By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, October 31, 2026
If there is still someone out there who has persisted until now in the idea that Ukrainian history began in 2022, and that wiser members of the U.S. establishment didn’t warn against, and more conniving members strategize for, each U.S. step toward war from the NATO enlargement of the 1990s through the U.S.-backed coup of 2014, the U.S.-backed war that began in 2014, Obama’s military training and base building, Trump’s weapons shipments, Biden’s hostility toward diplomacy, the fantastic horror fables of Russiagate, the reduction of Germany and France to mindless puppets treating the Minsk agreements as a trick, and the U.S. blocking of negotiation or peace just before and just after the Russian invasion — and if such a someone has reached a point of open-mindedness to information, there’s a new book that might really help.
And it sure is badly needed in this moment of Democratic candidates rising on public opposition to wars, even while promising to escalate the war in Ukraine the moment they’re able to.
But the value of this new book to me lies in how it takes the story of the Ukraine War back, not just to the 1990s but to the 1940s. In Boiling Point: How America Brought War to Ukraine, Stephen Kinzer gives us deeper understanding of roots and motivations, establishing beyond any possible dispute that the U.S. government began a project of using Ukraine to weaken Russia and pursued it across generations, through changes in individual actors, through failure after failure, and through U.S. presidents who themselves may have lacked a decent understanding of the project they were continuing — so that, as open hostility toward the Soviet Union became supposed friendliness toward Russia, the public face of obliviousness regarding Russia’s inscrutable opposition to the unchanging project of bringing Ukraine into NATO may in fact have involved some actual obliviousness.
Kinzer opens his book claiming to be presenting just the facts, ma’am, and to in no sense be denying the role that Ukrainians have played in their own history. He takes no position on Russia’s criminal and murderous actions, but simply includes them as part of the story. Nonetheless, it is a story of a major project aimed at influencing Ukraine and Russia from Washington, Langley, and Manhattan — sometimes secretly, for example by parachuting would-be revolutionaries into Ukraine to meet their deaths, and sometimes openly, for example celebrating U.S. efforts to interfere in a Russian election to ensure that a drunken buffoon remain in charge of Russia. Even the interference in Ukraine during the eight years leading up to 2022 was generally a point of pride to be openly bragged about right up until it wasn’t. Not just U.S. officials like Victoria Nuland but private foundations such as George Soros’ couldn’t help crowing about how much they’d spent and how responsible they were for overthrowing and manipulating the government of Ukraine. Even now, Nuland goes on camera and openly admits to the U.S. blocking of a peace agreement just weeks after the Russian invasion, and NATO’s top officials can’t stop themselves from pointing out that the insistence on NATO membership was the cause of the war. But the rest of us aren’t supposed to repeat these things.
In Ukraine we have polls now showing large majority support for compromising and ending the war, whereas for a couple of years we we badgered with our supposed responsibility to risk nuclear apocalypse because Ukrainians wanted it. The story of U.S. government behavior from the 1940s on, during which the desires of Ukrainians mattered to U.S. policy makers exactly never, makes clear what an odd and fleeting pretense it was to claim that keeping Ukraine at war was a sacred duty to the people of Ukraine who were insisting upon it.
When World War II ended and the U.S. government was able to jump right back to treating the Soviet Union as its primary enemy, some in the incipient U.S. spy-sabotage-assassination complex that would become the CIA saw Ukraine as the most powerful tool available to threaten Russia, just as Russia saw Ukraine as the pathway for a threatening invasion. Frank Wisner was an early driving force. He would witness a murderous Soviet takeover in Romania. Other key individuals over the decades would themselves or their families have histories of resentment toward Russia. Stalin had starved millions. Soviets had abused and humiliated on a large scale. People like Frank Wisner, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Madeleine Albright, “Masha” Yovanovitch, Evelyn Farkas, Alexander Vindman, Victoria Nuland, Antony Blinken, and many more seem to have taken their Russophobia very personally, while others like Dwight Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, Hillary Clinton, or Joe Biden had more general policies of preferring brute force to words.
