Justice is Coming...for Putin

Vladimir Putin and his Western Allies are in Hell

Photo Credit: SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”    -    Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“All warfare is based on deception,” according to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and there are few “world leaders” who have proven more deceptive and a danger to international security than Vladimir Putin. He’s the richest thief, a global terrorist, and sociopath who serves as the illegitimate president of the Russian Federation and continues to wage hybrid war against Russians and many nations. Putin is prepared to worsen the eight years of war he has waged on Ukraine’s soil by using the full force of his military against a neighbor that only wants to live in peace. As the global military machine churns in anticipation, the Kremlin is preparing to cross a red-line that is a World War III-level act of war against the West and threatens countless Russian lives. It is a test to see who shapes the future – the world’s most powerful murderous criminal regime or humanity in its fight for freedom and survival; everything is at stake, even if many fail to understand the significance - history is at a crossroad.

“There is no instance of a country having benefited from pro-longed warfare.”

-        Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Beloved American poet Robert Frost famously said, “Freedom lies in being bold.” Now is the time for the United States to be bold, allow truth to prevail, and prosecute American criminal fascists who helped the Kremlin secure influence in American politics and held the country hostage while they waged hybrid war against the United States for well over a half decade, endangering countless lives, and threatening the Constitution. This same Kremlin-backed network of American blood-money political mercenaries have attacked nations around the world. Judgement day is coming and all roads lead to Vladimir Putin, the one who needs to pay the greatest price.

It is not a coincidence Putin continues to threaten Ukraine with military might at the same time the United States is preparing to prosecute Putin’s American network of top political warfare operatives, starting with the Kremlin’s cult-leader Donald J. Trump, who was installed in 2016 with a Kremlin-financed shadow campaign that included a Russian military intelligence operation and the help of Putin’s long-time American political warfare generals, including Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Erik Prince, Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, the Freedom Caucus, and Henry Kissinger, among others. The Kremlin-GOP team, with support from its allies along the political spectrum, spent the next four years advancing Putin’s agenda while fueling civil unrest, purging the government and installing loyal fascists, waging disinformation warfare, trying to destroy Russia investigations and launching lawfare operations against witnesses, attacking the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies, weakening democracy, mass extortion, turning a global pandemic into a biowarfare disaster, and creating a pandemic of mental illness and exhausting the country while weakening it globally.

The political hybrid warfare playbook Putin used to install and keep Trump in the presidency was an old and tested one that dates to Russian and European monarchies of past centuries in crusades of imperial expansionism. The Russian Federation’s modern version of hybrid warfare, with new technologies weaponized, like social media platforms, allows Putin to expand his criminal empire’s ambitions well beyond geographic restraints, including an attempt to seize the United States using the same team and techniques that worked in Ukraine. The hybrid warfare battles are strategized, managed, and executed with the help of American political operatives, like Paul Manafort, who made fortunes propping-up Kremlin-controlled politicians in Ukraine, and laundering money through the country’s political system to fuel Washington, D.C.’s addiction to the blood money industry. Many American influencers of diverse political backgrounds and professions receive cuts of the high profit generating business, including law firms, think tanks, public relations firms, political firms, polling firms, media influencers, and others.

It is important to acknowledge that those most targeted by Putin’s political hybrid warfare tactics, which he uses to feed his insatiable hunger for money and power, and his craving for suffering and death, are the Russian themselves, his greatest victims. Putin commits acts of terror, holds fraudulent elections, bombards with disinformation while killing and silencing truth-tellers, wages psychological operations (PSYOPs) and cyber warfare, among other atrocities. Putin has made clear he hates Americans and Ukrainians, but he must really despise Russians given how he hurts them.

But Putin made a lethal mistake and went too far when he used the same political warfare tactics and operatives to aim Trump at the United States like a weapon of mass destruction, a devastating PSYOP against a sovereign nation that had left its political system vulnerable to attacks by hostile foreign actors. His plan backfired when it became clear the GOP could not successfully steal another election as easily as Putin steals power in Russia, but it was not for a lack of trying.  After all, Trump has a life-long track record of serving only himself and treating everyone and everything as disposable –  he believes he has the right to dispose of people by using his power to destroy them; he acts above the U.S. Constitution and believes he is superior; he attempted a hostile takeover of the U.S. Postal Service to prevent mail-in voting at the height of a pandemic he worsened; and there is concrete evidence he tried destroy voting machines as a tactic in his broader strategy to steal power and murder democracy for his personal benefit while beholden and supported by Putin.  

