Soft Power

In the great dream of creating a revived Russian Empire, Putin’s aim is to reclaim the Ukraine, which as Brzezinski explained in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, is “a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard” and “a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire.”[1] Drawing on America’s playbook of soft power warfare, Putin has embarked Russia on a grand strategy of hybrid war, using think tanks and NGOs. To reciprocate against American covert actions, Russia has been developing its soft power by investing in a worldwide octopus of various public diplomacy instruments throughout the 2000s. In 2013, Russia’s Foreign Policy Concept defined soft power as “a comprehensive toolkit for achieving foreign policy objectives building on civil society potential, information, cultural and other methods and technologies alternative to traditional diplomacy.”[2]

Joseph Nye, who originally coined the term, explained that Trump’s presidency has eroded America’s “soft power.”[3] And a British index, The Soft Power 30, showed America slipping from first place in 2016 to third place last year.[4] A recent Gallup poll of 134 countries found that, under Trump’s leadership, only 30% of people held a favorable view of the United States, a drop of almost 20 points since Obama’s presidency. The Pew Research Center found 30% approval rating for China, reaching near-parity with the US. In 2017, estimates predicted a drop in tourism of $7 billion, the biggest drop the industry has seen since the terror attacks of September 11 2001. Applications from foreign students to study at American colleges and universities have plummeted nearly 40%.[5]

Putin recognized that the United States and NATO exercise their enduring influence in Russia’s areas of interest through various soft power tactics that use NGOs like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), Freedom House and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations to foment “color” revolutions. The first president of the NED—an organization often described as an accessory to American intelligence, and which has been financially supported by Richard Mellon Scaife—confessed to the Washington Post that “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”[6] Acknowledgement of America’s actions has resulted in a growing worldwide trend of governments seeking to limit and delegitimize foreign funding to local NGOs, including not only Russia, but also India, Ethiopia, Hungary, Qatar, Egypt and Israel.[7] At home, the United States’ actions are excused by the perception that the imposition of democracy is not objectionable because it is not just an American, or Western ideal, but a universal one.[8]

The success of Western propaganda is such that the word “democracy” has become almost sacred. However, the American model of democracy is merely a system that provides its citizens an opportunity to choose their leaders at regular intervals. In fact, the system is completely compromised by campaign finance and lobbying which some critics have described as a legalized system of bribery or extortion, ensuring that private interests govern, despite whoever happens to sit in office.[9] Instead, America has become an oligarchy.[10] In 2014, two prominent US political scientists, Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, authors of Democracy in America?, published a study of national surveys of the general public conducted between 1981 and 2002, and concluded that, “The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”[11]

The reality is that the slogan of “democracy” is effectively just that, an empty slogan, which the United States employs to excuse its various imperialist forays around the world, both hard and soft. Such accusations are dismissed as paranoid conspiracy theories by the mainstream press of the West. Nevertheless, as indicated by Robert W. Merry in The Atlantic, given the sizeable expenditures that go into such projects, such intrusion “is a foreign-policy issue that deserves more attention than it is getting in American discourse.”[12] Even if these accusations were to be made public, the general view is, as Merry noted, “that these NGO activists are merely doing what comes naturally to those who believe American democratic structures represent universal values that should be embraced universally throughout the world.”[13] However, numerous critics have confirmed that NGOs have “acted as interest groups rather than as promoters of universal standards, and as tools of US foreign policy rather than as local representatives of the ‘global conscience’ or ‘transnational civil society.”[14] The truth is that the US State Department cannot divulge what are covert foreign policy tactics, and the work of NGOs provide them plausible deniability.[15]

The Kremlin has come to recognize that US foreign policy has made use of Western NGOs and social media attacks, orchestrated from abroad under the pretext of supporting democracy, combating electoral fraud or the corruption of the targeted regimes, to catalyse uprisings such as the Color Revolutions and the Arab Spring.[16] The leading NGOs include the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the International Republican Institute (IRI) and Freedom House, which are largely supported by government funds, and billionaire George Soros’ Open Society Foundations (OSF). Formerly the Open Society Institute, the OSF was founded in 1993 by Soros to financially support civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media.[17] In 1991, the Soros Foundation Budapest merged with the Fondation pour une Entraide Intellectuelle Européenne, an affiliate of the CIA’s Cold War front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF).[18] Open Society Institute was created in the United States in 1993 to support the Soros foundations in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. And, as remarked in 2007 by Nicolas Guilhot, a senior research associate of CNRS, the Open Society Foundations serve to perpetuate institutions that reinforce the existing social order, as the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation have done before them, reinforcing a capitalist view of modernization.[19]

Putin argued that “the US instigated Colour Revolutions in the former Soviet region, using grievances of people against their governments in order to impose their values that contradict local tradition and culture. These efforts were directed against Ukraine, Russia and Eurasian integration.”[20] Russian state media asserted that the American government had been spending millions of dollars in support of the revolution, and Russian websites were published with alleged proof of direct American involvement in the Euromaidan protests.[21] In response, the Kremlin has retaliated by imitating American strategy of using “soft power” to advance its imperial objectives. As explained in a Chatham House research paper, “For Russia, soft power is often a state-directed exercise aimed at exploiting a targeted country’s vulnerabilities.”[22]

Russia’s unconventional warfare techniques challenge the provisions of Article 5 of the NATO Charter because the treaty invokes collective defense in response to “armed attack” by another power. Throughout their operations, the Russians denied involvement or downplayed the size and activities of their military forces, making it more difficult to determine or agree that an armed attack has actually occurred.[23] NATO refers to this form of conflict as “hybrid war.” The phrase refers to a broad range of hostile actions, of which military force is only a small part that are invariably executed in concert as part of a flexible strategy with long-term objectives.[24] As outlined by Molly K. McKew in Politico, the purpose of this “non-linear” war isn’t a foreign policy aimed at building a new pro-Russian bloc, but is what the Kremlin calls a “multi-vector” foreign policy, aimed at undermining the strength of Western institutions by mobilizing alternate centers of power.[25]

Rossotrudnichestvo

Since the beginning of the 2000s, Russia has re-emerged as an increasingly powerful player in global affairs, using a range of tools in pursuit of its aims, including hard diplomacy, economic influence, control of energy supply, trade wars, military force, and finally propaganda and disinformation. From the early 2000s several large Kremlin-sponsored foundations, platforms and media projects were launched, forming a close circle of NGOs who maintain privileged access to state and private funding, in exchange for conformity to the objectives of Russia’s foreign policy.[26] In 2007, the first Russian think tanks were created following Putin’s speech at the Russia-EU summit in Portugal, where he announced that “by using grants, the European Union helps to develop similar institutions in Russia… It’s time that the Russian Federation does the same in the EU.”[27] By 2017, Russia had the fourth largest diplomatic network in the world, maintaining a multitude of posts in Eastern Europe and former communist allies such as China, Vietnam, Cuba, Ecuador and Angola.[28] As the BBC reported, “The size of its network reflects the extent of its undiminished global ambition.”[29]

The main state agency targeting Russian-speaking communities globally and projecting soft power is the Federal Agency for the Commonwealth of Independent States, Compatriots Living Abroad and International Humanitarian Cooperation (Rossotrudnichestvo), established in 2008. All international aid, which was previously managed by the Ministry of Finance, was now to be channeled via the agency, referred to in official documents as the “humanitarian dimension of foreign policy.”[30] Rossotrudnichestvo acts as an umbrella for a network of approximately 150 Russian organizations and “plays an active political role in Russia’s foreign policy by consolidating the activities of pro-Russian players in the post-Soviet region and in disseminating the Kremlin’s narrative.”[31] Former National Security Council Russia specialist, Dr. Michael Carpenter, who is now the Senior Director Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement, said the Kremlin “also uses the state-run cultural organization Rossotrudnichestvo as a cover assignment for its intelligence operatives.”[32]

Much of the basis of Eurasian unity is founded on the shared heritage of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is followed by large numbers of believers abroad and enjoys a high levels of trust in Russia and in areas of the former Soviet Union. The church has supported the “gathering of Russian lands” and backed Russian cultural efforts through affiliation with NGOs. Its Patriarch Kirill has collaborated closely with Putin, who has backed the expansion of Russian power into Crimea and eastern Ukraine. The leading Orthodox organizations are also vocal on political issues, including opposition EU and NATO membership, as well as condemning the West for its moral degradation, including secularism, materialism, and expressing opposition to LGBT and feminist groups.[33]

Putin is also supported by “Orthodox oligarchs” like Dugin’s collaborator Konstiantin Malofeyev, the CEO of Marshall Capital Partners. Malofeev, sometimes called “Putin’s Soros,” now runs Russia’s largest charity, the St. Basil the Great Foundation.[34] Malofeev is a Traditionalist, much like Dugin, and a devout practitioner of the Orthodox faith. He’s also president of Katehon (named after the “katechon” of the Third Rome prophecy), a right-wing think tank, and started his own television station, Tsargrad TV, a platform for figures like Alex Jones and Alexander Dugin, as well as a member of Katehon’s supervisory board. Malofeev also has ties to the American religious right. Malofeev also hired former Fox News employee and devoted Catholic Jack Hannick to help launch Tsargrad TV.[35]

Izborsk Club

Dugin is also a member of what is known as the “Izborsk club,” it helped unite a larger number of influential Russian nationalists and patriotic conservatives, like Alexander Prokhanov, Mikhail Leontyev, Mikhail Shevchenka, Nikolay Starikov, Vitaly Averyanov, Natalya Narochnitskaya. Rodina leader Dmitri Rogozin—who is close to both Dugin and Avigdor Eskin—is the lader of the club. According to Global Security, “It is more than just a ‘think tank’ (so common in the Western world) because it has a much greater direct influence on government decisions. The Izborsk club develops and publishes a wide variety of state development strategies - from defence to economic or social issues.”[36]

