fact that no such problems were visible anywhere else along the front. However, when Putin ordered them withdrawn following the signing of the interim peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine on March 31^st, they withdrew very quickly proving that they were neither out of fuel or broken down but that the reason they had halted was a political decision from the Kremlin. While it is true that Putin did attempt to encircle and capture Kyiv in the first week of the war in a bid to forcibly replace Zelensky with pro-Russian leader, former Ukrainian Vice Prime Minister Yuriy Boyko, once that failed, he used Russian troops in Kyiv and the rest of northern Ukraine to coerce Ukraine to agree to sign a peace agreement that was acceptable to Russia.

This powerful Russian armored convoy was a dagger pointed at Kyiv aimed at inducing Ukraine to agree to accept all of Russia’s limited objectives. Once Putin believed that was about to be achieved, he ordered Russian troops withdrawn from all northern Ukraine, which he had never wanted to permanently occupy in the first place. The bottom line is that if Putin had wanted to capture Kyiv or occupy all of Ukraine, he could have done so had he invaded with an army of half a million troops at the onset of the war. An existential war of conquest this was not. In his interview with Tucker Carlson on February 6^th, Putin stated he ordered the withdrawal of Russian forces from northern Ukraine at the suggestion of NATO leaders to prove he was sincere about fully implementing his interim peace agreement with Ukraine.

According to LTG Keith Kellogg (USA Ret.), President Biden was supporting peace negotiations during the first few weeks of the war behind the scenes. However, both the US and UK took the full Russian withdrawal from three Ukrainian oblasts including Kyiv itself as a sign of weakness emboldening them to step up military support for Ukraine. Then, under the false assumption that it was the Ukrainian armed forces that had miraculously chased the mighty Russian army from half of its territory inside of a week, they began claiming Ukraine could actually defeat Russia and expel Russian troops from all of their territory. For weeks, both Zelensky and the Biden administration had been stating that the ultimate goal of the war was for Russia to withdraw its troops to their pre-war positions. Yet, by late April, the Biden administration’s goal shifted to an unachievable objective—namely the liberation of all Russian annexed territory including Crimea. Retired generals on Fox News had already managed a dizzying 180 degree pivot shifting from saying Russian victory was inevitable to saying Ukraine could hold out against Russia if the US stepped up its arms shipments scarcely a month later.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson Arrives in Kyiv on April 8, 2022 threatening Zelensky with a loss of US and UK support if he proceeded with the signing of Ukraine’s draft peace agreement with Russia

Biden and Johnson Torpedo Russo-Ukrainian Peace Deal

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Kyiv on April 8th warning Zelensky the US and UK would not support a Ukrainian decision to make peace with Russia. Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett confirmed that Johnson blocked the peace deal even though Bennett had successfully mediated it with US, French and German support. Johnson informed Zelensky that if he abandoned all peace negotiations with Russia including Moscow’s demand of Ukrainian neutrality outside of NATO, both the UK and the US would essentially offer Ukraine a blank check of indefinite military and financial support to retake not just the five remaining Russian occupied Ukrainian oblasts of Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhia but Russia’s long-since annexed region of Crimea as well. Johnson informed Zelenskuy he had the full support of the Biden administration in making these declarations, which was subsequently confirmed. This was a deal Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt President could not refuse. The reasons he could not refuse have become increasingly obvious. Early last year, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh reported that the US was aware of widespread corruption on the part of Zelensky and other senior Ukrainian government officials revealing that Ukrainian government officials had embezzled at least $400 million in US aid by last year according to one CIA analysis. In January 2023, CIA Director William Burns traveled to Kyiv to warn Zelensky to stop stealing so much US foreign aid money.

“Zelensky has been buying the fuel from Russia, the country with which it, and Washington, are at war, and the Ukrainian president and many in his entourage have been skimming untold millions from the American dollars earmarked for diesel fuel payments. One estimate by analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency put the embezzled funds at $400 million last year, at least; another expert compared the level of corruption in Kiev as approaching that of the Afghan war, “although there will be no professional audit reports emerging from the Ukraine.” “Zelensky’s been buying discount diesel from the Russians,” one knowledgeable American intelligence official told me. “And who’s paying for the gas and oil? We are. Putin and his oligarchs are making millions” on it. Many government ministries in Kiev have been literally “competing,” I was told, to set up front companies for export contracts for weapons and ammunition with private arms dealers around the world, all of which provide kickbacks.

