Thread by @HansMahncke

"How top U.S. officials played key roles in destabilizing Ukraine and damaging U.S.-Russia relations"

New from @themarketswork and myself.

theepochtimes.com/before-russias…

2/ The deterioration relations with Russia started with President George W. Bush in 2008 when he dangled before Ukraine the promise of NATO membership during the Bucharest declaration, boldly claiming, “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.”

3/ In 1990, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher promised the Kremlin not to expand NATO eastwards in return for German unification. However, since then, NATO has incorporated 14 additional Eastern European countries.

4/ Bill Burns, Biden’s current CIA director, warned about the dangers posed by Ukraine gaining NATO membership, citing his own words in 2008 to then-Secretary of State Rice: “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).”

5/ Ukraine has been through two significant revolutions since gaining independence in 1991. In 2004, the apparent winner of the presidential election, Viktor Yanukovych, was unseated. Yanukovych made a political comeback in 2010 when he again won the presidential election.

6/ Yanukovych was deposed yet again in Feb 2014, when a US-supported coup installed a new government in Ukraine. Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the candidate pushed forth by the U.S., was installed as Ukraine’s prime minister, but would resign two years later amid corruption accusations.

7/ It was during events surrounding the Feb 2014 US-approved coup that then-vice president Biden, made his first appearance as a Ukraine power broker. Biden had been appointed as the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine in early 2014.

8/ An intercepted phone call revealed that the State Department was actively pursuing the ouster of Yanukovych and installation of Yatsenyuk. During that leaked discussion State Department Official Victoria Nuland told Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt that “Biden’s willing.”

9/ The U.S. State Department had assisted in the removal of a democratically-elected leader that was friendly to Russia and helped install a U.S.-friendly leader. The Kremlin, watching these events unfold, did not wait long to react, annexing Crimea a few days later.

10/ One of the members of Yanukovych’s government who lost his position in government as a result of the 2014 coup was Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of gas company Burisma. Following the sudden loss of Zlochevsky’s government position, Burisma appointed Hunter Biden to its board.

11/ On Nov 2, 2015, after Ukraine's new prosecutor Shokin reopened a case against Zlochevsky, the head of Burisma’s board, Vadym Pozharskyi, emailed Hunter to demand “deliverables,” stating that the “ultimate purpose” was to “close down any cases or pursuits” against Zlochevsky.

12/ On Nov 22, 2015 Joe Biden started demanding the removal of Shokin. Shokin seized Zlochevsky’s assets in early Feb 2016. He was fired on Mar. 29, 2016. Biden later famously bragged that he had leveraged $1 billion in U.S. government loan guarantees to force Shokin’s removal.

13/ It was against this political backdrop, with Ukraine destabilized and Russia angered by a U.S.-backed coup, that Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign made the fateful decision to falsely accuse Russia of colluding with Trump.

14/ The Intelligence Community, acting in a dangerous geopolitical game, assisted Clinton by backing her false claims and including Steele’s fictitious dossier in an official intelligence community assessment, effectively tying Trump’s hands with respect to dealings with Russia.

15/ Four years later, during the 2020 election, the Biden campaign introduced its own claims that Russia was meddling in the election, again in order to assist Trump. When confronted by Trump at the second presidential debate about Hunter's abandoned laptop, Biden blamed Russia.

16/ Again, as four years earlier, the Intelligence Community assisted Biden by claiming that Hunter’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”

As it turned out, Hunter's laptop and emails were authentic and not a Russian plot.

17/ Both Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden recklessly leveled false accusations against Russia, jeopardizing national security for their own personal and political gain.

18/ Adding to an already tense geopolitical situation, Biden held out NATO membership to Ukraine as recently as Dec 2021, as did his Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, ignoring CIA director Burns' warnings about the “brightest of all red lines”.

19/ The overarching national security goal should've centered around preventing Russia and China from forming further alliances. The vilification of Russia, driven in part by the self-serving actions of top U.S. officials such as Clinton and Biden, seriously undermined that goal.