When Trump failed to hold onto power in 2020, despite his best efforts to cheat and steal an election (again) while projecting his crimes onto his opponents through disinformation warfare, Trump led a violent insurrection, attacking the U.S. Capitol to install himself as dictator. When that failed, he kept fueling lies to undermine the incoming administration and threatened to start a nuclear war with China to avoid losing power, a too-close-for-comfort situation that required the U.S. military to step in to stop a global catastrophe and diffuse the situation. Now, we witness the lengths he will go to fuel civil unrest as the justice system finally closes in on him, leaving him reliant on his cult of followers to help him, the very Americans he successfully deceives most.

The U.S. response to Putin’s 2016 act of war should have been to immediately remove Donald J. Trump from the ballot before Election Day, both for his personal protection given how dangerous it is for anyone’s safety to be under the direct influence of the mafia-run Kremlin terrorist regime, let alone the most powerful elected official in the United States, and the devastating national and geopolitical consequences.  By the time Trump took his oath on Inauguration Day, an oath he violated daily since, there was enough counterintelligence and publicly available information to exercise the Constitutional protections of the 25th Amendment, Section 4 or the Impeachment Clause to remove him. As top mental health and national security experts warned at great personal risk about the “dangerous mind of Donald J. Trump,” he spent an entire four-year term proving their predictions correct while committing crimes against the United States. From the political hybrid warfare insurrection of 2016 to the violent terrorist insurrection of 2021, and the heartbreaking number of lives needlessly lost in between and since, the U.S. Constitution provided America the path to protection, but America’s political system was too beholden to the Kremlin to pull the safety lever, as seen clearly by Senator Mitch McConnell’s treasonous leadership.

We may not be able to go back in time, but we have a strong Constitutional roadmap forward. The U.S. Constitution, 14th Amendment, Section 3 makes clear that insurrectionists are disqualified from serving in any level of public office:

“No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”

In addition, after his failed insurrection and vacating the White House, news reports confirmed Trump illegally took boxes of government records, including classified material, that are the property of the United States government and belong with the National Archives; he brought them to his home in Mar-a-Lago. Under 18 U.S. Code § 1924 - Unauthorized removal and retention of classified documents or material, Trump can be prosecuted and sentenced up to five years of imprisonment. In addition, 18 U.S. Code § 2071 - Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally – applies to Trump’s federal crime and not only includes fines and/or up to three years of imprisonment but it also disqualifies him “from holding any office under the United States.”

Anyone promoting Trump or any of his insurrectionist-co-conspirators, including members of the Congressional Freedom Caucus, members of the Federalist Society, or Mitch McConnell, among others, as legitimate candidates in future elections, hurts the United States and normalizes treason and war crimes. This includes Trump’s lawyers who have no legitimate defense of their client other than requiring him to undergo a full neurological and psychiatric evaluation and having him plead insanity and providing proof of his inability to stand trial. This is a due process protection afforded by the U.S. Constitution, the highest law of the land that Trump could not be bothered to read, let alone protect, and continues to threaten. In fact, this “insanity plea” was the only defense Trump’s lawyers were justified in arguing during his first and second impeachments. Like President Joe Biden’s speech on the anniversary of the January 6th attack made clear, Trump is an enemy of the United States. He continues to wage war on America while his boss Putin threatens the security of the U.S., Ukraine and the rest of Europe. We may have freedom of speech in the United States, but it is not absolute and does not extend to speech that is used to incite civil war and insurrection, as Trump and his allies continue to do.

We are at the point of no return and the United States has every right and responsibility to protect itself against hostile domestic and foreign enemies. In this case, we are up against a hostile foreign power with domestic proxies operating as part of one team, like the playbook Putin uses in Ukraine and elsewhere. That includes the United States taking the steps necessary to ensure a desperate Vladimir Putin does not use his network of legally cornered domestic proxies in the U.S. to incite further violence and threats to national security at the local, state, and federal level. While indictments loom against Trump, the federal government is taking the threat of retaliation and more acts of violence seriously and securing federal buildings, while NATO and its allies help protect Ukraine. More than a year after leading a failed insurrection that resulted in a terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol meant to overthrow the government, at a rally in Texas on January 29th, Trump called for his cult of followers to stage “the biggest protest” in the history of the country against law enforcement, prosecutors, and judges overseeing federal investigations of his crimes. The states and cities targeted are taking his words as a high-level security threat.