The think tank was named after the town of Izborsk, the site of a historical Muscovite fortress that had resisted, as the club’s website recalled, “the Livonians, Poles, and Swedes.” Now the invader was the liberalism of the West.[37] The club was founded in 2012 by well-known philosopher and writer Aleksandr Prokhanov. Like Dugin, Prokhanov repeats the ideas of Carl Schmitt of the endless struggle of the sea-people against the land-people.[38] According to Prokhanov, whose approaches are echoed in the works of many influential conservative Russian experts, since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has begun the path to recovery by finally rejecting liberalism of the West.[39]

Prokhanov’s 2012 book, The Tread of the Russian Triumph is a fictionalized treatise on Russian history promoting the author’s own Fifth Empire, stating that the current Eurasian Economic Union is the successor to the four previous Empires: Kievan Rus/Novgorod Republic, Moscovy, the Romanovs’ Russian Empire, and Stalin’s USSR. After the last disaster, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the saviour was Vladimir Putin, resulting adding in the latest Russian golden age, the Fifth Empire.[40]

The fundamental problem, according to Prokhanov, were the Jews who have taken over the world, and who are using their power for evil. The only defense against this international Jewish conspiracy was a strong Russian leader. Eurasianism is Russia’s messianic mission to save mankind. It “has to encompass the entire world.”[41] Prokhanov has written that the Eurasian Union would be Russia’s “fifth empire,” with several capitals and several control centers.[42] This project would begin when Ukraine and Belarus would merge with Russia. “If the first empire was established here,” said Prokhanov, meaning Rus a thousand years before, “the future empire has already been proclaimed by Putin. It is the Eurasian Union, and Ukraine’s contribution to this empire could be grandiose.”[43]

The Izborsk Club presented the European Union as an existential threat to Putin’s Eurasian Union as “the project of restoring Russia as a Eurasian empire.” They therefore recommended that Russian foreign policy should support the extreme Right within its member states, until its collapses, in the words of Prokhanov, into a “constellation of European fascist states.”[44] Ukraine, as one Izborsk Club expert wrote, “is all ours, and eventually it will all come back to us.”[45] According to Dugin, the annexation of Ukrainian territory by Russia was the “necessary condition” of the Eurasian imperial project”[46] At the 2013 Valdai Club meeting, Putin declared that Russians and Ukrainians were “one people,” and that Ukraine was part of “our great Russian, or Russian-Ukrainian world.”[47]

The Izborsk Club also includes historian Natalya Narochnitskaya, another key exponent of the myth of the Third Rome, and an outspoken opponent of NATO. Narochnitskaya was a member of several minor political parties in Russia and was elected to parliament as a representative of the Rodina block in 2003. In Narochnitskaya version is one of history as Christian progress that diametrically opposed of the history of secularism in the West. Narochnitskaya sees this evolution beginning with the Renaissance and furthered by the Enlightenment, as ushering in a materialistic modernity that is antithetical to Russia and its Orthodox faith.[48] In 2009, Narochnitskaya was appointed by Medvedev to the Commission to Counter Attempts to Falsify History to the Detriment of Russia’s Interests.[49] Narochnitskaya is also a participant of the Valdai Discussion Club.[50] Narochnitskaya is a frequent recipient of presidential grants, as well as grants from the Gorchakov Foundation, where Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is a board member. Experts from her foundation have given lectures at the Gorchakov Foundation information centre in Kiev, emphasizing the unity of the Russian and Ukrainian people.[51]

In 2008, Narochnitskaya was appointed director of the Paris-based Institute of Democracy and Cooperation (IDC) in Paris, a pro-Kremlin NGO that was founded in consultation with Russian government officials. The IDC’s creation was first announced by Putin in 2007 and it has published reports defending Russia on human rights issues. The group’s aim is to “repair Russia’s damaged image in the US and Europe and at the same time extend the reach and influence of the [Government of Russia],” according to a U.S. State Department cable published by Wikileaks.[52] The IDC was founded in 2008 by a Russian lawyer, Anatoly Kucherena, who accused Western NGOs, Freedom House in particular, of ideological bias and doing the bidding of the CIA.[53] Kucherena has represented Viktor Yanukovych and Edward Snowden’s interests in the Russian Federation. In June 2014, Oliver Stone acquired rights to a screen adaptation of Kucherena’s novel, Time of the Octopus, the story of fictional American whistleblower Joshua Kold.

Since 2008, IDC has been headed by Narochnitskaya, who is close to Dimitri Rogozin, who received Marine Le Pen in Moscow in 2013. The trip was organized by Emmanuel Leroy, whose wife is also a member of IDC. Leroy, a former member of GRECE with an interest in Eurasianism, was Le Pen’s first geopolitical advisor and inspired her Russophilia. In 2007, Leroy participated in a White Forum in Moscow organized by Guillaume Faye, also a former member of GRECE, who is regularly published by Arktos Media. Le Pen borrowed heavily from Leroy’s work, saying, “To rely on Russia today is to create a true European space from the Atlantic to the Urals, a Europe comprising nations pursuing their national interests and linked within a shared civilization, very different fro the American ultra-liberal communitarian model toward which the European Union is driving us.”[54]

Postmodern Democracy

According to the Trump Dossier, Putin’s primary motivation for supporting Trump was “fear and hatred of Hillary CLINTON.” The new de-classified version of the report by the Office of the Director National Intelligence “Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent US Elections” from January 6, 2017, which includes an “analytic assessment” drafted and coordinated among the CIA, FBI and NSA, agreed on “Moscow’s use of cyber tools and media campaigns to influence US public opinion.” The reports states: “Putin publicly pointed to the Panama Papers disclosure and the Olympic doping scandal as US-directed efforts to defame Russia, suggesting he sought to use disclosures to discredit the image of the United States and cast it as hypocritical.” The report also noted: “Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.”

The 2011–2013 Russian protests, known as the Snow Revolution, began against the results of Russian legislative election of December 4, 2011, which were condemned as fraudulent by both international and Russian observers. The protests were focused against the ruling party, United Russia, and its leader Putin, who announced his intention to run again for reelection to the presidency in 2012. Putin claimed that hundreds of millions of dollars in “foreign money” was used to influence Russian politics, and that Clinton had personally spurred protesters to action. Putin said Clinton, then acting as Obama’s Secretary of State, had sent “a signal” to “some actors in our country.”[55] Putin said that Hillary Clinton “set the tone for some opposition activists” to act “in accordance with a well-known scenario and in their own mercenary political interests… our people do not want the situation in Russia to develop like it was in Kyrgyzstan or not so long ago in Ukraine.”[56]

The protests sparked fear in some quarters that Russia was to be subjected to an Arab Spring or color revolution, and a number of counter-protests and rallies in support of the government were held. On May 6, 2012, protests took place in Moscow the day before Putin’s inauguration as President for his third term. The protests were marred by violence between the protesters and the police. Russian authorities moved swiftly to contain the protests, deploying battalions of riot police officers and legions of pro-government young people to occupy public squares in Moscow and drown out the opposition. In June 2012, laws were enacted which set strict boundaries on protests and imposed heavy penalties for unauthorized actions.

On the first days following the election in 2012, Putin and United Russia were supported by the counter-protests of two youth organizations, the government-organized NASHI and United Russia’s Young Guard, who were organized by Vladislav Surkov, a close ally of Alexander Dugin.[57] Surkov’s professional links to Mikhail Khodorkovsky go back to at least 1987. In 1997 he became deputy director of Mikhail Fridman’s Alfa Bank.[58] Surkov was First Deputy Chief of the Russian Presidential Administration from 1999 to December 28, 2011, when Medvedev reassigned Surkov to the role of Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Modernisation, in a move interpreted by many to be fallout from the controversial Russian parliamentary elections of 2011.[59]

During Putin’s first two terms as president, Surkov was regarded as the Kremlin’s “grey cardinal,” and having directed its propaganda principally through control of state run television.[60] Since 2006, Surkov has advocated a political doctrine he has called “sovereign democracy,” to counter democracy promotion conducted by the USA and European states. The term, used by Sergei Ivanov and Putin, is the official ideology of the Russian youth movement NASHI. As an employee of the KGB in Soviet Union era, Ivanov became a friend of his colleague Vladimir Putin, who appointed him as his Deputy in the late 1990s. He has served as Deputy Prime Minister since 2005, and was the Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office from 2011 until he was fired on 12 August 2016. According to the Washington Post, “sovereign democracy” conveys that “Russia’s regime is democratic and, second, that this claim must be accepted without demanding any proof, period. Any attempt at verification will be regarded as unfriendly and as meddling in Russia’s domestic affairs.”[61]

Peter Pomerantsev, a vocal critic of Surkov and his influence on Putin, accuses Surkov of turning Russia into a “managed democracy,” and along with another critic, Pavel Khodorkovsky, termed Russia a “postmodern dictatorship.”[62] “I am the author, or one of the authors, of the new Russian system,” Surkov boasted. “My portfolio at the Kremlin and in government has included ideology, media, political parties, religion, modernization, innovation, foreign relations, and…”—pausing with a smile—“modern art.”[63] When Surkov was placed under executive sanctions by the Obama administration, freezing his assets in the US and banning him from entering the country, he responded to this by saying: “The only things that interest me in the US are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don’t need a visa to access their work.”[64]

Ned Reskinoff of ThinkProgress, and Adam Curtis in his BBC documentary HyperNormalisation, have claimed that the unique blend of politics and reality devised by Surkov, whose previous career was as a director in avant-garde theater, has begun to affect countries outside of Russia, most notably the election of Donald Trump.[65] Curtis credits Surkov for devising a blend of theater and politics to keep Putin, and Putin’s chosen successors, in power since 2000. Surkov sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups, and even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin. But Surkov would the let it be known that this was what he was doing. At the same time Surkov writes lyrics for a rock group called Agata Kristi and essays on conceptual art.[66] According to Pomerantsev, in an editorial for the London Review of Books quoted by Curtis:

In contemporary Russia, unlike the old USSR or present-day North Korea, the stage is constantly changing: the country is a dictatorship in the morning, a democracy at lunch, an oligarchy by suppertime, while, backstage, oil companies are expropriated, journalists killed, billions siphoned away. Surkov is at the centre of the show, sponsoring nationalist skinheads one moment, backing human rights groups the next. It’s a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused, a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.