The issue of corruption was directly raised with Zelensky in a meeting last January in Kiev with CIA Director William Burns. His message to the Ukrainian president, I was told by an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the meeting, was out of a 1950s mob movie. The senior generals and government officials in Kiev were angry at what they saw as Zelensky’s greed, so Burns told the Ukrainian president, because “he was taking a larger share of the skim money than was going to the generals.” Burns also presented Zelensky with a list of thirty-five generals and senior officials whose corruption was known to the CIA and others in the American government. Zelensky responded to the American pressure ten days later by publicly dismissing ten of the most ostentatious officials on the list and doing little else. “The ten he got rid of were brazenly bragging about the money they had—driving around Kiev in their new Mercedes,” the intelligence official told me.”

In October, a Ukrainian government official confirmed that the corruption has continued telling a reporter back that “people are stealing like there is no tomorrow” embezzling hundreds of millions more in US aid. We also know that the Ukrainian government has sent back tens of millions of dollars in indirect kickbacks through Sam Bankman Fried and other FTX executives to mostly Democrat US Senators but also a few Republicans like Senate Minority Mitch McConnell and Sen. Mitt Romney that supported massive US aid to Ukraine to help them get re-elected in 2022.

It turns out that the very reason that Biden chose war over peace in January 2022 was a farce all along. According to the recently published book “Breaking Biden—Exposing the Hidden Forces and Secret Money Machine Behind Joe Biden, His Family, and His Administration” by Alex Marlow, “In April 2022, with the war raging, Zelensky told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that the Biden administration never intended to truly support Ukraine’s membership bid for NATO. The Ukrainian president stated that throughout 2021, Biden officials privately told him that NATO membership was never truly on the table but that “publicly, the doors would remain open.” If that is true and it likely is, then the entire rationale for Biden provoking Russia to invade was based on lies. Biden and Zelensky refused to publicly give up on Ukrainian NATO membership to avert a certain Russian invasion while privately sharing an understanding that it would never happen. Major wars have seldom been provoked for more foolish reasons than this and the GOP-led House should explore hearings to ascertain the degree to which Biden is to blame for provoking this unnecessary and manufactured war in Ukraine as well as whether his family’s multi-million-dollar business ties with Ukraine.

The fact that Biden and Boris Johnson vetoed the finalization of the Russo-Ukrainian peace agreement and the withdrawal of Russian military forces to their prewar positions means that the Biden administration and British governments which are indirectly responsible for every Ukrainian life that has been lost since early April 2022. The question is why did the Biden administration reject victory when Russia offered it to them on a silver platter with an unprecedented Russian military withdrawal from 100 percent of Ukraine’s pre-war controlled territory after only five weeks of fighting, opting to prolong the war indefinitely in an unwinnable war to weaken Russia and sacrifice the lives of half a million Ukrainians instead? We can only speculate why Biden foolishly rejected Putin’s' offer to roll back Russian troops to its prewar borders. However, it seems to be his refusal to give up on his dream to expand America's liberal empire all along Russia’s western frontier including Ukraine giving it dominance over all of Europe as some kind of ‘benevolent hegemon’ despite being a non-European power. Giving up US control of Ukraine and ending Ukraine’s de facto NATO membership seems to be the one condition for peace the Biden administration refuses to accept. It was Biden’s refusal to guarantee Ukraine would never become a NATO member that caused Putin to invade Ukraine in the first place after he had spent the previous 15 years exhausting all diplomatic options to end the crisis.

Since the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 followed by the withdrawal of Russian troops from Eastern Europe a few years later, NATO lost its reason to exist as Russia lost any desire to reclaim its former Eastern European Empire. However, because NATO serves as both the primary symbol and instrument of US dominance over its European members, US leaders including Biden have used NATO expansion to expand its control and influence over the continent while searching for reasons to validate its continued existence. The Russian threat to invade Ukraine has provided a convenient pretext to do so as does Biden’s continuation of the war when Putin has provided multiple exit ramps for Ukraine and NATO to end it over the past two years. That explains why Biden refused Putin’s offer to withdraw Russian troops from the Ukrainian border in December 2021 in exchange for a US guarantee Ukraine would never join NATO even though Biden knows it was a farce all along.

