The eruption of war between Russia and Ukraine appears to have given the CIA the pretext to launch a long-planned insurgency in the country, one poised to spread far beyond Ukraine’s borders with major implications for Biden’s “War on Domestic Terror”.
As the conflict between Ukraine and Russia continues to escalate and dominate the world’s attention, the increasing evidence that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is and has been working to create and arm an insurgency in the country has received considerably little attention considering its likely consequences.
This is particularly true given that former CIA officials and a former Secretary of State are now openly saying that the CIA is following the “models” of past CIA-backed insurgencies in Afghanistan and Syria for its plans in Ukraine. Given that those countries have been ravaged by war as a direct result of those insurgencies, this bodes poorly for Ukraine.
Yet, this insurgency is poised to have consequences that reach far beyond Ukraine. It increasingly appears that the CIA sees the insurgency it is creating as more than an opportunity to take its hybrid war against Russia ever closer to its borders. As this report will show, it appears the CIA is determined to manifest a prophecy propagated by its own ranks over the past two years.
This prediction from former and current intelligence officials dates from at least early 2020 and holds that a “transnational white supremacist network” with alleged ties to the Ukraine conflict will be the next global catastrophe to befall the world as the threat of Covid-19 recedes.
Per these “predictions”, this global network of white supremacists – allegedly with a group linked to the conflict in the Donbas region of Ukraine at its core – is to become the new Islamic State-style threat and will undoubtedly be used as the pretext to launch the still-dormant infrastructure set up last year by the US government under President Biden for an Orwellian “War on Domestic Terror.”
Given that this CIA-driven effort to build an insurgency in Ukraine began as far back as 2015 and that the groups it has trained (and continues to train) include those with overt Neo-Nazi connections, it seems that this “coming Ukrainian insurgency,” as it has been recently called, is already here.
In that context, we are left with the unnerving possibility that this latest escalation of the Ukraine-Russia conflict has merely served as the opening act for the newest iteration of the seemingly endless “War on Terror.”
Insurgency Rising
Soon after Russia began military operations in Ukraine, Foreign Affairs – the media arm of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) – published an article entitled “The Coming Ukrainian Insurgency.”
The piece was authored by Douglas London, a self-described “retired Russian-speaking CIA operations officer who served in Central Asia and managed agency counterinsurgency operations.” He asserted in the article that “Putin will face a long, bloody insurgency that will spread across multiple borders” with the potential to create “widening unrest that could destabilize other countries in Russia’s orbit.”
Other notable statements made by London include his assertion that “the United States will invariably be a major and essential source of backing for a Ukrainian insurgency.”
He also states that “As the United States learned in Vietnam and Afghanistan, an insurgency that has reliable supply lines, ample reserves of fighters, and sanctuary over the border can sustain itself indefinitely, sap an occupying army’s will to fight, and exhaust political support for the occupation at home.”
London explicitly refers to models for this apparently imminent Ukrainian insurgency as the CIA-backed insurgencies in Afghanistan in the 1980s and the “moderate rebels” in Syria from 2011 to the present.
London isn’t alone in promoting these past CIA-backed insurgencies as a model for “covert” US aid to Ukraine. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whose State Department helped to create the “moderate rebel” insurgency in Syria and oversaw the US and NATO-backed destruction of Libya, appeared on MSNBC on February 28th to say essentially the same.
In her interview, Clinton cited the CIA-backed insurgency in Afghanistan as “the model that people [in the US government] are now looking toward” with respect to the situation in Ukraine. She also references the insurgency in Syria in similar fashion in the same interview. It is worth noting that Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff when she was Secretary of State, Jake Sullivan, is now Biden’s National Security Adviser.
The Afghanistan insurgency, initially backed by the US and CIA beginning in the late 1970s under the name Operation Cyclone, subsequently spawned the US empire’s supposedly mortal enemies – the Taliban and Al Qaeda – who would go on to fuel the post-9/11 “War on Terror.”
The US’ campaign against the descendants of the insurgency it had once backed resulted in horrific destruction in Afghanistan and a litany of dead and war crimes, as well as the longest (and thus most expensive) war and occupation in American military history. It also resulted in the bombings and destruction of several other countries along with the whittling down of civil liberties domestically.
Similarly, in Syria, the US and CIA’s backing of “moderate rebels” was and remains incredibly destructive to the country it supposedly wants to merely “liberate” from the rule of Bashar al-Assad. The US military continues to occupy critical areas of that country.
