YASHA LEVINE, mail at yashalevine.com, @yashalevine
Levine just wrote the article “Ukraine: A Short History of Meddling,” which states that U.S. “meddling in Ukraine goes a lot deeper than Trump’s crude attempt to squeeze kompromat from the country’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky. It goes deeper than even Joe Biden or the DNC or the 2016 election. The truth is that America has been meddling and messing with Ukraine so persistently for so many years that no one thinks there’s anything wrong with it. It’s been the normal way of doing things. That’s why Joe Biden sat around yuk-yuking it up at the Council of Foreign Relations, bragging about bossing Ukraine’s former oligarch-president around — as if this elected billionaire leader of a foreign nation was nothing but a busboy working in Joe’s Delaware country club for tips. And why not? That’s how America’s political class thinks and acts. …

“Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s political system has been dominated by shifting alliances of oligarchic clans organized aground regions and industrial sectors. In this murky and constantly changing world, alliances flip and players use whatever they can to get an advantage. They weaponize ethnicity, religion, nationalism, and regional identity. They use blunt force and leverage their monopoly on media. They also try to recruit foreign power support to bolster their position — Russia, America, the EU. …

“This latest scandal is just another iteration of this grim history, as both the anti-Trump and Trump sides gleefully try to weaponize Ukrainian meddling and use Ukraine as a proxy war in their domestic fight for the presidency.”

Levine’s books include Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet and he recently started a newsletter “Immigrants as a Weapon,” which looks at how the U.S. government “weaponizes nationalism and immigrant communities.”

See from Naked Capitalism, from 2014: “R. Hunter Biden Should Declare Who Really Owns His New Ukrainian Employer, Burisma Holdings.”

Also, see list of of major U.S. interventions by Bill Blum, author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower.

Also see, from Dov H. Levin in International Studies Quarterly: “When the Great Power Gets a Vote: The Effects of Great Power Electoral Interventions on Election Results.”