The senior ranks of the Biden administration are filled by Atlanticists who view NATO expansion as a religious tenet which they will never willingly abandon believing that NATO and by default NATO expansion is the very cornerstone of US national security, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding even though it has been NATO expansion to the borders of the Russian Federation that has effectively created the very threat NATO was supposedly created to deter the emergence of a more militarily powerful and aggressive Russia. The House should also conduct hearings whether potential blackmail over Zelensky disclosing evidence proving his successful effort to obtain $5 million in bribe money for himself from the notoriously corrupt Ukrainian company Burisma and $5 million for Hunter influenced his decision to prolong the war unnecessarily.

Biden Adopts Unattainable Objectives and Opts to Prolong the War Indefinitely

Biden memorialized this new Western strategy communicated by Prime Minister Johnson to Zelensky by declaring that the US would support Ukraine “as long as it takes” and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin followed up with a visit to Ukraine in April 25-26^th making even more sweeping promises of support for Kyiv. He stated that not only would the US continue to support Ukraine until it retook control of the Donbass and Crimea, which was annexed by Russia a decade ago but that it would seek to so weaken Russia as to eliminate its conventional military capability to wage offensive war. This is an objective that US military planners previously assessed could only be accomplished with US nuclear strikes on Russian strategic military targets. Biden stated that the goal of Western economic sanctions against Russia was to collapse its economy while calling for Putin to be overthrown from power so he could be tried for alleged war crimes.

Neoconservative Republicans have joined Democrats in declaring Biden's war against Russia in Ukraine a success because although half a million Ukrainians have died or been seriously wounded in the fighting thus far, no US combat troops have been lost. As noted by Responsible Statecraft, Sen. Lindsey Graham declared early in the war: “Four months into this thing, I like the structural path we're on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person,” said Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) early into the war, accidentally voicing what the war’s critics have often said about the war — that the U.S. will fight it “to the last Ukrainian.” Later, Graham called it the “best money we’ve ever spent.” While Ukraine has scored some major triumphs against Russia most notably the September 2022 Kharkiv and November 2022 Kherson counteroffensives, they have done so at a terrible cost with a deplorable casualty rate approximately three times higher than Russia’s. During the summer 2023 counteroffensive, Zelensky sacrificed the lives of up to 80,000 Ukrainian troops to achieve negligible territorial gains so small that they could hardly be seen on a map, amounting to 0.25 percent of Ukraine’s territory.

The casualty rate that so strongly favors the Russian side is to some extent surprising given the fact that Putin has forced the Russian armed forces to fight with one hand tied behind its back in a fashion reminiscent of the way the US fought the Vietnam War and that Russian troops were outnumbered in troops by about three to one for most of the first year of the war and have continued to fight numerically outmatched in Ukraine ever since. While the Ukrainian army currently consists of 600,000 troops, Russia only has 450,000 troops stationed in Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory. These facts strongly suggest that Western conceptions of the Russian military as weak and ineffective are little more than propaganda. In fact, the Russian military has proven quite resilient improving in its tactics and strategy over the course of the war since Putin began providing it with sufficient manpower reserves to hold of Russia’s annexed territories early last year.

With 500,000 Ukrainian soldiers killed or seriously wounded to date, Zelensky is attempting to draft another half million Ukrainian men and women to serve in the military to prevent the army from collapsing. However, one Ukrainian Army Captain stated he doesn’t think there are another 500,000 Ukrainians who are willing to die in this war. One must ask if the death toll in Ukraine has to reach a million lives before Biden, the Democrats and their America Last Republican allies in Congress stop believing this tragic and unnecessary war has been a good deal?

My Peace Plans to End the War

In June 2022, I published my proposed fifteen-point peace plan in The National Interest which I updated a couple weeks later in “The Real War” newsletter. I wrote the plan to make it as favorable as possible to Ukraine while also being minimally acceptable to Russia as the dominant and increasingly victorious power in the conflict to save Ukraine from further unnecessary death and destruction. My peace plan was notable for being the first comprehensive peace plan to end the war in Ukraine to be published in the West. After I published my peace plan, which received a lot of international attention, I was immediately denounced and viciously attacked by Ukrainians and placed on their blacklist along with 34 other “high-profile” Americans including former COL Douglas Macgregor (USA-Ret), Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