With these openly touted as “models” for the “coming Ukraine insurgency,” what is to become of Ukraine, then? If the history of CIA-backed insurgencies is any indicator, it heralds significantly more destruction and more suffering for its people than the current Russian military campaign.
Ukraine will become a failed state and a killing field. Those in the West cheering on their governments’ support for the Ukrainian side of the conflict would do well to realize this, particularly in the United States, as it will only lead to the escalation of yet another deadly proxy war.
However, in addition to the above, we must also consider the very unsettling reality that this Ukrainian insurgency began to be formed by the CIA at least several months, if not several years, prior to Russia’s currently ongoing military campaign in Ukraine. Yahoo! News reported in January that the CIA has been overseeing a covert training program for Ukrainian intelligence operatives and special ops forces since 2015.
Their report explicitly quotes one former CIA official with knowledge of the program as saying that the CIA has been “training an insurgency” and has been conducting this training at an undisclosed US military base. This training of Ukrainian “insurgents” was supported by the Obama, Trump, and now Biden administrations, with the latter two expanding its operations.
While the CIA denied to Yahoo! that it was training an insurgency, a New York Times report also published in January stated that the US is considering support for an insurgency in Ukraine if Russia invades.
Given that the CIA, at that time and prior to this year, has been warning of an imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine up until the current escalation of hostilities took place, it is worth asking if the US government and the CIA helped “pull the trigger” by intentionally crossing Russia’s “red lines” with respect to NATO encroachment in Ukraine and post-2014 Ukraine’s acquisition of nuclear weapons when it became clear that the CIA’s repeated predictions about an “imminent” invasion failed to materialize.
Russia’s red lines with Ukraine have been stated clearly – and violated repeatedly by the US – for years. Notably, the US’ efforts to provide lethal aid to Ukraine have coincided with the winding down of its lethal support to Syrian “rebels”, suggesting that the US war and intelligence apparatus has long seen Ukraine as the “next” on its list of proxy wars.
However, more recently, the CIA’s warnings of an imminent invasion of Ukraine were scoffed at, not only by many American analysts, but also apparently by both the Russian and Ukrainian governments themselves.
It is alleged that this all changed, at least from the Russian perspective, following Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s claim at the Munich Security Conference that his government would seek to make Ukraine a nuclear power in violation of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. Surely, Zelensky and his supporters in Washington DC and Langley, Virginia would have known that such an extreme claim from Zelensky would elicit a response from Russia.
One need only consider the reverberations that follow any country announcing its intentions to become a nuclear power on the world stage. Russian leadership has since made the case that they felt compelled to act militarily after Ukraine, which has been regularly attacking separatists along its border with Russia with embedded paramilitary units that have called for the “extermination” of ethnic Russians who live in those regions, announced plans to acquire nukes.
In addition, given Ukraine’s growing ties to NATO and its desire to integrate itself into that alliance, these theoretical nuclear weapons would be NATO-controlled nukes on Russia’s border. Zelensky, the US, and their other allied parties surely knew that this intention, particularly its admission in public, would push an already tense situation to the next level.
Of course, this statement from Zelensky followed a US-led airlift of weapons to Ukraine early last month, weeks before the current Russian military campaign. US lethal aid to Ukraine has previously been described as being tantamount to a “declaration of war” on Russia by the US, per members of Russia’s Ministry of Defense as far back as 2017.
It is worth considering that these red lines and the potential to cross them was discussed by Zelensky and representatives of Ukraine’s intelligence services when they met with the head of the CIA, William Burns, in January. The CIA, at that time, was already claiming a Russian invasion of Ukraine was imminent. Given the events described above, could it be possible that the CIA wanted to bring about the insurgency they have been preparing for, potentially since 2015?
Would they have done so by pushing their allies in Ukraine’s government to manifest the conditions necessary to begin that insurgency, i.e. prompting them to cross Russia’s “red lines” to elicit the reaction needed to launch a pre-planned insurgency? With the CIA also training Ukraine’s intelligence operatives for nearly seven years, the possibility is certainly one to consider.
If this theory is more than plausible and close to the truth of how we got here, we are left with more questions, mainly – Why would the CIA look to launch this insurgency in Ukraine and why now? The apparent answer may surprise you.
