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Senior U.S. Diplomats, Journalists, Academics and Secretaries of Defense Say: the U.S. Provoked Russia in Ukraine

it should come as no surprise that our government is lying now about the war in Ukraine.

The Ukraine Papers, by Donald A. Smith, PhD, 27 June 26

It took some years for Americans to realize they’d been lied to about the war in Vietnam. Thanks to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and thanks to the antiwar movement, Americans eventually learned about the injustices and failures of that war.

Likewise, it took several years after the starts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for Americans to realize they’d been lied to about those wars as well.

Americans are just now starting to realize that they’ve been lied to about the war in Ukraine. (The propaganda effort has been quite effective, with the New York Times, in particular, acting as a mouthpiece for the government’s position.) More and more mainstream publications are exposing the lies, and a majority of Americans now oppose further arming of Ukraine.

This essay is a summary of what the U.S. government has been hiding about the war in Ukraine, with links to sources for further information.

According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, U.S. military actions since 9/11 directly killed over 900,000 people, with an additional 3.5 million people dying from indirect effects. The wars cost Americans at least $8 trillion and displaced over 38 million people from their homes. The U.S. spends over a trillion dollars a year on its military, if you count all expenditures.

If we go back to the 1960s, the number killed by U.S. wars includes the several million killed in the Vietnam war, the approximately 1 million killed by U.S. support for Indonesian military’s attacks on left wing groups, and the hundreds of thousands, at least, killed in proxy wars and government overthrows in Latin America.

The wars, overthrows, and associated sanctions caused mass migrations worldwide — particularly in Europe and at the southern U.S. border — and destabilized politics. The Lancet medical journal reported that between 1971 and 2021, US and EU sanctions killed over half a million people annually. Yet almost nobody (except for whistleblowers) was held accountable for these disasters; indeed, many of the same people are in Congress or work for the government or the weapons industry.

Moreover, the U.S. government lied about almost all the wars — in particular, about the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, but also about the war in Yugoslavia, as documented in Harper’s Magazine, here (Chapter 3), and here. In short, the Kosovo Liberation Army that the U.S. supported was, basically, a terrorist organization funded by the CIA, and U.S. propaganda greatly overstated the nobility of the U.S. intervention. Likewise, The U.S. backed ethnic cleansing of Serbs in Croatia.

The United States withdrew from the following arms treaties: Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, Strategic Arms Reduction (START II)Treaty, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran deal, Open Skies Treaty, and Conventional Armed Forces Treaty (Russia withdrew after alleged NATO non-compliance)

So, it should come as no surprise that our government is lying now about the war in Ukraine. Specifically, claims by President Biden and others that the Russian invasion was “unprovoked” are greatly exaggerated.

Read what these diplomats, secretaries of Defense, journalists, academics, politicians, and others have to say:

Here the author gives quotations from 30 highly regarded people – certainly not pro Russian propagandists ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Ambassador Jack Matlock (referenced above) said in a 2024 interview: “Why don’t we understand that trying to remove Ukraine from Russian influence and put military bases there would be, in their case, absolutely unacceptable and worthy of defense?” Matlock said the U.S. backed the 2014 coup, and “Obviously, to any Russian leader, not just Vladimir Putin, that would have been an absolutely impossible, hostile act, which they had to react to. And in particular, they were not going to lose their naval base in Crimea.” Finally, Matlock said the Ukrainians are “dominated in their thinking by neo-Nazis — we tend to ignore that, or when Putin points it out, we say he’s lying. He’s not lying.” And Matlock wrote: “I have been appalled that a succession of American presidents and European leaders discarded the diplomacy that ended the Cold War, abandoned the agreements that curbed the nuclear arms race, and provoked a new cold war which has now become hot.”

See this for dozens of mainstream news articles about the presence Nazis in Ukraine and U.S. support for them.

Evidence of U.S. involvement in the coup is overwhelming. The Cato Institute (not a radical Marxist outfit!) wrote America’ Ukraine Hypocrisy which includes:

The extent of the Obama administration’ meddling in Ukraine’ politics was breathtaking. Russian intelligence intercepted and leaked to the international media a [U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Victoria] Nuland telephone call in which she and U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Geoffey Pyatt discussed in detail their preferences for specific personnel in a post-Yanukovych government… Both the Obama administration and most of the American news media portrayed the Euromaidan Revolution as a spontaneous, popular uprising against a corrupt and brutal government… It was a grotesque distortion to portray the events in Ukraine as a purely indigenous, popular uprising.