While the US and Ukraine continued to refuse all peace negotiations from April 2022 onward, the Russian government continued to support peace negotiations to end the war along the lines of its March 2022 peace deal with Ukraine, the terms of which even Zelensky said were much more reasonable than previous Russian peace offers. I predicted in April 2022, that Russia would annex the four Ukrainian oblasts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhia and Kherson if Zelensky continued to refuse to negotiate a peaceful end to the war and that is exactly what it did in September 2022. At that time, Russia pivoted away from offering a Russian military withdrawal from Russian occupied territory in exchange for Ukrainian neutrality outside of NATO to offering a permanent cease-fire and armistice agreement which recognized continued Russian control of the annexed oblasts plus Crimea, stating that most of the objectives of its special military occupation had been realized and stating its belief that the remaining objectives could be obtained diplomatically. Russia has continued to offer a permanent cease-fire, even attempting to unilaterally implement one in December 2022 which Ukraine refused to reciprocate. I immediately published a new peace proposal for a permanent cease-fire and Korean-style armistice agreement along the lines of control in The National Interest. While this plan garnered less attention, many other more well-known foreign policy experts have since repeated my call for an armistice agreement using many of the same provisions of my proposal.

Yet, President Biden and the other irrational actors who occupy the senior ranks of his Cabinet continue to repeat the lie that Ukraine will join NATO even reportedly offering to Russia a peace deal hand-delivered by CIA Director William Burns in a secret trip to Moscow back in January 2023 which would allow Russia to retain all its annexed territories from Ukraine providing it dropped its opposition to Ukrainian NATO membership. Given the fact, the principal reason, if not the only reason, that Russia invaded Ukraine was to roll-back its de facto NATO membership stemming from the US-Ukraine Strategic Partnership agreement signed in November 2021, it came as no surprise when Russia rejected the Biden administration’s peace offer.

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken subsequently stated the US would essentially veto any attempt by Ukraine to end the war with Russia on the basis of a negotiated peace settlement revealing what most realist national security analysts had already suspected which was that it was the US not Ukraine that was calling the shots in its war with Russia and that Ukraine was nothing more than a useful US proxy whose troops were to be used as cannon fodder in furtherance of the US objective of weakening Russia militarily. How it was in America’s interest to weaken Russia militarily, while potentially provoking an unnecessary world war with Russia that could end in America’s and NATO’s entire nuclear obliteration, neither the Biden administration’s officials nor any of its dutiful neoconservative cheerleaders have ever bothered to explain.   according

In January, reports surfaced claiming Russia was making a back-channel peace offer to the US that seemed to completely mirror Biden’s last peace offer which called for an armistice in which Russia would be allowed to keep all of its annexed Ukrainian territories but would agree to allow Ukraine to join NATO. The question is why would Russia agree to accept Biden's peace offer now when Russia is in a much stronger position in terms of winning its war in Ukraine than it was a year ago before the disastrous Ukrainian counteroffensive? The answer, of course, is they wouldn't. Accordingly, I think we can safely ascribe this story to Ukrainian disinformation. 

Biden Continues to Reject Putin’s Peace Offers to End the War in Ukraine

During Putin’s interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson on February 6th in which he detailed the history of his peace overtures to the West from 2000 when he asked President Bill Clinton if Russia would be accepted into NATO, Putin reiterated his desire to being peace negotiations with the US and Ukraine as swiftly as possible, practically begging Biden and Zelensky to come back to the negotiating table. Nevertheless, US leaders continue to deliberately mislead Americans, claiming Putin doesn’t want peace and isn’t ready to negotiate when in fact it is the Biden administration and Zelensky that is refusing all negotiations and wanting the war to continue indefinitely at the costs of hundreds of thousands more dead Ukrainians. A more anti-Ukrainian policy on the part of the Biden administration could hardly be imagined. David Sacks published an excellent article about this entitled “The War of Lies” late last month highlighting NATO leaders Orwellian statements about the origins of the war, how it is actually going and how they know it is going to end, calculated to deceive Western citizens into supporting a war in opposition to their own national security interests when if they knew the truth about it they would almost certainly unite in opposing it.

Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson interviewing Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on February 6th

The New York Times quoted a National Security Council spokesman as stating:

“Both we and President Zelensky have said numerous times that we believe this war will end through negotiations…Despite Mr. Putin’s words, we have seen no actions to indicate he is interested in ending this war. If he was, he would pull back his forces and stop his ceaseless attacks on Ukraine.”