Desperate and vulnerable on the world stage, Putin watches his American political arm fall apart while he continues to wage war on Russians and threatens the West. His failed leadership severely worsened the pandemic and has badly impacted his military. His regime continues to imprison political opponents and cracks down on media and human rights groups. But Putin expects Russians to die fighting Russia's peaceful neighbors in illegal wars to make him richer and more powerful so that he can commit more destruction and atrocities both domestically and internationally? That is a lethally bad assumption only the biggest narcissist would make and why we continue witnessing Putin making disastrous mistakes on the world stage. Less than two years ago he was enjoying himself weaponizing a U.S. President he helped install; less than one year ago, the new U.S. President gave him a pass on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline energy extortion project and held a photo opportunity and press conference to normalize relations. But now, Putin finds himself increasingly isolated globally while he flexes his military might, all while his grip over the U.S. threatens to fall like the Berlin Wall. Meanwhile, Putin’s greatest achievement since his military buildup along Ukraine’s border has been to unite Ukrainians and the international community in support of Ukraine. 

Russian-speaking Ukrainians in the eastern part of the country where Putin’s terrorists continue to wage war, overflow streets in protest of Putin’s war. Civilians, including young Ukrainian women, volunteer to be trained to use military equipment to fight Putin’s army should he act on his threats of invasion. Every day, more countries are publicly showing their support for Ukraine in the form of military and economic aid, while condemning Putin. Thousands of Russian intellectuals, including scientists, signed an open letter condemning Putin for his war crimes and voicing their support for Ukraine. The Kremlin’s inner circle of oligarchs continue to grow frustrated with Putin as they feel increasingly uncomfortable with the noose of sanctions tightening. The Russian military oligarchs publicly warned that Putin’s actions toward Ukraine will destroy Russia’s defense industry, and Russian military officials voiced clear disapproval of his illegal war and issued Putin stern warnings.

There is no greater contrast of Putin’s fall and the mess he has created for Russia than his experience at last week’s Olympic games hosted in Beijing, China compared to the Winter games he hosted eight years ago in Sochi, Russia. Sitting in the stands, surrounded by empty seats, a symbol of his increasing lack of international support and high global and domestic disapproval of his illegitimate government and its illegal wars, Putin looked tired and desperate to put on a show that has no happy ending for him in sight. It is a jarring contrast from February 2014, when Putin played the starring role of the Olympic games in Sochi; praised by the international community for being a gracious host and the face of the “new Russia.”  Most praising Putin overlooked how the development of the Sochi Olympic facilities was a massive money laundering scheme to enrich Putin’s Russian mafia-inner circle at the expense of many and cost the lives of hundreds of illegally human-trafficked laborers and was built on hallowed ground. Back then, many westerners misunderstood or did not properly pay attention to the danger he threatened and ignored the massive Kremlin operations to crack down on the media months and days leading up to the winter games, including threats to imprison the founder of Russia’s largest social media platform and heads of Russian news stations, all part of aggressive censoring campaigns against opposition. Many in 2014 barely noticed the recent draconian laws Putin signed weeks before the competition, which threatened basic human rights of women and the LGBTQ+ community and were written with help of American-far-right evangelicals who would later be part of Trump’s political leadership base. Even fewer may recall that while Putin was being praised at the Olympics and Russia secured first place for the most medals (a win the Russian athletes were stripped of when many were found to have cheated through a state-sponsored scheme), Putin was in the process of executing a hybrid war against Ukraine, one of plausible deniability. The final days before the Olympic closing ceremony, Putin’s team orchestrate a massacre in Kyiv; snipers assassinated Ukrainian protestors fighting for their freedom against Putin’s Ukrainian political regime run by Manafort’s client Yanukovych, who afterward was ousted and escaped to Moscow.