The 2019 RAND Corporation study Overextending and Unbalancing Russia examines “cost-imposing options that the United States and its allies could pursue across economic, political, and military areas to stress — overextend and unbalance — Russia’s economy and armed forces and the regime’s political standing at home and abroad.” It includes the paragraph:

“Providing lethal aid to Ukraine would exploit Russia’s greatest point of external vulnerability. But any increase in US military arms and advice to Ukraine would need to be carefully calibrated to increase the costs to Russia of sustaining its existing commitment without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would have significant advantages.”

The highlighted words indicate that the authors were quite aware that US provocations would cause Russia to respond militarily.

The New Yorker’s Is the F.B.I. Truly Biased Against Trump? contains a telling paragraph on the U.S. government’s efforts to suppress information about exactly what happened in Ukraine:

According to [FBI agent] Buma’s statement, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, he was told to terminate relations with one of his most valuable sources in that field, Dynamo. The order came from both his supervisors and the F.B.I.’s Foreign Influence Task Force, and, per Buma, superiors told him that the shutdown of Dynamo was based on “highly classified information from the National Security Agency” which he could not access. They also said that it was part of a broader effort, around the time of the invasion, to close off many “sources related to Russia/Ukraine matters.”

After the collapse of the USSR, Russia wanted desperately to be integrated into the West and, up to the end of 2021, pleaded with D.C. to come to an equitable peace in Ukraine, but the U.S. wanted to weaken Russia, and NATO needed an enemy to justify its existence. The expansion of NATO — which violated multiple verbal promises given to Soviet leaders — provoked the war that is now touted as showing the need for NATO.

According to the LA Times’s Russia feels threatened by NATO. There’s history behind that, “some of Russia’s security concerns are real. Offering to discuss them doesn’t qualify as appeasement; Thirty years ago, Russia had a buffer zone of satellite states to its west. Now it has only the unimpressive presence of Belarus.”

From 2018, in Medium’s American Lethal Weapons Could Already Be on the Ukrainian Front Line: “Two weeks ago, the Trump administration announced it will allow the sale of some lethal weapons to Ukraine, including the Javelin anti-tank missile….Butusov identified the [Nazi] Azov Battalion as a recipient of the PSRL-1 [grenade launcher] systems.”

Right before the Russian invasion, in January of 2022, Yahoo News reported: CIA-trained Ukrainian paramilitaries may take central role if Russia invades. After the invasion, in March of 2022, Yahoo News reported: Secret CIA training program in Ukraine helped Kyiv prepare for Russian invasion..

In November of 2023, the Washington Post exposed that “Since 2015, the CIA has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform Ukraine’s Soviet-formed services into potent allies against Moscow, officials said…. The extent of the CIA’s involvement with Ukraine’s security services has not previously been disclosed.” Foreign Policy’s essay of July 11, 2025 mentions the “CIA’s decade of covert support for Ukraine.” ABC News also has an article about CIA involevment in Ukraine since 2015.

Likewise, a New York Times article The Spy War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin, dated February 25, 2024, revealed that the CIA had been coordinating with Ukrainian intelligence since at least 2014 and that the Ukrainians had been launching assasinations and other kinetic actions in Crimea and Russia. As Mark Episkopos writes in Responsible Statecraft, CIA in Ukraine: Why is this not seen as provocation?: “An explosive new NYT report shows how Washington needlessly fed into Russia’s worst fears and precipitated the invasion, justified or not.”……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

These facts and opinions do not justify Russia’s brutal invasion, but they certainly give the lie to statements by President Biden and others that the invasion was “unprovoked.” Even the Russian occupation of Crimea in 2014 was provoked: it occurred after, and partially in response to, the U.S.-backed overthrow of the pro-Russian government of Ukraine.

And the facts expose stunning hyprocrisy. The U.S. launched numerous unjustified wars, proxy wars, bombings and coups far from U.S. borders; surrounded Russia and China with pro-US allies and military bases (about 800 worldwide); exited multiple arms treaties; and increased military spending to about $1 trillion a year despite $34 trillion in debt and dire domestic needs. Yet we accuse Russia and China of being the aggressors.

Both sides can be at fault in a conflict. The U.S. too has blood on its hands.

Finally, the facts are strong reasons why the U.S. should not be arming Ukraine to the teeth, pushing it to fight to the last Ukrainian and risking a nuclear war. Instead, it should push for a negotiated end to the war. https://theukrainepapers.org/senior-US-diplomats-academics-journalists-and-secretaries-of-defense-say-the-US-provoked-Russia-in-Ukraine.html

June 30, 2026 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Reference, Russia, Ukraine, USA, weapons and war