If Putin pulling back Russian troops from Ukraine is the proof of his sincerity to negotiate peace with Ukraine, then wouldn’t the Biden administration have taken his unilateral military withdrawal of Russian troops from nearly half of hard-won Russian occupied territory in Ukraine in April 2022 as proof that Putin was sincere about enforcing his peace deal with Ukraine? Can anyone imagine Adolf Hitler unilaterally withdrawing German troops from nearly half of German-occupied Europe at the height of World War Two and not taking it as a sign he was sincere about wanting peace with the West? Russia even enacted a unliteral 36-hour cease-fire in recognition of Orthodox Christmas from January 6-7, 2023 in the hopes that Ukraine would reciprocate and the cease-fire would become permanent. Not surprisingly, the Biden administration dismissed this and many other substantive Russian peace gestures before and after the war began as insincere when in fact it exposed their own stated criteria for peace talks as a farce.

Instead, Biden took Putin’s monumental “act of goodwill to help with peace talks” as a sign of weakness, telling Zelensky to cancel all peace negotiations with Russia and promising him a blank check of US military support to fight the war “as long as it takes’ to liberate all Ukrainian territory including Crimea from Russian control? The irony of the Biden administration’s hypocrisy on this point apparently escapes them or more likely, they just try to cover up the truth about Putin’s numerous and sincere offers to negotiate a compromise peace agreement ending the war hoping Americans never know that every single Ukrainian death in this war was entirely and easily avoidable if Biden had compromised with Russia on the issue of Ukraine NATO membership before the war.

Hitler made a similar goodwill gesture by halting his Panzers outside of Dunkirk and allowing the entire British Expeditionary Force and over 200,000 French troops to escape capture in May 1940 foolishly believing that Britain would take this gesture as proof of his desire for peace with Britain and accept his July 1940 peace offer to withdraw German troops from France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark and Norway but he was proven entirely mistaken. Similarly, Putin’s decision to unilaterally withdraw Russian troops from northern Ukraine, most importantly Kyiv, has proven to be the biggest mistake of the war as if he hadn’t, Ukraine likely would have finalized its peace deal with Russia and the war would have ended in April 2022 and Russia’s own military losses would have been much lower.

It is worth noting that it was the Western powers absolutist refusal to compromise that led to the unnecessary and disastrous prolongation of World War One and the outbreak and prolongation of countless wars at the costs of tens of millions of innocents since and it is Biden’s refusal to compromise that has provoked and unnecessarily prolonged the war in Ukraine by nearly two years. It was President Ronald Reagan’s and President George HW Bush’s willingness to compromise that gave Soviet leader Gorbachev the confidence that he could safely collapse the Soviet Union in what was, without question, of the greatest victories for freedom in world history. Had Biden or neoconservative Republicans been in charge at that time, either the Soviet Union would likely still exist or else they might have provoked the Soviets to use its nuclear weapons to destroy the U.S. entirely. History is constantly repeating itself, but US leaders seem entirely unwilling to learn from the mistakes of history and so are condemned to repeat them. One can only hope and pray that Biden’s refusal to negotiate peace with Russia doesn’t provoke an unnecessary nuclear war with Russia that costs the lives of up to a billion innocents.

The New York times article also quotes Samuel Charap, a Russia analyst at the RAND Corporation, who said “it was worth engaging the Kremlin in private to determine Mr. Putin’s actual demands stating, “Nobody knows for sure — and nobody can know for sure unless they try,” Mr. Charap said. He added that it was notable that Mr. Putin had not told Mr. Calrson that he had any preconditions for talks, such as the removal of Mr. Zelensky’s government. Mr. Charap also noted that Russia and Ukraine were already negotiating on a number of matters, including prisoner-of-war swaps and Ukrainian exports from its Black Sea ports.” The author then correctly notes that even if Putin were sincere in wanting peace, Zelensky is unwilling to compromise on his demand of a full Russian withdrawal from all of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory including Russian Crimea. Again, this is false as anyone who has been paying attention to Russia’s peace proposals knows what Putin’s demands are as Russia made its peace terms public in late February and March 2022, proving virtually all Ukraine war experts quoted by liberal mainstream media are either ignorant or entirely divorced from reality.

Back in September 2022, I had a comprehensive peace proposal I was going to share with Russian state media to send to the Kremlin encouraging Moscow to go public with its specific minimum peace terms but sadly Putin’s decision to annex the four Ukrainian oblasts was announced before I could send it causing Russia’s minimum peace terms to be modified to recognize continued Russian control of those territories. Accordingly, I was forced to radically modify my peace plan to take into account this new reality culminating in this Korean War-style armistice proposal I published in The National Interest.