Within hours of the Olympics in Sochi ending, Putin was well on his way to executing the military invasion of Ukraine that resulted in the illegal annexation of Crimea while many in western media played into his disinformation campaign and echoed his narrative that tried to falsely portray the fighting in Ukraine as a “civil war.” Putin prohibited mothers of Russian soldiers from mourning their sons who died in the Kremlin’s illegal war on Ukraine’s soil; many dead Russian soldiers were discarded in unmarked graves, buried like incriminating evidence. Putin’s war has since resulted in 14,000 deaths, 1.5 million internally displaced, and because he was not treated as the high-level threat that many warned he is, things continued to worsen. His war on Ukraine spilled over onto Europe and the U.S. when these same western actors, including Manafort and Bannon, helped Putin attack the U.K and U.S. political systems to manipulate their 2016 elections to secure Kremlin-aligned outcomes. The Kremlin-backed Brexit operation aimed to drastically weaken the UK and EU while creating chaos and confusion as it successfully continues to do today, and Trump’s presidential candidacy was meant to cripple America, bring it to its knees and at Moscow’s mercy and sphere of strong influence, one that threatened complete destruction.

“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.”

-        Sun Tzu, The Art of War

 While Putin sat isolated at the Olympic Winter games in Beijing, even the life-long KGB trained criminal had trouble projecting a strong poker face knowing he was playing his last hand, a losing hand of throwing himself at the mercy of China’s President Xi for support. It appears Putin’s final contribution to the Russian Federation, a country prided on nationalism, is making it economically and politically beholden to ‘The Red Dragon.’  His dreams of reviving “Mother Russia” and being the ‘Czar’ of a great new empire of Eurasia - a criminal, religious extremist, terrorist regime with far-right global reach and criminal satellite states - has turned into a nightmare of hell and isolation as Russia’s economic and geopolitical security rests in China’s hands, a nation dealing with its own domestic and international problems, some a result of Putin’s work.  

Are we to believe that China suddenly overlooks and forgives Putin for waging political hybrid warfare against China using the same tactics and American political operatives he used to execute similar playbooks against Ukraine and the United States?  Several years ago, Steve Bannon, one of the Kremlin’s most significant disinformation warfare political generals who has publicly suggested top U.S. government officials should have their “heads on a pike,” partnered with one of the top Chinese billionaire fugitives, Guo Wengui, in an operation to create a far-right movement targeting a sector of the Chinese diaspora and weaponizing it against China and the U.S.

Bannon and Wengui helped create the disinformation operation that falsely blamed China for intentionally starting the Covid-19 pandemic, using a Hong Kong researcher who fueled false conspiracies about the virus, in a well-financed international disinformation campaign blaming China for the pandemic the way Trump, Bannon, and Manafort used a Kremlin-backed disinformation operation to falsely blame Ukraine, not Russia, for trying to “sabotage” the 2016 U.S. election. These disinformation operations against China, Ukraine, and the United States, are promoted by the same far-right pro-Kremlin-propagandists (for example, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and Info Wars’ Alex Jones). They are maliciously conducted disinformation warfare operations that aim to turn Americans against the target country and cause problems for diplomacy and national security. Will a photograph of Putin and Xi, and their joint announcement of a new Russia-China energy deal, erase this pandemic-themed disinformation operation that has the Kremlin’s fingerprints all over it and badly hurt both China and the U.S.?  

One must also ask how President Xi may feel about Putin threatening to wage a full-scale war on one of China’s significant trading partners – Ukraine. In fact, China is currently Ukraine’s biggest trading partner, replacing Russia a few years ago for the top spot. The "breadbasket of Europe," which was strategically starved by Joseph Stalin to strengthen his political grip over Ukraine and to finance the Soviet military industrial complex, is seen as vital in helping China, a nation of 1.5 billion, address its food security issues. China may voice disapproval of NATO expansion into Ukraine, but it also does not want to experience unnecessary Putin-caused disruptions impacting its trade deals with Ukraine, one of its top suppliers of food and military technology. Also, while Putin’s American operatives were waging a disinformation operation against China in 2020, that same year, a cargo train line was opened between China and Ukraine, and many Chinese businesses are interested in increasing investments in Ukraine, a nation that is an important hub for Beijing’s global infrastructure and investment program - the Belt and Road Initiative. Putin is disrupting this economic progress.