Surkov’s strategy is one he refers to as non-linear war, whose underlying aim, according to Surkov, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control it.[67] It was due to Surkov that several of Dugin’s political projects got off the ground.[68] According to Dugin: “Any project sent to Putin that dealt with politics, ideology, information or culture either went to Surkov or it went into the wastebasket.”[69] “Everything that was on TV was decided in one office,” said Dugin of Surkov. Surkov’s politics were a kind of bricolage, according to Dugin, using a term popularized by Claude Levi-Strauss in reference to a form of art using any materials available, regardless of their original purpose. Surkov, explained Dugin, operated a postmodern “ideological centrifuge,” which “scattered all ideological discourses to the periphery.”[70] Eduard Limonov, Dugin’s partner in the National Bolsheviks, also described Surkov as having “turned Russia into a wonderful postmodernist theater, where he experiments with old and new political models.”[71]

Euromaidan

In the last several years, Russia has demonstrated a return to an assertive foreign policy through successful military interventions in Ukraine and Syria. In the Kremlin, Dugin represents the “war party,” a division within the leadership over Ukraine. He considered the war between Russia and Ukraine to be inevitable and appealed for Putin to start military intervention in the eastern part of the country. “Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions,” he warns in The Foundations of Geopolitics, “represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics.”[72]

Dugin is seen to have been the author of Putin’s annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation in early 2014.[73] According to Jolanta Darczewska, “The Crimean operation has served as an occasion for Russia to demonstrate to the entire world the capabilities and the potential of information warfare.”[74] The annexation was Russia’s response to the Euromaidan Revolution, a wave of demonstrations and civil unrest in Ukraine, which began on the night of November 21, 2013, in Kiev. The protests were sparked by the Ukrainian government’s decision to suspend the signing of an association agreement with the European Union, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. The Russians justified their actions by claiming correctly that the West had backed neo-Nazi elements inside the Ukraine.

The pro-European Union protests were Ukraine’s largest since the Orange Revolution of 2004, which saw President Viktor Yanukovych forced to resign. Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland had been closely involved with Ukraine during the Orange Revolution. Nuland enjoyed a friendly meeting with the openly pro-Nazi Svoboda, one of the “Big Three” political parties behind the protests. This is despite the fact that Nuland is descended from immigrant Ukrainian Jewish parents, Meyer and Vitsche Nudelman who moved to New York from the Russian Empire. Nuland started in the State Department in the last years of the Soviet Union and served as US ambassador to NATO during George W. Bush’s presidency and State Department spokeswoman for Hillary Clinton before becoming assistant secretary for Europe under Barak Obama. Nuland was known as one of the most hawkish members of Obama’s team when it came to Russia.[75]

Nuland’s husband is neoconservative Robert Kagan, who is often dubbed the most prominent representative of modern neoconservative thought on US foreign policy.[76] Kagan is a co-founder of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a member of the CFR. Kagan was an adviser to John McCain during his presidential campaign in 2008. Kagan’s book The World America Made disputes the theory that the U.S has declined as a global superpower. Barack Obama quoted from it several times during his address to the nation in 2012.

At a December 5, 2013 US-Ukraine Foundation Conference, Nuland boasted of the US’s role in supporting the protests in the Ukraine:

Since Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the United States has supported Ukrainians as they build democratic skills and institutions, as they promote civic participation and good governance, all of which are preconditions for Ukraine to achieve its European aspirations. We have invested over $5 billion to assist Ukraine in these and other goals that will ensure a secure and prosperous and democratic Ukraine.[77]

Events following the Orange Revolution were a terrible disappointment to Nuland, especially after Yanukovych returned to power, and she played a central role in his subsequent overthrow in 2014.[78] The Euromaidan protests were sparked by the Ukrainian government’s decision to suspend the signing of an association agreement with the European Union, instead choosing closer ties to Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union. The ultra-nationalists and the extreme right were a small part of the overall campaign, but at times they have appeared to be the driving force behind the Maidan.[79] Protesters repeated the cry, “Hail Ukraine! Hail the heroes!” taken from the UPA, one of the two organizations founded by Nazi-collaborationist Stephan Bandera. Pro-Russian activists claimed “Those people in Kiev are Bandera-following Nazi collaborators.”[80]

In Washington, Bandera’s OUN had reconstituted under the banner of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America (UCCA). “You have to understand, we are an underground organization. We have spent years quietly penetrating positions of influence,” one member told Russ Bellant.[81] By the mid-1980’s, the Reagan administration was interwoven with UCCA members, with the group’s chairman Lev Dobriansky, a member of the ASC and the board of the US WACL.[82] As a member of the OSS, Dobriansky worked under Donovan in running many Ukrainian SS officers and their Ukrainian Nazi collaborators to safety in Operation Paperclip.[83] During the Eisenhower Administration, Dobriansky initiated Captive Nations, which employed many ex-Nazis and fascists among Eastern European émigrés in the United States.

Dobriansky’s daughter Paula served on the NSC and as an assistant director of the defunct US Information Agency during the George H.W. Bush administration. She was also one of the original Signatories to Statement of Principles of the neoconservative PNAC. Paula’s friend and colleague was Katherine Chumachenko, an American of Ukrainian descent and wife for former Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko. Chumachenko had been one of Lev Dobriansky’s students. She was a former Reagan administration official and ex-staffer at the Heritage Foundation.[84] Chumachenko was formerly the director of the OUN-linked UCCA’s Captive Nations Committee and then Deputy Director for Public Liaison at the White House.[85] During the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election campaign, Chumachenko was accused of exerting the influence on her husband’s decisions, as an agent of the US government or even the CIA.[86]

In 2010, Yushchenko awarded Stephan Bandera the title of “National Hero of Ukraine.” On January 1, 2014, Bandera’s 105th birthday was celebrated by a torchlight procession of 15,000 people in the center of Kiev and thousands more rallied near his statue in Lviv. The march was supported by Svoboda, whose leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, had called for the liberation of his country from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.”[87] Svoboda is linked to an international network of neo-fascist parties through the Alliance of European National Movements. The alliance’s founding members were Jobbik, France’s National Front, Italy’s Tricolour Flame, Sweden’s National Democrats, and Belgium’s National Front. At the end of 2011, Marine Le Pen, the new French National Front leader, resigned from the AENM and joined the EAF (European Alliance for Freedom). Nick Griffin of the BNP was its Vice President. Svoboda’s openly anti-Semitic politics did not prevent Senator John McCain from addressing a EuroMaidan rally alongside Tyahnybok. In a leaked phone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine, Nuland revealed her wish for Tyahnybok to remain “on the outside,” but to consult with the US’s replacement for Yanukovich, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, “four times a week.” Yatsenyuk became prime minister of Ukraine on February 27, 2014. They discussed that the EU would not commit to mediate, with Nuland adding, according to a leaked phone conversation, “Fuck the EU.”[88]

The scope of the protests soon widened, with calls for the resignation of Yanukovych and his government. As a result, Yanukovych was forced to make concessions to the opposition to end the bloodshed in Kiev and end the crisis. The Agreement on settlement of political crisis in Ukraine was signed by key leaders of the Euromaidan, Vitaly Klitschko, Arseny Yatsenyuk and Tyahnybok. The signing was witnessed by the Foreign Ministers of Germany and Poland, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Radosław Sikorski, respectively, and the Director of the Continental Europe Department of the French Foreign Ministry, Eric Fournier. Vladimir Lukin, representing Russia, refused to sign the agreement.

The protests led to the 2014 Euromaidan revolution, when Yanukovych and many other high government officials fled the country. Protesters gained control of the presidential administration and Yanukovych’s private estate. Afterwards, the parliament removed Yanukovych from office, replaced the government with a pro-European one, and ordered that former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko be released from prison. On March 17, 2014, the day after the Crimean status referendum, Yanukovych became one of the first eleven persons who were placed under executive sanctions by President Obama

Crimean Crisis

The ousting of Yanukovych sparked a political crisis in Crimea, which initially manifested as demonstrations against the new interim Ukrainian government. Events rapidly escalated, which led to the installation of the pro-Russian Aksyonov government in Crimea, conducting the Crimean status referendum and the declaration of Crimea’s independence on March 16, 2014. The Ukrainian territory of Crimea was annexed by the Russian Federation on March 18, 2014, and the peninsula is now administered as two Russian federal subjects, the Republic of Crimea and the federal city of Sevastopol. Putin welcomed the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation by declaring that he “was saving them from the new Ukrainian leaders who are the ideological heirs of Bandera, Hitler’s accomplice during World War II.”[89]

In August 2014, Dugin called for a “genocide” of Ukrainians.[90] During the conflict, Dugin also lost his post as Head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations of Moscow State University in 2014, as the result of a petition signed by over 10,000 people. The petition was started after Dugin in an interview expressed his opinion on how to deal with Ukrainians: “To kill, kill, kill. There should be no more conversations. As a professor, I think so.”[91]

In October 2016, Ukrainian hacker group CyberHunta leaked emails and other documents alleged to belong to Vladislav Surkov, which show a direct Russian role in creating and directing the rebel uprising in eastern Ukraine in 2014. In 2011, then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had reassigned Surkov to the role of Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Modernisation. On 20 September 2013, after he resigned from his position under Medvedev, Putin appointed Surkov as his Aide in the Presidential Executive Office, who became Putin’s personal adviser on relationships with Abkhazia, South Ossetia and Ukraine. On 17 March 2014, the day after the Crimean status referendum, Surkov became one of the first eleven persons who were placed under executive sanctions on the Obama administration.