During his interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson last month, Putin repeatedly expressed a sincere desire to negotiate a peaceful end the war with both the US and Ukraine, but he lamented both countries continue to refuse to discuss how to bring this unnecessary war to an end.  Rather than rejecting peace, the Biden administration should take up Putin on his offer. I believe that the key to achieving a peace deal would be one that recognized continued de facto Russian control of all its annexed Ukrainian territories while permanently banning all NATO military forces from entering Ukraine and disarmed Ukraine of all its nuclear capable missiles and delivery systems. Such an agreement which also included a US security guarantee for Ukraine outside of NATO would render the NATO membership issue moot perhaps giving Biden a face-saving exit to ending his proxy war with Russia in Ukraine now that everyone admits Ukraine has no chance to regaining its lost territories from Russia.

Why did Putin Invade Ukraine and Who Are Ukraine’s True Enemies in the US?

History has shown conclusively that Putin only takes aggressive action in reaction to what he believes are increasing, and at times existential, threats from the NATO alliance to Russia’s legitimate security interests. For example, Putin never thought about invading Georgia until the Bucharest Declaration in April 2008 which said that both Ukraine and Georgia would join. He never thought about invading Ukraine until Bush told him he planned to expand NATO into Ukraine. He never dreamed about attacking Finland until they joined NATO. One would think that US leaders would see a clear pattern here. Putin didn't invade Ukraine while Trump was President because he feared Trump but rather, he didn’t invade because he didn't feel threatened by Trump because he knew Trump was committed to peace with Russia and wanted to withdraw the US from NATO.

Putin did invade Ukraine after Biden got elected because Biden pursued an extremely anti-Russian policy, signed a Strategic partnership agreement with Ukraine and engaged in joint NATO military exercises in Ukraine making it a de-facto NATO member by November 2021. The more Biden and NATO threatens Russia with increased NATO attacks on military strategic targets inside Russia and even potential military intervention in Ukraine, the greater the chance Putin will respond with a massive cyberattack and perhaps even a super-EMP or nuclear attack that could effectively destroy the US and NATO.  At some point US leaders have to get smart and learn the lessons of history but it seems like they never do.

The most important thing to realize about the war in Ukraine is that half a million Ukrainians would not be dead or seriously wounded if Biden had given Russia a written guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO in January 2022 as Putin had pledged not to invade Ukraine if he had. Joe Biden vetoed the peace deal Russia and Ukraine were about to sign in early April 2022 that would have ended the war with a Russian withdrawal from six out of eight oblasts. Accordingly, he is to blame for every Ukrainian who has died in the war since. It is the Democrats and their neocon Republican allies who have unnecessarily prolonged the war for the past two years by giving Ukraine unlimited financial and military aid without which Zelensky would have been forced to make peace with Russia back in 2022.

It is supremely ironic that the people who claim to care about Ukraine are the ones that have been destroying Ukraine and getting then killed in an unwinnable war of their own making. Whereas opponents of military aid to Ukraine supporters of a permanent cease fire and negotiated peace with Ukraine have been trying to save Ukraine from being overrun by Russia and save hundreds of thousands of brave Ukrainians killed unnecessarily. Speaker Mike Johnson has courageously refused to buckle to increasing pressure from Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Biden’s own neoconservative Republican collaborators in the House to agree to take up the Senate Ukraine aid bill. The Biden administration has a moral obligation to end the war as soon as possible by suspending further aid to Ukraine until Zelensky agrees to sign and implement a permanent cease-fire and armistice agreement with Russia to save Ukraine from further death, destruction and territorial losses, thus allowing ten million Ukrainian refugees to return to their homes and the process of reconstruction to rebuild. More importantly, he has a moral obligation and duty to the American people to safeguard them against the increasing threat of Russian nuclear escalation if this war continues.