As significantly, Chinese leaders experienced first-hand the terror of how Putin-installed-Trump threatened to start nuclear war with China, a danger so serious that it required the Joint Chiefs of Staff to intervene to keep peace. That is not something that one overlooks, especially the direct correlation between Trump and Putin that created the highest-level threat against China’s security and sovereignty. Putin’s role in securing Trump as head of the executive branch endangered global security. If Trump launched nuclear weapons against China, which would have resulted in immediate retaliation, hundreds of millions of people would have died and the planet would have been devastated.

The unhinged hostility Trump unleashed on China early on in his presidency, is especially interesting when viewed through the lens of history. While China is considered one of the U.S.’s top adversaries today, for a variety of reasons, it is also the “forgotten ally” of World War II. China was the first of the Allies to fight the Axis of power in Asia when the Second Sino-Japanese War started in 1937. Over the following eight years, China lost more than twenty million civilians, another hundred million were left homeless, and it suffered great damage to basic infrastructure; but it also prevented the Empire of Japan from achieving its goal of expansionism, which threatened the West too. Tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers fought in battles with American and British troops, including in Burma. Chongqing, which served as China’s temporary capital during the Chinese War of Resistance against Japan and Second World War, was a vitally important strategic hub for the U.S. The Flying Tigers, the First American Volunteer Group of the Republic of China Air Force, composed of volunteer pilots from the U.S. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps, did immense damage to Japan’s large and well-equipped aircraft fleet. Seventy-six years later, the U.S. was fortunate that its former World War II ally-turned- modern-day-adversary did its part to prevent a global catastrophe at the hands of the Kremlin’s occupant in the White House.

China’s civil war history post-World War II also provides interesting context to the Putin-Xi meeting. Taiwan was under Japanese occupation from the First Sino-Japanese war (1894-1895) until the end of the Second World War. After the war, Japan intended to recognize the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the rightful government, but the U.S., as part of its containment foreign policy, insisted Japan recognized the Kuomintang (KMT)-run Republic of China (ROC) instead. Japan handed control of Taiwan over to the KMT, while the PRC secured mainland China. The KMT was led by Chiang Kai-shek, whose White Terror rule left tens of thousand dead, more than a hundred and fifty-thousand imprissoned, countless disappearances, and led to almost four decades of martial law in Taiwan. One of Chiang Kai-shek’s most significant initiatives, financed by wealthy Japanese war criminals and other fascists, and supported by the U.S., was a psychological and political warfare academy that remains the most powerful in the world today. Evolving from the “China Lobby” that solicited political support against the PRC being recognized as the official government of China, it was first established as the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League, then replaced by the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) founded in 1966 in Taiwan.

The WACL played a big role in executing the West’s containment strategy by mobilizing, training, arming, and empowering Nazis and other fascists with the help of former U.S. high ranking officials, from generals to intelligence, as well as American political operatives. Its North American Regional WACL Organization (NARWACL) branch continues to be especially strong. WACL evolved into today’s global fascist psychological and political warfare nexus, which empowered Putin’s rise, and is directly linked to the Council for National Policy, John Birch Society, the Heritage Foundation, Sun Myung Moon (creator of the Washington Times), the Mercer Family, Oliver North, Erik Prince, Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, and many others who play a large role helping Trump and the GOP wage hybrid warfare against the U.S. and China. Is China supposed to overlook this history when dealing with Putin too?

“Wheels of justice grind slow but grind fine.”

-        Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Given the seriousness of the situation and Putin’s pattern of doubling down when he is cornered, as we saw in Ukraine in 2014 and today, and the ongoing treasonous behavior of his American Kremlin-beholden network that continues to refuse allegiance to the United States, President Biden needs to declare a national emergency and the U.S. military must be prepared to protect the nation however needed when indictments drop. This is the level of protection the country deserved when there were early and consistent warnings given to the White House by the U.S. Intelligence Community that Putin was waging hybrid war against America’s democracy many months before Election Day in November 2016, warnings which were ignored.  It is the level of protection the country needed when there were heavily armed fascists swarming state capitol buildings leading up to the 2020 election and warnings of the insurrection on January 6, 2021 that followed.  The survival of the United States depends on mass prosecutions of Americans who committed war crimes against the U.S. and other nations while aiding and abetting a hostile foreign enemy. It is unacceptable for traitors to run free, and even worse for them to be empowered to run for office. National security threats should not be permitted on the ballot in 2022 or any election, regardless how much they may complain or what threats they make. A nation has a responsibility to protect itself, and the justice system must be on the frontlines.