One of the emails to Surkov from Dugin’s associate Konstantin Malofeev, who reportedly had ties to the rebels, contained a list of recommended candidates for positions in the separatist government prior to their appointments.[92] Malofeev was accused of financing “illegal military groups” in Eastern Ukraine who at the time fought against the Ukrainian army. For this he was also placed on the European Union list of individuals sanctioned during the 2014 pro-Russian unrest in Ukraine.[93] In 2014, a Russian hacking collective called Shaltai Boltai released a trove of emails between Dugin associate Georgy Gavrish and Syriza officials, in which they discussed efforts by Malofeev and Dugin to identify political partners in Greece with Russian sympathies.[94] Alexander Borodai, a Russian citizen and former prime minister of the Russian-backed Ukrainian separatist state the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), is a friend of Malofeev’s and previously worked as his public relations consultant.[95] Malofeev is also the former employer of Igor Girkin (aka Igor Strelkov), a former FSB colonel and commander of pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine who the Ukrainian government accused of being a criminal.[96] Malofeev’s inner circle includes Father Tikhon, who is believed to be Putin’s personal confessor, and Igor Shchegolev, a former minister of communications and Putin’s current internet tsar.[97] Tikhon is also close with Sergei Ivanov, and is believed to have connected Ivanov and Malofeev to discuss issues relating to Ukraine.[98]

Malofeev is thought to be doing the Kremlin’s bidding, in Ukraine and potentially around Europe as well.[99] “The Kremlin administration may have wanted to keep a distance to the whole ‘Novorossiya’ adventure by having Malofeev run it and pay for it,” the Interpreter Magazine reported.[100] “He’s useful like Soros in that he acts on his own,” Sergei Markov, a policy consultant to Putin’s staff, told Bloomberg. “He suits Russian authorities because they don’t want to take responsibility for certain things.”[101]

Furies of Maidan

On January 15, 2016, Nuland held a closed-door meeting with Surkov. “That it was Surkov, and not [Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory] Karasin—Nuland’s counterpart—is very significant,” said foreign affairs expert Vladimir Frolov.[102] Though he has allegedly been responsible for managing Russia’s Ukraine policy, Surkov had not officially taken part in any prior high-level negotiations with the United States. Both the US State Department and the Russian Foreign Ministry revealed little about the substance of the meeting. Surkov told reporters that the meeting was essentially a “brainstorming” session. State Department spokesman John Kirby said that the two discussed “the situation in eastern Ukraine and the need for a full implementation of the Minsk agreements,” and designed to support ongoing international negotiations to bring the crisis to a close. Kirby said after the meeting on Friday that “[Surkov] is the appropriate person in [the Russian] government [with whom] to have this discussion about Minsk implementation.”[103]

Working under Surkov was a friend of Nuland, Sergei Prikhodko, who took over the position when Surkov resigned in 2013 after Putin became President.[104] Prikhodko, one of Russia’s least public high-ranking state officials, spent many years managing the Kremlin’s foreign policy, before taking over as Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev’s chief of staff. A expert in international relations, Prikhodko is practically the most influential politician in the field, even more influential than Lavrov.

Russian opposition activist Alexei Navalny developed a case that during the 2016 election Prikhodko had been a conduit between the Kremlin and an oligarch linked to the Trump campaign. That was in August 2016, a month after Paul Manafort, then Trump’s campaign manager, offered “private briefings” to Oleg Deripaska, a close ally of Putin, according to an email seen by The Atlantic.[105] During the 2016 Presidential campaign, less than two weeks before Donald Trump accepted the Republican presidential nomination, Manafort, via Konstantin Kilimnik, a Kiev-based operative with suspected ties to Russian intelligence, offered to provide briefings on political developments to Deripaska, though there is no evidence that the briefings took place.[106] He was known as “Kostya, the guy from the GRU.”[107]

Manafort and Kilimnik started working for Viktor Yanukovych after the 2004 Orange Revolution cost him the Presidency. Kilimnik was still working for Russian intelligence when, during September and October 2016, he was known to be communicating with the Trump campaign.[108] According to court filings by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Kilimnik was known by Manafort’s employee Rick Gates to be a “former Russian Intelligence Officer with GRU.”[109] Kilimnik was indicted by Mueller’s grand jury on June 8, 2018 on charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy to obstruct justice by attempting to tamper with a witness on behalf of Manafort.

Navalny presented a video which features a recording made by Nastya Rybka, a Belarusian woman, a self-described “sex expert,” who has claimed to have been Deripaska’s mistress. Rybka, whose real name is Anastasia Vashukevich, was on Deripaska’s yacht sailing off the coast of Norway with Prikhodko, accompanied by other escorts. In September 2017, Navalny had first discovered that Vashukevich was among a group of women in bondage gear who happened to be recorded by journalists from a pro-Putin media outlet the moment they entered into the Moscow office of his organization, the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Navalny then revealed they were a “mildly insane” troupe of activist sex workers who specialize in stunts like picketing naked outside the American Embassy in support of Harvey Weinstein.[110]

Vashukevich is self-declared “huntress” who secretly recorded her seduction of wealthy “victims.” Vashukevich’s “master” is Alexander Kirillov, also known as Alex Lesley, a 36-year old mathematician turned “expert in seduction and orgasm techniques,” who has made headlines in Russia for vowing to challenge President Putin.[111] Kirillov worked for Skolkovo Innovation Centre, the Russian equivalent of Silicon Valley, a complex headed by Viktor Vekselberg and co-chaired by former Intel CEO Craig Barrett.[112] Vekselberg and Deripaska had a falling out in 2012, when Vekselberg left Rusal.

Kirillov describes himself on his website as the author of eight best-selling books on seduction, published by one of the largest publishing houses in Russia. One is titled a Life Without Panties. In the preface, Lesley explains that developed his “seduction style,” which makes use of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, while in Israel.[113] Lesley ordered female followers, whom he refers to as “slave girls,” to perform public stunts. An explicit clip emerged showed a giggling Anastasia Davydova filming Vashukevich having sex at five in the morning next to the river Volga. Both women were sentenced to seven days behind bars. Another stunt involved six women in lingerie entering a McDonald's restaurant to order food and tease other customers. On July 12, 2017, Kirillov posted a photo of himself on Instagram in front of Trump Tower in gesturing the satanic hand-sign.[114]

Graphic descriptions of the elaborate sexual and surveillance techniques used by Vashukevich and Kirillov appear in her lightly fictionalized, Russian-language instruction book titled, Who Wants to Seduce a Billionaire. For the past few years, Kirillov has cultivated young females to seduce unsuspecting “targets” in several countries to have sex, fall in love and confess their personal lives, Vashukevich wrote. In the book, Kirillov wrote: “The Huntress plays for real. She might hate someone, but if she has to love him, she will fall in love with him and make him fall in love with her. Then she’ll switch back to another identity and [have sex with] him!”[115]

At one point during her time on the yacht with Deripaska, Kirillov reportedly sent her text messages reading: “Nastya, your written report was perfect, but I must have audio to understand intonations and… what exactly you are doing there… Start taping everything!”[116] Vashukevich identified herself as “Deripaska’s mistress, Alex Lesley’s project” on her nastya_rybka.ru Instagram account. Asked why Vashukevich wrote the book and uploaded photos of Deripaska, Vashukevich’s friend “Misha” said, “This book and all the pictures she posted on the Instagram was for Deripaska. It’s just a part of his seduction,” Misha said. “She loved [Kirillov] very much. She told me… Nastya presented this book to him. It was a gift from her to him.”[117]

In Vashukevich’s novel, Deripaska is called “Raslan.” She also wrote about the supposed sexual boorishness of an unnamed “Deputy Prime Minister,” referring to Prikhodko, who is called “Daddy.” Of Daddy she writes, “This is the grey eminence of the regime. Richelieu of our time.” She adds, “Nobody ever called him by his name. But Raslan yields to him. Never argues. Takes cue from him. And Daddy is the only one Raslan never jokes about. Who is he? Who can a billionaire be afraid of?... And the billionaire can’t even put a word in when Daddy blatantly harasses this woman?” Vashukevich asks herself what might be the purpose of the meeting on the yacht. They were clearly more than a “fishing trip.” “Those were informal negotiations about something important for Raslan.”[118]

Vashukevich’s video includes photos of Deripaska sitting next to Prikhodko. Deripaska is recorded saying to Vashukevich: “We’ve got bad relations with America. Why? Because the friend of Sergey Eduardovich, Nuland is her name, is responsible for them. When she was young, she spent a month on a Russian whaling boat, and after this, she hates the country.”[119] A related claim was made in 2014 on a program on NTV, one of Russia’s major television networks, in a documentary on Ukraine called The Furies of Maidan: Sex, Psychosis, and Politics, which cast the Euromaidan protests as the result of the displaced energy of sexually frustrated or pathological women. The program claimed that Nuland was a secret lesbian and that she enjoys group sex with male sailors on the same fishing trip.[120] A day after Navalny’s video was published, the Roskomnadzor, the Russian federal executive body responsible for media and telecommunications, added the video to the Federal List of Extremist Materials, thus making accessing the video illegal for all Russian citizens.[121]

Vashukevich, who may have information about the infamous Golden Showers episode described in the Trump Dossier, claims to be the “the missing link in the connection between Russia and the U.S. elections.”[122] Vashukevich and Lesley were arrested on February 25, 2018 in Thailand, while teaching a “sex training” seminar for Russian tourists in the resort city of Pattaya. Lesley told the Associated Press that he believes Russia is behind their arrests.[123] From what was apparently the back of an open-air police vehicle, Vashukevich made an Instagram video begging Americans for help. “I am the only witness and the missing link in the connection between Russia and the U.S. elections — the long chain of Oleg Deripaska, Prikhodko, Manafort, and Trump,” she said, according to CNN’s translation.[124]