© David T. Pyne 2024

David T. Pyne, Esq. is a former U.S. Army combat arms and Headquarters staff officer, who was in charge of armaments cooperation with the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and the Americas from 2000-2003, with an M.A. in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. He currently serves as Executive Vice President of the Task Force on National and Homeland Security and as a member of the Committee on the Present Danger-China. He recently served as Defense and Foreign Policy Advisor to a top-tier presidential candidate. He has also co-authored the best-selling new book, “Catastrophe Now--America’s Last Chance to Avoid an EMP Disaster” and his new book “A Nuclear Posture Review for Advanced Technology Weapons” will be published in early fall 2024. He serves as the Editor of “The Real War” newsletter at dpyne.substack.com and as a contributor to “The National Interest”. Here is a link to his interview archive. He may be reached at emptaskforce.ut@gmail.com.

Recent Media Interviews

February 9th-Interview with REN TV to discuss Zelensky’s likely reasons for firing of Ukrainian Commander-in-Chief General Valery Zeluzhny and how it will likely affect the course of the war in Ukraine.

February 14th—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Broadcast Network radio and TV shows to discuss the threat of a Iranian nuclear/super EMP missile launch from a cargo ship as well as the request by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Turner to declassify a Russian plan to put a nuclear (likely super-EMP) weapon in orbit to use to destroy US satellites on the first day of any war with them. Here is the link to the TV interview.

February 20th—Interview on RT’s Crosstalk TV program hosted by Peter Lavelle to discuss the true origins of the war in Ukraine, who is winning the war, how it is likely to end and what security arrangement can be made between Russia and NATO to prevent it from re-occurring. Here is the recording.

February 20th—Interview with Jon Twitchell on his Talk with Jon show to discuss Tucker Carlson’s interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the state of the war in Ukraine, Russia’s new super EMP satellites which can destroy the US and my peace plan to end the Gaza War. Here is a link to the interview.

February 21st—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Hour show on Patriot TV to discuss the news that Biden is trying to stop the Russian super-EMP satellite from being tested as well as the story that 75% of components in a North Korean KM-23 SRBM were found to be made in America. Here is the link to the interview.

February 22nd—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Radio network broadcast on 67 affiliates to discuss the effects of EMP on cellphone networks and US communication systems. Here is the link.

February 27th—Interview with Jon Twitchell on his Talk with Jon show to discuss the latest developments with regards to Russia, the war in Ukraine, the war in Gaza and the increasing threat of war with China. Here is a link to the interview.

February 27th—Interview with Nima Alkhorshid on his Dialogue Works podcast to discuss the 2nd anniversary of the war in Ukraine as well as my newly published peace plan to end the war on Gaza on fair and reasonable terms while also ending America’s proxy war with Iran. Here is the link to the interview.

February 27th—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Hour show on Patriot TV to discuss the NATO threat that the UK and France are considering sending an Expeditionary Force into central Ukraine to fight Russia directly and start World War Three and Russia’s threat to nuke the US and NATO if they do. Here is a link to the interview.

Upcoming Media Interviews

March 5th—Interview on the COL Rob Maness (USA Ret) on the Rob Maness Show to discuss the Russian super-EMP satellite threat, the potential vulnerabilities of America’s Nuclear Command, Control and Communications (NC3) system and what we can do to reduce America’s vulnerability to a nuclear/EMP first strike.

March 6th—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Hour show on Patriot TV to discuss Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Decision to Highlight the 14 top US nuclear targets Russia would attack if US troops are sent to fight Russia in Ukraine during his annual presidential address.

March 8th—Interview with Brannon Howse on his Worldview Weekend Hour show on Patriot TV to discuss General Cotton’s leaked classified briefing to the Senate Armed Services Committee that China will finish deploying its new DF-45 mobile ICBM based in its 3,000 mile underground tunnel network by next year greatly expanding the size of China’s strategic nuclear arsenal.

March 15th—Interview on The American Journal hosted by Harrison Smith to discuss Russian and Chinese super-EMP satellites and orbital nuclear weapons as well as the coming Chinese blockade of Taiwan and ramifications for the US.

March 21st—Serving as a panel speaker on the Nation State Threats Panel with some DHS, FBI and NSA officials at the Critical Infrastructure Security Summit at the Utah Valley University Center for National Security Studies in Orem from 8:30am-4:30pm.

March 22nd—Interview with Canadian Prepper to discuss the chances that the US may soon be embroiled in a two-front world war with both Russia and China.

April 18th-19th—I will be presenting an extensive briefing at the Firm Foundation Expo at 10am on April 18th and 6pm on April 19th at the Mountain America Expo Center at 9575 South State Street in Sandy, Utah to discuss the increasing threat of World War Three with Russia, China, North Korea and Iran and what we need to do to avert it.