The U.S. erased the Nazi history of hundreds of Ukrainians in order to illegally bring them — including the usual quota of Soviet spies — to the United States. Hundreds more were put to work in Germany. Mass murderers of Jews and Poles were protected from both Nuremberg and Soviet justice in order to engage in the Cold War game of spying and counter-spying, propagandizing, infiltrating, and fantasizing about overthrows. For years, Ukrainians were sacrificed to the dream by being sent into Ukraine to the waiting arms of the well-informed Soviets. Fighting for Ukraine to the last Ukrainian is not a new idea.
I was surprised to learn from Kinzer that up through 1992, in a residential apartment building in New York City, immediately nextdoor to the one I lived in around 1990-1991, the CIA had maintained the headquarters of its Ukrainian nationalist propaganda production for 40 years beginning in 1952. This was a publishing house called Prolog at 875 West End Avenue led by Stepan Bandera’s buddy Mykola Lebed (whom the CIA was actively keeping out of reports on unprosecuted Nazis as late as 1991). The apartment building ought to be on hidden history tours of the Columbia University area. Kinzer credits its pamphlets, magazines, newspapers, and books with having kept anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism alive for decades. Radio stations were added, broadcasting from Germany and Greece. Unsuccessful but major efforts were made to recruit Ukrainian athletes at each Olympics, in hopes of putting a non-Nazi face on the campaign.
When the Soviet Union was dismantled and U.S. policy generally rolled on as if nothing had changed, those who saw global domination as the driving force in U.S. policy found this unremarkable. Those who had believed that the U.S. military existed because of the evil Soviets, and NATO existed because of the now-nonexistent Warsaw Pact, were bewildered. Historians generally struggle to blame everything before 1990 on the Soviets and everything after on Russia. Kinzer points out the inconvenient facts, the U.S. approach perhaps best encapsulated in a comment President Bill Clinton made about Boris Yeltsin:
“We keep telling Ol’ Boris, Okay now, here’s what you’ve got to do next. Here’s some more shit for your face.”
Yet even Yeltsin drew the line at Ukraine joining NATO. And despite, or because of, that clear and critical Russian demand from virtually every Russian official for decades, the U.S. altered course not at all. NATO even went to war in Yugoslavia, declared its right to launch wars at will, and suggested that Ukraine might be on the list. Brzezinski had it at the top of his list. Dubya tore up the ABM treaty. NATO declared it would add Ukraine. The U.S. took its secretive activities out of the CIA and made them public through the NED, dumping more money over the 30 years since Ukrainian independence from the Soviets into Ukraine than anywhere else, and funded an “Orange Revolution” that actually used what U.S. media would soon begin accusing the U.S. public of: hired protesters. Despite the majority of Ukrainians opposing joining NATO, despite Ukraine’s neutrality serving it well, and despite the future pretense of wanting to follow the will of the Ukrainian people, the U.S. just kept hammering away at the supposed need to get Ukraine into NATO. But as long as countries like Germany and France were still maintaining their own foreign policies not wholly subservient to Washington, NATO could only threaten to add Ukraine (and Georgia) at some future date.
Eventually, in 2013, the U.S. added television channels to its repertoire. U.S. taxpayers and George Soros paid to tell Ukrainians to assemble in the Maidan along with EU nations’ ambassadors, Victoria Nuland, John McCain, Nazi paramilitaries, and half a million other people — and paid to supply them with food and camping supplies. With a Nuland phone call recording publicly advertising U.S. support for the coup, with Senator Chris Murphy and Soros’s organization publicly taking credit, a new Ukrainian government began restricting the use of the Russian language and threatening the NATO takeover of the Russian military base in Crimea.
The rest, as they say, is so-called “history.”
Major investment and forces put to work on both propaganda and structural momentum-building for the better part of a century may seem unstoppable. But not only does the non-U.S.-government world have a say in events, but there always remains available the option of changing course, or what we might call the five-word option. Just as Kamala Harris would now be president if she has said the five words “No more weapons to Israel,” a great many Ukrainians and Russians would still be alive if Joe Biden had said the five words “Ukraine will not join NATO.”
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