As reported by CNN’s Ivan Watson who met with Vashukevich in Thailand, “she says she witnessed meetings between the Russian billionaire and three Americans who she refused to name. She claims they discussed plans to effect the US elections but she wouldn’t give any further information because she fears she could be deported back to Russia.”[125] The New York Times reported that the FBI has asked to speak to her, but was refused access by Thai authorities.[126]

Bank of Cyprus

In the spring of 2016, Victoria Nuland, as the top State Department official charged with overseeing US policy toward Russia, was one of those who had “first rung the alarm bell” inside the Obama administration, warning that Russia appeared to be trying to “discredit the democratic process” in the United States as part of a concerted 2016 strategy.[127] Nuland claims to have known since late 2015 that the DNC’s email servers had been hacked. “That’s when the hairs really went up on the back of our necks,” she recounted in an interview with The Global Politico. In the interview, Nuland said she was familiar with Christopher Steele’s work through regular reports he had passed on to her office over the previous several years dealing with political maneuverings in Russia and Ukraine. When information from the Dossier was presented to her in July 2016, she apparently decided, it was not the business of the State Department, and advised that the information should be communicated to the FBI.

Nuland ended up quitting the State Department days before Trump took office over her qualms about him. David Duke, a frequent critic of Nuland, celebrated by publishing an article on his website titled, “Trump kicks insane Jewess Nuland out of State Department — So this is what winning feels like!”[128]

Nuland was active subverting politics in the Ukraine at a time when American consultant, Paul Manafort, partner in Black, Manafort and Stone, and later chairman of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, was advising Yanukovych since his original ouster in 2004. It was Arthur J. Finkelstein who years ago introduced Manafort to Putin’s pro-Russian Ukrainian oligarchs.[129] When Yanukovych was reelected in 2010, it was a comeback attributed to a drastic makeover engineered in part Manafort.[130] Manafort was introduced to Yanukovich by Rinat Akhmetov, a Ukrainian oligarch, who an official Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs report titled the “Overview of the Most Dangerous Organized Crime Structures in Ukraine” identified as a leader of an organized crime syndicate.[131] Manafort, who had begun advising Yanukovych months after the Orange Revolution, rebuffed U.S. Ambassador William Taylor when he complained Manafort was undermining US interests in Ukraine.[132]

One of Manafort’s biggest clients was the shady pro-Russian Ukrainian billionaire Dmytro Firtash.[133] By his own admission, Firtash maintains strong ties with Ukrainian/Russian mob boss Semion Mogilevich.[134] The acting US attorney in Chicago recently dubbed Firtash an “organized-crime member” and an “upper-echelon associat[e] of Russian organized crime.” Firtash is currently under indictment in US federal court for allegedly orchestrating an international titanium mining racket.[135] Firtash and a partner owned half of RosUkrEnergo (RUE), which was founded in 2004 and emerged as Ukraine’s sole gas importer in 2006 to 2009. Russia’s state-run Gazprom owned half of RUE, and there are the reports that, as a 50-50 partner, Firtash made his billions as Putin’s handpicked surrogate.[136]

Firtash has allegedly financed the Russian separatists in South-Eastern Ukraine. Bankers close to Putin granted Firtash credit lines of up to $11 billion, which helped Firtash to back Yanukovich who won power and went on to rule Ukraine for four years. “Firtash has always been an intermediary,” said Viktor Chumak, chairman of the anti-corruption committee in the previous Ukrainian parliament. “He is a political person representing Russia’s interests in Ukraine.”[137] Yanukovych, who is mentioned in the Trump Dossier, was said to have assured Putin that no one would ever trace alleged cash payments to Manafort back to the Russian president.[138]

Manafort has also been forging some intricate business deals for Oleg Deripaska. As early as 2005, Manafort secretly worked for Deripaska on a confidential strategy that he would influence politics, business dealings and news coverage inside the United States, Europe and former Soviet republics to “greatly benefit the Putin Government,” The Associated Press reported.[139] Manafort told Deripaska he was pushing policies as part of his work in Ukraine “at the highest levels of the U.S. government—the White House, Capitol Hill and the State Department.”[140]

According to the Associated Press, starting in 2006, Deripaska made annual payments of $10 million to Manafort through the Bank of Cyprus, the largest bank in Cyprus, one of the key offshore havens for illicit Russian finance, to advance Putin’s global agenda.[141] Since the 1990s, Cyprus has served as one the top three offshore destinations for Russian and former Soviet Union flight capital, most of it motivated by tax dodging, kleptocracy, and money laundering.[142] Manafort has spent the majority of his recent career with pro-Russian groups in the Ukraine.

Wilbur Ross, Trump’s current Secretary of Commerce, has been Vice Chairman and a major investor since 2014 in the Bank of Cyprus. Ross’ fellow bank co-chair, Vladimir Strzhalkovskiy, worked with Putin in the KGB in the 1980s.[143] The Bank of Cyprus is led by CEO John Hourican, the former Royal Bank of Scotland head of investment banking who resigned after the group settled with US and UK authorities over Libor fixing. In 2014, the bank selected former Deutsche Bank head Josef Ackermann, as chairman. His appointment was supported by Ross and Viktor Vekselberg, a business partner of Len Blavatnik, and whose Renova Group is the second largest single shareholder in Bank of Cyprus. During Ackermann’s tenure, the bank paid between $630 and $650 million in fines for allegedly laundering $10 billion in Russian money suspected to have ties to Putin’s family and associates. Deutsche Bank has also been and still is Trump’s main creditor, and for a long time, the only major bank that would lend him significant money.[144]

According to the Paradise Papers, which were leaked to the public on November 5, 2017, Ross has kept a 31 percent stake in Navigator Holdings, which the New York Times said earns millions of dollars a year transporting gas for Russian petrochemical firm Sibur. Stakeholders in Sibur include Gennady Timchenko, a Russian oligarch and Putin associate subject to US sanctions, and Putin’s son-in-law, Kirill Shamalov.[145]

Robert Mueller’s indictment of Paul Manafort unsealed on October 30, 2017, details how he and his former business partner and deputy campaign manager for Donald Trump, Rick Gates, used a company called Lucicle Consultants Limited to wire millions of dollars into the United States. The Cyprus-based Lucicle, in turn, reportedly received millions of dollars from Ivan Fursin a Ukrainian businessman and parliamentarian, a senior figure in the Mogilevich criminal organization.[146] Fursin is also very close to Putin protégé Dmitry Firtash. “It was very similar to the relationship between Manafort and Gates,” said Ken McCallion, a former federal prosecutor. “Gates was a significant player in the criminal activities that Manafort engaged in… He played a major role, he was a major lieutenant in Manafort’s organization. By the same token, Fursin was one of the chief lieutenants of Firtash.”[147]

Flynn Intel Group

In December 2017, Ret. Lieutenant General Michael T. Flynn, who had served as Trump’s controversial National Security Advisor, was convicted of lying to the FBI, a felony, about contacts he had with the Russian government during Trump’s presidential transition. Flynn had been appointed by President Barack Obama as the eighteenth director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. In that capacity, Flynn travelled to Moscow where he became the second director of the DIA to be invited into the headquarters of the GRU, though he will later boast of being the first. “Flynn thought he developed some rapport with the GRU chief,” a former senior U.S. military official said.[148] Records show that Flynn collected nearly $68,000 in fees and expenses from Russia-related entities in 2015.

After he had been forced into retirement in 2014, and warned by the Defense Intelligence Agency against accepting foreign payments,[149] documents published on March 16, 2017, by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, detailed Flynn’s financial ties to Russian companies. Flynn was paid $11,250 that year by the American subsidiary of a Russian cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky Lab, and another $11,250 by a U.S. air cargo company affiliated with the Volga-Dnepr Group, which is owned by a Russian businessman. Kaspersky Lab, which makes some of the world’s most popular anti-virus software, has long suspected by US intelligence of being used to assist Russian espionage efforts. However, in December 2016, a top Kaspersky Lab official was arrested by Russian authorities and accused of spying for American companies and intelligence services. In 2007 Volga-Dnepr was removed from a list of approved UN vendors following corruption allegations against two Russian officials who steered contracts to the firm.[150]

Flynn’s efforts aligned with Russia’s policy towards Turkey, which was supported by Dugin. In July 2016, Flynn spoke favorably of the 2016 coup participants, saying that Erdogan had been moving Turkey away from secularism and towards Islamism.[151] On November 7, the day before the election, Flynn registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for $530,000 worth of lobbying on behalf of a Dutch-based company that may have been working for the Turkish government. The following day, Flynn reversed his support for the plot and writing an op-ed published by The Hill, that called for US backing for Erdogan government and criticizing Gülen, alleging that Gülen headed a “vast global network” that fitted “the description of a dangerous sleeper terror network.”[152] Former Director of the CIA James Woolsey said that in September 2016 Flynn, while working for the Trump presidential campaign, had attended a meeting in a New York hotel with Turkish officials and had discussed abducting Gülen and sending him to Turkey, bypassing the US extradition legal process.[153]

Dugin’s writings have made him an influential thinker not only in Turkey, but also Iran. When a Russian jet was shot down by Turkey in 2015, Dugin used his contacts in both countries to form a backchannel that helped Vladimir Putin and President Erdogan end an increasingly dangerous feud.[154] Dugin’s diplomacy received the assistance of Ismail Hakki Pekin, the former head of Turkish intelligence, who acted as an intermediary between Putin and Turkey, and Konstantin Malofeev. Dugin introduced Malofeev as Putin’s “right-hand man,” and the Turks came to learn the financier really can “knock on Putin’s door.”[155]

During the Fall of 2016, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Flynn Intel Group, a lobbying group established by Flynn, was flying Turkish officials to Washington to interview them to be featured in a documentary on Gülen which featured Pekin.[156] Dugin claimed that Russian intelligence agencies had “concrete evidence that CIA agents commanded the failed coup attempt.”[157] Days later, the Istanbul Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office on December 1, 2017, issued an arrest warrant for Graham Fuller, the former vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council of the CIA.