In the meantime, the international community needs to put the nail in the coffin of Putin’s illegitimate terrorist regime. In addition to another round of tough sanctions targeting Putin and his inner circle, the SWIFT economic nuclear option should be implemented to remove the mafia state from the international banking transaction system. It is one of the greatest fears of the Russian Federation since the majority of its banking transactions still depend on SWIFT. Those who refuse to abide by basic international laws and norms while threatening geopolitical and global security, as Putin has clearly illustrated (similar to Trump), then bold action must be immediately taken to protect humanity and the planet, while ridding the world of the Putin cancer. It has been proven that Putin and western democracies cannot peacefully co-exist and no election in the U.S. will be safe until he and his western accomplices are exposed and held accountable for trying to start political Armageddon rather than face the justice that is coming.

“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

-        Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The Russian Federation is only as strong as its weakest link, and the weakest link is Vladimir Putin. He fails to know when to fight and when not to fight; he has made a mess trying to handle both superior and inferior forces; his army is not “animated by the same spirit through its ranks” but defeated internally by his failed leadership and illegal wars; his enemies are well prepared; he has made himself economically beholden to a foreign sovereign, China, that he has waged hybrid wars against.

Russians hold the key to open the door that leads the world on a path of peace, and they deserve global support in their fight to take down Vladimir Putin. Many in Russia’s defense industry and Putin’s inner circle agree it is time for him to go, he has lost all ability to properly function and is leading Russia down a path of destruction that will only further fuel the blood-money war machine, while humanity and the planet pay the price. France’s President Emmanuel Macron was wrong for meeting with Putin and validating his leadership – Putin is an illegitimate leader of Russia and a nuclear-armed global terrorist who has repeatedly demonstrated he gets off on obtaining power and using it to cause death and destruction. Like Trump, Putin is loyal only to himself and at great cost to many.

Retired Colonel General Leonid Ivashov, the Chairman of the All-Russian Officers Assembly, an independent group of retired and active staff of Russian Armed forces, law enforcement, and security agencies, wrote an open letter to the Russian people and Vladimir Putin called, “The Eve of War.” Ivashov’s words launched a missile at Putin’s war plans against Ukraine. Ivashov called Putin’s plan “criminal,” demanded Putin resign and compliance with Russia’s constitution. He called on Russians serving in the military to disobey incitements of war and to ignore propaganda and to protect Russia from internal conflict. Ivashov warned that Putin’s war with Ukraine will lead to Russia’s destruction. He countered the Kremlin’s lies for trying to justify the aggression and reminded that the West was united with Ukraine given the criminality of Putin’s intentions. Regardless of what Westerners may think of Ivashov position on NATO, his powerful words will be studied in the history books and reflect Sun Tzu’s teaching:

“There are roads which must not be followed, armies which must not be attacked, towns which must not be besieged, positions which must not be contested, commands of the sovereign which must not be obeyed.”

Finally, as the world watches Ukraine, one big take-away is the betrayal of the Budapest Memorandum, signed in 1994 by the United States, Russia, and Britain, a promise “to respect the independence and sovereignty and existing borders of Ukraine,” in exchange for Ukraine handing over nuclear weapons (the world’s third largest arsenal after the collapse of the Soviet Union) to Russia. Had Ukraine known then, what it knows today, that two of the original signatories were not only Kremlin-friendly but would someday have their own governments infiltrated by Kremlin-loyalists and Russia would be run by another Stalinist-tyrant set on conquering Ukraine at any cost, it may have acted in its own interests and held onto the weapons, rather than endure decades of threats to its sovereignty. But then again, the proven danger to Ukraine’s sovereignty over the years has not been Russian military build-up along its border and not one that NATO has been able to protect against; it has been Western Kremlin-financed political mercenaries like Paul Manafort who visibly spent years executing hybrid warfare tactics aimed at Ukraine’s government to install pro-Kremlin politicians and then did the same to the U.S. Twenty-six years after the Budapest Memorandum and Ukraine is finally seeing meaningful support from the the global community. Many now realize - Putin’s war on Ukraine, is a war on the free world.