In December 2016, Flynn met with Heinz-Christian Strache, who succeeded Jörg Haider as leader of the Austrian far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ). The party is a member of the Europe of Nations and Freedom (ENL), a political group in the European Parliament which represents a union of Europe’s far-right nationalist parties. On 15 June 2015, Marine Le Pen announced the new group to be launched the following day, set to comprise MEPs from the Front National (FN), Geert Wilders’ Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), Italy’s Lega Nord, the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), Flemish Interest (VB), the Polish Congress of the New Right (KNP) and former UK Independence Party member Janice Atkinson. With 39 members, the group is the smallest in the European Parliament. The largest party of the group by number of MEPs is the Front National (FN) representing more than half of ENL’s MEPs with 20 MEPs out of 39.

Order of the Old Nobility

At the end of May 2014, Strache attended a secret meeting in Vienna, convened by Malofeev, and which featured Dugin. The official topic was the Congress of Vienna, referring to a series of meetings of representatives of European states and Russia held in 1814-1815, which eventually established Metternich’s Holy Alliance that aimed at containing the spread of secularism and republicanism in Europe, and “confirmed that the big countries had certain legitimate interests and establish specific spheres of influence in Europe.”[158]

Attendees included other FPÖ leaders, as well as the FN’s Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, Bulgarian far-right Ataka’s leader Volen Siderov, Prince Sixtus Henry of Bourbon-Parma, Serge de Pahlen, president of the Swiss financial company Edifin Service and husband of the Fiat heiress Countess Margherita Agnelli de Pahlen, whose family are known as the “Kennedys of Italy.”[159] Count Serge de Pahlen, a founding member of St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation, is the son of a White Russian émigré of the same name, Serge S. von der Pahlen (1915–1991), who enlisted with the Wehrmacht to serve on the Eastern Front in the Russian Liberation Army before being repatriated to Paris. Until 2004, he held an important position at Fiat as vice-president for the Group’s international operations, particularly in the former Soviet Union, before creating Edifin Services, based in Geneva. He is also on the management committee of Eastern Property Holdings, which works in real estate in Russia, Cyprus, and the Cayman Islands. In addition, he directs the well-known Éditions des Syrtes, which publishes regularly on Russia; is one of the founders of the movement for the Local Orthodox Russian Tradition in Western Europe; and co-directs the Union of Descendants of Russian Combatants at Gallipoli, an association of descendants of the White Army which collaborated with Nazi Germany during the war.[160] Prince Sixtus was present at the episcopal ordination of four bishops who belong to the Society of Saint Pius X by Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre on 30 June 1988 at Écône, Switzerland, and was the first to publicly congratulate him. In the French presidential election, he endorsed the candidature of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the candidate of the Front National.[161]

Prince Sixtus, who is Knight Grand Cross of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, is a cousin to Otto von Habsburg, founder of the Pan-European Union.[162] Sixtus’ father was Prince Xavier of Bourbon-Parma, brother-in-law of Emperor Charles I of Austria, father of Otto von Habsburg. Xavier was born to a highly aristocratic Bourbon-Parma family, who in the mid-eighteenth century diverged from the Spanish Bourbons, who in turn diverged from the French Bourbons few decades earlier. The House descended from the French Capetian dynasty in male line. The title was held by the Spanish Bourbons as the founder was the great-grandson of Duke Ranuccio II Farnese, Duke of Parma (1630 – 1694). The duchy was invaded by Napoleon and annexed to France, and had its sovereignty restored in 1814, with Napoleon’s wife, Marie Louise as its reigning duchess. With her death, the Duchy was restored to the Bourbons, only to be formally abolished in 1859 as it was integrated into the new Italian state.

Prince Sixtus is considered Regent of Spain by some Carlists, a Traditionalist and fascist political movement in Spain seeking the establishment of a separate line of the Bourbon dynasty on the Spanish throne. Since 2015, Prince Sixtus has claimed the title of Grand Master of the Order of Saint Lazarus, as part of its “Jerusalem obedience” wing. Sixtus is also Knight Grand Cross of Justice of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of Saint George, whose legendary origins trace its foundation to an apocryphal order founded by Constantine the Great. Its incorporation as a religious order of the Catholic Church hereditary in the House of Farnese and its heirs, the Bourbons, dates from the transfer to Francesco Farnese in 1698. The Parmesan Constantinian Order was a new foundation, instituted in 1817 by Napoleon’s wife, Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma, granddaughter of Leopold II, brother of Joseph II. Following her death, the duke of Lucca, heir to the Bourbon-Parma succession, became duke of Parma under the terms of the Congress of Vienna and assumed the grand mastership which is today claimed by Prince Carlos, Duke of Parma. Currently, the grand magistry of the order is disputed among the two claimants to the headship of the former reigning House of Bourbon-Two Sicilies as heirs of the House of Farnese, namely Prince Pedro and Prince Carlo.

Prince Xavier was involved in the Sixtus Affair, a failed attempt by Charles I to conclude a separate peace with the allies in World War I. For his role as a peacemaker during the 1917-1918, Charles I was solemnly declared blessed in a Mass of Beatification on October 3, 2004, by Pope John Paul II. The miracle attributed to Charles was the scientifically inexplicable healing of a Brazilian nun with debilitating varicose veins, who was able to get out of bed after she prayed for his beatification in 1960. During the World War II, Prince Xavier returned to the Belgian army, where he had served during World War I. He was demobilized and joined the French Resistance. He was taken prisoner by the Nazis and sent to Natzweiler and Dachau concentration camp, where American troops liberated him in 1945. In 1952, Javier was proclaimed King of Spain, asserting Carlist legitimacy. Soon thereafter he was expelled from Spain by order of the Francoist government. He transferred all political authority to his eldest son, Prince Carlos Hugo of Bourbon-Parma, and formally abdicated as the Carlist king in his elder son’s favor in 1975.

Otto von Habsburg, Archduke Karl von Habsburg and Prince Vincenz of Liechtenstein, grandson of Charles I of Austria, were significantly involved in 2008 in the reorganization of the Ancient Order of St. George, dating back to the Order of the Old Nobility (or later Order of the Four Roman Emperors, in honor of Henry VII, Charles IV, Wenceslas and Sigismund of Luxembourg, founder of the Order of the Dragon.[163] Building on the centuries-old Habsburg motto “Viribus Unitis,” the peoples and nations of Central Europe should now take care of their interests together. In the framework of the Order of St. George, the historical connections are to be strengthened and expanded, also in order to be able to perform better in United Europe.[164] In addition to local meetings, the order has major events such as in Vienna, Budapest, Prague, Zagreb, Ljubljana, Trieste, Milan, London, Frankfurt, Salzburg, and Tyrol.  According to the order’s homepage, members are often well-known personalities, but also people such as Ulrich W. Lipp, the long-standing Habsburg imperial advisor, herald and master of ceremonies, Otto von Habsburg’s political assistant Eva Demmerle or Alexander Pachta-Reyhofen, the Chancellor of the Order of the Golden Fleece.[165]

[1] Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives (Basic Books, 1997), p. 46.

[2] Concept of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation Approved by President of the Russian Federation V. Putin (February 12, 2013).

[3] Joseph S. Nye. “Donald Trump and the Decline of US Soft Power.” Project Syndicate (February 6, 2018).

[4] Soft Power 30. Retrieved from https://softpower30.com/country/united-states/?country_years=2015,2016,2017

[5] Moira Whelan. “Ugly rhetoric first.” The Soft Power 30: A Global Ranking of Soft Power 2017 (Portland: USC Center on Public Diplomacy, 2017).

[6] David Ignatius. “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups.” The Washington Post (September 22, 1991). Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1991/09/22/innocence-abroad-the-new-world-of-spyless-coups/92bb989a-de6e-4bb8-99b9-462c76b59a16/

[7] Ronald R. Krebs & James Ron. “Democracies Need a Little Help From Their Friends.” Foreign Policy (June 7, 2018); Robert W. Merry. “Why Do Some Foreign Countries Hate American NGOs So Much?” The Atlantic (April 2, 2012).

[8] Robert W. Merry. “Why Do Some Foreign Countries Hate American NGOs So Much?” The Atlantic (April 2, 2012).

[9] Robert Reich. “Robert Reich: Lobbyists are snuffing our democracy, one legal bribe at a time.” Salon (June 9, 2015); Russ Feingold. “US campaign finance laws resemble legalized bribery. We must reform them.” The Guardian (November 8, 2017); Mike Masnick. “Is Lobbying Closer To Bribery... Or Extortion?” TechDirt (April 10, 2012);

[10] Natalie Jones and Alastair Gee. “America's super rich: six things to know.” The Guardian (September 26, 2018).

[11] Martin Gilens & Benjamin I. Page (September 2014). “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens.” American Political Science Association, 12(3): 564-581.

[12] Robert W. Merry. “Why Do Some Foreign Countries Hate American NGOs So Much?” The Atlantic (April 2, 2012).

[13] Ibid.

[14] Andrew Wilson. “Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, NGOs and the Role of the West.” Cambridge Review of International Affairs. 19(1), March 2006.

[15] Robert Pee. “Political Warfare Old and New: The State and Private Groups in the Formation of the National Endowment for Democracy.” 49th Parallel: Myth & Legacy, Issue 22, Autumn 2008.

[16] Orysia Lutsevych. “Agents of the Russian World Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood.” Russia and Eurasia Programme (Chatham House, April 2016).

[17] Kerric Harvey. Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2013).

[18] Nicolas Guilhot. “A network of influential friendships: The foundation pour une entraide intellectuelle europeenne and east-west culturial dialogue.” Minerva, 44 (2006), pp. 379-409.

[19] Nicolas Guilhot. “Reforming the World: George Soros, Global Capitalism and the Philanthropic Management of the Social Sciences.” Critical Sociology. 33, 3 (May 2007), pp. 447–477. doi:10.1163/156916307X188988.

[20] Evgenii Mikolaichuk, ‘Amerikanskie den’gi na ukrainskoi krovi’ [American money on Ukrainian blood], Vremia.ua (February 1, 2014). Retrieved from

http://vremia.ua/rubrics/zakulisa/5321.php.

[21] See Rukspert statistics, ‘Podderzhka Evromaidana amerikantsami’ [American support of Euromaidan]. Retrieved from

http://ruxpert.ru/Поддержка_Евромайдана_американцами; Cited in Orysia Lutsevych. “Agents of the Russian World Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood.” Russia and Eurasia Programme (Chatham House, April 2016).

[22] Orysia Lutsevych. “Agents of the Russian World Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood.” Russia and Eurasia Programme (Chatham House, April 2016).

[23] Nicholas Fedyk. “Russian ‘New Generation’ Warfare: Theory, Practice, and Lessons for U.S. Strategists.” Small Wars Journal (August 25, 2016).

[24] Sam Jones. “Ukraine: Russia’s new art of war.” Financial Times (August 28, 2014).

[25] Molly K. McKew. “Putin’s real long game.” Politico (January 1, 2017).

[26] Lutsevych. “Agents of the Russian World Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood.”

[27] “The Propaganda of the Putin Era.” Institute of Modern Russia (25 April 2013). Retrieved from https://imrussia.org/en/politics/443?start=1

[28] “Global Diplomacy Index – Country Rank.” Lowy Institute. Retrieved from https://globaldiplomacyindex.lowyinstitute.org/country_rank.html

[29] Alex Oliver. “How big is the Kremlin’s diplomatic network?” BBC News (March 30, 2018).

[30] Orysia Lutsevych. “Agents of the Russian World Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood.” Russia and Eurasia Programme (Chatham House, April 2016).

[31] Ibid.

[32] Grant Stern. “A GOP Kremlin-insider connected Alexander Torshin to Congressmen. Then he joined the NRA.” Medium (March 25, 2017).

[33] Orysia Lutsevych. “Agents of the Russian World Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood.” Russia and Eurasia Programme (Chatham House, April 2016).

[34] “Putin’s ‘Soros’ Dreams of Empire as Allies Wage Ukraine Revolt.” Bloomberg (June 15, 2014).

[35] Justin Salhani. “The Russian billionaire carrying out Putin’s will across Europe.” Think Progress (January 4, 2017).

[36] “Dmitry Rogozin.” Global Security (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/rogozin.htm

[37] Timothy Snyder. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (Tim Duggan Books, 2018).

[38] Ibid.

[39] Areg Galstyan. “Third Rome Rising: The Ideologues Calling for a New Russian Empire.” National Interest (June 27, 2016).

[40] Adam Robinson. “Putin cast as national saviour ahead of Russia election.” BBC News (January 21, 2018).

[41] “Dmitry Rogozin.” Global Security (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/russia/rogozin.htm

[42] Areg Galstyan. “Third Rome Rising: The Ideologues Calling for a New Russian Empire.” National Interest (June 27, 2016).

[43] Snyder. The Road to Unfreedom.

[44] Ibid.

[45] Ibid.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Transcript of Putin’s speech at the Valdai International Discussion Club (September 19, 2013). Retrieved from http://eng.news.kremlin.ru/news/6007

[48] Areg Galstyan. “Third Rome Rising: The Ideologues Calling for a New Russian Empire.” National Interest (June 27, 2016).

[49] Iver B. Neumann. “From Rome to Russia.” Foreign Affairs (February 3, 2017).

[50] “Natalia Narochnitskaya.” Valdai Discussion Club (n.d.). Retrieved from http://valdaiclub.com/about/experts/383/

[51] Orysia Lutsevych. “Agents of the Russian World Proxy Groups in the Contested Neighbourhood.” Russia and Eurasia Programme (Chatham House, April 2016).

[52] Alana Goodman. “The Ron Paul Institute for Putin’s Priorities.” Washington Free Beacon (March 17, 2014).

[53] “The Propaganda of the Putin Era.” Institute of Modern Russia (25 April 2013). Retrieved from https://imrussia.org/en/politics/443?start=1

[54] Nicola Lebourg. “The French Far Right in Russia’s Orbit.” Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (May 15, 2018).

[55] David M. Herszenhorn & Ellen Barry. “Putin Contends Clinton Incited Unrest Over Vote.” New York Times (December 8, 2011).

[56] Miriam Elder. “Putin and Medvedev try to calm Russian election outcry.” The Guardian (December 11, 2011).

[57] The GiFiles. Wikileaks. Retrieved from https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/54/5416149_re-edward-lozansky-.html

[58] “Vladislav Surkov Biography.” The Moscow Times (March 25, 2011).

[59] Associated Press. “Putin ejects Kremlin 'puppet master' after protests.” The Guardian (December 27, 2011).

[60] Anna Nemtsova. “Eli Lake: Is This the Mastermind Behind Russia’s Crimea Grab?” The Daily Beast (March 19, 2014).

[61] Masha Lipman. “Putin’s ‘Sovereign Democracy’.” The Washington Post (July 15, 2006).

[62] “Russia: A Postmodern Dictatorship? With Pavel Khodorkovsky & Peter Pomerantsev.” Legatum Institute, (October 14, 2013).

[63] Peter Pomerantsev. “The Hidden Author of Putinism.” The Atlantic (November 7, 2014).

[64] “Vladimir Putin’s top aide Vladislav Surkov mocks US sanctions.” The Independent (March 18, 2014).

[65] Charles Clover in Moscow. “Kremlin loses its need for a ‘grey cardinal’” Financial Times (May 13, 2013).

[66] Adam Curtis. “The Years of Stagnation and the Poodles of Power.” BBC.co.uk (January 18, 2012).

[67] Tim Hains. “BBC’s Adam Curtis On The “Contradictory Vaudeville” Of Post-Modern Politics.” RealClear Politics (December 31, 2014).

[68] Charles Clover. Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (Yale University Press, 2016).

[69] Ibid.

[70] Ibid.

[71] Adam Curtis. “The Years of Stagnation and the Poodles of Power.” BBC.co.uk (January 18, 2012).

[72] Aleksandr Dugin. Osnovy geopolitiki: Geopoliticheskoe budushchee Rossii (Moscow: Arktogeya, 1997), p. 348.

[73] Dina Newman. “Russian nationalist thinker Dugin sees war with Ukraine.” BBC News (July 10, 2014).

[74] Jolanta Darczewska. “The Anatomy of Russian Information Warfare: The Crimean Aperation, A Case Study.” Point of View Number 42, (Centre for Eastern Studies: Warsaw, May 2014).

[75] Hannah Levintova. “Russian Activist Alleges New Link Between the Kremlin and Paul Manafort.” Mother Jones (February 8, 2018).

[76] Alexander Gabuyev. “Eastern Roots For Western Duo Staring Down Moscow.” Kommersant (March 9, 2014).

[77] Max Blumenthal. “Is the US backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine?” Salon (February 25, 2014).

[78] Alexander Gabuyev. “Eastern Roots For Western Duo Staring Down Moscow.” Kommersant (March 9, 2014).

[79] “Ukraine’s revolution and the far right.” BBC (March 7, 2014).

[80] “A ghost of World War II history haunts Ukraine’s standoff with Russia.” Washington Post (25 March 2014)

[81] Bellant. Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, p. 69.

[82] Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, 1993), p. 216.

[83] Wayne Madsen. “Ukraine and Latin America: Same neocon cabal behind political disruption.” Intrepid Report (March 24, 2014).

[84] Bruce Bartlett. “The Other Election.” National Review (October 27, 2004).

[85] Bellant. Old Nazis, the New Right and the Republican Party, p. 77.

[86] Mark Rachkevych. “Even as private citizen, Kateryna Yushchenko finds criticism remains.” KyivPost (May 6, 2010).

[87] Blumenthal. “Is the US backing neo-Nazis in Ukraine?”

[88] “Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland-Pyatt call.” BBC News (February 7, 2014). Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957

[89] “Ukraine’s revolution and the far right.” BBC (March 7, 2014).

[90] Sam Jones, Kerin Hope & Courtney Weaver. “Alarm bells ring over Syriza’s Russian links”. Financial Times (28 January 2015).

[91] “В России собирают подписи за увольнение профессора МГУ, призвавшего убивать украинцев”. Ukrainian Independent Information Agency. 15 July 2014.

[92] Associated Press. “Ukrainian hackers leak emails that show ties between Kremlin, rebels.” Toronto Star (October 26, 2016).

[93] David Chazan. “French politician defends plan for Crimean theme park.” Telegraph (August 16, 2014).

[94] Justin Salhani. “The Russian billionaire carrying out Putin’s will across Europe.” Think Progress (January 4, 2017).

[95] Ibid.

[96] Ibid.

[97] Ibid.

[98] Ibid.

[99] Ibid.

[100] “Russia Update: Sergei Ivanov Nominated for Board of Rostelkom – and Further on Malofeyev.” The Interpreter (March 17, 2015).

[101] “Putin’s ‘Soros’ Dreams of Empire as Allies Wage Ukraine Revolt.” Bloomberg (June 15, 2014).

[102] Matthew Bodner. “Russia Pushing for An Endgame in Ukraine.” Moscow Times (January 21, 2016).

[103] Ibid.

[104] “The man with the golden shoes The key figure in Alexey Navalny’s ‘RussiaGate’ investigation is Deputy Prime Minister Sergey Prikhodko. Just who is he?” Meduza (February 16, 2018).

[105] Julia Joffe & Franklin Foer. “Did Manafort Use Trump to Curry Favor With a Putin Ally?” The Atlantic (October 2, 2017).

[106] Tom Hamburger, Rosalind S. Helderman, Carol D. Leonnig & Adam Entous. “Manafort offered to give Russian billionaire ‘private briefings’ on 2016 campaign.” The Washington Post (September 20, 2017).

[107] Kenneth P. Vogel. “Manafort’s man in Kiev.” Politico (August 18, 2016).

[108] Zachary Fryer-Biggs. “Mueller just connected a top Trump campaign staffer to Russian intelligence.” Vox (March 29, 2018).

[109] Jeremy Stahl. “Mueller’s New Indictment of the Russian Hackers Is Full of Clues About Connections to Trump World.” Slate (July 13, 2018).

[110] Michelle Goldberg. “The Trump-Russia Story Gets Even Weirder.” New York Times (March 2, 2018).

[111] Guy Birchall & Will Stewart. “FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE Inside Putin-linked sex guru’s ‘orgasm’ class in Thailand where randy punters were arrested after paying £1k for ‘climax’ lessons.” The Sun (February 28, 2018).

[112] Olga Hryniuk. “‘Sex-training” courses sweep across Belarus.” Belarus Digest (March 21, 2018).

[113] Alex Lesley. Life Without Panties (Lulu.com, 2016).

[114] Paul Harper. “DIRTY POLITICS Who is Alex Lesley? Vladimir Putin rival and ‘sex guru’ who staged Moscow sex romp and runs seduction courses.” The Sun (September 20, 2017).

[115] Richard S. Ehrlich. “FBI piqued by Russia sex spy story.” Asia Times (March 16, 2018).

[116] Will Stewart & Sara Malm. “Revealed: Sex guru who has rocked the Kremlin after one of his acolytes trained in seduction and ‘orgasm techniques’ allegedly seduced a prominent pro-Putin oligarch.” Daily Mail (February 21, 2018).

[117] Richard S. Ehrlich. “FBI piqued by Russia sex spy story.” Asia Times (March 16, 2018).

[118] Navalny. “Яхты, олигархи, девочки: охотница на мужчин разоблачает взяточника.” (Yachts, oligarchs, girls: the huntress for men exposes the bribe taker). YouTube (February 8, 2018).

[119] Hannah Levintova. “Russian Activist Alleges New Link Between the Kremlin and Paul Manafort.” Mother Jones (February 8, 2018).

[120] Cathy Young. “Want a Good Look at Putin’s Pervy Propaganda? See ‘The Furies of Maidan.’” The Daily Beast (April 25, 2104).

[121] “Суд включил в реестр запрещенной информации фильм ФБК о Дерипаске и Приходько.” Interfax.ru (February 10, 2018).

[122] Anton Troianovski. “A self-described sex expert says she will spill information on Trump and Russia to get out of a Thai jail.” New York Times (February 27, 2018).

[123] Todd Pitman and Nataliya Vasilyeva. “Jailed Instagram model wants to trade Trump secrets for freedom.” Chicago Tribune (February 28, 2018).

[124] Emma Burrows. “Russian model in Thai jail promises to spill Trump-Russia secrets.” CNN (March 1, 2018).

[125] CNN. “Jailed model offers Russia meddling info for US asylum.” YouTube (March 5, 2018).

[126] Richard C. Paddock. “From Thai Jail, Sex Coaches Say They Want to Trade U.S.-Russia Secrets for Safety.” New York Times (April 2, 2018).

[127] Susan B. Glasser. “‘The Hairs Really Went Up on the Back of Our Necks’.” Politico (February 5, 2018).

[128] David Duke. “Trump kicks insane Jewess Nuland out of State Department — So this is what winning feels like!.” DavidDuke.com (January 27, 2017).

[129] András Göllner. “The Budapest Bridge: Hungary’s Role in the Collusion Between the Trump Campaign and the Russian Secret Service (Part 2).” Hungarian Free Press (April 14, 2017).

[130] Clifford J.Levy. “Ukrainian Prime Minister Reinvents Himself.” New York Times (September 30, 2007).

[131] “OC Prosecutions Rarely Successful In Ukraine.” Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (November 21, 2008).

[132] Franklin Foer. “The Quiet American.” Slate (April 28, 2016).

[133] Taras Kuzio. “Beyond Manafort: Both parties deal with pro-Russian Ukrainians.” The Hill (April 24, 2017).

[134] James S. Henry. “The Curious World of Donald Trump’s Private Russian Connections.” The American Interest. Volume 12, Number 4 (December 19, 2016).

[135] Betsy Woodruff. “Mueller Reveals New Manafort Link to Organized Crime.” The Daily Beast (November 2, 2017).

[136] Robert Kolker. “Will Trump Rescue the Oligarch in the Gilded Cage?” Bloomberg (February 15, 2017).

[137] Stephen Grey, Tom Bergin, Sevgil Musaieva and Roman Anin. “SPECIAL REPORT-Putin’s allies channelled billions to Ukraine oligarch.” Reuters (November 26, 2014).

[138] Robert Kolker. “Will Trump Rescue the Oligarch in the Gilded Cage?” Bloomberg (February 15, 2017).

[139] Jeff Horowitz & Chad Day. “Manafort Had Plan to Benefit Putin Government.” Bloomberg Politics (March 22, 2017).

[140] Jeff Horwitz & Chad Day. “AP Exclusive: Before Trump job, Manafort worked to aid Putin.” AP News (May 22, 2017).

[141] Ruth May. “GOP campaigns took $7.35 million from oligarch linked to Russia.” Dallas News (August 3, 2017).

[142] James S. Henry. “The Troubling Russian Connections Of Trump Nominee Wilbur Ross.” The National Memo (February 27, 2017).

[143] Lianna Brinded. “Bank of Cyprus Funded and Controlled by Ex-KGB, Billionaires and Controversial Former Financiers.” International Business Times (November 11, 2014).

[144] John Reed. “Following the Money: Russia, Cyprus, and the Trump Team’s Odd Business Dealings.” Just Security (March 30, 2017).

[145] Reuters. “Paradise Papers: Trump commerce secretary Wilbur Ross had stake in Putin-linked firm.” Global News (November 5, 2017).

[146] Betsy Woodruff. “Mueller Reveals New Manafort Link to Organized Crime.” The Daily Beast (November 2, 2017).

[147] Ibid.

[148] Greg Miller, Adam Entous & Ellen Nakashima. “National security adviser Flynn discussed sanctions with Russian ambassador, despite denials, officials say.” Washington Post (February 9, 2017).

[149] Manu Raju, Jim Sciutto & Tom LoBianco. “Pentagon warned Flynn in 2014 against taking foreign payments; IG launches investigation.” CNN (April 27, 2017).

[150] Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger. “Trump adviser Flynn paid by multiple Russia-related entities, new records show.” Washington Post (March 16, 2017).

[151] “Cleveland Meeting: General Michael Flynn.” Act! (video) (July 15, 2016). 13:15.

[152] Our ally Turkey is in crisis and needs our support.” The Hill (November 8, 2016).

[153] James V. Grimaldi, Dion Nissenbaum & Margaret Coker. “Ex-CIA Director: Mike Flynn and Turkish Officials Discussed Removal of Erdogan Foe From U.S.” Wall Street Journal (March 24, 2017).

[154] Henry Meyer & Onur Ant. “The One Russian Linking Putin, Erdogan and Trump.” Bloomberg (February 2, 2017).

[155] Scott Stedman. “Flynn Intel Group Worked with Turkish Officials with Close Ties to Man Dubbed ‘Putin’s Rasputin’.” Medium (November 6, 2017).

[156] Ibid.

[157] Christina Maza. “Did This CIA Agent Try to Overthrow a Foreign Government? Who Is Graham Fuller?” Newsweek (November 12, 2017).

[158] Anton Shekhovtsov. Russia and the Western Far Right: Tango Noir (Routledge, 2017).

[159] Mark Seal. “The Woman Who Wanted the Secrets.” Vanity Fair (July 8, 2008).

[160] Marlene Laruelle. “Russian Soft Power in France: Assessing Moscow’s Cultural and Business Para-diplomacy” Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs (January 8, 2018).

[161] “Prince Sixtus Henry of Parma.” World Heritage Encyclopedia.

[162] “S.A.R. il Principe Sisto Enrico” – Website Reale e Ducale Casa di Borbone Parma.

[163] Homepage of the “St. Georgs-Orden - Ein europäischer Orden des Hauses Habsburg-Lothringen”. Retrieved from https://www.georgsorden.at/geschichte/?L=0

[164] Moritz Csaky. “Pluralité culturelle et identité: Criteres d´ une auto-reconnaissance transnationale sous la Monarchie des Habsbourg.” Les Temps Modernes, 48, 550 (1992), p 154.

[165] Homepage of the “St. Georgs-Orden - Ein europäischer Orden des Hauses Habsburg-Lothringen”. Retrieved from https://www.georgsorden.at/struktur/die-ordensregierung/?L=0

Volume Six

1. Culture Wars

2. Red Mafia

3. From Russia With Love

4. #MeToo

5. Conservative Media

6. Atl-Reich

7. Multipolar World Order

8. Katehon

9. Collusion

10. Russia House

11. Techno-Libertarianism

12. Military-Digital Complex

13. Fake News

14. Memetic Warfare

15. Big Data

16. Make America White Again!

17. In Trump We Trust

18. Israel First